Governments, if they endure always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class—whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracies.

—Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

Strange days have found us.

Strange days have tracked us down.

They’re going to destroy

Our casual joys…

—Jim Morrison and The Doors

What could be stranger than the media coming out against free speech and the First Amendment? Maybe biological men winning championships in women’s sports? Or the government forcing people to close their businesses? Or perhaps mask mandates and vaccine passports? Now we have a federal Ministry of Truth. Strange days indeed.

It is the new aristocracy that is destroying our casual joys. They do so gleefully because they have contempt for the middle class. To the new American elites, the middle class means prosperity and they believe that prosperity should accrue only to themselves. Everyone else should be poor and happy just to be alive. They think little of that which they tear down or what evils they may create to fill the void. The American experiment was a way to avoid this aristocracy trap. It looks as though we are witnessing the demise of that noble effort.

Two hundred and forty years of pent-up envy have deprived these would-be aristocrats of any sense of fair play. They despise free enterprise and the awesome success of the individual.

In another age, the average people that they so loathe would have been consigned to serfdom and drudgery. They know that it was individual freedom and the Constitution that liberated Americans from this prison and lifted the poor into the great American middle class. They, therefore, must tear down the country and rebuild it as an authoritarian hellhole to restore themselves to their rightful place of power and prestige.

Image: The World turn’d upside down, 1646.

Bearing witness to these very strange days, it’s almost impossible to believe that it’s real and not just the conjuring of some late-blooming middle-age crisis. This is not, however, the country we grew up in and there is ample evidence pointing to real changes that are happening all around us:

• The Department of Justice imprisons trespassers without bail or constitutional rights while watching passively as attempted mass murderers go free.
• They place parents on terrorist watch lists for standing up to evil bureaucracies at school board meetings while real terrorists come into the country across our open southern border.
• Democrats and Republicans refuse to act as a corrupt administration violates the Constitution at will.
• The Bill of Rights is under daily assault as the “public square” is increasingly available only to leftists and their sympathizers.
• Men, thinly disguised as women, are allowed to compete in women’s sporting events.
• We defend the borders of countries that will not benefit our national interests while we refuse to defend our own border as all varieties of criminality, illicit drugs, and illegal aliens are pouring into the country in record numbers.
• We ignore the ever-growing suicide rates and overdosing of our increasingly impoverished middle class.
• Inflation reaches rates not seen since the 1970s as the cost of energy continues to soar along with the national debt.
• The “entrenched bureaucracy” manufacturers endless crises to distract from its members’ incompetence and their authoritarian wish list.

Our citizenry is either hopelessly inured to these changes or stands aghast and frozen in place not yet believing what has so quickly occurred and not having any clue what to do about it.

Now we are facing, the new Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board. Please wake me up because this can’t be happening. These people can’t believe that they can get away with deleting the First Amendment. Yet here we are.

By its very name, the Board is a violation of free speech. Who decides what is disinformation? We should have known this was coming when Jen Psaki so casually mentioned that the Biden administration was overtly violating the First Amendment in one of her propaganda briefings. Now they’ve set up the DHS to perform that function as part of their job description. Where are the Republicans? Where are the Americans?

Frank Liberato is a pseudonym.