Quickies: Groupthink Engineering

     Given the pieces below, you might be wondering how on Earth the famously individualistic, free-thinking and free-speaking American citizen was brought to this terrible pass. Justin Katz of Ocean State Current is here to tell us:

When the people in power — backed by the President of the United States — decide the rules don’t apply to them, it must be quite a game for them to watch the reasonable, civilized people attempt to battle them using the rules. Here’s Quin Hillyer checking in on the case of the IRS promising a leftist group that it would spy on churches:

So the IRS, acting with the whole power of government behind it, seems to be saying it can monitor and presumably punish churches for the content of their sermons, but the churches can’t know exactly if, how, and why they are being monitored….

The ADF, on behalf of threatened churches, merely demanded through FOIA that the IRS share that same “evidence” with it, including details about the new “procedures.” Pretty basic stuff. …

And the IRS now has violated even the latest deadline it set for itself, after its first illegal extension, without even bothering to give further notice that it is doing so.

....The activist types (mostly impressionable kids and 1960s throwbacks) have been co-opted to one side by facile news and entertainment media narratives, and most people just want to live their lives. At this point, when visible activism might have an effect, the threat doesn’t seem real enough for the masses to risk jail time and family disruption. (After all, the nature of the affronts that they would protest give them reason to fear that they’ll have the book thrown at them, rather than benefit from leniency based on their law-abiding records.)

Meanwhile, reasonable Democrats and other progressives could have a similar effect simply by speaking up against their allies (particularly if the admonitions came from the news media), but they’re constrained by social pressure not to be associated with conservatives (which could mean exclusion from the in group, as attacks on Fox News have shown for years) or even taking seriously conservatives’ concerns, which are cast as kooky conspiracy theories.

They are until they aren’t, and then it’s too late.

     The Main Stream Media have misdirected, misinformed, and anesthetized the greater part of our nation. With most outrages of this sort, the media either minimize them – say, by reporting them in a bottom-of-the-page box on page A36 – or ignore them completely. When word begins to get around, most persons will say to themselves, “Well, it can’t be all that important or commonplace, or I’d have read about it already.”

     The only counterweights to this are the Internet, talk radio, and Fox News...and Fox has begun to drift leftward, for which I have no explanation.

Remain skeptical.
Accept no one’s claim of authority.
Insist on seeing primary sources.
Check and cross-check.
And keep your powder dry.

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it – no matter if I have said it! – except it agree with your own reason and your own common sense.” -- Buddha