With Respect To Matt Taibbi, No, We Are Not Winning.
The system is "winning" when we treat a nonvictory as a victory.
Anyone paying attention to what is happening in America politically at the moment knows that it is not good. On a daily basis, we are seeing the Constitution Republic that we love slip away.
There are many explanations for the slide away from government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Perhaps none is more dangerous than not realizing you are losing when you are. While I am a huge fan of journalist and commentator Matt Taibbi, his recent article is a prime example of this phenomenon. I do not write this to criticize his work; far from it. The point is that when we interpret smaller losses as victories, we are only further eroding the system that we (rightfully) cherish.
Yesterday, Taibbi published a nationwide column titled “People Can Win.” In the piece, he claimed that a recent retreat by the Biden Administration’s “misinformation, disinformation, and malformation” infrastructure should be considered a victory. To be specific, he wrote this
The Governance Board was already dead, and now the whole MDM mission is being wound down, which feels like a win. Perhaps they’re just publicly retreating from the concept for now, but at this point, I’ll take that. Moreover there are signs everywhere that people are losing their fear of departing from the orthodoxy such types would like to impose, and pushing for a return to normalcy, which for the first time in ages feels within reach.
Taibbi is wrong. We should not celebrate the minor (and likely temporary) retreat from these people. People like Nina Jankowicz never give up. To them, everything is politics and the power they crave consumes their very soul. After all, she did not just think censorship and tyranny were a good thing, she proudly sang about it, and in public:
What Taibbi is missing (or ignoring) is that part of the reason that we have gotten to this point is that when overreach of this magnitude were discovered in the past, there would not have been a minor (and, again, very likely temporary) retreat. Instead, in the not too distant past, the head of the responsible agency (in this case, Homeland Security) would have had to resign and the President that appointed him or her would have to pay a price politically. Neither of those things have happened.
More to the point, not only has there not been a political price, each of the malfeasant actors still have their jobs and remain free to plot their next attempted silent coup against our Founding documents. This is not victory. Indeed, it is not anything approaching it.
The point is not to blame Taibbi. Everyone wants to be happy and find the good where one can. However, when we accept the “not as bad as it could have been” to be seen as progress, we fall into the same trap that got us to this place. Worse yet, the Left knows this and use it against us very effectively.
This retreat, as small and as temporary as it will be, plainly was designed to get us to stop pushing back, or to push back at a lesser level than we might have otherwise. When the attention has subsided, they will be right back to pushing anti-American censorship and tyranny and it will have been our letting our guard down that, in part, let them do that. We should not continue to fall for this scheme.
This phenomenon occurs on a near daily basis and helps to explain how the Left has made so much progress and so fast, especially in the last fifteen years. Examples abound, but the recent House hearings on Thursday for TikTok provide another glaring example. Since the hearings occurred, many on the right have applauded as “victory” the fact that people are “waking up” to the dangers of TikTok and otherwise starting to address it. Little could be further from the truth. In fact, so undeterred was TikTok, that its CEO took to social media to mock the hearings:
In fact, we are no closer to addressing TikTok than we were prior to Thursday. Accordingly, it should not be seen as a positive when one tiny step towards sanity occurs, such as holding a hearing about a Chinese owned data spying app that erodes our childrens’ minds and propagandizes them.
Until, and if, we realize that just noticing problems is not victory, we will not make any progress towards re-establishing our Constitutional Republic. Respectfully, people like Taibbi accepting small (or even non-existent) steps in a (potentially) positive direction as “victories” is part of the problem, even if they do not realize it.
We all must and should recognize that even the smallest erosion of our Freedoms leads to the end of the Republic. None of us wants to lose America. After all, as Ronald Reagan once said:
If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth.
Let us not forget that losing her slowly is no better than losing her all at once.
Totally agree.
Problem is, we have had no real victories in such a long time, we don’t even know what victory looks like. We don’t even know how to fight any more.