As Joe Biden has begun his fade into oblivion, to be loved in the future only by historians with their useless and laughable rankings of the presidents, he shared with us some farewell remarks.
President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military industrial complex. He warned us then about "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power. End of quote." Six decades later, I'm equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling, editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.
Where does one even start, dear reader?
(1) Is Biden also concerned about the military-industrial complex? Does Biden think the dangers of the military-industrial complex, as identified by Eisenhower, persist to this day? If so, what did he do as president to curtail them?
(2) Has the U.S. government itself been guilty of "misinformation" or "disinformation"? How does the misinformation or disinformation of the U.S. government and its compliant media compare with alleged misinformation or disinformation spread by private individuals?
(3) Is the "free press" crumbling, or is legacy media crumbling, and a less cowardly and more decentralized alternative taking its place?
(4) "Fact checking" sounds soothing and nice, but many bad things have nice-sounding names. Are there examples of "fact checking" that were in fact partisan attacks on true statements? In other words, might someone have a good reason (other than irrationally hating "facts") for being wary of "fact checkers"?
(5) The entire U.S. regime rests on a mountain of lies that contribute to its power and enrich its key players. The history of U.S. wars and foreign policy is a pile of lies that would embarrass a second grader. The track records of various federal agencies are distorted and lied about in order to justify ever-higher budgets. As usual, the U.S. government accuses other entities and individuals of doing the very things that it does every day.
I could probably write an entire book refuting this single Biden paragraph. In fact, very often a single Biden sentence is so misleading that it would take paragraphs to refute.
I've sometimes wondered: why are leftists so much more likely than other people to cover their cars in bumper stickers?
Answer: because their entire worldview is a bumper sticker. They think enormously complicated questions can be boiled down to a single moralizing sentence.
The various utopian communities and reform movements of the 19th century were the same way. We would have the society we all longed for if only we could abolish some corrupting institution. Simple!
For the temperance movement it was alcoholic drink that was behind the vast majority of social ills. For the public school movement it was "ignorance." For the utopian communities it was private property. For the Oneida community it was monogamous marriage. And for the 20th-century civil rights movement it was "racism."
In each case, everything had a quick and simple answer, and the real world was reduced to a comic book, complete with supervillains (and of course heroes, namely themselves).