Things Will Change Only When the People Learn to Recognize How Power Actually Works

The naive public remains in the dark because it insists on viewing Washington as it should be, and not how it actually is.

For how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation. —Machiavelli, The Prince

Perusing reader comments to my post this morning, Can a State Attorney General Successfully Prosecute Anthony Fauci?, it appears that many readers somehow (by some miracle of misinterpretation) managed to interpret the post as me stating that a State Attorney General should not prosecute Anthony Fauci.

The point of the post is not to elucidate whether a state AG should prosecute, but the reality that doing so will face enormous hurdles, and that the proper venue for prosecuting him is federal court.

The comments reminded me of the above passage from The Prince in which Machiavelli touched on a key element of his (perfectly accurate) understanding of human nature.

We suffer enormously in life from our expectation that people—and especially politicians—be steadfast, faithful, and virtuous in their conduct. A better way to live is accept that people are self-serving, hungry for gain, and avoidant of principled conduct that comes at a personal cost or impediment to the gain they seek. This isn’t cynicism—it’s absolute realism. In my opinion, Machiavelli was not a wicked man, but one of the wisest men who has ever lived.

The US government is NOT in the business of serving the interests of We the People. It IS in the business of protecting and advancing the interests of the powerful oligarchs—the great lords of this earth—that it serves and enriches.

For a decade I was under the mistaken impression that Donald Trump had arrived a point in his life in which he genuinely wanted to serve and to protect “We the People”—that is, the working and middle classes of this country who are not represented by a lobby or interest group in Washington.

Since he was reelected for his second term, he has revealed himself to be—without a doubt—what you might call the “Oligarchian Candidate” or the “Epstein Class Candidate.” The fact that the Democrats challenged him with the raving imbecile Kamala Harris should be regarded as strong circumstantial evidence that they are in on the act.

Kamala played a key role in the “race to the bottom” drama that led us to believe that Donald Trump was our only hope. Now that he is in office for his second term, we are facing major wars on multiple fronts, a doubling of the federal money sent to the military-industrial complex, accelerating national debt, unqualified support for the Great Lords of Tech who are rolling out AI with reckless abandon, and still no removal of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from the market.

Anthony Fauci’s entire mission during the pandemic was to serve as the midwife of bringing mRNA technology into use on a global scale. This was the entire point of Operation Warp Speed in all of its wild extravagance.

Until President Trump publicly revises his assessment of Warp Speed and declares that it was the work of an organized crime syndicate (of which Fauci was the public face), there is no way his administration could even consider bringing Fauci to justice.

This is the way things are, not how they should be, and until people recognize this, they will remain confused about how the US government actually works.