This person speaks my mind

'We the Sheeple …'

by Scott Lazarowitz
Reason and Jest

To some people, referring to "sheeple" sounds demeaning. However, when we have an entire population of millions in the greater Boston area not going out of their homes, and an entire community under siege because of one lone criminal, I will say, "Sheeple."
Americans seem so dependent on the government for everything, and are so hypnotized now by the government’s fear-mongering and rationalizations for its abuse.
The people really seem to be saying, "Sock it to me!" like on the 1960s TV series, Laugh-In. The star would say, "Sock it to me," which would be followed by the star getting hit over the head by a giant club, a wall caving in on the chump, or a huge amount of water being splashed on the dupe’s person.
Well, I think that each time we have an election, like last November, the American people say, "Sock it to me, baby!"
And then they get socked. And then they act surprised. "Wha happen?"
What reminded me of this was one of the U.S. senate’s latest turncoats, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who attempted to pass a gun control compromise bill, which failed.
This was the "conservative" that Tea Partiers were swooning over in his failed bid to defeat Sen. Arlene Specter, but later did get elected to the senate. So, with Toomey’s latest gun control compromise, I was saying, "Sock it Toomey, baby."
In fact, one conservative Boston Herald columnist felt very betrayed by former Republican Sen. Scott Brown in his switch to the anti-2^nd Amendment side, and his votes for Dodd-Frank, raising payroll taxes and the Obama "jobs" bill. She compared such a betrayal to "leaving a bride at the altar."
But this pattern of the American people getting bamboozled by these professional pols never seems to stop. Americans continue to have faith in their Rulers, despite the betrayals, the squandering of the loot they steal, and their growing police state Leviathan that threatens each and every one of us.
And to get an idea of what masochistic sheeple the people of Massachusetts are, in 2008 they voted by 70%-30% against repealing the state income tax. (Who in his right mind would vote against being able to keep more of his own earnings?)
And now Gov. Deval Patrick and the legislature want to raise taxes even more!
So, like the people of Massachusetts, the American people continue to beg, "Sock it to us, government."
As H.L. Mencken wrote, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
And with that, Attention Deficit Democracy author James Bovard observed, "We now have the Battered Citizen Syndrome: the more debacles, the more voters cling to faith in their rulers."
And this is also how Americans tend to respond to crises, whether they be natural disasters, a mass shooter, or being attacked by terrorists. When these crises happen, the extremely naïve and gullible people plead with their Rulers – government bureaucrats – to increase the intrusions, their wealth confiscations, their police state, and so forth. "Anything to keep us safe. Please. Sock it to me – good and hard!"
And the government Rulers really do sock it to the people – good and hard.
So, this past week there was a "lockdown" situation in the Boston area to find one lone alleged killer, a 19-year-old "pothead" who played soccer and who most of his acquaintances couldn’t believe could be involved in the Boston Marathon bombings.
Outside of Police State Watertown, the entire Boston area was literally a ghost town, all day. Millions of people "advised" by the fascist government police to stay at home and don’t go out. And the martial law police state didn’t even achieve its goal of catching the suspect!
But how much of an added risk would it have been to people’s lives to just go about their business that day, go to work, do their shopping, or go to school, regardless of whether one lone criminal was on the loose?
Well, life is full of risks, but the sheeple of America have become phobic of any risk in life whatsoever, unfortunately.
In contrast to the fascists’ tyrannizing and terrorizing of the obedient sheeple, Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger had this more sensible alternative to the police state lockdown in Boston:

What should be the response is that every American who lives in that area should go about their business while openly carrying a pistol, rifle or both.
Go ahead – try that terrorist crap with the proper response to such an event and see how long you live.  That would instantly be the end of those terrorists and the economic disruption would be zero.  It would also send a strong message – pull that crap and we the people will do our duty as citizens to the common defense.

Unfortunately, such a scenario is too frightening to the sheeple who would rather be kept in their martial law prisons.
But while Toomey’s compromise gun-grabbing bill was voted down this week, Premier Obama has been hinting at yet another executive power grab. On the senate’s vote against the Toomey-Manchin compromise, Obama whined, "They blocked common-sense gun reforms…"
You mean "communist" sense reforms, don’t you, Herr Obama?
Anyway, it is truly a disgusting act of exploitation the way Obama paraded the survivors of the Sandy Hook massacre around to get votes for his fascist gun-grabbing.
While they continue to be emotionally manipulated by the simple-minded rationale that making them defenseless will "reduce gun violence," the sheeple do not see that they are making themselves more vulnerable to government’s gun violence.
As Judge Napolitano wrote,

The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.
We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense.

And Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes passionately wrote a Pledge of Resistance against the government’s disarmament agenda.
Now, before readers panic and conclude that I am promoting any kind of "anti-government militia movement," no, I am not doing that.
I am merely pointing out the primary reason the writers of the Bill of Rights included the 2^nd Amendment: to protect the people’s right to defend themselves against government tyrants.
As we have seen with the Amerikan police state, Leviathan’s growing tyranny and recent Presidents’ starting of wars for no good reason, the early Americans had many reasons to oppose even the existence of a national standing army, as Jacob Hornberger wrote here and here.
However, the "conservative" Tea Partiers seem just as ignorant as many progressives, as seen by the Tea Partiers’ level of authoritarianism and deference to Washington’s central planners.
The conservatives, nationalists and collectivists of the right also say, "Sock it to me" in their love of men in uniforms, their worship of all things police and military, and their demonizing of anyone who dares to question the legitimacy of government police and military.
These authoritarians will have a very hard time understanding the possibility of tyranny happening here in Good ol’ US of A, as voluntaryist Larken Rose pointed out.
So, even if the "Law and Order conservatives" read William Grigg, Cop Block, Radley Balko, and Rick Horowitz every day, they still wouldn’t understand how like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany America is now.
And the people around here in Boston cheered all the militarized police in their fascist security theater. Most of the obedient sheeple would never believe the possibility of FBI or private agents involvement in the Boston Marathon bombings prior to the event itself. And nationally conservative and liberal statists tend to believe what government bureaucrats and the media propagandists will tell them. (Whether the "lockdown" and siege of Watertown was because of "sequestration" threats and needing to justify an overly-bloated federal agency budget, or the local police attempting to justify more federal handouts, or just because many of these "cops-n-robbers" neanderthals just get off on these situations, who knows. But I digress.)
Now, there have been many arguments over what exactly the phrases "promote the general welfare" and "provide for" the general welfare mean in the U.S. Constitution. My own interpretation is that "promote" means to advance and "welfare" means the general well-being of the people within the territory over which the federal government has jurisdiction.
Clearly, the federal government has gone against the promoting of our general welfare in the extreme, as have state and local governments. The terribly destructive consequences of government gun-grabbing, the Federal Reserve’s monetary central planning, the non-productive U.S. Congress’s stealing more and more private wealth from the actual workers and producers, and the executive branch’s continued lawlessness, provoking of foreigners and domestic overreach have all made us less prosperous, less safe, and less secure.
And in the past I have compared the federal government to an occupying foreign government in Washington, inflicting its criminality against the American people, and that is a more accurate way to view those buffoons and crooks: they are invaders.
How could we not view the federal government as an occupying foreign regime when its own military personnel are engaging in psy-ops of U.S. senators? Psychological operations are mainly used by governments against enemies in order to manipulate the enemies’ emotions, behavior and decisions toward one’s own advantage. But given that U.S. senators supposedly represent the American people (and given all the other threats against us such as the feds purchasing a billion rounds of ammunition for domestic use, and the IRS, the FBI and NSA criminally spying on innocent Americans), one would have to conclude that either the military or the feds in general view the American people as the enemy.
The feds have not only been AWOL in their abandonment of their duty to "promote the general welfare," but, with psy-ops, false flag ops, and intrusions run amok such as ObamaCare, they obviously do not have the American people’s interests at heart.
"But that’s what elections are for," cry the naïve and gullible.
U.S. elections are repeatedly just rearranging of deck chairs, as I have noted before. For conservatives and Tea Partiers, nothing has changed for the better since the elections of 1980, 1994 or 2000.
One can easily predict that in 2014 the conservatives will elect the same old slithering snakes and sleazebags dressed in Tea Party outfits, the same old turncoats who will promise to repeal ObamaCare and oppose gun control but then go on to vote for more socialized medicine and gun registration.
Before there is to be a real economic collapse, and civil unrest and martial law (which is obviously the direction in which America is heading), the people need to pry themselves from the grasp of government’s control and its tyranny.
Sooner or later, people will have to realize that as an institution of monopoly, compulsion and coercion the government is thus inherently an organization of criminality. The people need to stop being its willing victims.
So, rather than being sheeple saying "Sock it to me!" to the abusive Big Daddy Government, the people need to realize that what America needs is not reforming (which is impossible), but a complete dismantling of the federal government, because it should never have existed in the first place. Its existence has provided for nothing but a place for traitors, shysters and violent psychopaths, and it just gets worse and worse.
Decentralization, nullification, localism and secession are clearly in order, before it’s too late.

April 22, 2013

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.