patrick.net

America was, for much of its existence, defined as a nation of laws, not men, in the famous phrase of John Adams. No more. Now men, but only some men, rule. They rule as they please, in arbitrary, selective, self-benefitting fashion. Thus, what we live under is a tyranny, a system without rule of law. Unlike a traditional tyranny, though, our tyrant is not one man, but rather a compound being. Think the classic picture of Hobbes’s Leviathan, one giant and powerful undying creature, whose body is composed of the hive members of our rotten ruling class. But look more closely—our Leviathan is giant and powerful, yes, but is also drooling and imbecilic.

This our tyranny is something new in history, and I name it the Brawndo Tyranny. The reference is to the prescient 2006 movie Idiocracy, a dark comedy where a future society of morons starves because they irrigate crops with Brawndo, a Gatorade stand-in (the “Thirst Mutilator”), figuring it’s better for plants than nasty water. Our tyranny is the same level of stupid. Oh, certainly, its real-life effects, in lives ruined and people killed, are not a joke, and those guilty must be made, ultimately, to pay for their sins. But those of us who worry that the Brawndo Tyranny will have a long tenure should worry less. It is a lot like a malicious five-year-old who has somehow gotten the keys to a backhoe. Yes, he can cause a lot of damage, but it’s not going to go as he plans, and very soon he’s going to be upside down in the ditch.

To be sure, it is not only our ruling classes that are stupid. They have infected much of the country with their stupidity, and thus stupidity dominates nearly all public discourse. Years of propaganda have created a type of harmonic resonance across the land, where stupidity bounces back and forth, increasing in power with each bounce (though of late our rulers have had to resort to blanket censorship to keep reality from dampening the resonance). The best recent example of mass stupidity is reaction to the Wuhan Plague, where public opinion has been characterized by total irrationality and hyper-feminization. There are many other examples, however; it is truly unbelievable how much stupidity America features today. Any prior society with this level of stupid would long since have collapsed, but due to a combination of wealth and historical circumstance, we stagger on, for now. But we can be certain that the end is going to be no different than watering crops with Brawndo. ..

I warn you what I am writing today is very much not for everyone. Rather than history or political philosophy, for the most part it is technical legal analysis of government actions. My aim is to show, in all its naked rancidness, how it is we are actually ruled at this moment. I am not focusing on spectacular and compelling examples, such as how corruption has enabled Nancy Pelosi to accumulate a fortune of more than a hundred million dollars, or how Janet Yellen is allowed to maintain her position while accepting millions in open bribes from those most affected by her decisions. Instead, I am talking about drier examples which show the pervasive underlying rot of the system. For this reason, we will focus mostly on civil law and the making of law, not the application of criminal law. This means we will not talk, except in passing, of how the criminal law has in the past few years been repeatedly used to persecute enemies of the regime, a classic move of tyranny. Yes, those injustices cry out to heaven, but that is not our focus here; it will instead be the focus of future trials and punishments. ...