COVID-19 has fully exposed Americans to another full-blown virus, known as “expertism,” that is running amok in elitist circles today. An essential element to this phenomenon is the captive-audience authoritarianism relished by the establishment Left. Appointed authority, as opposed to that which commands respect based on its own merit, begets tyranny, as its undeserved title-bearers cling to their unearned standing.
Holding Americans hostage to an imposed agenda rather than trying to win them over by compelling persuasion is the heartbeat of the Biden administration. Two recent examples spell this out with crystalline clarity.
You Will Not Question, You Will Obey
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s shocking Oct. 4 declaration that he will sic federal policing agencies on concerned parents who dare to question their local school boards is, above all, about preserving this cherished power dynamic. Pronouncements about “defending democracy” are a favored tool in the effort. Garland did not hesitate to resort to this stale trope once again.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” Garland proclaimed in an official Justice Department release. “Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.”
Read that paragraph again, keeping in mind the words are aimed at the parents of this nation’s schoolchildren. The attorney general of the United States is draping himself in the American flag to use an exaggerated threat of violence to squelch all criticism of the hallowed expertist group of government teachers in the name of preserving the “core values” of democracy.
President Biden’s equally stunning rhetoric in his Oct. 7 remarks in Illinois defending his federal employment coronavirus mandates also operates entirely within the axis of the captive-audience tyranny. The hostages here, of course, are those employed by any company that does business with the U.S. government or any of the several big-brand mega-corporations whom Biden name-dropped as enablers of his squeeze play on the working citizens of this country.
“[W]hile I didn’t race to do it right away… I’ve had to move toward requirements that everyone get vaccinated or I had the authority to do that. That wasn’t my first instinct,” Biden asserted, flat-out saying, not suggesting, that it was the fault of those unwilling to be bribed to do something they did not want to do that left him with no choice but to strip them of their jobs for their refusal.
No Cage-Free Communications Allowed
Jim Acosta
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The hubris continues to astound. CNN host Jim Acosta effortlessly scolded his Oct. 9 guest, former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, for having the unmitigated nerve to go on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program.
“I mean Andrew, I just have to ask,” Acosta said to Yang, addressing him as if he were an unruly child. “Tucker Carlson… let’s just say he’s just a bad person and he represents so much of what is wrong in television news these days. You know this all too well. He spouts off white nationalist talking points. So why would you even go on his show?”
Yang has announced he is forming a third party to break the Swamp Uniparty stranglehold on American politics. He explained to Acosta that any such effort requires reaching across the aisle to disaffected citizens of all political stripes. A glum-faced Acosta wasn’t buying it for a second. This blithe assumption of the dominance of the playing field was decades in the making. It has now blossomed into a full-grown malignant tumor on the body of this nation.
Two of the greatest threats ever posed to captive-audience authoritarianism in America in modern times were the growth of cable TV as a force to be reckoned with in the early 1980s and the creation of the Internet in the 1990s. In both instances, bigness was deployed to ruthlessly crush developments that had the true potential to break the restraints of the controlled-narrative mass communications box.
One of the sadder cultural events to transpire in this country in the past 100 years occurred when a handful of large corporations gobbled up every significant independent local radio and TV station in this country in the 1990s. Read up on the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which eliminated the limits on the number of local stations one company could own in a single market. It effectively annihilated the radio dial as a source of genuine human personality.
Both mediums were utterly destroyed by big-corporate homogenization and left unable to provide anything approaching quality programming. That sad result is an uncontested fact today. Warnings about the leaden dullness brought on by the stifling uniformity and dumbed-down safe predictability of mega-corporate monopoly ownership were presented at the time. The mistake, however, was seeing it merely as a matter of bad product. The inanity was in fact intended much more as a tool of suppression. In that regard, it succeeded wildly. A threat to the controlled narrative was eliminated.
This is what today’s Big Tech Internet censorship crackdowns are all about. This is what beating down criticism of anointed experts is all about. This is what taking your job from you if you won’t “accept the science” is all about – and don’t think for a second it is going to stop with a virus.
The ruling regime is not trying to offer you anything. It is not seeking to enrich your life. This is an exercise of power to impose that which could never be implemented by popular acclaim.
~ Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
