The Rise of Tyranny in the United States

TYRANNY

Paul Craig Roberts

One of America's last remaining journalists, Glenn Greenwald, sees hope that people are catching on and the process can be stopped.  My fear is that Western peoples are too weak and uninvolved to reclaim their freedom and that they will accept tyranny with minimal opposition, thus committing all future generations to life under tyranny.  In contrast, the elite are determined and have demonstrated the power to discredit, to remove, and, it seems, to indict an elected President of the United States who attempted to represent the people against the elite.  Moreover, with control of the media, the elite were successful in turning Donald Trump into a hate figure for roughly half of the US population. The same will happen to anyone who attempts to restore government accountable to law, the Constitution, and the people.

Perhaps the most important lesson in Greenwald's report, essentially a history of the development of the national security police state in the 21st century, is that no President regardless of political party or ideology, neither Bush nor Trump, Obama nor Biden, can refuse legislation that builds a police state in the name of national security. Those Democrats who once opposed police state measures now favor them because they are useful in getting rid of Donald Trump. In Congress, Republican patriots and leftwing Democrats rush to the support of legislation that destroys their own freedom and turns the US Constitution into a dead letter document.

“No matter how much you hate the corporate media, it’s not enough. It is literally impossible to overstate not only the damage that they do but the malice with which they do it. And by malice, I don’t mean that they’re evil masterminds. I mean malice in the sense of the “banality of evil.” The people who go and punch the clock every day, never question what they’re doing, but whose work is nonetheless incredibly toxic and harmful. They’re just basically sociopathic careerists. But no matter sometimes those people can be the most destructive. “  —  Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald is a rare honest media voice of our time.   Edward Snowden understood this and entrusted Greenwald with the documents that proved the Nazi National Security Agency was spying on all Americans in violation both of law and the US Constitution.  It was Snowden who was punished for telling us the truth about how far we were down the road to tyranny.  The NSA’s crimes were defended and covered up by the Corporate Media.  Congress and the White House did nothing to stop the NSA’s disregard for law and the US Constitution.  Indeed, they facilitated the NSA’s transgressions.