Silence as a Political Strategy
Spend and Spend and Spend and
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
-George Orwell
“The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.”
-George Orwell
“This debt structure is fiscal insanity”
-Chicago Alderman Bill Conway
We live in curious times. It’s popular to look away from certain issues if they don’t accord with your political prejudices-to pretend that they simply don’t exist.
No one explicitly supports some of the policies in place, as far as I can tell. They’re simply not talked about, and any attempt to bring them up is painted as a partisan move, immediately inviting dismissal from 35-45% of national voters.
A border that was effectively open, for years, was one such policy (that reality changed in 2024, to the dismay of the DNC). Bail reform is another. When was the last time you heard a politician acknowledge the costs of bail reform? I’ve literally never heard any major political figure argue for bail reform or try to spark discussion about its effects. There are thousands of nonprofits which support it, and there are politicians which have executed it… but no public dialogue. NONE. It’s as if people are trying to pretend that changes aren’t happening, all while a legion of privileged supporters gleefully promote the idea of radical and revolutionary change online. But these are your changes! Don’t you want to advertise them, use their effectuation for political energy? You wouldn’t expect silence and deflection if you thought that these policies had sincere support.
“The idea is to change while pretending to stand still. When people object, silence them. When they call your radical policies radical, pretend that you don’t know what they’re talking about. When they bring up the costs and effects of the changes, change the subject.”
What is going on here? I honestly don’t know.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (the subject, along with Tiffany Henyard, ‘Mayor Kobi’, and others of an upcoming piece of mine, that links BLM-adjacent politicians and corruption/incompetence) has proposed a $830 million loan, which would have front-loaded interest such that the first 20 years would exclusively go toward interest payments and the total repayment amount would exceed $2 TRILLION. The loan has language which would allow it to be diverted from infrastructure to migrant contracts and the teacher’s union, which Johnson belongs to and which he’s unethically working to enrich as we speak. The performance and interests of the Chicago teachers’ unions during the past 5 years is another tragic, egregious case of policy failure but I can’t get into all of them. I’ll be here all day.
Try to find current graphs and projections of city/state/federal debt right now. I studied economics in college. It used to be trivially easy to find this data. Now most of it is out of date by 5 years, or 10.
Perhaps Elon Musk is offensive and scattershot. Perhaps he’s overstepping! It’s undeniable that he’s (ostensibly) working on a massive and growing problem: our national debt.
I simply don’t hear any acknowledgement that this is an issue on the Left. I don’t hear any interest in addressing it or formulating proposals to shrink our massive annual budget deficits. Of course, the Right has been hypocritically silent on this issue during Republican administrations in the past, but we’re here now. We’re watching a capable and energetic individual attacking the problem and half of the country seems unwilling to admit that there is a problem. Am I crazy? Do I not understand economics? My impression is that this is a looming catastrophe which could annihilate our economy and impoverish our children.
I wish I could include some alternative points of view… but I’ve never encountered any. It seems that there are people working to address this problem, and there are people who are attacking those people. What is the Democratic party’s position on our national debt? I wish I could say. No one ever talks about it. What is the intelligentsia’s position on bail reform? I have no idea. There’s a deafening wall of silence on the issue.
There are two salient indicators of national debt: the size of the debt relative to our national economy, and the percentage of debt payments which go toward paying interest. I’ve NEVER heard a mainstream politician address either of these metrics honestly, in years.
It’s sinister to encounter dishonesty and deflections and ad hominem attacks being used in political discussions. It’s far worse to encounter nothing, a kind of concerted omerta of deliberate ignorance.
Many people seem to be deliberately ignoring policy catastrophes, or potential catastrophes, for political advantage, or emotional convenience. Are they conscious of their self-deception? Do they understand the blind spot which they have erected in their own worldview? They seem to be pursuing the Orwellian strategy of Doublethink:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able -- and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years -- to arrest the course of history.
-George Orwell, 1984
Try to find graphics about our current debt level on Google right now. Try to find some mainstream political dialogue or proposals concerning the debt during the past 5 years. This policy dialogue is insanity. We’re a fucking democracy, for God’s sake. Let’s put aside childish things for a minute and acknowledge the basic shape of reality. Forget Elon and Trump and the GOP, and votes and ratings. This could break the entire world. Can we just agree that our debt is a problem?
"Try to find current graphs and projections of city/state/federal debt right now. I studied economics in college. It used to be trivially easy to find this data. Now most of it is out of date by 5 years, or 10."
This line alone inspired me to write an article on the topic. When I was an economics major, I could easily access hundreds of voting sheets from different states through a centralized data source. Now it's all gated or nonexistent.
Brandon Johnson is clearly a criminal and a not very smart one. As to the national debt:
There’s a good way to go about government downsizing and a stupid way. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s effort headed by Elon Musk is using the second approach.
First, it’s okay to eliminate obviously unnecessary positions like those used to promote DEI. No harm, no foul, but after that is accomplished attempting to micromanage complex government programs is a fool’s game.
Each government agency should by now have scores of Trump appointees in charge of agency management down to the regional office level outside of Washington DC. The way to proceed with minimal disruption is to give each of these appointees a set budget reduction target (say 10% or 15%) and let those individuals working with the senior civil service employees they now manage determine how to meet the new targets with the least disruption to services provided to the American people. DOGE simply does not have the ability to do this job and the stupid mistakes they are making will completely and permanently tarnish their ability to reduce government spending. This NYT article highlights the kind of stupidity Musk is engaged in:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/travel/national-park-service-firings.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zU4.auCr.xN44vnAIiMzg&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare