Dissent In Democracy Quotes

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.

Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.

Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder.

We cannot play ostrich. Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. In the chill climate in which we live, we must go against the prevailing wind. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away. We must dissent from a government that has left its young without jobs, education or hope. We must dissent from the poverty of vision and the absence of moral leadership. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.

If no one had ever challenged religious authority, there’d be no democracy, no public schools, women’s rights, improvements to science and medicine, evolution of slavery and no laws against child abuse or spousal abuse. I was afraid to challenge my religious beliefs because that was the basis of creation—mine anyway. I was afraid to question the Bible or anything in it, and when I did, that’s when I became involved with PFLAG and realized that my son was a perfectly normal human being and there was nothing for God to heal because Bobby was perfect just the way he was.

Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. . . . We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, and the mistrust.

The right of dissent, or, if you prefer, the right to be wrong, is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That’s the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail toward totalitarianism.

That so many of the well fed young television-watchers in the world's most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. "Free as a bird", we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded.

As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.

Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent. And yet, what's happening is just the opposite. The world over, non-violent resistance movements are being crushed and broken. If we do not respect and honour them, by default we privilege those who turn to violent means.

But the disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent - however irritating it may be when taken to extremes - is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstream opinion. A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy.

He's the President—it's the responsibility of every citizen to criticize aggressively when they think it's warranted.

We have long known that in closed societies, the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be “complex and frightening,” as Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent.

When those who are responsible for the leadership of State begin to move in villainous ways; when they begin to destroy the fabric of what it is that our nation is held together with; when they violate the Constitution of our nation and begin to do things that are false to our dreams and our hopes--it is incumbent upon every citizen by right, but also by responsibility, to challenge that administration, to raise their voice in vigorous dissent and to challenge the way in which the state is doing business. And those who fail to do that, should be charged with patriotic treason!

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence -- on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.

For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of minorities to dissent, loudly.

When a state treats its citizens as an existential threat then that state ceases to be a democracy.

If politics transforms society to such an extent that it calls the dissenter a traitor, putting a barbed wire of intimidation between itself and citizens, then that is a form of violence too.

Dissent is most controversial during wartime because it is cast as unpatriotic and dangerous to the national cause. But that is precisely the time when a democracy should be asking itself difficult and uncomfortable questions.

Our treatment of Adivasi is a blot on Indian democracy. Only someone who cares sincerely for the future of this country will say that. Others will say that ‘Oh no no, they are doing fine, they live wonderfully… It is all hyperbole, exaggerated and manufactured dissent.’ If you are in a mode of self-denial, you will stay where you are- a flawed, intolerant and imperfect society. The main task of any nationalist is to be ashamed of crimes committed against his fellow citizens in the name of nationalism.

America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn’t forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required period exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences.

People succumb to fear, no matter the government. The everyday person doesn’t want war, but it’s remarkably easy to convince them. It’s the government that determines political priorities, and it’s easy to drag people along with you by tapping into that fear. I don’t care if you have a communist mecca, a fascist regime, or a representative democracy, even some monarchy with a gutless parliament. People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbors will do it for them.

It might sound like a contradiction at first, but it isn't; collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals (p48)

Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. . . . Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

To remind him, and perhaps myself, that any hope for the future depends on our ability to reclaim the narrative of a long con- tinuum of resistance that has been the foundation of our country and the bulwark against the very forces that have threatened our democracy since its founding.

Complex scientific and moral problems are not resolved through censorship of dissenting opinions, deleting content from the Internet, or defaming scientists and authors who present information challenging to those in power. Censorship leads instead to greater distrust of both government institutions and large corporations.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace.

All sorts of democrats have argued that a diversity of points of view, and even active and passionate dissent, are healthy for a democracy.

In a democracy dissent is an act of faith.

Who is an elected government in a constitutional democracy to decide it will not tolerate dissent

In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers, an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-fe, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed forever since he has offended the only authority that is able to open it. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before making public his opinions he thought he had sympathizers; now it seems to him that he has none any more since he revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize him loudly and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, over-come by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for speaking the truth.

Truth be told, if you say you are not an objector, you are ranged against democracy. If you have a different point of view, say you are a dissenter. Post ten things on Facebook daily and say openly, 'Yes, I have a difference of opinion.' Being an objector is no crime.

The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

There is value in dissent. And, perversely, there can be value in lawbreaking. These are both ways we improve as a society. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is the enemy of democracy, liberty, freedom, and progress. Defending this assertion involves a subtle argument—something I wrote about in my previous book Liars and Outliers—but it’s vitally important to society. Think about it this way. Across the US, states are on the verge of reversing decades-old laws about homosexual relationships and marijuana use. If the old laws could have been perfectly enforced through surveillance, society would never have reached the point where the majority of citizens thought those things were okay. There has to be a period where they are still illegal yet increasingly tolerated, so that people can look around and say, “You know, that wasn’t so bad.

Dissent is verbal resistance. It is the affirmation of our voices, of our worth. It is, in a democracy, a fundamental right. And, in fact, dissent is not unrelated to love. They are complementary forces. In a climate where bigotry is an explicit value of those in institutional power, speaking love is an act of dissent.

Nixon and Kissinger actually drove their South Asia policies with gusto and impressive creativity—but only when silencing dissenters in the ranks, like Blood, or pursuing their hostility toward India. They found no appeal in India, neither out of ideological admiration for India’s flawed but functioning democracy, nor from a geopolitical appreciation of the sheer size and importance of the Indian colossus. Instead, they denounced Indians individually and collectively, with an astonishingly personal and crude stream of vitriol. Alone in the Oval Office, these famous practitioners of dispassionate realpolitik were all too often propelled by emotion.

Market fundamentalism is a harsh accusation. Christian fundamentalists are notorious for their strict biblical literalism, their unlimited willingness to ignore or twist the facts of geology and biology to match their prejudices. For the analogy to be apt, the typical economist would have to believe in the superiority of markets virtually without exception, regardless of the evidence, and dissenters would have to fear excommunication. From this standpoint, the charge of “market fundamentalism” is silly, failing even as a caricature. If you ask the typical economist to name areas where markets work poorly, he gives you a list on the spot: Public goods, externalities, monopoly, imperfect information, and so on. More importantly, almost everything on the list can be traced back to other economists. Market failure is not a concept that has been forced upon a reluctant economics profession from the outside. It is an internal outgrowth of economists’ self-criticism. After stating that markets usually work well, economists feel an urge to identify important counterexamples. Far from facing excommunication for sin against the sanctity of the market, discoverers of novel market failures reap professional rewards. Flip through the leading journals. A high fraction of their articles present theoretical or empirical evidence of market failure.

We need a political framework that exhibits ‘tolerance for dissent, a skepticism of government orthodoxy, and a willingness to endure strange and even offensive ways of life’.46 We need to find a way to live with one another in spite of our differences and together strive to ‘find and follow the way of peace, and discover how to build each other up’.47 Victory in liberal democracy is not vanquishing our opponents, but winning their respect, living in peace with them, and affirming their right to their opinion.

There was a profound difference, he believed, between American democracy and the so-called “democracy” of places like the Soviet Union. And the credit for that difference didn’t just go, as certain sectors of the Left would have it, to the people throughout American history who’d defied the system. It went to the system as well, for its capacity to absorb dissent and respond to it constructively. America was more than he’d been able to admit in the past. And the best aspects of the Left, of himself, were more of America than he’d realized.

Ellison, Gates, and the other members of this government/industry collaboration used the lockdown to accelerate construction of their 5G network54 of satellites, antennae, biometric facial recognition, and “track and trace” infrastructure that they, and their government and intelligence agency partners, can use to mine and monetize our data, further suppress dissent, to compel obedience to arbitrary dictates, and to manage the rage that comes as Americans finally wake up to the fact that this outlaw gang has stolen our democracy, our civil rights, our country, and our way of life—while we huddled in orchestrated fear from a flu-like virus.

In an article titled "The Ex-Communists," she analyzed how these McCarthy loyalists had simply switched allegiances. Instead of demanding communism as they had earlier, they now called for unconditional loyalty and cooperation in denouncing others for the sake of freedom and democracy. They still had a cause, just a different one from before. The new cause, the right cause, she continued, had a totalitarian catch to it. By turning democracy "into a cause," something that would arrive in the future and to which the present must be devoted, the present became unfree. The idea of futurity destroyed the present moment. How could one escape this destruction of the present by fear of the future....?

We have long known that in closed societies, the the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be "complex and frightening," as [Karen] Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent. The noise of argument, the constant hum of disagreement--these can irritate people who prefer to live in a society tied together by a single narrative. The strong preference for unity, at least among a portion of the population, helps explain why numerous liberal or democratic revolutions, from 1789 onward, ended in dictatorships that enjoyed wide support. Isaiah Berlin once wrote of the human need to believe that "somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science... there is a final solution." Berlin observed that not all of the things that human beings think are good or desirable are compatible. Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group--all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people: "to admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera." Nevertheless, unity is a chimera that some will always pursue.

How are we going to bring about these transformations? Politics as usual—debate and argument, even voting—are no longer sufficient. Our system of representative democracy, created by a great revolution, must now itself become the target of revolutionary change. For too many years counting, vast numbers of people stopped going to the polls, either because they did not care what happened to the country or the world or because they did not believe that voting would make a difference on the profound and interconnected issues that really matter. Now, with a surge of new political interest having give rise to the Obama presidency, we need to inject new meaning into the concept of the “will of the people.” The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country. As a result, we have left the job of governing to our elected representatives, even though we know that they serve corporate interests and therefore make decisions that threaten our biosphere and widen the gulf between the rich and poor both in our country and throughout the world. In other words, even though it is readily apparent that our lifestyle choices and the decisions of our representatives are increasing social injustice and endangering our planet, too many of us have wanted to continue going our merry and not-so-merry ways, periodically voting politicians in and out of office but leaving the responsibility for policy decisions to them. Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens. Historians may one day look back at the 2000 election, marked by the Supreme Court’s decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, as a decisive turning point in the death of representative democracy in the United States. National Public Radio analyst Daniel Schorr called it “a junta.” Jack Lessenberry, columnist for the MetroTimes in Detroit, called it “a right-wing judicial coup.” Although more restrained, the language of dissenting justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter, and Stevens was equally clear. They said that there was no legal or moral justification for deciding the presidency in this way.3 That’s why Al Gore didn’t speak for me in his concession speech. You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it. The crisis brought on by the fraud of 2000 and aggravated by the Bush administration’s constant and callous disregard for the Constitution exposed so many defects that we now have an unprecedented opportunity not only to improve voting procedures but to turn U.S. democracy into “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” instead of government of, by, and for corporate power.

Tocqueville charged that Americans lived under the constant threat of a tyranny of the majority - an alternative despotism - that muzzled dissent and killed freedom of opinion in America. He claimed, 'I know of no country where there is in general less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion that in America.' What Tocqueville feared most from equality was a deadening uniformity of thought, which he believed he detected in America. he depicted Americans as victims of a crippling conformity of opinion, justified only in part by the great instability of conditions inherent in a new country, yet aggravated by an extreme case of national pride that made self-criticism unlikely. He complained that one could not even criticize the weather in America.

Confident pluralism has a very simple premise, namely, that people have the right to be different, to think differently, to live differently, to worship differently, without fear of reprisal. Confident pluralism operates with the idea that politics has instrumental rather than ultimate value. In other words, politics is a means, not an end. No state, no political party, no leader is God-like, or can demand blind devotion. Any attempt by political actors to create social homogeneity by compelling conformity, by bullying minorities or by punishing dissent, whether in religion or in policy, is anti-liberal and undemocratic. As Australian political leader Tim Wilson writes: ‘A free society does not seek to homogenise belief or conscience but instead, affirms diversity and advocates for tolerance and mutual respect.’43

Across Western nations, shell-shocked citizens experienced all the well-worn tactics of rising totalitarianism—mass propaganda and censorship, the orchestrated promotion of terror, the manipulation of science, the suppression of debate, the vilification of dissent, and use of force to prevent protest. Conscientious objectors who resisted these unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating. American lives and livelihoods were shattered by a bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislative approval or judicial review, risk assessment, or scientific citation. So-called Emergency Orders closed our businesses, schools and churches, made unprecedented intrusions into privacy, and disrupted our most treasured social and family relationships. Citizens the world over were ordered to stay in their homes.

Sixty years ago, Austin Ranney, an eminent political scientist, wrote a prophetic dissent to a famous report by an American Political Science Association committee entitled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.”4 The report, by prominent political scientists frustrated with the role of conservative Southern Democrats in blocking civil rights and other social policy, issued a clarion call for more ideologically coherent, internally unified, and adversarial parties in the fashion of a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy like Britain or Canada. Ranney powerfully argued that such parties would be a disaster within the American constitutional system, given our separation of powers, separately elected institutions, and constraints on majority rule that favor cross-party coalitions and compromise. Time has proven Ranney dead right—we now have the kinds of parties the report desired, and it is disastrous.

In all ages, the technique of the Black Magician has been essentially the same. In all spells the words are deprived of their meanings and reduced to syllables or verbal noises. This may be done literally, as when magicians used to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards, or by reiterating a word over and over again as loudly as possible until it has become a mere sound. For millions of people today, words like communism, capitalism, imperialism, peace, freedom, democracy, have ceased to be words, the meaning of which can be inquired into and discussed, and have become right or wrong noises to which the response is as involuntary as a knee-reflex. It makes no difference if the magic is being employed simply for the aggrandizement of the magician himself or if, as is more usual, he claims to be serving some good cause. Indeed, the better the cause he claims to be serving, the more evil he does…. Propaganda, like the sword, attempts to eliminate consent or dissent and, in our age, magical language has to a great extent replaced the sword.

Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we've seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we've seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves. ....In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work better if we recognized that all of us posses values worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledge that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

Protestantism's evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one's kIng. This is the root of self-government in the English-speaking world. On the other hand, Protestantism's shedding away of authority, as evidenced by my [Pentecostal] mother's proclamation that I needn't go to church or listen to a preacher to achieve salvation, inspires self-reliance—along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy—namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It's why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good ol' boy who's fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinker who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed.

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

We can all endeavor to do the same, pursuing the facts of the matter, especially about the past of our own country. Facts are impressively dual in their effects. “Truth and reconciliation” meetings in Argentina, South Africa, and in parts of Spain’s Basque country have demonstrated that facts are marvelously effective tools—they can rip down falsehoods but can also lay the foundations for going forward. For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of minorities to dissent, loudly. The accurate view almost always will, at first, be a minority position. Those in power often will want to divert people from the hard facts of a given matter, whether in Russia, Syria, or indeed at home. Why did it take so long for white Americans to realize that our police often treat black Americans as an enemy to be intimidated, even today? Why do we allow political leaders who have none of Churchill’s fealty to traditional institutions to call themselves “conservatives”? The struggle to see things as they are is perhaps the fundamental driver of Western civilization. There is a long but direct line from Aristotle and Archimedes to Locke, Hume, Mill, and Darwin, and from there through Orwell and Churchill to the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” It is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it, and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter.

Generally speaking a view of the available economic systems that have been tested historically must acknowledge the immense power of capitalism to generate living standards food housing education the amenities to a degree unprecedented in human civilization. The benefits of such a system while occasionally random and unpredictable with periods of undeniable stress and misery depression starvation and degradation are inevitably distributed to a greater and greater percentage of the population. The periods of economic stability also ensure a greater degree of popular political freedom and among the industrial Western democracies today despite occasional suppression of free speech quashing of dissent corruption of public officials and despite the tendency of legislation to serve the interests of the ruling business oligarchy the poisoning of the air water the chemical adulteration of food the obscene development of hideous weaponry the increased costs of simple survival the waste of human resources the ruin of cities the servitude of backward foreign populations the standards of life under capitalism by any criterion are far greater than under state socialism in whatever forms it is found British Swedish Cuban Soviet or Chinese. Thus the good that fierce advocacy of personal wealth accomplishes in the historical run of things outweighs the bad. And while we may not admire always the personal motives of our business leaders we can appreciate the inevitable percolation of the good life as it comes down through our native American soil. You cannot observe the bounteous beauty of our county nor take pleasure in its most ordinary institutions in peace and safety without acknowledging the extraordinary achievement of American civilization. There are no Japanese bandits lying in wait on the Tokaidoways after all. Drive down the turnpike past the pretty painted pipes of the oil refineries and no one will hurt you.

But Muslims now find themselves in a world shaped by western theories and western values. If we are to consider how Islamic communities conducted their affairs throughout the greater part of their history, it may be convenient to compare and contrast this way of life with the contemporary western model. Today the Muslims are urged to embrace democracy and are condemned for political corruption, while western scholars debate whether Islam can ever accommodate the democratic ideal. On the whole, they think not. Democracy, they believe, is a sign of political maturity and therefore of superiority. Western societies, since they are seen as democratic, exemplify this superiority. So there is one question that has to be pressed home: what, precisely, is meant by democracy? Let me put forward an imaginary Arab who knows nothing of western ways but would like to learn about them. He is aware that the literal meaning of the word democracy is "mob rule", but understands that this is not what westerners mean by it. He wonders how this meaning has, in practice, been modified and, since his questions are directed to an Englishman, he is not altogether surprised to be told that Britain is the exemplary democracy. He learns that the people—all except children, lunatics and peers of the realm—send their representatives to Parliament to speak for them. He is assured that these representatives never accept bribes to vote against their consciences or against the wishes of their constituents. He enquires further and is astonished to learn that the political parties employ what are known as Whips, who compel members to vote in accordance with the party line, even if this conflicts both with their consciences and with the views of the people who elected them. In this case it is not money but ambition for office that determines the way they vote. "But is this not corruption?" he asks naively. The Englishman is shocked. "But at least the party in power represents the vast majority of the electorate?" This time the Englishman is a little embarrassed. It is not quite like that. The governing party, which enjoys absolute power through its dominance in the House of Commons, represents only a minority of the electorate. "Are there no restraints on this power?" There used to be, he is told. In the past there was a balance between the Crown, the House of Lords and the Commons, but that was seen as an undemocratic system so it was gradually eroded. The "sovereignty" of the Lower House is now untrammelled (except, quite recently, by unelected officials in Brussels). "So this is what democracy means?" Our imaginary Arab is baffled. He investigates further and is told that, in the 1997 General Election, the British people spoke with one voice, loud and clear. A landslide victory gave the Leader of the Labour Party virtually dictatorial powers. Then he learns that the turn-out of electors was the lowest since the war. Even so, the Party received only forty-three per cent of the votes cast. He wonders if this can be the system which others wish to impose on his own country. He is aware that various freedoms, including freedom of the press, are essential components of a democratic society, but no one can tell him how these are to be guaranteed if the Ruler, supported by a supine—"disciplined"—House of Commons enjoys untrammelled authority. He knows a bit about rulers and the way in which they deal with dissent, and he suspects that human nature is much the same everywhere. Barriers to oppression soon fall when a political system eliminates all "checks and balances" and, however amiable the current Ruler may be, there is no certainty that his successors, inheriting all the tools of power, will be equally benign. He turns now to an American and learns, with some relief since he himself has experienced the oppression of absolutism, that the American system restrains the power of the President by that of the Congress and the Supreme Court; moreover, the electe

Our curious Western relationship with the country reinforces their strange status. We beg them to buy yet another squadron of supersonic interceptors to go with their latest platoon of tanks, plead with them to keep the price of oil low, and praise them as reliable partners in the Middle East while turning a very blind eye to their extreme distaste for democracy, not to mention the fact that they supplied nearly all the 9/11 terrorists and continue to promote dissent in the Islamic world.

At the level of economic theory, the great fallacy in the logic of David Ricardo, the father of free-trade theory, was to view the gains and losses of trade in a static fashion, as a snapshot at a single point in time. In Ricardo’s theory, whose variants are espoused by free-market economists to this day, if nineteenth-century Britain offered better and cheaper manufactured goods, the US should buy them and export something where it could compete—say, raw cotton and lumber—even if that meant the US never developed an industrial economy. By the same token, if twentieth-century America made the best cars, machine tools, and steel, Japan and Korea should import those, and continue to export cheap toys and rice. And if other nations subsidized US industries, Americans, rather than being fearful of displacement, should accept the “gift.” What Ricardo missed—and what leaders from Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt grasped (likewise statesmen in nations from Japan to Brazil), as well as dissenting economists like the German Friedrich List and the Americans Paul Krugman and Dani Rodrik—was that the dynamic gains of economic development over time far surpass the static gains at a single point in time. Economic advantage is not something bestowed by nature. Advantage can be deliberately created—an insight for which Krugman won a Nobel Prize. Policies of economic development often required an active role for the state, in violation of laissez-faire.

It is one thing to argue that a free society should accept gay marriage or allow people to define their gender in terms utterly unrecognizable to science. It is another thing to demand that individuals rejoice—or pretend to rejoice—in the lifestyles or decisions of others. But that is precisely what the jihad against “hate speech” demands. Dissent from the orthodoxy is now the equivalent of violence or complicity in it. The war on tolerance has become an effort to make room for a new intolerance.

So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes.

when the government’s approval rating is low, media and opposition grow more brazen, judges become emboldened to stand up to the president, and allies begin to dissent.

F.S. Nariman rightly found some similarity between the decision of the ADM Jabalpur and that of Dred Scott, rendered more than a century ago in 1857 by a 6:2 majority of the American Supreme Court. The majority in Dred Scott held that a black person could never be a citizen of the US. A strong criticism of this view by Abraham Lincoln got national attention and ultimately helped him win the presidential election, which changed history. In both the cases, powerful dissenting opinions brought about far-reaching changes in these two democracies.

The comments section is now alive and chewing at the heart of Western democracy.

areas that were once the preserve of national sovereignty are now ring-fenced by international law and global regulation. The instinct in Davos is to push even more policy-making out of the range of nation states. The answer to Europe’s problems is always more Europe. The answer to the global trade backlash is always to sell trade deals more effectively. It should come as no surprise that democracies are now loath to ratify such agreements. The last time any serious world trade talks were held in a Western city was in Seattle in 1999. It was shut down by protesters. The next time global leaders made the attempt was in 2002, from the safe space of the Arabian Gulf where no dissenters could be heard. The Doha Round died a few years later. Now Donald Trump has killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the deal that was launched by George W. Bush and completed by Barack Obama. Trump is also picking apart the Clinton-era North American Free Trade Agreement and has buried hopes of a transatlantic agreement. Britain, meanwhile, is abandoning the European single market. The

An avid reader, he found himself agreeing with the former Soviet dissident turned Israeli political figure Natan Sharansky, whose The Case for Democracy (2004) distinguished between “free societies,” where dissent flourished, and “fear societies,” where unpopular opinions risked imprisonment and death.

Building on the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) and the intelligence agency’s “Dark Winter” (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Schwartz’s “Lockstep” Scenario Document (2010), and MARS (2017), the Gates-funded SPARS scenario war-gamed a bioterrorist attack that precipitated a global coronavirus epidemic lasting from 2025 to 2028, culminating in coercive mass vaccination of the global population. And, as Gates had promised, the preparations were analogous to “preparing for war.”191 Under the code name “SPARS Pandemic,” Gates presided over a sinister summer school for globalists, spooks, and technocrats in Baltimore. The panelists role-played strategies for co-opting the world’s most influential political institutions, subverting democratic governance, and positioning themselves as unelected rulers of the emerging authoritarian regime. They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic. The official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded.192 Looked at another way, when it erupted five years later, the 2020 COVID-19 contagion faithfully followed the SPARS blueprint. Practically the only thing Gates and his planners got wrong was the year. Gates’s simulation instructs public health officials and other collaborators in the global vaccine cartel exactly what to expect and how to behave during the upcoming plague. Reading through the eighty-nine pages, it’s difficult not to interpret this stunningly prescient document as a planning, signaling, and training exercise for replacing democracy with a new regimen of militarized global medical tyranny. The scenario directs participants to deploy fear-driven propaganda narratives to induce mass psychosis and to direct the public toward unquestioning obedience to the emerging social and economic order. According to the scenario narrative, a so-called “SPARS” coronavirus ignites in the United States in January 2025 (the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020). As the WHO declares a global emergency, the federal government contracts a fictional firm that resembles Moderna. Consistent with Gates’s seeming preference for diabolical cognomens, the firm is dubbed “CynBio” (Sin-Bio) to develop an innovative vaccine using new “plug-and-play” technology. In the scenario, and now in real life, Federal health officials invoke the PREP Act to provide vaccine makers liability protection.

Several months before she was defeated in the Wyoming Republican primary, Liz Cheney told me that the fear of physical harm was working. Flanked by armed guards at a fundraiser, she said that Republican colleagues rejected Trumpism but were afraid to come forward after witnessing her experience. She was no stranger to Secret Service protection, given that her father had been vice president of the United States, but this was different. A security detail was not a mark of status for the Cheneys anymore; it was reflective of the fact that people were making violent threats against her family back in Wyoming, where she couldn’t go out in public the way she used to. Her fellow dissenters felt the same. “You know, it puts you at risk,” said Michigan congressman Fred Upton, who decided to walk away from a thirty-year career in Congress after his impeachment vote, “particularly when they threaten not only you—and I like to think I’m pretty fast—but when they threaten your spouse or your kids or whatever, that’s what really makes it frightening.” Ohio congressman Anthony Gonzalez decided to quit, too, confessing to receiving threats and fearing for the safety of his wife and children.

A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy. Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular constituency is not (or should not be) relevant. Not surprisingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section of America. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers[18] who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans[19]), or even a Protestant of any denomination. The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.

And then there is Apple, the dissenter from the libertarian creed. Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have been real allies to the content community, and their stance against the surveillance-marketing model that is at the core of Google’s and Facebook’s businesses—i.e., their support of ad blockers—puts them in direct opposition to the dominant search and social platforms.

Who is an elected government in a constitutional democracy to decide it will not tolerate dissent.

The message of such silence is simple: "we the people" will no longer conspire in supporting the illusions that help corrupt leaders maintain control. By withholding our cheers and falling into silence, we take a small step toward withdrawing the consent that helps maintain abusive power. We no longer affirm, or pretend to affirm, that the national flags and religious symbols in which corrupt leaders wrap themselves have any meaning -- except as an implicit judgment on the duplicity of those leaders.

Dissent and democracy go hand in hand. It’s also good management technique. What traditional executives don’t consider is that decisions arising from debate are implemented much more quickly because explanations, alternatives, objections, and uncertainties have already been aired. As a result of democracy, employees have had their say, and projects or ideas have been analyzed from every point of view.

Dissent was the essence of democracy,

None of them engaged in soul-searching about how to preserve constitutional rights during a global pandemic. Instead, the simulations war-gamed how to use police powers to detain and quarantine citizens, how to impose martial law, how to control messaging by deploying propaganda, how to employ censorship to silence dissent, and how to mandate masks, lockdowns, and coercive vaccinations and conduct track-and-trace surveillance among potentially reluctant populations.

Dr. Fauci’s strategy has been to exercise his frightening capacity to silence dissent and mangle reputations.

They practiced techniques for ruthlessly controlling dissent, expression, and movement, and degrading civil rights, autonomy, and sovereignty. The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic.

Western democracies held no positive principles aside from liberalism and tolerance. The result was a negative culture, lacking substance, that would eventually dissolve and be replaced by a pagan culture that espoused materialism, secularism, and moral relativism as positive principles. These principles would be enforced as a public or state morality, and those who dissented from them would be punished. Paganism, as Eliot saw it and as this book argues, imposes a moral relativism in which power alone determines right.

Duesberg and others charge that by stifling debate and dissent, Dr. Fauci milled public fear into multi-billion-dollar profits for his Pharma partners while expanding his own powers and authoritarian control. The resulting policies, they say, have caused calamity to global economies and public health, and vastly expanded the pool of human suffering.

My hope is to chronicle Tony Fauci’s role as high priest of an orthodoxy that today supports a multibillion-dollar global enterprise. Over the years, Dr. Fauci has deflected and evaded scientific debate and transformed theories into quasireligious dogma, punishing and silencing dissent the way the Inquisition punished heresy.

The US military industrial complex—HHS, NIH, NCI, DAIDS—all of it, is designed along military command structure because it is,” says Celia Farber. “It is the military. It’s not ‘science’ and it’s not ‘merit.’ Fauci understands this and has mastered the elimination of both dissent and any mercy for the destroyed. It’s a sin as he has now openly said, to question him—to question ‘science.’ He’s so far gone that he has actually come out and said he is science.

On July 4, 1992, one of my heroes and inspirations, Thurgood Marshall, gave a speech that deeply resonates today. “We cannot play ostrich,” he said. “Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. . . . We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, and the mistrust.” This book grows out of that call to action, and out of my belief that our fight must begin and end with speaking truth. I believe there is no more important and consequential antidote for these times than a reciprocal relationship of trust. You give and you receive trust. And one of the most important ingredients in a relationship of trust is that we speak truth. It matters what we say. What we mean. The value we place on our words—and what they are worth to others. We cannot solve our most intractable problems unless we are honest about what they are, unless we are willing to have difficult conversations and accept what facts make plain.

In the open space of democracy, we engage the qualities of inquiry, intuition, and love as we become a dynamic citizenry, unafraid to exercise our shared knowledge and power. We can dissent. We can vote. We can step forward in times of terror with a confounding calm that will shatter fear and complacency.

Democracy is a rare thing, Pete. You hear how democracies are all over the place, but it isn’t really true. They call it democracy. They use the vocabulary, the props, but it’s theater. What your Founding Fathers did was the real thing. But the problem with democracies is they’re hard to maintain. Especially in the face of high technology. How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.

Fauci understands this and has mastered the elimination of both dissent and any mercy for the destroyed. It’s a sin as he has now openly said, to question him—to question ‘science.’ He’s so far gone that he has actually come out and said he is science.

It’s not ‘capitalism,’ at all. It detests merit, standards, and all the values of Western Civilization. It uses the violence of the ‘woke’ economy to re-cast lies as truth, and to proudly crush and block any and all dissenting voices. It does this always in the name of ‘saving lives.’ Only now, with COVID, are Americans able to see Fauci’s cold, ruthless face behind the mask.

his five-decade dictatorial control of the FBI to transform the agency into a vehicle for shielding organized crime, fortifying his corrupt political partners, oppressing Black Americans, surveilling his political enemies, suppressing free speech and dissent, and as a platform for building a cult of personality around his own inflated ego. More recently, Dr. Fauci’s perennial biographer, Charles Ortleb, analogized Dr. Fauci’s career and pathological mendacity to the sociopathic con men Bernie Madoff and Charles Ponzi.37 Another critic, author J. B. Handley, labeled Dr. Fauci “a snake oil salesman” and a “bigger medical charlatan than Rasputin.”38 Economist and author Peter Navarro, former Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, observed during a national network television interview in April 2021 that “Fauci is a sociopath and a liar.”39 His white lab coat, his official title, and his groaning bookshelves crowded with awards from his medical cartel collaborators allow Dr. Fauci to masquerade as a neutral, disinterested scientist and selfless public servant driven by a relentless commitment to public health. But Dr. Fauci doesn’t really do public health. By every metric, his fifty-year regime has been a catastrophe for American health. But as a businessman, his success has been boundless. In 2010, Dr. Fauci told adoring New Yorker writer Michael Specter that his go-to political playbook is Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather.40 He spontaneously recited his favorite line from Puzo’s epic: “It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business.

On July 4, 1992, one of my heroes and inspirations, Thurgood Marshall, gave a speech that deeply resonates today. “We cannot play ostrich,” he said. “Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. . . . We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, and the mistrust.

It takes a special brand of courage to forge a path against a marching crowd. We may live in a democracy of majority rule, but one of our most important founding ideals was to confer legal protection on those unafraid to buck popular sentiment with contrarian voices. Dissent can sometimes be uncomfortable, but it is vital in a democracy. Our nation would never have thrived without the determination of those who were fearless in their beliefs, even when those beliefs were severely out of step with the popular mood and those in power. And in moments like the present, when our government has become erratic and threatens our constitutional principles, dissent is doubly necessary to resist a slide into greater autocracy. I grew up in a segregated and bigoted world in dire need of dissenting voices. My parents, teachers, friends, and acquaintances mostly accepted the status quo without question, and I have come to learn that most people, in most times, tend to follow the herd. That is why our First Amendment is so important. Free speech must be protected so that we can hear from those who challenge our beliefs. And a free and independent press is essential for bringing dissenting opinions to the national conversation.

At the heart of every flourishing democracy is the unyielding commitment to free speech. It is the beacon that illuminates the path towards a more just and equitable society, where every citizen is empowered to participate in shaping the collective narrative. Embracing free speech isn't just about tolerating dissent; it's a celebration of intellectual diversity, a recognition that the strength of a nation lies in the unfettered expression of its people.

Strange are the ways of democracy; everyone disagrees with everyone else and such dissent is considered a good thing. Stranger are the ways of dictators; once they have coerced all their subjects to agree with them, they spread their evil wings across their borders to secure the nod of the rest of the humanity. That is how dictatorships usually end. If a dictator does not aspire to be a world hegemon, he could be forever, limited only by the fact that even dictators are mortal.

The militant Islamists, convinced of the exclusive truth of their vision of Islam, display little tolerance even towards fellow Muslims. Their monolithic vision of Islam does not allow this. Consequently, they do not develop any tools for coping with dissent among the people. Many elements, then, point out that the Islamists’ vision of democracy is quite different from the one developed in Western Europe, even though the same terminology is used.

Conflict, of course, has always been part of life. We argue in our marriages and friendships, at work and with our kids. Debate and dissent are part of democracy, domesticity, and every meaningful relationship. As the human rights activist Dorothy Thomas once wrote, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.

There exists an inherent power that has the ability to shape societies, challenge the status quo, and ignite the flames of progress. It is within the pages of books that this power finds its most potent expression, for they are the vessels of knowledge, the repositories of wisdom, and the catalysts of transformation. Therefore, any attempt to ban books is not just an assault on the written word, but an assault on the very essence of freedom, intellect, and human dignity. Book banning is an act of intellectual tyranny, born out of fear, ignorance, and the desire to stifle dissent. It is a desperate attempt to control the narrative, to manipulate minds, and to maintain a stranglehold on power. By banning books, we deny ourselves the opportunity to engage in a rich tapestry of ideas, perspectives, and experiences that have the potential to broaden our horizons, challenge our assumptions, and foster empathy. History has taught us that book banning is a tool of oppressive regimes, for it seeks to suppress voices that question authority, challenge injustice, and advocate for change. It is an insidious tactic that seeks to create a uniformity of thought, a homogeneity of ideas, and a society devoid of critical thinking and independent thought. In essence, book banning is an assault on the very foundations of democracy, for it undermines the principles of free speech, intellectual diversity, and the right to access information. We must remember that the power of books lies not only in their ability to educate and enlighten but also in their capacity to provoke discomfort, challenge prevailing norms, and spark dialogue. It is through the clash of ideas, the exploration of different perspectives, and the confrontation of opposing viewpoints that societies evolve, progress, and chart a path towards a more just and equitable future. Book banning is an act of intellectual cowardice, for it seeks to shield individuals from ideas that might be uncomfortable, inconvenient, or challenging. But it is precisely in these moments of discomfort that growth, empathy, and understanding emerge. By denying ourselves the opportunity to confront difficult ideas, we deny ourselves the chance to question our own beliefs, expand our intellectual horizons, and ultimately, evolve as individuals and as a society.

Whereas democracy is founded on the negotiation of diverging viewpoints, ideology is sustained through intolerance of dissent. You are, as the saying has it, either with us or against us. This is the essence of bigotry.

This so-called “independent” monitoring and accountability body’s purpose was to validate the imposition of police state controls by global and local political leaders and technocrats, endorsing their efforts to take the kind of harsh actions that Gates’s simulation modeled: subduing resistance, ruthlessly censoring dissent, isolating the healthy, collapsing economies, and compelling vaccination during a projected worldwide health crises. GPMB’s board includes a pantheon of technocrats whose cumulative global power to dictate global health policy is virtually irresistible: Anthony Fauci; Sir Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust; Christ Elias of BMGF; China’s CDC director, George Gao; Russian health minister, Veronika Skvortsova; WHO’s health director, Michael Ryan; its former director, Gro Harlem Brundtland; its former programming director, Ilona Kickbusch; and UNICEF’s Henrietta Holsman Fore, who is former director of USAID, that used to be a reliable CIA front.

Whereas democracy is founded on the negotiation of diverging viewpoints, ideology is sustained through intolerance of dissent.

America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn’t forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required periodic exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences.

The other argument [about the Iraq War] was about argument itself. It characterized any argument about policy (whether, in fact, Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction and whether regime change could be effected through an invasion) as unnecessary, dithering, disloyal, and possibly even deliberately evil, since the correct course of action was so obvious. Major media outlets demonized dissent. In a democracy.

Democracy rests on the principle of majority rule, yet it’s eternally coupled with the tolerance of dissenting views. However, ongoing competitive party politics has demeaned the role of opposition. Though it’s explicitly visible that the present Government has yet to accomplish many feats. Still, you can’t deny the fact that they have outwitted in holding the nerve of the people in terms of their narratives. That’s what you need when the opposition becomes dysfunctional.

I feel a rush of anger at those grumbling intellectuals and professional dissenters who constantly carp about this great country. Frankly, they can only do it because they are allowed to. And they are allowed to because, for all our imperfections, we are a genuine democracy.

Hence the elaborate pretense that the press is a critical dissenting force—maybe even too critical for the health of democracy—when in fact it is almost entirely subservient to the basic principles of the ideological system: