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Note: Dr. Art Robinson is a noted scientist, former professor and co-founder of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. He is a five-time Republican nominee for Oregon’s 4th congressional district.
Having established in the public mind that, regardless of the rules of our constitutional republic, voters can elect politicians who will ignore those rules (and their oath of office) and give the people anything they want (including the lives, liberty and property of their fellow citizens), miscreants in our media and political establishment need only to influence Americans to vote their way.
Having failed in this in the presidential election of 2016, they are doing everything they can to ruin this presidency and to make sure the people do not do this again.
Advertising professionals know that people can be manipulated through their virtues and through their faults. The two most effective faults to use are fear and greed. Fear is stronger. Four principal fears are being used to manipulate Americans today.
First is fear of war. The U.S. “defense” budget is now $750 billion per year, but little of this is spent for homeland defense. It is spent on actual and potential wars abroad, with the hollow promise that military wars can always be fought on the soil of other nations – if enough resources are given to the military-industrial complex.
Second is fear of the Earth itself. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental pollution – all exaggerated far beyond common sense – are said to “existentially” threaten us. So we are told that we must give our freedom and resources to the environmental-industrial complex.
Third, is fear of personal illness. Many wonderful medical discoveries have been made, and many fine doctors and their assistants dedicate their lives to medical care. Yet, most of our medical dollars do not go to these people and their equipment and materials.
An estimated 75 percent of our medical expenditures go to a vast assembly of special interests, empowered by licensing and regulation. We are told that we will lose our medical care unless we give our freedom and resources to this medical-industrial complex.
Fourth is fear of energy. Most people do not understand energy, but they know that it is powerful, and they can be led to fear it – especially nuclear energy. The elite who seek to diminish individual freedom also fear energy because it is the currency of technology. Unrestricted, low-cost energy in the hands of free people enhances their liberty. So, we are told to support the regulations that place control of our energy in the hands of the energy-industrial complex.The use of our nation’s resources in the service of these four fears amounts to many trillions of counterproductively spent dollars each year. All four imitate justified concerns, but absorb far more resources than needed, extracted through exaggerated fear.
This waste of resources significantly weakens individual Americans and our entire nation in the ongoing and truly existential war we do fight every day – worldwide economic warfare.
Warfare? Yes. Our primary economic competitors do not live in constitutional republics. Many live under tyranny. If we lose out in the economic competition with them, we too will live under tyranny.
Yet, there is much to be gained by trading with everyone. America’s founders favored control of trade sufficiently to protect us from trade abuses and maintain our economic independence, and they opposed entangling alliances.
President Trump is now working to rebalance our trade so that we are not at a disadvantage to our competitors.
Our personal liberty, privacy, property and our very lives are at stake in this contest. These things far transcend the relative wealth within our nation.
That some Americans are rich, some are affluent, some are average and some are poor does not diminish us. American liberty has made possible a situation wherein even our poor are wealthier than most people in the world, and all can work to rise.
Another man’s wealth surely does not diminish me. In fact, his wealth makes possible advances, some of which will benefit me.
How can we, however, effectively diminish the river of fear the media wash over our fellow citizens every day? So many lies are being told and amplified with vast financial resources that most voters do not know what to think. So, they tend to follow the majority of “thought,” which the manipulators assure them is on the side of fear – every day.
In this situation, our thoughts logically turn to education, but what do we find there? We find the same fear and manipulation, where only 30 percent of property taxes reach the classrooms and the rest goes to the non-teaching educational-industrial complex.
President Eisenhower addressed two of these dangers in his Farewell Address.
First, Ike said, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Second, Ike said, “Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
“In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
President Eisenhower was right on both. The educational-industrial complex has largely been co-opted. We must work on alternatives to this complex and on post-graduate education. We have many principled allies. This site, WND, tries to be useful in this way.
We have no reason to feel unusually misused. Tyranny has always plagued mankind. It is a perpetual opponent of liberty.
