Seeing Eye Dog Democracy

By Tim Hartnett at Lew Rockwell

Ah, ye of little faith. I’m talking about the faithful, of course. Aren’t they the dangerous misfits who keep defying a clergy of experts into whose hands all fate must be placed? Why won’t the miscreants accept that junior is doomed without the options of hormonal therapy, a little black dress and pronouns? Synods of the new religion pass over at 30,000 feet downing Sauterne with their foie gras. More earthly members of the congregation must follow another set of commandments. They include restricted travel, an unpalatable diet and 24/7 contrition for, supposedly, dodging victimhood.

The infidel must be de-platformed, unfriended, debanked, dehumanized, excommunicated and demonetized for preaching another gospel. Strangely though, even as we are commanded to heed, the high-priesthood keeps most of what it has to say out of public earshot. It’s a system that works a lot like the higher bar of behavioral standards for the unordained.

March 20 the Senate held a hearing on Reforming Federal Records Management. It failed to get a ripple in news waves. Why should it? Rand Paul presented two different documents on Covid produced by the Department of Health and Human Services. Both were 100% redacted. Together over 500 pages of non-classified material were blacked out. Numerous other FOIA requests from HHS and the NIH arrived with large portions of text excluded. Is it any wonder that many who had the vaccine forced on them felt roofied? The question, “what’s in that drink,” has become the latest “dog whistle.” Anyone wanting to know gets labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”

People who didn’t watch the hearing or see it on YouTube weren’t filled in reading news feeds or op-eds later. The ongoing tale of government and quasi-government entities covering their tracks must be mundanely conspiratorial too. Its coverage by our official informers has an inverse relationship to the magnitude of the danger. US citizens are footing the bill for amassing and warehousing troves of information that is kept from them. That development has failed to stir much media ire in the almost fifty years since the Freedom of Information Act was passed. The law’s text is over 25 pages long. What’s less than clear, in over 8000 words, is what the people filling requests are allowed to leave out. Hence, what the Senate asked for fits the description of “honored” without a single word in over 500 pages. We’ve received no explanation of why any of the information in either document should be concealed from the public.

This isn’t anything close to an isolated example. The legislature itself cannot call government agencies onto the carpet and expect anything remotely resembling satisfactory answers. How far can this kind of thing go before the public is completely in the dark? Or have they been for at least a generation now? Authoritative figures keeping their vassalage uninformed has become bureaucratically hip. The development is too chronic to qualify as newsworthy. The people deciding what’s fit to print have married into the redacting clan.

What, exactly, qualifies as “kooky”? Blindly accepting official word? Giving zero attention to all the unknown words that are cooked into the recipe of official doctrine? Or, wanting to know the deal? The Washington Post, whose first words everyday are “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” felt no necessity to report at all on the Senate hearing March 20^th. “Don’t ask,” has become the credo of the ones who find themselves uniquely qualified to do the asking. When someone else bothers taking on the task of inquiry they neglected, it becomes a “scandal” that, literally by their lights, endangers democracy.

There is, in fact, a scandal going on. It’s that the media isn’t up in arms daily about the closed doors that keep us slobs wondering. Back in the days of “smoke-filled-rooms” and “sausage making” we got better understanding. The so-called “yellow press,” of the turn of the 19^th century, came across more candidly. Pretenses of leaps and bounds in press “authenticity,” since the likes of James Gordon Bennett Jr., Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst ruled the daily copy roost, aren’t authentic. Whatever their faults, which were many, keeping details they were privy to from subscribers were seldom among them. Can that really be said of people like Grahams, Sulzberger’s and others who attend fat cat conclaves around the globe and keep mum? Have these elitist assemblages ever been anything less than efforts to bypass the principle of one-man-one-vote in policy making?

During the Senate hearing penalties for people failing to come clean at federal bureaus were discussed. They were talking about firings. That doesn’t go far enough. Anyone hiding official records to serve a parochial interest deserves prison. It is a species of theft.

Bureaucratic brass behaves as though their names are on a title deed to the US. Major media is hoping and betting no one will notice. This is the same gang trying to incite panic over the phenomena of religious observance. They shake their heads daily whining, ‘look at what those rednecks believe.’

Meanwhile, the public is coerced to pay for a service that operates behind the scenes. From there the servers enjoy a free hand to impose a litany of various behaviors on an involuntary customer base. Does democracy die in darkness? If that’s so, is it even on life support right now? Trust in anything without knowledge can only be based on faith. Who actually believes that what they don’t know can’t hurt them?

Covid protocols amounted to the biggest crackdown on US citizens since rationing in WWII. Taxpayers are entitled to a comprehensive explanation. Every other redactor in the alphabet soup has splainin’ to do. We’ll never get it out of them without the threat of a trip up the river. It is past time to turn the search warrants around and scour all of our property at the Potomac’s fall line. The help has become way too comfortable. They act like the squatter in Queens who sublet part of the house he appropriated. A thorough rifling can only improve on the gut wrenching fragrances wafting out of the District of Columbia.

Civil service is not an employee owned venture. A news industry that fails to point that out is abetting RICO level offenses.