There were two simultaneous hearings yesterday in the House now ruled by Republicans. The first concerned Big Tech censorship and featured Twitter ex-employees being grilled on their role in controlling the public mind in ways that were politically biased.
It was mostly boring of course but I was struck by how many times the people under oath claimed that they couldn’t hear the question, couldn’t read the chart, couldn’t follow the line of thinking, or, even when all else failed, simply could not remember anything. Then there was the former attorney who refused to answer anything on grounds that he must maintain attorney/client privilege even though Twitter is no longer his client.
The second hearing was on the COVID response and featured various public officials including the head of the CDC, who must hold that position based on her Ph.D. in Dissembling. Sadly, nothing much came of the hearing unless I missed something. The questioning was all over the place and imprecise. Too many Republicans wasted time, almost as if they don’t really want to know the truth.
What stands out to me most—and which I almost could not believe—was the absolute unity among the Democrats. I saw no exception. They all agreed that 1) the COVID response was great and only undermined by non-compliance, 2) censorship is necessary and well done by all these ex-Twitter employees and there really needs to be much more of it to protect the public against dangerous disinformation, and 3) these hearings are completely unnecessary.
Something truly terrible has happened to the Democrat Party. Something wicked. This is not the party of John F. Kennedy. Nor Jimmy Carter. Not even Bill Clinton would fit into this gang. I’m not even sure Obama is a good fit here. They are careening toward a consistent position that society should be controlled in all respects by wise government run by aggressive partisans and other experts of their choosing.
Gone completely is affection for free speech, freedom of association, minority rights, trial by jury, public accountability, free expression, and all that stuff. It’s like it’s been wiped out of the liberal brain. There is simply no suspicion of power left in them, unless it is power exercised by someone not part of their team. Really, there is a screw loose here. They seem to have abandoned all the main pillars of civilized life and become full-on champions of the bad guys in every dystopian novel.
What’s more, this entire political party seems to have decided that its best hope is to sign up as the public face of the entire administrative state, not only its biomedical arm but even its police-state arm at the FBI and CIA. It’s truly hard to understand. Even five years ago, such a reality seemed impossible. But it is here now.
You listen to these people with your jaw on the floor. Once you pick it up, you want to mutter things like “And yet there is the Bill of Rights” while fully expecting anyone in this crowd to jump down your throat and accuse you of being controlled by QAnon (whatever that is). The cynicism here runs extremely deep. Maybe they never took a civics class. Maybe they don’t believe in freedom or rights. Maybe they really did sneak off to a Stalinist training camp somewhere and get brainwashed. Otherwise I truly don’t know how to account for it.
Stunningly, these people are called “liberals.” There is nothing liberal about their thinking that remains. There was a time when this crowd founded the ACLU but that was before the ACLU became a front to defend lockdowns and mandated jabs. They defended the civil rights movement but that was before major civil-rights organizations warmed up to segregation and race hatred.
Truly, the corruption of “liberalism” is complete. It’s unbearably tragic. Yes, it did begin in the United States long ago. Maybe it began with Woodrow Wilson when the liberals decided to favor world war. It extended with the New Deal, when the liberals made their peace with the corporate state. It got worse in the 1960s and 1970s when liberals decided that dependency on welfare was better than enterprise.
Even so, after all these decades, you could still perceive the existence of some liberal instincts. They favored good government, some human rights, and pushed for at least freedom of speech and so on. But that impulse to control has lately become a malignant cancer that has landed a whole political party into the intellectual camp of totalitarianism.
If that sounds extreme, I truly don’t know what else to conclude from yesterday’s hearings. I guess a memo was sent out to every party member to remember the rule: government, Big Pharma, Big Media, and Big Tech are always right, and, if in doubt, always defend the Deep State. It was as predictable as clockwork.
There were other major problems with the hearings that I saw. The Republicans lack fire, with some exceptions. They were disorganized, with some exceptions. Then viewers had to sit and wait while the opposition party yammered on with time-wasting defense of the indefensible. But there was another problem to which I do not see a solution: the elected branch of government in this setting is at a major disadvantage against the seasoned professionals on the stand.
See how this works? The seasoned professionals have all the tricks up their sleeves, while the elected politicians (for the most part with some exceptions) only have staff-prepared questions that they hardly understand and therefore cannot go toe-to-toe with the eggheads.
What we really need is expert-on-expert questioning. I could put together a panel of people who know this stuff inside and out and could make mincemeat out of the Deep-State blather coming from these people. But sadly due to the structure of these hearings, that is simply impossible. It cannot happen because these hearings are premised on their largely bogus idea that the elected politicians represent the people and the people through them are holding accountable these permanent bureaucrats.
In any case, it was not a good start overall and does not bode well for the future. If this keeps up just as it is, we stand very little likelihood of getting the truth, much less justice. Meanwhile, we have one of two political parties ostensibly running this country who have nothing but obsequious deference toward the darkest of the dark corner of the Deep State. And they do this in the name of a “liberalism” that has in reality become extinct.
The Democrats have become the party of the Total State.
There is a path out of this morass. Republicans need to get smart. They need to get courageous. They need focus. And they need to get ferocious. Time is wasting and there may not be that much of it.
