Scott Kamps
Biden’s Education Secretary Miguel Cardona recently said, “I think it was President Reagan who said, ‘We’re from the government. We’re here to help.’”
Anyone who is familiar with Reagan’s remark knows Cardona got some words of the quote right, but conveyed the polar opposite idea behind the quip.
The assumption behind progressivism is that decision-making knowledge is concentrated in socially-concerned magnanimous elites that can be utilized to benefit society. This assumption is common among educated elites since they’re already confident such knowledge is already concentrated in themselves.
This leads to bigger government “helping” citizens.
To borrow from James Madison, if elites were angels or if angels governed men, then such an assumption might be wise. Instead, being governed by men with a fallen nature, self-preservation and selfishness are far more prevalent than magnanimity.
Thus the conservative posture – previously the American impulse – is a healthy distrust of government (not hatred or deep distrust) leading us to take care of ourselves where we can as individuals, families and small communities. This leads to desire for smaller government that “helps” citizens less.
Recently, government entities have been censoring American citizens to “help” us “avoid confusion” in complex times.
The Facebook files and the Twitter files expose clear government censorship of Americans. If you haven’t read them, you should.
The latest piece to come out exposing the anti-disinformation movement is the Cyber Threat Intelligence League files.
According to the whistleblower’s report – documented by Michael Shellenberger – U.S. and UK government agencies coordinated with private military contractors to control and censor speech on social media.
It alleges that the league’s files were started by the Obama administration in early 2017 to “stop a repeat of 2016” and used sophisticated intelligence tactics that the CIA, NSA and Department of Defense use in other countries.
It was unconstitutional for the government to use these tactics on Americans, so they sought private contractors to be trained under the guise of cyber security – with the blessing of the Department of Homeland Security. Their activity was more than censorship; it sought to control the narrative to influence behaviors.
In light of that, one the trainers of these tactics said, “Most misinformation is actually true but set in the wrong context.”
Another trainer – after acknowledging the activities they were teaching were illegal to use on Americans – rationalized it this way: “But we need to help them out by deciding what kind of things we can do proactively….for John and Jane citizen who watches Fox News and believes…”
It doesn’t matter what the next words are; it’s not the government’s job to determine what news we are allowed to hear!
This kind of censorship won’t remain against only conservatives, but will grow against progressives as well.
Indeed, Shellenberger has documented examples of it already. America needs bipartisan opposition to such paternalistic censorship and manipulation.
One doesn’t need to be a conservative to readily value Reagan’s actual statement, mentioned earlier: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Scott Kamps writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, thestableguy@frontier.com.