Government Secrets vs Manufactured Outrage: Where Do We Go from Here?
As thousands of patriotic public servants are entrusted with America's most sensitive secrets, a large swath of Americans is enthralled with a corrupt ex-president & his universe of fabulism and lies.
To my surprise, my previous posting, containing a brief 72-word comment on the sensitivity of classified nuclear information has attracted a lot of attention, overwhelmingly vitriolic. Reaction on LinkedIn has thus far won me nearly 6,000 reads and over 100 (and counting) attack-filled reactions from Trump supporters, some of whom I have blocked due to profanity. Samples:
The FBI continues to show that is nothing more than the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party, which is why it must either be completely remodeled from the ground up or abolished.
James Bruno: Stop the war mongering!
It looks to me like a generic fishing expedition ... or intended to be a provocation to get rightwing extremist backlash - genuine or Antifa/false flag - possibly to justify political suppression measures.
Your first mistake: believing what this administration says about Trump. Your second mistake: believing what the media says about Trump.
This is total BULLSHIT!!
And then there are the many whatabout-Hillary’s and whatabout-Hunter’s. For some reason, some of these folks assume that I gave Hillary a pass on her bedroom computer server scandal. In fact, I felt she should have been prosecuted. I even raised the matter informally with a former top FBI counter-intelligence official at the time.
It truly saddens me to see a broad swath of Americans believing in conspiracy theories so fantastical that they rival any superstitious clap-trap invented in the Dark Ages. And what makes their brainwashing so concerning is how meretricious politicians fan the flames for their own opportunistic ends. I divide these into two categories: those, like Gohmert, Boebert, Greene and Johnson, whose diminished intellectual capacities make one wonder how they complete household shopping much less get elected to Congress. They truly believe the fables conjured up by Fox, OAN, right-wing “think tanks” and Russian intelligence. The second — Stefanik, Cruz, Hawley, Graham, Rubio — greatly outnumber the morons. These highly educated individuals clearly know better, don’t actually believe the lies, but nonetheless will sell their souls to continue to wield power. For their Faustian bargain, these will be consigned to Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell for the Fraudulent and Malicious: “The image of the City in corruption: the progressive disintegration of every social relationship, personal and public . . . all the media of the community’s interchange are perverted and falsified.”
Contrast the denunciations of Trump by Cruz, Rubio, Stefanik and Graham in 2016 with their robotic praise of him now, and their echoing his dangerous lies.
The Atlantic’s Peter Wehner describes them aptly:
The entire incentive structure is to use language that is intemperate, belligerent, conspiratorial, even crazed.
Some people on the right—enraged and inflamed, caught in an echo chamber of undiluted anger and massive lies—clearly hope for it. They are perpetually frenzied and hyper-agitated, convinced they are in an existential struggle against a wicked foe.
In the face of this, virtually the entire Republican Party is egging them on.
Republicans are promoting a narrative that the events of this week prove that the United States government and its chief law-enforcement agency are Nazi-like, corrupt to the core, at war with its own citizens. This can’t end well.
Wehner goes on to describe the rise in violence-laden language infusing social media since the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, with references to “hanging” Democrats, “REVOLUTION!” and “lock and load.”
NBC’s Ben Collins reports, “The posts on these pro-Trump forums tonight are as violent as I’ve seen them since before January 6th. Maybe even moreso.”
The term, “civil war” is trending on social media outlets.
We are in dangerous territory in this country. Five years ago, I warned that we were on the road not to 1861 but to 1920’s Weimar Germany:
Weimar Republic, slid into fourteen years of political gridlock, civil unrest and social and economic chaos. . . Corporate and labor leaders, the landed aristocracy, and other interest groups shortsightedly focused on their individual self-interests at the expense of the nation’s. Wealth and income inequality grew.
The Nazi Party and other extremist factions surged.
If we do sink into widespread civil strife, it will be along the lines of the deadly clashes that have already taken place in Charleston, Dallas, St. Paul, Baltimore, Ferguson, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria—urban riots as opposed to armies clashing on a field of battle. Recent violent confrontations between radical right neo-Nazis and radical left antifa groups may just be a preview of coming attractions. Our political and civil institutions may prove to be too moribund and dysfunctional to deal effectively with the spread of violence, just as in Weimar Germany. And chaos will ensue.
As the law finally closes in on Donald Trump, expect social tensions to rise. One violent incident, as occurred this week when a Trump fanatic was fatally shot after attacking an FBI office in Cincinnati, could spark more right-wing violence.
If so, we Americans will be able to blame only ourselves, as George Orwell warned us, “A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims. . .but accomplices.”
But back to nuclear secrets. The vaunted “Q” clearance, in my case, required the government doing an additional deep down investigation of my life and work. Once I was cleared, I was told to expect my communications, finances, travel and associations to be monitored. My work place was a vault within vault, with so many combo locks and other secure devices it was a constant chore going from A to B. I could tell no one outside of my program the nature of my work. My dates got bored with reticent, enigmatic me. I’d be sent to secret locations for a week at a time. I couldn’t tell my parents or anyone where I was or what I was doing. Bottom line is this: nuclear secrets are gravely serious business. I was proud to have served my country any way I could. And if one corrupt president played fast and loose with such secrets, he deserves the full measure of the law — as I would have as a lowly public servant.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.
There is a third option you appear not to have considered. The Democrats have allowed themselves to be seduced by the ages-old siren song of Global Leftism. Some in the Party are true believers for whom Donald Trump is Satan Incarnate, which means that ridding America of him is a moral imperative far higher than any petty legal or pesky Constitutional questions. All of their manufactured hysteria is just that. I, too, have dealt with varying ranges of classification and my response was always, "No, I'm good - you can spare me the Secret Squirrel Decoder Ring crap; I think I can add value on this side of the - many times arbitrarily or nefariously applied - red ink stamp." Obviously, more succinctly and politely than that.
Color me wildly skeptical that anything in President Trump's possession suddenly became a matter of urgent national security 100 days before the midterms and while the flop "January 6th: The Musical!" is failing to deliver anything but a chorus of AMENs from true believers, yawns from the majority of the country and justifiable scorn and vitriol from those of us who disdain kangaroo courts or hearings with not even a hint of due process.
Color me highly skeptical when "my" government wants to violate my Constitutional rights by disarming me, while specifically carving out from their gun bans the agents of that same Administrative State who get to own the weapons the American Left wants to strip the populace of. My family's experience in Nazi Germany is illustrative: the FIRST thing Hitler did was to seize firearms from Jews and others he didn't like.
From Hammurabi - and probably earlier - one stark truth has remained: Free people own weapons with which to defend themselves; slaves do not. Democrats can't talk their way out of people's opinions which have been formed in reaction to their actions.
Gerald Ford sacrificed his own political prospects by placing the nation's interests in healing the socius above his own reelection chances. He pardoned Richard Nixon, because like it or not, avoiding the internal divisions and external damage caused by showing the world we are a banana republic was far more important than putting some old clown in prison for trying to hide a burglary as part of political espionage. Breaking and entering and burglary are actual crimes. Again, you seem to be convinced that President Trump did something far more nefarious than - perhaps - being sloppy with records, an assertion the truth of which I have no a priori reason to believe anyway.
I'm open to rational argumentation and can be persuaded. I don't think anyone over 60 should be a candidate for President in 2024, so I'm not here cheering for Donald Trump to quit political retirement. I am deeply concerned about the disdain with which Democrats treat President Trump and his voters - that is a very bad road to go down for myriad reasons, starting with the fact that being a pointless dick is not a good look.