The Crazy Years

I’ve watched a lot of videos of UK police (just like this one) and there seems to be an inordinate number of officers, both female AND male (which does not reflect well on British masculinity) where the only word I can think of to accurately describe them rhymes with Howard Hunt.

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In a society unwilling to prosecute actual antisocial and criminal behavior, the police must be kept busy by criminalizing ordinary behavior. Providing them with sufficient “crimes” to ticket is the impetus for regulators to “regulate” each and every possible human behavior. Here, the cops go beyond even that. It suffices to merely come to their attention to be prosecuted. Remember Stalin’s Berea.

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I’m half expecting lefties (the rare ones who dare to bring children into the flawed world they’re working so hard to “fix”) to name their kids after Berea. Diminutive forms of his first name, Lavrentiy, include “Lava”. Kind of melts in the mouth, no?

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The right isn’t any better. See the so-called “Patriot Act”, which can be used to justify just about anything à la “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”.

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True, sorry to say. However, it’s not the full time business for the right as it is for the left.

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👀A History Lesson - October 4, 1974
🇺🇸American Civil Rights Activist Cesar Chavez explains the harmful effects of illegal immigrants on American Citizens pic.twitter.com/XcfWQABUFF

— miguelifornia (@miguelifornia) June 7, 2025
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FYI: I used ChatGPT to help organize and articulate my thoughts as follows:

Here is where the real danger lies—the ratcheting effect. Each party nudges the Overton window a bit further in its preferred direction, and the other, rather than reversing course, either normalizes the shift or rebrands it to fit its own narrative.

The Patriot Act is a textbook example. Had the Democrats proposed warrantless wiretaps, secret courts, and indefinite detention in the name of social justice, conservatives would have erupted in outrage. But wrap it in red, white, and blue after 9/11, call it “Patriot,” and suddenly it becomes a loyalty test on the right. Dissent is framed as un-American.

That’s how conservatives get tricked—not necessarily by the left, but by the partisan theater itself. The right introduces authoritarian powers under the banner of security, and the left later adopts those same tools for its own ends.

For example, the tools originally designed to track foreign terrorists were soon redirected at domestic political opponents. Consider how the Obama administration authorized surveillance of the Trump campaign—an extraordinary use of intelligence powers, justified under the thinnest of pretexts, and later revealed to be riddled with procedural and factual problems. Once again, powers created in the name of national security were leveraged for political advantage.

Even when there’s a backlash, it rarely leads to repeal—only to repurposing. The machinery stays intact, simply aimed in a different direction. And while the right often protests when the left uses these tools to silence dissent, they’re just as willing to wield them when it suits their own agenda—whether to suppress protest, target whistleblowers, or punish speech they deem unpatriotic or undesirable in some way.

So even if one accepts the claim that control is the left’s full-time job, the right plays a crucial role. They lay the groundwork, pass the laws, build the infrastructure, and establish the precedents. In that sense, the two parties don’t behave like adversaries—they function more like relay runners in the race toward the same goal of ever-increasing centralization and control.

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