McCarthy's Wet Dream

Fear and (self-)loathing in Washington DC: How to Build a Blacklist, Part I: Isolate & Other.

For something that doesn’t exist, America’s social credit system certainly has warped the American psyche beyond recognition, turning us into a nation of snitches abdicating personal responsibility to an increasingly oppressive corporate state, terrified of thinking any thoughts not pre-masticated for us by the sniveling guardians of the narrative that call themselves journalists (or worse, fact-checkers). Former president Donald Trump being essentially charged with felony thought-crime based on his intent when dispatching his lawyer to pay off the porn star threatening to tell the world about his funny-shaped genitalia is not just a distraction from the ongoing asset-stripping operation dismantling the Empire - it’s a morality play, acted with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the temple, and it’s being staged to teach you a lesson.

 When Trump was arraigned at a Manhattan courthouse last week, his supporters neither burnt down their own neighborhoods nor descended upon New York City like the plague of locusts gleefully predicted in the establishment media, which had padded the area with human kindling in the hope of giving the moribund “insurrection” narrative a shot in the arm and kicking off the civil war their masters require to camouflage the collapse of the US dollar.

It wasn’t because Trump’s supporters weren’t pissed off - even people who hate the man were raging on various internet platforms about the miscarriage of justice underway. But after two years of being treated like terrorists for attending what was for 99% of those present a peaceful demonstration of concern for the nation’s future on January 6, 2021, few had any appetite for a repeat performance. A Verge writeup of the Trump ‘perp walk’ describes a surfeit of media, crazies, and “influencers,” but few if any real people. 

It’s not just the Right that has been shocked off the streets. February’s Rage Against the War Machine rally, billed as a much-needed post-partisan revival of the moribund anti-war movement in the face of the Biden administration’s shameless emptying of the US Treasury into a Ukrainian abattoir of its own making, delivered such an anemic crowd that the “prebunking” propaganda from the usual suspects (including a “parody” website drafted with all the wit of ChatGPT) came off wildly disproportionate, as if the feds had brought a bazooka to a knife fight. The Biden administration didn’t have to hunt these people down and lock them up - they had preemptively castrated themselves by deplatforming their star speaker, then sheepishly inviting him back, pissing off both halves of the “controversy” in their haste not to offend anyone.

“are you telling me we could have stayed home and jerked off to Victoria Nuland nudes instead?”

While it would be unwise to rise to the bait and “do a terrorism” just because the ex-president who tried to poison us all is being mildly humiliated, allowing the ruling class to get away with their asset-stripping operation is not much smarter. Just because your activities have not made you a target this week does not mean you are safe. The ex-president himself is the perfect object-lesson - deplatformed, raided by the FBI, debanked, and now subjected to cheeseball lawfare despite dutifully selling the country out to Big Pharma, Big Israel, and Big Bullshit while convincing a not-insignificant faction he’s the Second Coming. Rather than be allowed to peacefully tweet out his retirement, he’s been charged with felony thoughtcrime, and while he’ll be fine, the lesson to the American people is unequivocal. Such treatment should alarm even the most rabid never-Trumpers, whose disbelief in reported election results has technically rendered them terrorists, but it won’t - until they slip up and are hauled in front of the thoughtcrime tribunal alongside their ideological nemeses.

When is an insurrection not an insurrection?

When Fox News broadcast security camera footage last month from the Capitol that appeared to confirm Stop the Steal protesters’ claims that theirs was a mostly peaceful demonstration that devolved into chaos only after police began peppering the masses with flash-bang grenades, the establishment wasted no time opening fire on the messenger (Tucker Carlson) in defense of the Holy Narrative. If you weren’t part of that firing squad, you were part of the problem - Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer insisted “millions of Americans” were “furious” that the commentator had aired real footage that diverged so alarmingly from the “insurrection” script, calling Carlson’s broadcast “an attempt to rewrite history and erode the very foundation of our precious and sometimes fragile democracy.”

Whereas pre-Trump CNN audiences might have scoffed at Chris Cuomo’s 2016 lecture about how “reading Wikileaks is illegal” for anyone but professional journalists, the same network in 2023 was able to coax its grazing herds away from the offending footage with nothing-to-see-here headlines like “Here’s what you need to know about the Tucker Carlson January 6 footage.” ‘Factcheckers’ like Politico literally asked “who’re you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”, purporting to disprove video evidence with words - officer testimony, an internal memo from the Capitol Police chief, and a plea agreement signed under extreme duress. Articles attributing the death of Capitol police officer Brandon Sicknick to “injuries sustained while defending the Capitol,” specifically a bludgeoning assault by fire extinguisher, when he died of a stroke, are still live on ProPublica and elsewhere.

At the same time, the shocking admission from Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson that the House January 6th Committee had not even viewed the surveillance footage themselves, instead relying on unspecified “staff” to “kind of go through” the video for them, was ignored as the media establishment attempted to frame the release of the surveillance tapes (minus a few frames Capitol Police thought could potentially jeopardize the building’s security) as a monumental offense on the level of the bogus “insurrection” itself. So seditious was Fox’s coverage of the “insurrection”, Massachusetts congressman and flatulent Sinophile Eric Swalwell told CNN, that military personnel should be prohibited from viewing Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham or any of the other FoxNews hosts whose refusal to play along with the armed-insurrection narrative he declared treason. Hell, why not ban Fox altogether - unless, of course, they took the initiative to sanction their own rogue elements and deplatform their most popular anchors for the sake of Our Democracy™, wink wink, nudge nudge?

To believe the dominant “armed-insurrection” narrative of January 6 requires believing not only that a doddering old war criminal who couldn’t fill a high school gymnasium won more votes than any other candidate in US history, but that weaponized “disinformation” galvanized millions of Americans to attempt to violently overthrow the US government in a vacuum of real-world events, working them into such an irrational lather that they left their guns at home in their haste to meet up for the rally and somehow managed not to seriously wound anyone on the “other side.” Four of their own died, sure - but these were literal victims of internet conspiracy theories, and those skeptical of the notion that “fake news” can cause real harm had dumped at their feet the corpses of Ashli Babbitt and five police officers who supposedly killed themselves in the months following the event because of the toxic political climate. Not subscribing to this narrative meant contributing to the carnage by creating distrust in democratic institutions. The January 6th Select Committee’s star witnesses effectively held reality hostage, warning the sane, stop questioning our absurd self-contradictory narratives or we’ll kill ourselves and charge you with the murders.

This was the rationale by which thousands of people, including the sitting president of the United States, were railroaded off social media, denied a voice in what was for post-lockdown humanity a venue as mission-critical as the real-world public square ever was, for espousing ideas that just four years previously had been ubiquitous. Who didn’t, for one reason or another, doubt the legitimacy of some part of the 2016 presidential race, whether one bought the Trump-Russian collusion scam or seethed at the Clinton campaign stealing the nomination from Bernie Sanders? What about 2000? When did voting machine manufacturers patch the vulnerabilities elementary-school kids regularly exploited at hacker conferences, to say nothing of the many new flaws introduced by mail-in voting?

Only by designating the discussion of factual information as “terrorism” or a deadly “infodemic” could the moribund J6 narrative be rescued from choking to death on its own contradictions, just as only a population truly paralyzed with fear and hopelessness would accept the “Don’t Look Up”-style histrionic flailing of a Schumer or a Swalwell as a reasonable response to the release of the footage. While any member of Congress can currently view it, what should have been the last nail in the coffin of the “violent insurrection” narrative has instead given it a new life. When the nation swallowed the Covid-19 narrative, Americans accepted the necessity of having their experiences moderated by a third party for the sake of the common good. Such experiential bureaucracy has seeped into every area where theres’s a yawning void between appearance and reality, whether it’s Pharma-owned scientists explaining the recurrence of the virus du jour in the vaccinated as proof the shot is working, congressional employees viewing security camera footage to “interpret” the contents for lawmakers who then draft domestic terrorism legislation based on events they’ve never seen, or Capitol police officers explaining how continued questioning of the 2020 election caused their PTSD and should result in criminal charges. 

Eager to keep their winning streak going, the narrative managers have hinted that even if the Manhattan case is dismissed, Trump could still be excluded from the 2024 ballot in southern states under an archaic Reconstruction-era law that prohibits the candidacy of anyone who has “engaged in an insurrection or rebellion against the US” or “given aid to [its] enemies.” Setting aside the fact that every US president since Harry Truman has given aid to America’s enemies, the fact that Trump was never convicted of inciting the nonexistent insurrection is irrelevant - Wikipedia says he’s guilty as hell of a “self-coup,” and if we don’t believe them, who can we believe?!?

Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core

Wikipedia for nobodies

While the propaganda of wartimes past has centered on the designation of a visibly different “other” both at home and abroad, be it the Japanese in World War II or Muslims in the War on Terror, the intersectionalist War for Our Democracy™ requires Americans to take aim at the monster in the mirror. In a terrifying show of bipartisan unity, Left and Right have willingly castrated themselves, obediently intoning the lines they are fed about whether We The People can ever really be trusted with unfettered free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly again.

Federal prosecutors have spent the last two years hunting down some 1,000 civilians on charges it is now clear they knew were cartoonishly inflated at best. Even if every single case were dismissed based on the withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors failing to share the profoundly un-incriminating Capitol footage - as they should be - the damage is already done. The “insurrectionists” were always meant to be crucified in the court of public opinion, sacrificial offerings to the bloodthirsty egregore of Our Democracy™. The result - the chronically-underreported “January 6th registry” - should make any political dissident’s blood run cold. As described by Walk Away founder and blacklist victim Brandon Straka, the publicly-available list features defendants’ names and crimes they had not only not been convicted of but were no longer even charged with in some cases. It surfaces at the top of any defendant’s Google results, meaning even those wrongly tied to the riot will flunk even the most cursory background check, an albatross named ‘insurrection’ hung around their neck forever.

Brandon Straka @BrandonStraka

Audio fixed: The DOJ has placed J6 defendants on a registry, like sex offenders, which appears as a top search result all ACCUSED J6 individuals- even if unconvicted. This registry is causing ppl w misdemeanors & the unconvicted to be denied housing, banking, & much more.

Not only are the blacklisted barred from common payment apps like PayPal and Stripe, they can’t even open normal bank accounts or apply for loans from some financial institutions, according to Straka, who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, to avoid felony charges prosecutors later admitted were baseless. Worse, as many have noted, whether or not an individual was pursued appeared to have less to do with their actions on January 6th and more to do with their social media postings after the fact - whether they continued to deny Biden’s claim to the White House, boasted about their exploits, or threw their comrades under the bus.

The January 6th registry expands to the wider population the kind of institutionalized character assassination once limited to public figures on Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia, the registry appears at the top of search results for the target’s name and includes defamatory smears - in this case, charges that have been dismissed or downgraded. Journalists barreling towards deadline feed a name into a search engine and get everything they need from this purpose-built dossier. It is government-sponsored libel, the total inversion of innocent-until-proven-guilty, a mockery of the Bill of Rights and a clear warning to anyone else who would challenge the dictatorial whims of Our Democracy™.

The primary aim of this terror campaign - because it is economic terrorism - is to dissuade anyone who might have been thinking of pointing and laughing at the naked Emperor’s junk from doing so. By keeping the angry mobs off the street, the narrative managers are able to suggest that there are no angry mobs at all, that it’s just you who are upset by the strategic dismantling of your country - and that you’d better not say anything about it unless you want to be consigned to the blacklist and tarred with the worst attributes of the worst of its members. To publicly deviate from groupthink, as anyone who has lived under a totalitarian regime could tell you, is to risk a tap on the shoulder from the secret police.

Canonizing the Snitch

A well-trodden cliche is that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. The notion that thousands of Second Amendment-loving Americans descended upon the Capitol to overthrow their government on January 6th but somehow forgot to bring their guns to the armed uprising beggars belief, yet from this Big Lie springs the lionization of the common snitch and the idea - suddenly ubiquitous - that the cowardly urge to turn our fellow humans in to the authorities to save our own wretched skin is not just noble but our only hope of survival as a society.

Guest spots on CNN, thousands of dollars in crowdfunded donations, the adulation of millions of strangers on social media, even professional advancement have been dangled in front of the children of January 6th protesters in some of the most repugnant examples of authoritarian grooming this side of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple. Already primed to become grade-A rats through multiple generations of DARE drug-war programs, Department of Homeland Security snitch-for-cash schemes, and a cultural shift in favor of the informant-as-hero with “celebrities” like Tekashi 6ix9ine, these kids were arguably doomed even before Covid-19 gave snitches a formal job title as “contact tracers”. Now advice blogs call on Americans to take the side of the IRS against their fellow citizens so as to reap the rewards of snitching.

Making Snitching Cool

And Americans have learned their lesson. Not only did the Rage Against the War Machine rally manage to upset its participants more than the government, but when Trump himself called for a protest as rumors of his impending arrest build, even the users of his Truth Social platform balked, smelling another “January 6 trap.” Once permanent, easily searchable registries are involved, the reputational stakes of supporting a cause increase dramatically, and those on the fence must think of their careers, their families, their mortgage payments, and so on, quietly backing away from the stand they might otherwise have taken, perhaps even deleting tweets or pulling down blog posts to cover their tracks while the victims of this witch hunt are left flapping in the breeze. Like the victims of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare half a century earlier, Americans whose only “crime” was holding the wrong political views in the wrong place at the wrong time are being traumatized with violent raids, social isolation, Kafkaesque touchless torture, and a refusal by those in power to even acknowledge their right to non-mainstream ideas - a cocktail so effective some are no doubt left wondering if maybe they had tried to overthrow the government by asking a Capitol police officer where the men’s room was. Offered the unappealing choice between a prolonged legal battle to clear their name or copping to a lesser but still bogus charge and moving on with their lives, their mental and physical health suffers. Friends and family, asked to choose between two terrifying realities - either their loved one is a terrorist, or their government is a predatory rogue state - often simply avoid the person altogether rather than make that choice. “I don’t know what to believe anymore!” has become a common refrain, and faced with such cognitive dissonance, the bonds of family don’t stand a chance.

Jackson Reffitt, the Texas teen who called the FBI on his Three-Percenter father Guy upon learning he was traveling to DC for the Stop the Steal rally, became an establishment darling after bugging his own home at the agency’s request when the recordings he made of himself goading his dad into drunken death threats netted the Justice Department its first conviction. Guy’s empty words were a running joke among the family, according to his wife and daughter, and even Jackson admitted under oath that his dad’s “threats” were more “bravado” than reality - but they played spectacularly in the courtroom. The prosecutor asked for a “terrorism” enhancement to the sentence and read a letter from Jackson urging the judge to throw the book at his father, and while the former wasn’t granted, the amateur militiaman - who never entered the Capitol - got seven years in prison, the first of many scalps for a newly-empowered Thought Police.

Snitches, as Patrick Bateman understudy Gavin Newsom famously said, get rewards, and Jackson had pulled down more than $189,000 in GoFundMe donations as of this writing, refusing to cough up a cent for the family he deprived of its breadwinner (“he basically just said it’s a Go Fund Me, not a Go Fund Us,” his sister Sarah recently told Vice). The teenager has remained loyal to the state and appeared to feel no remorse post-sentencing, telling CNN he was glad his father got such a lengthy sentence because Guy needed help for his “mental illness” and that given the chance, he’d snitch again. In the same breath, he acknowledged the American prison system was woefully flawed and abusive, apparently unable to comprehend that he’d just sent his dad into the belly of the beast, where he’d suffer a seizure due to Xanax withdrawal (a potentially deadly condition) just days into his confinement.

Americans might tell themselves it was Reffitt’s “big mouth” - inflating his role in the chaos in DC and blustering unserious threats at his family - that did him in, even though such bloviation is constitutionally-protected free speech. They might tsk-tsk about what did he expect hanging out with a bunch of insurrectionists-in-waiting like the Three Percenters, perpetuating the legal fiction that ideation is the equivalent of action or even intent, or chide him for putting his life in the hands of a bloodthirsty jury rather than taking a plea. Certainly, that’s what the media did, depicting Reffitt as equal parts sad sack loner, delusional narcissist, and gun-toting redneck. But Reffitt’s punishment could not exist without the snitch culture that has taken root in the country over the last several decades, the era of “See something say something,” in which education has focused on repatterning children’s loyalties from their families to the state while parents are told letting the same state raise their children for them is true freedom. After all, his son was not the only person close to Guy to be nudged by the feds into snitching on him - the FBI nearly turned his daughter Peyton against him as well, with prosecutors only opting at the last minute not to put her on the stand when they suspected she might defend her father instead. Even Reffitt’s Three Percenter buddy Rocky Hardie willingly turned snitch when the FBI subpoenaed him following Reffitt’s arrest, taking partial immunity in a deal which rewarded him with de facto amnesty for every crime he could confess his friend’s involvement in.

what, you don’t remember the part where they SET THE CAPITOL ON FIRE??

 In reality, everyone who publicly chalked Reffitt’s overzealous prosecution to his inability to keep his mouth shut is perfectly aware there are at least three people in their own lives, probably within their own families, who are capable of doing just as much damage to them as Jackson Reffitt did to his father. While the media went on to publish dozens more cases in which naughty insurrectionists were turned in by employees, parents, girlfriends, even their spouse of 18 years, none had the heft of the Reffitt case. The treatment Guy endured - from the family betrayal to the pre-dawn SWAT raid to the seven-year sentence for not even trespassing in the ‘riot area’ at the Capitol - was a powerful motivator for anyone not physically present in DC on January 6 to run, not walk, from those who were, lest they too attract the attention of these predators. 

Creating the Enemy Within

Once the target is successfully isolated, establishment commentators and their minions in the alt-media deploy language to great effect to craft an enduring image of the Enemy Within, making it as easy as possible to “other” the targeted group. Unflattering or downright repulsive images are used as stand-ins for the ideology to be demonized - the now-iconic “QAnon Shaman” in his ridiculous body paint and furs being an instantly recognizable example of the tactic, now recycled at every protest like the human embodiment of USAID’s “clenched-fist” color revolution meme.

Preventing empathy becomes a full-time job for the establishment, which discourages approaching the other using loaded rhetoric and demonizing narratives such as the overwrought testimony of Capitol police officers before the J6 Select Committee and the members of Congress who likened the events of that day to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Emotionally-charged terms like “denier” (meant to evoke the cardinal epistemological sin of “holocaust denial,” itself largely fictitious) are legion. Question the 2020 election results? You’re an election denier. Think there’s something off about the manmade climate change narrative? Climate denier. Question the wisdom of letting Big Pharma dictate what goes into your body? Vaccine denier. Even 9/11 researchers are no longer “truthers,” but “9/11 deniers.” You either believe the official story about the event, or you categorically deny it happened at all. Nuance is betrayal. The targeted group, we are told, aren’t just victims of a highly contagious infodemic, but threats to social order, terrorists even. Bad actors - often themselves federal agents, as was the case on January 6th, in the bizarre kidnapping plot targeting Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in the leadership of the Order of Nine Angles, the Proud Boys, and Atomwaffen, and the entirety of Patriot Front - are held up to represent entire movements. Seeing bits of themselves in the ‘other’ that are no longer socially acceptable - things like intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, insubordination, a sense of humor - the masses are all the more motivated to conform, lest they tempt a snitch and end up on the receiving end of the treatment they’ve been manipulated into dishing out against the targeted population.

what are you, some kind of denial denier??

Without this cultish black-and-white thinking, the social climate supporting McCarthy-style blacklists cannot stand. If Democrats who’d been on the fence about Biden’s legitimacy had seen the J6 protesters as peaceful people with misgivings just like their own, the past two years would have been very different. The moment the average American feels more sympathy for Guy Reffitt than Nancy Pelosi, the game is up.

The J6 blacklist is just the most organized, public version of a phenomenon that has been quietly constructed in the shadows of American commerce for years. Between the sanctions ostensibly leveled against foreign adversaries like Russia and Iran, which have resulted in thousands of Americans losing their jobs because their employer is deemed too cozy with a “bad” country, the FDA’s efforts to shut down alternative medicine practitioners (which reached a fever pitch during the pandemic with “Operation Quack Hack”), the IRS’ longstanding harassment of activists and journalists including this writer, and the coordinated de-banking targeting the firearms industry, conservative political groups, and more recently anyone who dared pledge financial support to the Canadian Freedom Convoy, financial terrorism has become one of the corporate state’s favorite weapons against the loudest voices for sanity, whether they identify on the Right, the Left, or neither. The victims of such attacks are rarely left with the means to expose their plight, and those around them back away so as not to attract the attention of the cruel and capricious corporate state. 

Big Tech isn’t the only industry operating the censorship-industrial complex, after all. Congress - and the international financial cartels that control Congress - has long recognized banking as the ideal ‘choke point’ for exercising control over the population, and because the banks are ostensibly private corporations, they are not subject to the First Amendment - or the Second. Bank of America has been closing the accounts of firearms manufacturers since 2017, and with every mass shooting, support for such extralegal measures increases. A brief look at some of the absurd policies that banks have adopted in recent years to placate groups like the Anti-Defamation League and Color of Change who might otherwise allow their tame hordes to burn ATMs and drag bank managers out by their ties is instructive. Capital One bans all transactions that “promote hate,” whatever that means. Visa forbids customers from using its services “in any manner that could be deemed hateful.” PayPal vows to fine users who engage in “promotion of hate…or other forms of intolerance that [are] discriminatory.” Most importantly, these vague terms are all defined at the companies’ sole discretion. The “private corporation” fig leaf disintegrates when one looks at the size of the donations the industry feeds Congress and the revolving door between bank management, government, and regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

Once you’ve been deemed an enemy of the state, any and all means will be deployed to bring you to “justice.” There is no hiding from the cyber-stasi. Jigsaw, the Google subsidiary that purports to “explore threats to open societies” through the wonders of data mining, claims it can suss out a “white supremacist” using techniques their detractors dub “cyber-phrenology” - the dubious theory that not only choice of platform and vocabulary but metadata like speed of typing, operating system, decisiveness of clicks, and other non-content attributes reliably predict not only demographics but ideology. While this has posed little risk in the past - for non-Muslims at least, the worst that would happen if you got mistaken for a member of ISIS was YouTube force-feeding you videos of avuncular Muslims discoursing on their journeys out of extremism - things got real when Google turned the tool on “white supremacists,” referring some to “counselors” who could then funnel the information to authorities on a pre-crime basis. That was years ago - long before the January 6th blacklist or PayPal’s $2,500 misinformation fees were even a twinkle in Big Brother’s eye - and while the technology used by cyber-phrenologists has advanced, it has not become more accurate, as improvement from the perspective of Jigsaw’s programmers means expanding the range of censorable ideas rather than refining it. If Jigsaw decides that merely interacting with “malicious actors” on social media makes one part of a “hate cluster,” merely matching that profile becomes sufficient to justify further targeted prying - by a financially-incentivized citizen SnitchCorps or by the real cops. 

Some readers may protest that they are safe from this kind of McCarthyite fantasy - their ideological bona fides are untouchable, they have tenure, they have friends or relatives in high places. It does not matter. Even the most well-meaning witch hunt eventually runs out of witches, as the anti-extremist crusaders at Google’s Jigsaw learned the hard way when they ended up on the receiving end of the circular firing squad they helped arm. The FBI has declared merely sharing conspiracy theories and memes online or using internet slang like “based” and “red pilled” is a warning sign of violent extremism, meaning that if you are reading this article, you are on a watchlist (and were long before you read this article, so don’t blame me). In the last few years, we have seen such innocuous children’s classics as James and the Giant Peach and grown-up favorites like the James Bond novels butchered in the name of “sensitivity,” while 1984 and Brave New World - long considered the foundational works of the modern dystopia in which we live - are both listed as signs of extremism by the UK’s anti-terrorism boondoggle Prevent. Ideas once merely considered unstylish - not believing in global warming, or opposing mandatory vaccination - have been recast as attacks on the “trustworthiness” of “institutions,” while parents are being deemed terrorists for trying to safeguard their young daughters from male genitalia in the locker room or their sons from pornography in schools which have devolved into a cross between fetish club and supermax prison. The moment the narrative managers’ hyenas have finished tearing out the throats of their latest ideological quarry, it’s onto the next one. After they’ve come for the the health freedom activists, the anti-war protesters, the election integrity campaigners, the climate change skeptics, the anti-Zionist Jews, the de-transitioners, and the free speech absolutists, there will be no one left to speak for you - and you will not deserve anyone. You cannot appease your way out of tyranny. Stop trying.

to be continued in PART II: the psychological disorders you never knew you had, and how the RESTRICT Act will cure them for you…