Pete Hendrickson (@LostHorizons)

It's Always About Fear. by Laura Williams (with an important afterword by Yours Truly...) A National Terrorism Advisory Service bulletin released last week identified the number one terroristic threat to Americans as “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. Government institutions.” Free speech, and specifically the right to criticize our government, is being reframed, in real time, as a threat to public health and safety. You are being primed to fear thought crimes, in which criticizing the US government is equal to a violent act. The federal government is creating a public health pretense for silencing those who tell the truth about the US government’s very real history of victimizing its own citizens. To take away your most basic civil liberties, overzealous governments rely on your fear. They cultivate, stoke, and stimulate it. Then they demand new powers to fight it. H.L. Mencken aptly observed in 1918, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” A population clamoring to be led to safety can easily be persuaded that some of its freedoms – even the most cherished ones – must be suspended until the danger has passed. A laundry list of supposedly civilization-shaking specters (the threat of Communists, of crack cocaine, of crime, of Islamic extremism, of Covid-19) has thus been presented to the public, to inspire their fear and ensure their continued willingness to cede Constitutionally guaranteed natural rights. Each of the worst authoritarian abuses of the state can be traced to a particular enemy, conjured by fear in the public imagination. When we allow ourselves to be led in fear of such an enemy, we invite the full repeal of the Bill of Rights. Drugs Continued: https://losthorizons.com/N/184.htm#4