In the digital public square of social media, I have seen a noticeable uptick in biting memes and political cartoons calling out the U.S. government for its constant lies.  In one example, a cyber-billboard screams, "I don't know if I'm being distracted by vaccine deaths so I don't notice inflation, or if inflation is the distraction to Ukraine money laundering, or if Ukraine is a distraction for rampant pedophilia, or if pedos are distracting me from election fraud."  Clearly, that was produced before the great balloon scare gripped the nation.  Ah, but no sooner had China Joe proven once again how unsecured our open borders are by allowing a Chinese surveillance balloon to float above the continent's nuclear silos than I ran into a cartoon divided into four squares in which the same man was being hypnotized — first by a dangling coronavirus in 2020, then an mRNA "vaccine" shot in 2021, then a Ukraine flag in 2022, and finally an extraterrestrial spaceship in 2023.  Well done, meme masters and internet freethinkers!  Actually, corrupt Senator Harry Reid had started to play the UFO card a decade ago, so perhaps this cycle is just starting up once again.  Uff da.

If you want to know what's really going on within a society, you don't run to the national newspapers or interview people with titles.  You get out and talk to the people nobody else would dare seek.  In the Internet Age, you look at what's being said by ordinary people on unremarkable chatrooms whose opinions are routinely overlooked.  What I see today is a bubbling movement of frustration and anger that is as acidic as anything I've come across.  Americans are furiously mad — but noticeably not in despair.  People are not throwing their hands up in desperation; they're venting their rage at a corrupt system of government that has gotten out of control.  They're not hiding in the shadows, whispering in hushed tones; they're screaming at the top of their lungs, just daring the Big Tech censors to blot out their (un)free speech.  They're not allowing the State's "politically correct" priests and purveyors of officially sanctioned disinformation to shame them into silence; they're laughing in the spin doctors' faces and calling out the government's mass propaganda for what it is.  That's refreshing!

One of my favorite lines from Martin Scorsese's The Departed comes from hard-nosed cop Mark Wahlberg when he says, "My theory on Feds is they're like mushrooms...feed 'em s--- and keep 'em in the dark."  The unfortunate truth is that that zinger perfectly encapsulates the federal government's philosophy regarding the American people.  Whether it is White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claiming that Slow Joe is the "best communicator" around; Treasury secretary Janet Yellen insisting for over a year that skyrocketing inflation would be "transitory"; government economists redefining words to avoid admitting that we're in a recession; Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas flat-out lying about the southern border being "secure"; or former chief of staff Ron Klain preposterously labeling the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, in which thirteen U.S. servicemembers lost their lives for no reason, a "tremendous humanitarian achievement," the people occupying the highest positions of power and authority in the U.S. government do not bat an eye while telling the American people the most outrageous falsehoods drenched in risibly nauseating sanctimony.  It is we, the American people, who are constantly left in the dark and fed foul-smelling filth.

To a certain extent, this is nothing new.  Governments lie and abuse their powers all the time.  Anyone who says otherwise either is from the government or benefits directly from the government's monopoly on creating official public "narratives."  Not so long ago, people allied with the political left understood this fundamental truth.  They railed against the "weapons of mass destruction" rallying cry that catapulted the U.S. into two concurrent wars; they called out the PATRIOT Act as an obvious violation of civil rights; they lambasted Wall Street, Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex, and government's petty regulation regime.  They could never admit it to themselves, but deep down, most would have agreed with President Reagan's quip about the nine most terrifying words in the English language being "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."  In their hearts, most Americans of whatever ideological persuasion understood and appreciated Lord Acton's famous warning that "all power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

After seeing how effectively the communist vanguard of "woke" warriors have used carrot-and-stick "intersectionality" to co-opt culture, finance, industry, the Intelligence Community, the FBI and DOJ, the courts, and even the military, one thing is abundantly clear: Lord Acton was right!  Also clear is that now that political leftists have control over essentially all levers of administrative, economic, and cultural power, they've become amnesiacs when it comes to the great British historian's ardent warnings against centralized government's eternal threat to personal liberty.  How quickly the left's mantra on gay "marriage" went from "love is love" to "you must bake the cake!"  How brazenly the left's pro-choice jingles went from "safe, legal, and rare" to "shout your abortion!"  How cognitively dissonant the left's favorite new tactic of vilifying political enemies as "Russian appeasers" appears when played next to decades of leftist outcry against Senator Joe McCarthy's "red scare."  When people without principle secure power, then power alone is worshiped as the highest principle.

Where does that leave us?  Well, if we're being honest, it should leave us with a shared understanding that the system as it exists today cannot hold.  We cannot be a nation whose rights and liberties are guaranteed by a governing constitution when lawmakers, presidents, bureaucratic agencies, and federal courts have redefined the Constitution's plain meaning into a whole new document.  We cannot be a free people with a cherished Bill of Rights when freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, the right to self-defense, due process, and other supposedly secured rights are thrown out the window every time government agents declare a "health emergency" (especially now that "health" has been redefined to include everything under the sun, including "climate change" and "systemic racism").  We cannot pretend to have representative government when two private corporations posing as political parties exclude most Americans from office while promoting their own lackeys.  We cannot feign to have a functioning Congress when most every member is a bought-and-paid-for stooge for some corporate special interest.  We cannot profess to be wed to "democratic" principles when millions of unelected bureaucratic agents defended by an authoritarian and secretive national security Deep State run the show.  We cannot make believe that we live with anything remotely like "free markets" when the value of the U.S. dollar continues to crumble, Congress spends more and more money it does not have, the private Federal Reserve bank of financial titans keeps printing currency, and the apologists for multinational behemoths claim that blue-collar towns across America must be destroyed in order to pay proper tribute to international treaties posing as bulwarks for "free trade."  All these things are lies, and people of goodwill and conscience must call them out as such.

Believe it or not, that is what "the powers that be" fear the most: a self-assured population willing to see through all the poppycock and call it what it is.  You didn't think our government just woke up one morning and decided to start an unprecedented mass-censorship campaign targeting "harmful" language" and "disinformation," did you?  They did so because they noticed that the people have noticed that they're nothing but self-serving propagandists and liars.  When people wake up in raw anger, real change is never far behind.

Image via Public Domain Pictures.