It cost the American taxpayer $24 million to find out what we knew all along: politics is corrupt.
After four years of being subjected to special prosecutor Jack Smith’s dogged investigation into alleged election interference by Donald Trump, the Justice Department has concluded that Trump would have been convicted of breaking the law if only he hadn’t gotten re-elected.
In other words, the Deep State wins again.
The revelation here is not that Trump broke the law but the extent to which sitting presidents get a free pass when it comes to misconduct.
None of this is news.
The Deep State has been operating from this exact same playbook for decades, regardless of which party has occupied the White House.
Indeed, Richard Nixon let the cat out of the bag when he explained that the very act of being president places one beyond the rule of law (“when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal”).
This is how we ended up with an imperial president—empowered to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability—and why “we the people” keep finding ourselves mired in a political swamp of lies, graft, cronyism and corruption.
George Orwell, who died 75 years ago on Jan. 21, 1950, must be rolling in his grave.
In the 75 years since George Orwell died, his works of dystopian fiction—which warn against rampant abuse of power, mind control and mass manipulation coupled with the rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism—have become operation manuals for power-hungry political regimes wedded to the corporate state.
While Orwell’s novel 1984 foreshadowed the rise of an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state, his novel Animal Farm aptly sums up the state of politics today, propped up by a two-party system designed to maintain the illusion that voting matters.
Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people—even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.
As Orwell explains:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power… We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
No doubt about it: the revolution was successful.
That January 6, 2021 attempt by President Trump and his followers to overturn the election results was not the revolution, however.
Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to amass even greater powers.
It was a set-up, folks.
The Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president was the tell.
The only coup d’etat to undermine the will of the people happened when our government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations.”
This swamp is of the Deep State’s making to such an extent that every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State’s tune.
Beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.
Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC, merely paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.
Joe Biden was no different: his job was to keep the Deep State in power.
Trump’s return to the White House has already thrown wide the gates to all manner of swampiness.
Follow the money. It always points the way.
This brings us back to Orwell’s Animal Farm, which turns 80 this year.
Originally titled a fairy story, the satirical allegory recounts the revolutionary struggle of a group of farm animals living in squalor and neglect on a poorly run farm managed by a derelict farmer.
Hoping to create a society where all animals are equal, the farm animals mount a revolution, ejecting the farmer, taking control of the farm, establishing their own Bill of Rights, and operating under the mantra “four legs good, two legs bad.” Not surprisingly, as is the case with most revolutions, the new boss—a pig named Napoleon—turns out to be no different from their old human oppressor. Over time, a ruling class of pigs comes to dominate on the farm, which is policed by dogs, with the pigs starting to dress, walk and talk like their human counterparts. Eventually, the pigs forge an alliance with their former two-legged adversaries in order to maintain their power over the rest of the farm animals. Before long, the pigs’ transformation into two-legged overlords is complete: “they were all alike.”
“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs,” writes Orwell. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Much like the gullible, easily led creatures of Animal Farm, we find ourselves being brainwashed into believing that the tyrannies meted out against us are for our own good; that the trials are tribulations we experience at the hands of the ruling elite are privileges for which we should feel grateful; and that our bondage to the Deep State is actually, appearances to the contrary, freedom.
Over time, without their realizing it, the Seven Commandments of liberation and equality that were so central to Animal Farm’s revolutionary movement are whittled down to a single commandment: “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”
And that, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is the lesson for all of us in the American Police State as we prepare for yet another changing of the guard in Washington, DC.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
