June 17, 2023

As radio personality Jesse Kelly remarks on Twitter, there are two ways to view what is happening with Donald Trump right now:

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Either you see what’s happening to Trump as being about Trump or you see it being about a weaponized government planning to make any opposition a crime.  

Only one of those views is correct. You don’t have to be a Trump fan to see it’s the latter.

For most Americans who’ve paid the slightest bit of attention these past years, that’s an obvious statement.  But as George Orwell said of his own time, we’ve “sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” 

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That particular phrase derives from a 1939 review of the book Power: A Social Analysis (1938), by Bertrand Russell.  What makes his observations interesting, and why it serves as another example of Orwell’s prescience, is how precisely his commentary reflects what we are witnessing at this moment.

While he offers praise to Russell as among the most “readable of living writers,” and notes that his not being in jail signifies “that the world is still sane in parts,” he does critique his “pious hope” that the madness of the world in 1938 could not endure, much less descend into a deeper madness.  “He is inclined to point to the past,” Orwell writes, and to say that “all tyrannies have collapsed sooner or later,” and “there is no reason to suppose [Hitler] more permanent than his predecessors.”

Americans today, like Russell, cling to the fading hope that common sense will prevail and that the weaponization of our institutions and our obvious march toward an authoritarian state cannot continue.   And Orwell wouldn’t have been surprised, given the extent to which he feared the potential for tyranny represented by “radio,” at the algorithmic propaganda dissemination that we’ve seen tech companies employing in collusion with the federal government, coupled with the unchecked government control of the education system.  Add to this the potential for tyranny in deepfake technology and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, and it becomes clear that all signs, as Orwell recognized in 1939, point to things getting significantly worse before they get better.

Our once-free citizenry no longer has any means of holding our representatives accountable.  Americans have never had less faith in the integrity of the electoral system, but even if we could trust election results, the truth is that we live under the rule of faceless, unelected politburos that are immune from any efforts toward accountability via the ballot box.  These institutions exact punishment upon anyone who dares to oppose the growing power of the government.

It has been that way for some time.  Consider the now largely forgotten revelations that the Obama administration, in the years leading up to the 2012 election, weaponized the IRS to go after his political opponents.  Forty years earlier, an allegation that Nixon “attempted to misuse” the IRS for political purpose constituted the second of three articles of impeachment brought against him.  Where Nixon failed, Obama had “very effectively screwed Obama/Biden’s political opponents,” writes attorney Cleta Mitchell, who investigated this criminal conduct of the IRS.   

We know there was subversive and damaging criminal conduct, but Obama escaped accountability for two reasons.  The first is that the media had no interest in pursuing anything that would damage their anointed leader, and in fact, they supported his weaponizing our institutions against their mutual enemies in the Tea Party, whom both the Obama administration and the media viewed as “domestic terrorists.”