Over the course of my life I have watched interest in ideas die. Ideas have been replaced by agendas, and emotion has taken the place of reason.
American political campaigns have always been burdened with mudslinging and misrepresentations, but I can remember when presidential campaigns also involved contrasting ideas about domestic and foreign policies. The issues might have been false ones, like John F. Kennedy’s “missile gap,” but candidates were supposed to have some idea of issues at home and abroad and how to deal with them.
In the current presidential campaign the Democrats’ main issue is that Trump is a dictator who will destroy democracy. This from a Democrat regime that has turned law into a weapon against political candidates such as Trump who is currently fighting four felony indictments and as many civil indictments in the midst of the presidential campaign. Clearly, the Democrat Department of Justice (sic) and the Democrat New York attorney general are using law to interfere in the election. All of this is underway while one of the Democrats’ indictments of Trump is that he interfered in an election by the way he reported a business expense. The corrupt Democrat judge presiding over this farce intends to sentence Trump next month.
The double standards are extraordinary and go far beyond mere mudslinging. We are watching the party in power use the police powers of the state in an effort to control the outcome of an election. As for the Democrats’ commitment to democracy, how strong is this commitment when some of them are saying that they will not accept the election outcome if Trump wins? Doesn’t this make them “January 6 insurrectionists”?
Once you start thinking, you will understand how deplorable our situation is.
I started writing in the 1960s. In the 1960s and first half of the 1970s my writings were mainly in scholarly journals, such as Classica et Mediaevalia, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Law and Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, Southern Economic Journal, Public Choice, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, and so on. But once I entered the public policy arena my podiums were the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, The Scripps Howard News Service, Creators Syndicate. Afterwards, I returned to scholarly publication with books published by Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, and articles in journals of monetary economics and scholarly economic journals in Germany and Italy. Subsequently my dozen books have been published in ten languages.
All of this happened because there was interest in ideas. The innovative and dissident ideas that I introduced attracted both supporters and opponents. Today no such thing could happen.
Scholarly journals today are about money, promotion, and advancing the agenda of one’s supporters who provide the research grants. The wide variety of magazines and quarterlies in which ideas and debates flourished have disappeared. Several years ago Ron Unz catalogued online the past issues of the defunct but once abundant publications in which issues were raised and discussed. Two decades ago a friend of mine, a distinguished attorney, complained to me that there is no longer anything to read.
I think it was in the last years of the Clinton regime that ideas began losing ground to agendas. As agendas are independent of truth, the importance of truth declined. Today truth is irrelevant to the media, and I think as well to much of scholarship. Once we spoke of the power of ideas. Now we speak of the power of agendas. As President George W. Bush put it, “you are with us or against us.”
Today it is not only the CIA, FBI, the State Department, and AIPAC who sponsor “fact-checkers” to protect their narratives from the truth, but also corporations and left-wing organizations. The Constitution’s guarantee of free speech notwithstanding, the easiest and most certain way to get into trouble in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe is to tell the truth. Witness the current federal police state attacks on Tulsi Gabbard, Scott Ritter and Donald Trump. If such high profile people can be threatened, anyone can.
Today there are so many governmental agencies, so many advertisers, so many employers that can bring troubles to people and publications that step on their feet. Remember, the editors of the two most prestigious medical journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet said that they had no confidence in the articles they published because 70% of them were written with Big Pharma research grants. Displease your sponsor, and there go your research grants and career.
Once money entered elections, later sanctified by the Supreme Court, it brought the end of any accountability of government to the people. It used to be that votes were bought for 50 cents and a half pint of whiskey. Today it is done differently. For example: see this.
Or they just steal elections by removing or violating safeguards intended to protect the integrity of election outcomes, or they vote illegals.
How can a system be reformed that is so corrupt that so many people and institutions and so much power are dependent on the corruption?
Today when liberal-left Democrats call for the assassination of a presidential candidate out of fear that democracy will elect a leader with a different agenda than theirs, where is the comity required for intelligent debate? Without intelligent debate, how does democracy function?
The Soviet Union collapsed as a result of developments that came from President Gorbachev’s arrest by hardline elements of the Soviet Politburo who were suspicious of Gorbachev’s openings to the West. It was unfortunate, because it removed the constraint on Washington’s unilateralism. The American neoconservatives quickly seized the initiative and declared a policy of US hegemony over the world. The pursuit of this policy has created three formidable and dangerous opponents–Russia, China, and Iran–that Washington is pushing into war with the West.
There are very few Americans who speak out about the unfolding events. Scott Ritter is one of them. John Mearsheimer is one of them. I am one of them. Instead of the Council on Foreign Relations sponsoring a debate between Ritter and an opponent, the American police state seizes Ritter and removes him from an airliner, confiscates his passport, and sends the FBI to raid his home. If Ritter is so wrong and so dangerous, why not allow a debate to bring that out? Suppression and intimidation are the tools of a police state that knows it is wrong and cannot survive expression of the truth.
If people cannot speak outside the official narrative, how do we avoid catastrophic nuclear war that can easily destroy life on earth? Just give a moment to thinking how dependent you are on going to a grocery store, a gasoline station, a doctor’s office for your needs. What do you do, assuming you are still here, when they are not here, when there are no supply chains?
In Washington and throughout the Western world war is now more important than survival. Washington regards people who seek understanding with concocted “enemies” as more dangerous than nuclear war. Washington has all of the European leaders speaking of the need to prepare for war with Russia.
The last thing the West needs is war with Russia as it means the termination of the West. How is it possible that people who challenge this insanity are labeled “Russian agents,” “threats to democracy,” yanked off airliners, and investigated? Doesn’t anyone understand what this means? Are the Western leaders themselves as brainwashed and indoctrinated as their populations?
Perhaps the most disappointing of all peoples in this scenario that is playing out are the American conservatives, the flag wavers who cannot believe anything bad about their country. They dismiss critics as “America-haters,” and tell them to “love it or leave it.” “USA, USA, USA!”
The picture I have presented is merely the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more. There is the enormous US debt, on a per capita basis double that of the most indebted European countries and many times larger than Russia. As long as the US treasury debt serves as reserves of foreign central banks, the US debt can be financed. But sanctions and mindless weaponization of the US dollar have caused a move away from US Treasury debt as central bank reserves. A declining use of the dollar means that the dollar’s value will decline. As the US produces abroad in other currencies a large percentage of the goods and services that it consumes, massive US inflation will be the consequence. We will be like Germany in the 1920s when people went to the grocery store with wheelbarrows of bank notes to purchase a loaf of bread.
The strictly unconstitutional DEI policy imposed by force by the Biden regime has marginalized white people, especially heterosexual white males. The majority population has been demonized and their paths to upward mobility blocked. Unless they are completely stupid, they must wonder what allegiance they owe to Washington.
While Washington concerns itself with Ukraine’s borders it intentionally leaves its own borders wide open. Every year the official account, most likely understated, is that 3.6 million immigrant-invaders enter and overwhelm the cities to which they are assigned with expenses that cannot be met. Native born Americans no longer recognize the country that they live in.
The deceit about the Covid vax and the banning of the effective treatments–Ivermectin and HCQ–have caused widespread mistrust in the medical establishment, which lied through its teeth. Here we have another severe breakdown in Americans’ trust of major institutions.
Indeed, I am unable to identify a single American institution that is worthy of trust. Can you? What does it mean that a people who live in a country cannot trust a single institution? It means that the country in which they live no longer exists.
Americans do not yet realize it, but they soon will. They live in a geographical area that can be held together and ruled by nothing but force. The US Constitution is a dead letter document. Democracy is a joke. There is no accountability of government at any level. Truth is a threat to the ruling elite and every material interest that accommodates elite rule. There is no protection against the exercise of raw power against an American citizen. Just ask Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, Scott Ritter and a large number of others.
The prospect we as a people face is that the 2024 election will again be stolen as were the 2020 and 2022 elections. Just as the American people acquiesced to the 2020 and 2022 thefts, they will acquiesce to the 2024 theft and enter into a life under tyranny with catastrophic war looming ever nearer.
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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
