“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
George Orwell, 1984
Yesterday Twitter shut down for awhile, right after Tucker Carlson revealed that he was going to talk about the Hunter Biden e-mails on his show on Fox. Perhaps this was fortuitous, perhaps not, but the Tech Lords have revealed that they are using their power to censor what you see and hear. It used to be said that only governments could censor. I used to say this myself. Not any more. There is nothing in prior human history like the Tech Lords. Facebook, Google (Owns Youtube), Twitter and a handful of others, are quasi monopolies that have a frightening ability to control discourse. Freedom of speech means nothing if no one can hear you, and that is precisely what the Tech Lords intend to do to those they perceive as their enemies. The Tech Lords feign that their platforms are neutral platforms, when in fact they are clubs by those who control them to be wielded against those they perceive as enemies. Past time to break them up and end their monopolies. Clarence Darrow, famed defense attorney, once said that he opposed government ownership of railroads, but he preferred it to railroads owning the government. In the Tech Lords we have a group of people who intend to be our masters. No truce with them until they are destroyed. I place this now just below my pro-life commitment as to who I will vote for in the future.
Some more thoughts:
https://www.steynonline.com/10692/the-last-copier-in-the-woods-arrives-sooner-than
Steyn as always is brilliant Phillip. He does not overstate the case:
If anybody is around to write history in a generation or two, October 14th 2020 will go down as the first day of a new Year Zero. Yesterday, with less than three weeks to go in a national election in a settled democratic society with an ostensibly free press, the woke billionaires of the social media cartel decided to freeze and/or cancel the Twitter/Facebook accounts of the President’s press secretary, the Trump campaign, Republican Senate candidates and Republican House members.
So America is now formally a one-party state, at least as far as fair access to media platforms is concerned. In old-school “people’s republics”, the dictator keeps the opposition party off the air. In the subtler version operated by social media, woke dictators of a nominally two-party state are now openly keeping one of those two parties off your telephones and tablets. Wanker conservatives of the lemming right wonder if this might be, ooh, a “campaign-finance violation”. Hey, yeah, maybe John Durham can do that for his next any-day-now investigation-without-end.
If the people who own the railroads, and the people who regulate the railroads, and the politicians who have charge of the government are all cut from the same cloth, all think the trains should go in the same direction at the same times for the same rates, does it really matter if the government owns the railroads or if the railroads own the government? Can we even tell the difference?
Always the possibility to change the government through the ballot box.
And there’s always the right to overthrow a tyrannous government and reclaim it for the people at the barrel of a gun.
But where we should be focusing our political efforts is on reforming the substance of government through an Article V convention. Because it seems to me that we have the form of a representative republic, but we lack the substance owing to the existence of the leviathan administrative state.
And even that doesn’t address the real problem. Because the real problem is cultural; and politics, as they say, is downstream of culture.
But where we should be focusing our political efforts is on reforming the substance of government through an Article V convention.
Difficult to call and I would be opposed to replacing the 1787 masterpiece in any case. I would not trust a Constitutional Convention.
It’s been replaced. We’ve just been wearing it’s dead carcass like a skin-suit. At least a Convention would have the effect of concentrating the mind.
I disagree. Amendments yes. Constitutional Convention no. The main defect currently is the poor quality of people elected to Congress. Exactly the same type, and quality, of people would be elected as delegates to a Constitutional Convention.
Art V is for Amending the Constitution, not scrapping it.
Granted, somebody might try to amend the Constitution away, or introduced additional amendments to the ones the convention was called to consider, but they would first have to be adopted, and even if they were, they would still have to be ratified by the States.
You could call a Convention to Consider on or all of Levin’s Liberty Amendments, and your State (more likely mine, since Illinois is a dysfunctional swampy mess like New York and California) could charge it’s delegates to vote on those amendments and only those amendments. Other states might permit their delegates wider latitude, but it still takes 2/3rds of the states to propose an amendment and 3/4ths to ratify one.
Anyway, at the rate things are going, a Convention is preferable to a civil war.
Granted, somebody might try to amend the Constitution away,
The first Constitutional Convention was called to suggest amendments to the Articles of Confederation.
And there will be States that send Important People with Big Ideas to do in one fell swoop what they’ve already been doing through the Courts and the bureaucracy for fifty plus years.
Personally, I find that clarifying.