Consider the haunting opening lines to the 2010 BBC documentary, “The Power of Nightmares”:

In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed. And today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand.

Ten years ago, I found this intense documentary online. Over the years, the links to the documentary keep breaking and I have fixed them at least twice. You can now view the entire work here. Also here is the full script.

What would motivate a phalanx of high-paid government-financed experts to protect us from a never ending procession of alleged nightmares? How about job security. More specifically, now that Middle East terrorism is no longer looming as a threat to Americans, how about drumming up the new threat of misinformation/malinformation/dysinformation? How about funding huge bureaucracies of highly paid experts to protect us from each other? Notice that they have now turn our suspicions and paranoia toward each other, a disgraceful tactic in a country founded on the principle that we the citizens are in charge and it is our duty as self-rulers to interact and negotiate with each other to find solutions to complex problems. To feed their coffers, they have found a gift that keeps on giving, the concept of “misinformation,” ignoring that this concept is comically vague, in other words, perfectly suited for instigating Americans to form circular firing squads.

See the latest example, “They’re searching for fears to tap into,” article at Public by an excellent journalist, Lee Fang. Here is an excerpt:

Smith: So when you’re talking about this mission creep, do you think that this is just an example of the government just trying to grab power increasingly or do they seem to have some sort of position that they’re creeping towards intentionally, if that makes sense, like some sort of policy or what?

Fang: Bureaucracies tend to be self-perpetuating. We see this in a number of areas. The military is certainly an example of this. It’s difficult to wind down major military programs to cancel or roll back major military conflicts. Even with wars ending and conflicts ending and winding down in Iraq and Afghanistan, oversized military budgets seem to only grow and grow. There’s no peace dividend when these conflicts end. And the same is the case with the Department of Homeland Security. This agency has grown and grown.

And even as the threat of Islamic terrorism from Al-Qaeda or ISIS has radically waned in recent years, has gone down, this agency needs to justify its existence. So it’s searching for new threats, searching for new fears to tap into, and coming up with new justifications for this enlarged bureaucracy and variety of government contractors. It’s shifting from protecting against overseas terror threats to focusing on social media censorship. And that seems like a radical progression, but it helps justify the duration and expansion of these agencies.

Smith: In one email, Kate Starbird specifically said something like, unfortunately, current public discourse seems to accept that malinformation is speech protected within democratic norms. I’m curious if you think that people like Kate Starbird truly think that there is a threat that needs addressing, or if there’s some understanding or there’s some concern regarding, like, these ideas might, you know, we don’t want the public to see how we’re thinking about these things necessarily.

Fang: This is a very dangerous form of government interference with political speech. There’s “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” These are the kind of category areas that CISA and the Department of Homeland Security created as a rubric for interfering with social media discussions. Malinformation, it’s not a colloquial term. I’ve never heard it used outside of the… bureaucratic setting, but it basically means true information that feeds a false narrative. And the malinformation that we’ve seen from a variety of government-funded think tanks and this universe around DHS are actually true information that feeds into often true narratives, but it’s just narratives that the bureaucracy or political elites deem as unhelpful.

And that’s true information about the lab leak when the lab leak theory around COVID-19 was seen as a false narrative or a racist narrative. It’s true information about the war in Ukraine, but information that might not feed the pro-NATO, pro-Western narrative. This is a categorical form of government censorship. We saw really heavy-handed government censorship in China and Thailand and Russia and other countries, where they say that any kind of true reporting is traitorous, is dangerous to the Republic, it feeds into national security fears. This is essentially an American version of that, an American version of saying that, okay, this might be true information, journalistic information, accurate observation, but it feeds into unhelpful narratives that help the enemy. That’s an authoritarian argent in terms of suppressing speech. And we see in the emails that I’ve obtained emails from litigation, records requests, various leaks and whistleblowers, and now from this report. And it just shows that even though officials that were leading this government intervention realized that… Malinformation was a very weak argent. They still pursued this effort in terms of their crackdown.

One more thing . . . from Glenn Greenwald’s show, System Update, last night. Disinformation rhetoric [mostly from the political Left these days] is even attempting to shut down the the core operations of democratic process:

Tonight: if forced to identify the single greatest danger the West faces, I would almost certainly choose the ongoing institutionalization of censorship. Or, put another way, the incremental yet aggressive erosion of free speech, both as a legal right and as a social value. There are multiple ways a censorship regime is being implemented. We know from the Twitter Files and from other reporting both before and since that U.S. and Western security state agencies apply enormous pressure on Big Tech corporations to heavily censor online political discourse, largely by banning dissent from establishment orthodoxies on virtually every consequential debate. From reporting on Joe Biden to the integrity of elections, from COVID to the war in Ukraine, all of those issues have ushered in extreme levels of censorship, invariably aimed at those who question or dissent from establishment narratives. We have reported on such efforts many times. Then there is the truly pernicious attempt to stigmatize or even criminalize political dissent by depicting it as “too dangerous” to allow, based on the theory that this dissent is the primary culprit that inspires violent attacks. After a white supremacist shooter murdered people at a grocery store in Buffalo, in May 2022, for instance, established media outlets instantly created the narrative that the real criminal with blood on his hands was not the shooter but instead, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose speech was blamed for inspiring the killer even though there was no evidence the shooter had even heard of Tucker Carlson, let alone watched this show, let alone was inspired by him to murder. This theory, of course, is never applied the same way to establishment voices. When a rabid fan of Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders tried to murder GOP Congressman Steve Scalise and other members of the Republican House caucus, in 2017, based on his view that Republicans are racist, traitors and Russian agents, nobody seriously tried to claim that Maddow or Sanders had blood on their hands, nor did anyone claim that about an environmental activist, when a climate activist murdered the Dutch politician, Pim Fortuyn, in 2002, just nine days before a general election, which could have made Fortuyn the new Dutch prime minister. This media narrative is, again, yet another weapon designed to suppress and ultimately lead to the outlawing of dissent against establishment parties on the grounds that such dissent is too dangerous to permit. Then there are these social pressures designed to marginalize or silence establishment critiques in many countries.

In the democratic world, major societal sectors barely pretend any longer to value or defend free speech. At most, they may pay lip service to free speech, but then immediately offer a mountain of other values that they insist are more important, and that justified the restrictions on free speech. Increasingly, the phrase ‘free speech’ is depicted as a far-right or even a fascist cause. Even though every fascist in history has embraced censorship and not free speech. And the demands are now intense for establishment critics to be silenced or censored. We saw just last week that liberal media figures demanded that nobody, neither Joe Biden nor Professor Peter Hotez M.d., Ph.D. debate RFK, Jr. on the grounds that RFK, Jr.’s ideas are simply too harmful to allow to be heard. Google has repeatedly censored RFK or even mentions of him from YouTube, and that should not be surprising. Seemingly every day new theories are invented as to why one should regard dissent not only as wrong but also as too dangerous to allow. That is the pernicious theory that is leading in many democratic countries throughout the world, from Brazil and Canada to Ireland and Germany. A spate of new censorship laws, regulations and judicial rulings is based on the view that dissent either constitutes “hate speech” or “disinformation,” terms that intrinsically cannot apply to establishment defenders, but only to their critics.

There is a topic we want to focus on tonight, which is the direct legal attacks on free speech. In the U.S. The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights imposes serious obstacles in the way of the ability to censor to criminalize dissent but a recent series of judicial rulings, including the attempt to indict former President Donald Trump for the political speech he gave on January 6, along with a case now making its way through the federal judicial system that it tends to hold Black Lives Matter leaders, including DeRay Mckesson, liable for the violent acts of others whom they are accused of inspiring, are making significant inroads and undermining and even erasing some of the most important landmark Supreme Court rulings from the 20th century, which have safeguarded our free speech rights when it comes to political debate. Because these kinds of legal attacks are often carried out under the darkness of technical-sounding debates about obscure legal dogma, they rarely receive media coverage but that is something we want to fix tonight because of all the ongoing attacks on free thought and free debate, this legalistic one now being carried out through the American court system is among the most threatening, and it’s vital that it be reported on and explained in a way that is easily understood. We’ll review those developments tonight.

OK, I’ll say it rent-seeking combined with the banality of evil is rotting out the democratic process. As Upton Sinclair once wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”