Desiccation In Progress

     [W]e are told that there is no need to fear the concentration of power in government so long as that power is checked by the electoral process. We are urged to believe that so long as we can express our disagreement in words, we have our full rights to disagree. Now both freedom of speech and the electoral process are important to liberty, but alone they are only the desiccated remains of liberty…. Effective disagreement means not doing what one does not want to do as well as saying what he wants to say. – Dr. Clarence Carson

     There’s a subject on which I have a habit of repeating myself. (“What? Only one?”) (“Shut up, you.”) It’s the sharp difference between democracy and freedom. The amount of propaganda the Left has poured on us, to the effect that “as long as you can vote, you’re free,” is simply staggering. The falsity of it could not be clearer… yet it has succeeded to a remarkable degree.

     I first wrote about this deceitful substitution of ballots for individual liberty a long time ago. Yet few have listened. After the atrocities of 2016, the Establishment’s strokes against the trustworthiness of our elections should require no comment. Yet this notion of “the vote as freedom” seems to be an armored against all objection.

     A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. – Lysander Spooner

     If you’re a long-time Gentle Reader, you may recall this 2003 observation, from the old Palace of Reason:

     So long as speech was protected, Americans could claim with some justice that we were in some sense free. If Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision prevails, we will not be able to call ourselves even partly free. We will be a people in chains. Chains forged to protect incumbents from having their records in office publicized in the press as they stand for election. Chains forged to increase the power of the Old Media, granting their journalists and editors the last word on political campaigns. Chains forged by (and for) men to whom “the people” are not only not sovereign, but are a force to be fastened down and made to do as they’re told by those who know better.

     That was about the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, an anti-Constitutional monstrosity that was struck down by the Supreme Court some years later. That Act was one of the political Establishment’s first strokes against freedom of expression. For you see, that had begun to threaten the Elite’s grip on power. Clearly – to them — that meant it had to go.

     Americans have been a little more successful at preserving our freedom of expression than our British cousins. The “authorities” there have been locking up Britons for posts on Facebook and X. Similar things have been happening in the other Anglospheric nations. Here, should you say anything that makes the Elite uncomfortable, the Regime dispatches the FBI to “talk to you.” Intimidation by federal employee, however, is apparently not very effective.

     The latest news from the U.K. suggests that its Establishment has laid a crosshairs over Britons’ electoral franchise, as well:

     Sir Keir Starmer’s government proposes allowing millions of foreign nationals to vote and abolishing measures to prevent voter fraud.
     Ministers are considering plans to overhaul the way elections are held by scrapping voter ID laws and giving five million foreign nationals the right to vote in UK elections.
     They clearly plan to cheat and stay in power in perpetuity.

     Just Google “Keir Starmer AND voter ID” if you doubt this. The Starmer Regime openly plans to dilute British citizens’ votes with the votes of millions of foreigners, including an unknown number of illegal aliens. Do you have any doubt that Britons who dare to object to this will get visits from the Regime’s myrmidons?

     Some years ago, in the run-up to the bicentennial celebration of the ratification of the original Bill of Rights, Philip Morris Corporation released a TV ad promoting that occasion because it guarantees our right “to say what we wish to say, to think what we wish to think” – and nothing else. Even that drew denunciations from the Establishment media. They claimed it was an attempt by that company, which sold tobacco products, to offset the criticism it had weathered due to smoking’s deleterious effect on human health. Whatever the motives involved, the ad campaign itself was innocuous by any imaginable standard. Indeed, by not mentioning at all the other rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, it missed 95% of the significance of the document.

     Once the Elite and their media allies decide on a position, they will brook no opposition. Speak against it? You get denounced, on whatever basis is most convenient. Vote against it? You’ve been duped, brainwashed by “propaganda” and “misinformation.” Compare this to Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse’s conception of “false consciousness:”

     The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and ‘philosophies’ can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the ‘end of ideology’, the false consciousness has become the general consciousness–from the government down to its last objects.

     And so even what Dr. Carson called “the desiccated remains of liberty” are beaten back, chained down, corrupted and forced to serve those determined to remain at the levers of power. Now we’ll get to observe that process across the pond, in the nation that was once called “the land of liberties.”

     Have a nice day.