OPINION:
This week our country’s ruling class doubled down in its efforts to silence anyone who dares dissent from their approved narrative.
Yes, our nation’s established elites have once again proved themselves to be shameless, pompous, unpretentious power brokers. They (whoever “they” are) no longer even care to hide it. “They” have decided that “they” are the deciders.
“They” will decide where and when you can shop.
“They” will decide what you will wear on your face.
“They” will decide what drugs you will inject into your body.
“They” will decide what research will and will not be available concerning such drugs.
“They” will decide when you can go to church.
“They” will decide how far apart you will stand when you wait in line at the cashier.
“They” will decide what you can and cannot read and what you will and will not hear.
“They” are the deciders.
Want proof? Consider this week’s news of YouTube’s and Google’s censorship of former United States Rep. and 2019 Democrat presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.
On March 9, 2022, Ms. Gabbard offered the following comments to Fox News concerning our government’s handling of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
“Nothing that the Biden administration has done has helped make this situation better [nor] has it helped deescalate the situation. When I look at these issues, I think about what is in the best interests of the American people [and] the continued escalation of this conflict and this war is not in the best interest of [Americans] or the world. … People like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, all use this flowery language about how you know we’ve got to take a stand and pay the price … for freedom. The question that we should all be asking them is OK, tell us how Russia somehow has the power to take away … the rights that are enshrined in our Bill of Rights. The answer is, they don’t; they don’t have that power. So, the lines that we’re being sold [are] just crap. … It’s crap.”
Ms. Gabbard then summarized: “The ‘Power Elite’ in Washington” is doing all this simply to further their goals; “their warmongering” and their “military-industrial complex.”
And for all the above, Ms. Gabbard was then declared verboten by Google and YouTube, and her comments were flagged this week by “fact-checkers” as “inappropriate and offensive to some audiences.”
So, there you have it. Ms. Gabbard just said something that, for all intents and purposes, is indistinguishable from what the leaders of her own party have said a thousand times over when they criticized former Presidents George Bush, Ronald Reagan or for that matter Lyndon B. Johnson, and she was canceled for doing so.
This kind of censorship should bother you. Or as Tucker Carlson recently said, “[When] every orifice of the national media, fully aligns [with the political establishment] to push a single message, [this] ought to make you nervous.”
In his 2010 seminal work, “The Ruling Class,” Angelo Codevilla warned of the dangers of such an alignment. Here’s just a snippet of his prophetic wisdom:
“[Today’s elites] dismiss the [average citizen] as ignorant. … They have made themselves into a Ruling Class [whose] contempt for opposition is so patent …”
“Today’s Ruling Class [has] a narrow, uniform set of ideas. … The class’s chief pretension is its intellectual superiority …”
“The Ruling Class thinks that Americans are unfit to run their own lives [i.e., they believe we are incapable of even deciding for ourselves what we should read].”
“At stake are the most important questions. … Who gets to decide what?”
“The enlightened of the Ruling Class know … that ordinary people can no more be trusted with [information] than they can with guns. … Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar a proper authority acknowledges them.”
“By identifying [truth] with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. … Thus, does the Ruling Class go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.”
In his forward to Codevilla’s book, Rush Limbaugh added, “These people … have a certain strange set of beliefs. One is that those of us not in the Ruling Class haven’t got the smarts to know what’s best for ourselves. They think they have to decide for us. … This is an insidious bunch.”
Isn’t it amazing how today’s oligarchs and technocrats who fancies themselves to be our “deciders” are now censoring people for saying the same thing they were shouting in protest just yesterday?
Indeed, our “deciders” are a very “insidious bunch.”
I believe Vladimir Lenin had a name for these people. I think he called them “useful idiots.”
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery) and, most recently, “Grow Up: Life Isn’t Safe, But It’s Good.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.