On December 16, 1773, off the Boston coast, irate American colonists, fed up with paying excessive tax rates and getting political abuse from their colonial masters in return, flooded the sea with 342 chests of British East India Company tea.
It was a glorious symbolic act of defiance. War ensued, and eventually the patriots, once in the extreme minority among the total colonial population, were vindicated.
The rallying cry of the revolutionary movement was “no taxation without representation,” meaning that the colonists were subjected to taxation to fuel the British Empire’s expensive adventures across the globe, but did not enjoy any real political representation in British Parliament for it.
Does modern America suffer from the same phenomenon?
I have previously referenced a 2014 study published via Cambridge University Press that quantitatively debunks the “democracy” myth that American children are force-fed in public school:
“When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it… average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence [over US policy].”
In layman’s terms, the multinational Western technocratic state does not factor the peasants’ desires or values into its decision-making at all.
Furthermore, the government considers at least a third of its own population “domestic terrorists” for non-crimes as petty as parents not wanting their kids exposed to transgender indoctrination in public schools. It uses money collected from said alleged domestic terrorists through taxes to politically persecute them, and frequently requests more to facilitate its jihad.
Via New York Times, May 4, 2021:
“Attorney General Merrick B. Garland told lawmakers on Tuesday that the Justice Department needs more money for Biden administration priorities including combating domestic extremism.… Mr. Garland has prioritized efforts to fight domestic terrorism and protect civil rights over the department’s focus during the Trump administration on street crime and gangs…
The department is also seeking an additional $101 million to address the rising threat of domestic terrorism.”
Journalists who expose government abuses such as the ones enumerated above, instead of being lauded as heroes for their good work, are targeted for political persecution by the state.
There are literally thousands of examples of this, but the most prominent is Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been hounded to the ends of the Earth for a decade now for exposing US war crimes, Hillary Clinton’s personal corruption, and other factual information in the public interest.
The government selectively enforces the law against white people and conservatives while letting leftist agents of chaos run hog-wild on American streets in a phenomenon called “anarcho-tyranny” that I have written about previously at The Daily Bell.
Due process has been all but discarded as a relic of legacy America, in the before-times prior to the installment of the multinational technocracy. Alex Jones was not permitted, in his Sandy Hook defamation trial, to offer his innocence as a defense. His guilt had been pre-determined; the court proceedings were only to determine how much moneyJones owed the alleged victims.
Former president Donald Trump recently lost a civil rape case to a certifiable lunatic The Atlantic writer who offered no evidence of any kind except her own unhinged testimony. The alleged rape occurred in 1996 – 27 years ago. There were no witnesses in the busy department store where it allegedly went down. The jury awarded her millions of dollars anyway, and Rachel Maddow did a fawning interview to celebrate.
Trump maintained his innocence throughout. After the trial, when Trump again pled innocence at a CNN town hall, her attorney threatened another lawsuit for simply claiming his innocence as he has since the whole scandal erupted.
None of this is an endorsement – not even a tacit one – of political violence if it can be avoided. Kinetic warfare with the multinational corporate state is inadvisable for many reasons, not least of which is that the government’s capabilities dwarf those of any insurgency.
Rather, this is an acknowledgment of reality: a strong case can be made that the United States government is illegitimate. What we do with this assessment is up for debate.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.