More Americans grasp how the U.S. government actually works.  Large corporate interests pay off politicians and bureaucrats to advance their financial interests.  In return, those politicians and bureaucrats are responsible for creating new problems for the American people that can be exploited to justify spending huge sums of money — the bulk of which falls into the laps of the large corporate interests. 

The pharmaceutical industry, for instance, would love for lawmakers to mandate that Americans purchase and use their products in perpetuity.  Big Pharma then pays hospitals, research scientists, and medical doctors to push its products.  It privately funds public health agencies, while rewarding ostensibly objective bureaucrats with research grants and promises of future lucrative employment.  Through its lobbying arms, Big Pharma fills the campaign coffers and family foundations of elected officials and works hand in glove with lawmakers to craft legislation that simultaneously expands Big Pharma's profits and lawmakers' personal stock portfolios.  Lawmakers who refuse to play this corrupt game end up becoming the electoral targets of all those extra dollars in industry profits, and the stick-or-carrot system effectively works to eliminate ethical politicians, while elevating criminals.  It's plain old bribery and extortion, and it is how Washington, D.C. operates.

Notice that for this system to thrive, industry and government agents must continue to create new crises for the American people.  Far from being motivated to build a healthy future where humans are free from disease, Big Pharma has an incentive to invest in viral gain-of-function research or other dangerous experimental work that might inadvertently leak from a lab and unleash the next big pandemic.  A healthy world is profitless.  Likewise, defense industry interests have every incentive to see mortal threats throughout the globe and no incentive to sue for peace.  Only endless war can sustain regular investment growth.  If politicians and bureaucrats were slightly less immoral than they really are, then perhaps they could agree to just pay off Big Pharma and Big Defense with big bags of printed bills, rather than force their products on new victims around the world.  Alas, as the stick-and-carrot machinery continues to corrupt the system, the politicians and bureaucrats become only more committed to total destruction both here at home and abroad.  

That operation to destroy everything for an extra buck is D.C.'s mission, and if you are willing to concede that Big Pharma and Big Defense might have nefarious motivations but are still 100% convinced that government agencies are reliably warning about the "existential threat" from man-made climate change out of some altruistic obligation to humanity, then you have deluded yourself into thinking that evil government actors will, from time to time, generously tell the truth.  Evil liars are evil liars; they do not lie about health emergencies, open borders, election integrity, and the need for war while embracing honesty when it comes to "global warming," "white supremacy," or "transgenderism."  There is no spectrum where this subject is held reverently off-limits from government manipulation, while this other subject is deemed not worthy of providing the public with accurate information.  Once you accept that the government is in the business of lies, you must scrutinize anything that it says and act accordingly.

Of course, politicians and bureaucrats aren't all stupid.  They know that a growing share of Americans do not trust anything they have to say.  That's why they funnel so much tax money directly into the pockets of "non-governmental" think-tanks, media organs, fact-checkers, universities, environmental groups, and distinguished institutes filled with so-called "policy wonks."  As the government recognized that it had trashed its own credibility, it chose to delegate its policymaking to prefabricated third parties dripping in manufactured prestige.  If you don't trust us, surely you must trust NBC, CNN, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, The New York Times, the World Economic Forum, the Global Disinformation Index, or Greenpeace!

Third-party think-tanks that are direct or indirect recipients of taxpayer funds and corporate profits reach "objective" intellectual conclusions that just so happen to directly or indirectly benefit government and corporate interests.  See how that works?  Instead of adversarial reporters and true thinkers holding government power accountable, the government just put all its erstwhile enemies on its ever-growing payroll.  "Democracy" works best when corporate oligarchs tell politicians and bureaucrats what to do, while corporate news and corporate-funded "non-profit" groups pretend that everything the government does is all very reasonable.  Government power launders prestige to the academics, journalists, and think-tanks; those outside opinion-leaders launder their "objectivity" to the politicians and bureaucrats; the politicians and bureaucrats launder taxpayer dollars to big corporate interests; and the big corporate interests kick some coin back to the politicians, bureaucrats, academics, journalists, and think-tanks.

It's pillage and plunder — just like the old days.

That's the American system of "democracy" — a farcical wonderland where the wealthy and powerful use counterfeit money and counterfeit opinion to generate real policy and wealth while impoverishing and endangering the people in whose name the system is ludicrously said to serve.  In this propaganda zone, "vaccines," "economic recession," "climate," "war," and even "womanhood" are redefined as nonchalantly as "democracy" has been redefined — all to benefit the financial and hegemonic interests of the corporate State. 

This Frankensteinian fascism that we must pretend is "democracy" borrows from 1984's manipulation of language, Brave New World's psychologically engineered social hierarchy, Fahrenheit 451's commitment to destroying knowledge through censorship, and The Hunger Games' authoritarian control over desperate citizens who exist only to enrich the Capitol.  All of these books have been banned at different times in countries around the world (including our own), and the more successfully that the American government forfeits Americans' birthright of freedom, the more likely that all four will someday be rewritten (just as so many other books have already been) as works of fiction in support of government's totalitarian control.  Forty years after Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, he warned that Western "political correctness" is "the real enemy these days" and should be considered "thought control and freedom of speech control."  Remember those words when Big Tech works with Big Government to transform his warning into support for the criminalization of "disinformation," "misinformation," and "hate speech."  Government censors have no shame.

I have no interest in this kind of future, but the first step to liberating ourselves from certain dystopia is understanding and accepting that the government is always lying.  It does not consider telling the truth a civic or moral duty; rather, it believes in disseminating "narratives" that are most beneficial to its own grip on power.  Those who advance farthest in government are not honest people, and their trickle-down dishonesty corrupts everyone around them.  In politics and war, the lowest common denominator tends to win out.  There is a race to the bottom in which ruthless violence and abject immorality succeed while honor and principle are rejected.  As Representative Burchett from Tennessee recently acknowledged, congressional ethics doesn't exist.

What separated the American government for the longest time from others in the world was its steadfast (albeit imperfect) respect for personal freedom, representative government, constitutional fidelity, and limited bureaucratic power.  That has gone out the window.  When President Kennedy urged Americans during his Inaugural Address to "ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country," he was "defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger."  Today's politicians demand that Americans do what they say and have made government our maximum danger.

While the corporate-controlled State engages in false narratives, propaganda, and 1984 distortion of language, we have but one duty: to reject all lies.  Resistance against illegitimate power begins with one simple thing — the truth.

Image: Mark Hillary via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.