Who can you trust?

Ronald Reagan famously once quipped that the scariest 9 words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” [1]

If you’re looking for the root of the madness that has befallen our country, start there.

The notion that government is essentially evil and we’d all be much better off if it just got out of the way is a myth created by plutocrats who hate personal accountability almost as much as they hate poor people. [2]

But an entire generation of over-privileged Ayn Rand fanboys, mostly white and mostly male, took that notion as gospel. And now they’re taking a sledgehammer to institutions that were designed to insulate and protect people from the unrestrained excesses of corporations. 

One of the many nasty side effects of this is that federal websites are being stripped of information, left for dead, and taken over by the bottomfeeders of the Internet. To cite one example, cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs notes that many of the sites operated by the Centers for Disease Control have been taken over and are being redirected to porn sites and malware. 

Cybersecurity consultant Henk Groenewoud found the following malware linked to the CDC sites:

Meanwhile, pages for the National Diabetes Prevention Program now display information on how to book airline tickets and obtain refunds. Unfortunately, I am not joking.

Why? No friggin’ idea. But it’s yet another sign of the chaos being intentionally unleashed. 

CDC you later

There’s more deliberate damage at the CDC site, like this pissy little note at the top of the HIV information page, written by some apparatchik who thinks AIDS is spread via the promiscuous use of pronouns.

The good news here – and it’s not much, but I’ll take any I can get – is that the HHS felt compelled to actually obey the orders of the court. Not sure how long that state of affairs will last.

Most of the as-yet-undamaged CDC sites carry the following disclaimer:

What this means is you can no longer trust any information on any sites published by the federal government. In other words, during a period where monkeypox is spreading and the Avian Flu is threatening to make the Covid pandemic look like a day at the beach, our most trusted sources of information on the spread of infectious diseases can no longer be trusted. 

We’re on our own here, folks.

Dying for your business

There are a lot of Libertarians out there cheering the death of federal oversight. These are people who think Elon Musk is a direct descendent of John Galt, and who are blissfully ignorant of anything that happened in the world before they emerged from the womb. They don’t actually care about how government works, they only care about how well it works for them. 

To paraphrase the old joke about George Herbert Bush: They were born on third base but think they built the stadium. [3]

Regulatory agencies were created because people were dying – from tainted meat, toxic chemicals in our air and water, quack cures, mining disasters, virulent diseases, planes dropping out of the sky, it’s a long list – and the public demanded that elected officials do something about it. That’s how we got the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), CDC, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and all those others in the first place. [4]

Here’s the thing: Industries also benefit from regulation. Sure, their CEOs complain bitterly about laboring under a ‘regulatory burden’, but routinely killing your own employees tends to put a damper on recruiting. These companies want people to eat their meat and buy their airline tickets. They need the public to feel safe using their products. Agency regulation gives potential customers at least some assurance that Uncle Sam is keeping an eye on things, and if those companies stray too far over the line there will be consequences. 

What happens when those assurances go away? 

Neither grotesque wealth nor unsullied ignorance will inoculate you against monkeypox. Tainted meat doesn’t care whether you live in a red or blue state. Airlines are unlikely to ask how you voted before they start handing out parachutes. 

People currently applauding the dismantling of our government are laboring under the delusion that it’s only going to hurt the people they don’t like. Imagine their surprise when they discover it’s coming for them, too.

Next week, I’ll talk about some of the people who are fighting back, and what you can do to help.

Heard any funny jokes lately? Share them in the comments or email me at my NEW address: [email protected].

[1] I’d bet $50 that line was written by Peggy Noonan, poet laureate to fascists.

[2] Historian Heather Cox Richardson has written extensively about this in her “Letters from an American” newsletter, which is unfortunately still hosted on Substack.

[3] Libertarians also do a lot of complaining about government overreach on the Internet. How the f**k do they think the Internet got here in the first place? Do they think somebody put two 300-baud modems together in a room with mood lighting and romantic music and let nature take its course?

[4] Fun Fact: The EPA, FAA, FDA, OSHA and many other regulatory bodies were formed under Republican administrations. Remember when letting people die unnecessarily was considered a bad thing by both parties?