The Internal Revenue Service has become a finely honed weapon aimed squarely at anyone who disagrees with their political masters, notifying their activist opposition of confidential information necessary to harass and silence the opposition, the Federal Election Commission under Congressional direction carefully collects and publishes the donor information regularly used by unions, activists, and federal agencies to target private citizens for their political positions, the NSA and the FBI and local law enforcement, among many others, have large budgets dedicated to mass surveillance products as if they served North Korea rather than a constitutional democracy, and the President of the United States frequently announces to the nation his disapproval, prior to evidence, of citizens and police attempting to protect themselves from visceral criminal assaults by thugs who happen to share his ethnic designation. And, of course, you are a racist if you quibble with his position.
In response, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, etc., have risked whiplash owing to the haste with which they look the other way, stopping only occasionally to disparage any voice that might aspire to do better and actually inform the American people as was hoped for when the First Amendment was authored. It is no mistake that the best coverage of the United States’ national elections is found in places like London, Paris, Berlin, Singapore, and Taipai.
And now that the Internet Service Provider options have resolved to a monopoly or duopoly in most of the United States, the winners are all to eager to police their customers’ use of the Internet per our governments’ “suggestions” while the Federal Communications Commission continues to seek traction in their quest for authority over every bit that takes a hop anywhere in the US. (TorBrowser, anyone?) And was anyone at all surprised when federal officials announced that data entrusted to ostensibly private enterprises worldwide were fair game for whatever maniacal mass surveillance scheme the latest disciple of J. Edgar Hoover, the late, blackmail-happy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Constitution Infringement?
We Americans have always prided ourselves on our freedoms, even when we practiced slavery, Jim Crow, the detention of ethnically Japanese Americans during World War II, scandalous civil forfeiture practices, and now the militarization of civilian federal, state, and local institutions that once had to convince judges and qualified law enforcement agencies to exercise the use of physical force against targeted citizens. If a pond develops in a remote holding of a rancher known to donate to political organizations dismissive of climate hoaxes and supportive of such organizations lobbying to protect private property rights or natural marriage, the EPA’s tanks and snipers can now decend in force, unhampered by all that red tape. Just as if the Bill of Rights never existed.
Let freedom ring? Not so much.
How do we unwind this? Why not Every Netizen a Blogger? The kind of see something say something that we desperately need to counter the cowardice and incompetence of our current news disservices. If you feel the need, there are tools to protect your identity, but nothing would unsettle our would be masters more than a million new bloggers shedding fresh light on their scheming and thuggery. You don’t need to dedicate your life to the job, go through an Ivy League journalism curriculum (in fact, they are a big part of the problem and would be seen as a likely disqualification in a news room with any integrity). You don’t have to write when you have nothing to share, there is enough of that already. Highlight an obscure local story, share your latest illustrative anecdote, don’t give your own party a break. Somebody, somewhere knew that Bob McDonnell, the recently convicted ex-Governor of Virginia, and his acquisitive wife were a steaming bags of gimme and did not commit that fact to their blog. Now, Virginians are saddled with the biggest tax increase in their history “to improve the business environment” and the Virginia Governor’s Mansion is now infested by the grasper that turned the Lincoln Bedroom into a political fund raising asset.
You might have been the faithful blogger who could have spared us yet another kleptocrat. Don’t wait for yet another tragic mistake to bring facts to light, save America now!
Sisyphus Achaean 