Lies, Oppression & Implementation Of Social Policy At The Directive Of Political Operatives

by William Lafferty 

We are fortunate.  Unlike much of the rest of the world, we have never lived under a dictatorship.  But now, for the first time, we have reason to reflect on what that must be like for our fellow human beings who have been not so fortunate.
Maybe you have had friends or acquaintances who came from Communist bloc countries.  These people, in my experience, are afraid of the government and terrified of the police.

Some of us, the ones who even know that there is a place called Benghazi and who have heard of the IRS scandal, are beginning to be afraid also.  What is the nature of this fear?
We fear the overwhelming power of the federal government, capable of crushing almost anyone at will.  We fear the tools of this type of oppression, the militarized police teams housed in many government agencies, and we fear the groundless and interminable “investigations,” audits, interrogatories, and prosecutions that can be visited upon us by people who want to obliterate what we thought was our right –  to disagree.

But there is another thing we fear.  We fear the ability of the government to make oppression seem patriotic.  We fear the ability of the president to appear on television and talk about how “appalled” he is that political oppression was carried out by the IRS just before an election, when we all know that the IRS, an agency controlled by the executive branch and therefore by the White House, must have approved of the targeting of conservatives by the IRS.  We are, in short afraid of the lies.
Lies turn black into white.  They obscure what really happened.  They make it possible for the person in charge of the wrongdoing to be promoted.  They are the building blocks of oppression.  And lies can shutdown inquiry into what really happened.
Lies, used skillfully, don’t need to be extensive.  If you say, for example, that low level employees in the IRS concocted the targeting of political enemies of the administration right before an election and refuse to release information and testimony that might prove otherwise, you have cut off inquiry at its knees.


Or, because of the lies, the investigation may overlook critical questions, as apparently happened in the IRS audit, which condemns what happened, but finds no evidence that the targeting involved anyone outside of the IRS.  I guess we are expected to believe that the top bureaucrats of the Treasury Department, who have admitted they knew about the misconduct, never had any conversations or wrote any emails to the White House about the misconduct.
It is important to realize that these agencies, IRS, HUD, EEOC, HHS, and a host of others, implement social policy.  That’s why the IRS did what it did.  It was implementing the distorted social policy of squelching dissent and rigging elections.  (See my earlier article, “The Ascendancy of the Bureaucrats“)

The agencies of government are supposed to be neutral providers of services that effect agreed-upon policies, but in reality, they have become agents of oppression supervised and staffed by politicians.  The IRS targets political opponents; HUD creates rules to favor minority borrowing and leasing, terrifying those who don’t comply with prosecution (see my earlier article,  “Fear the Bureaucrats“); EEOC favors blatantly racist policies like affirmative action and, like the IRS, has the power to demand volumes of information and initiate prosecutions (see my earlier article, “Theory and Practice in Government“) ; and HHS runs the welfare and disability system in such a way, complete with free cell phones,  that fraud and scamming within the system are unaddressed.  All of these perverted activities favor politically correct constituencies.
So we are afraid, in sum, because we are faced with lies and blatant partisan oppression by massive agencies staffed by hundreds of thousands of people implementing their version of social policy, under the direction of political operatives.