Connexion
U.S. Attorney General William Barr, along with co-conspirators in the UK and Australia, recently wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg requesting he not move forward with a plan to implement end-to-end encryption across Facebook's messaging services. A draft of the letter was published earlier this month by Buzzfeed, and it's worth examining in some detail.
What immediately strikes you is the letter's emphasis on "protecting the children," a talking point universally used by authoritarians throughout history to justify both a reduction of public liberty and a transfer of increased power to the state. Though this tactic is transparent and well understood by those paying attention, it's nevertheless disturbing to observe Barr's disingenuous and shameless use of it (the words 'child' and 'children' appear 17 times in the course of this brief letter).
Here's just one example from the letter:
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
- Maya Angelou
If nothing else, one silver lining to Donald Trump's election is the exposure of establishment types, whether Democratic or Republican, for what they really are. We now recognize that there's very little daylight between a neocon and a neoliberal, and that the back and forth fighting over power between these two camps -- which defined American politics for decades -- was nothing more than a manipulative pro-wrestling circus.
Trump's election has forced many establishment Democrats out of the closet as the intelligence agency, surveillance state, empire-worshipping, centralized power bootlickers they always were. Since neocons were historically more in your face shameless about their support for endless war, oligarch-coddling, and authoritarianism, establishment Democrats could pretend to represent an ethical opposition to such things. Alas, it was all an act and if the Obama administration didn't already prove that to you, the embarrassingly clownish neoliberal "resistance" movement should.
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