How many insults to our intelligence can we take?
A few days ago, it was the dilution of the indictments against Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
And now, on June 20, the feds finally have made a “plea deal” with the president’s son Hunter for charges of tax evasion that essentially amounts to little more than a slap on the wrist. He will also receive what amounts to less than community service for buying a gun while being a certifiable drug addict.
Pretty good deal, no?
The deeper intentions couldn’t be more obvious—to shove allegations of influence peddling to foreign nations—several of the sworn enemies of our country and what’s left of its values, down the infamous memory hole.
And there’s a second intention that presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy—often quicker than his opponents with responses—got precisely right in his Twitter post:
“It’s no accident that the farcical Hunter Biden ‘plea deal’ comes right after the Trump indictment: it’s the perfect fig leaf to pretend that ‘no one is above the law,’ while absolutely putting certain people above the law. It’s an Orwellian gesture that gives the news media exactly the level of cover that they needed. Amazing to see how this game is played.”
Well, maybe not so amazing at this point.
The question is, where are we? What country is this?
I got a metaphorical—or was it mystical—answer this morning when making out my quarterly IRS payment, to discover that my check number was 1984.
And yet we are in a situation, given the immense technological powers of government and its Big Tech allies, that not even George Orwell, author of “1984,” or Aldous Huxley could have conceived.
What is most feared by these people is a possible new Trump administration, which is the proximate cause of this ongoing miscarriage of justice. That administration would yield an unprecedented loss of power—in our country anyway—among a ruling class (aka deep state) with concomitant immense loss of money and status.
This is true, again obviously, for politicians, but also for media and a fair percentage of business leaders.
This yields yet another potent indication of what a growing number say is true—that we are in the midst of a non-shooting civil war. (Let’s hope it stays that way.)
We are, like it or not, all in an intellectual war. The old expression “You snooze, you lose” applies, and then some.
I am giving myself the homework of rereading Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” No one knew more about the workings of justice than he.
