Part 1 of this series pointed to the eerie political fact that sometimes evil elites succeed in rigging a system so comprehensively that they benefit from their own failures. Instead of bad ideas getting discredited when they flunk the reality test, their power over the public mind grows even stronger.

Corrupt “experts” and media figures who serve the ruling regime don’t begin to doubt themselves. Instead, they double down. They churn out the rationalizations, gaslight the unwary, and demonize the whistleblowers. Then if they succeed, the wicked system comes out of its crisis even stronger than before. Indeed, it will have now a database of potential enemies whom it can surveil, censor, and persecute.

We began with the example of the Deep State failing utterly to protect the U.S. from the September 11, 2001 attacks — and getting richly rewarded with vastly new funding, new leeway to abuse citizens’ rights, and less democratic or legal oversight to keep its spooks under control. The crazy new unconstitutional powers which Congress gave the intelligence community in 2001 to reward its failure to prevent 9/11 were soon used by the Obama administration to target not innocent Muslims but conservative Christians — as yours truly predicted would happen, way back in 2005.

Now the Deep State has made itself the guiding force in American politics, as the KGB (turned FSB) once inherited de facto power in Russia, installing Vladimir Putin. Do you recall how FBI and CIA officials colluded with Hillary Clinton campaign hacks to create the Russia Collusion hoax, then prosecuted General Mike Flynn and swung the 2020 election by censoring news about Hunter Biden’s laptop? Now the Deep State denizens have come out into the open, endorsing the far-left Kamala Harris who once refused to prosecute cop-killing Weather Underground terrorists and bailed out city-burning Antifa rioters:

741 former high-ranking national security officials (233 general and flag officers) signed letter endorsing Kamala Harris for president. 15 four-star generals, 10 former cabinet secretaries, 10 service secretaries, and Repub leaders who served under Trump. https://t.co/I0clmLZOAL

— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) September 22, 2024

This is not your father’s CIA or FBI.

The Hangings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Our national landscape is littered with train wrecks like the Patriot Act — terrible policies based on false assumptions whose futility and final failure should have been obvious early on. But instead of changing course or hitting the brakes, elites who gained power by peddling each such fantasy doubled down — terrified that if they admitted the truth and (God forbid!) apologized, that would discredit them. Much better to slander, censor, bankrupt, or imprison any critics. That teaches most people to obey their betters the old-fashioned way: with a rolled-up newspaper swatted across their snout. Let the hangings continue until morale improves. Here are more examples of institutions (sadly, there are dozens, in every facet of church and state) turning their own Chernobyl meltdowns into cash- and power-grabbing bonanzas.

Garbage Government Schools

Secular public schools were created by liberal, post-Protestant elites in the late 19^th century to help “cure” American children of their parents’ “fundamentalist” Protestant or immigrant Catholic worldviews — and create a homogenous, dutiful, vaccinated, secularized, and easily governed populace. Just as in ancient Sparta, Plato’s Republic, and Kamala Harris’s latest word salad, these elites believed that children born in a community belonged to “the community.” Not their parents, and certainly not to Christ.

“The children of the community are the children of the community” – Kamala Harris

Democrats think your kids don’t belong to you.

The quiet part out loud.pic.twitter.com/pBgzEHc7k3

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 18, 2024

The secular state should shape kids’ beliefs and behavior, and parents who push back too hard will lose their kids. That’s why states such as California and (thanks to its failed ex-governor Mike Pence) Indiana will strip parents of custody for resisting government claims about “transgender” identity. It’s why in “free” Western countries like Germany, homeschooling is illegal — again, resulting in loss of parental custody to the state.

Has the triumph of experts, Ivy League elites, massive educational bureaucracies, decades of research, and intrusive government micromanagement of children produced any of the results progressive advocates promised? The answer is obvious: no. Test results and objective measures of learning have been declining for decades. Children are more obese, more sexually active, more depressed and anxious, and now suddenly afflicted with an epidemic of “gender” issues “requiring” massive hormones we won’t even let adult bodybuilders take, not to mention surgery that leaves the victims both sterile and often anorgasmic.

Does the cascade of failures even by progressives’ own criteria lead our elites to question the premise of government-run secular education? Quite the contrary. The left constantly calls for more governmental interventions, from preschool to daycare, extending the tendrils of the state and its agents into every last crevice of parents’ relationship with their children.

When nihilistic students hopped up on psychiatric medications turn up with stolen guns to slaughter their classmates, the answer isn’t to re-examine what’s happening in such schools: It’s to confiscate legal firearms from law-abiding adults. So the failure of massive government power produces … a new opportunity to grab more power, removing our last backstop of potential resistance to tyranny.

And when parents’ groups such as Moms for Liberty try to resist the latest, most sexually explicit attempts to groom young children via drag queen shows and homoerotic young adult literature in school libraries, what’s the response? To surveil such parents with FBI agents and falsely smear them as sympathetic to Hitler. We’re not quite at Irish levels of state repression yet: In that country, a teacher at a Christian school now sits in prison for refusing to use made-up transgender pronouns at work.

Mass Low-Skill Immigration

In Great Britain, for decades, popular opinion has overwhelmingly favored reduced immigration, especially from Muslim countries. That might have something to do with mosques full of military-age men on welfare forming street militias demanding sharia. And Muslim rape gangs targeting native British teens with impunity, while police refuse to investigate out of fear of being hit with the “racist” label.

But all major political parties, including the “Conservatives,” simply ignored the will of the public. The recent victory of the far-left Labour Party emboldened British elites to transform their disdain for their critics into outright fascist repression. The “Chernobyl” event this time was the mass stabbing in late July by the son of Rwandan “refugees” which left three British children dead.

When outraged, fed-up native Britons protested, there was some ugly violence as long-ignored, long-suffering citizens rallied outside the costly, taxpayer-funded centers for “welcoming refugees.” The British government cracked down savagely, and now is emptying the prisons of (disproportionately immigrant) rapists and other felons to make room for native citizens who complained about mass immigration on social media or stood with flags at protests. Meanwhile, violent antisemites who call for sharia and wield machetes in the streets are treated with kid gloves.

Suddenly, dissent from official policy of mass immigration and multiculturalism is not just a disapproved opinion, politically ignored even by the Conservative Party. Now it amounts to “incitement to violence” or to “racial hatred,” and results in police arresting people for non-violent Facebook posts. A thousand years of old-growth British liberty has been clear-cut in just a few weeks, and British citizens are staring aghast at the stumps, like the Ents in The Lord of the Rings.

The parallels to immigration chaos here at home and elite efforts to quash their critics are so obvious you don’t need me to draw them. The promised multicultural Utopia where “our diversity is our strength” and eager, hard-working newcomers can replace the babies we’re too beaten-down to have and think we can’t afford turns out to be just a new Soviet Union: a ramshackle patchwork of mutually hostile minorities, too fragmented to challenge the power of a self-appointed elite — which ruthlessly crushes dissent from its official superstitions.

A cynic like St. Augustine would say that this was the intended outcome all along. He might point to still more examples, like the bioweapons research Dick Cheney hired Anthony Fauci to conduct — justified by panic over the anthrax attacks in the early 2000s — that produced the COVID virus. That lab-leaking “failure” became a spectacular success when it empowered global elites to lock people at home, censor all media, professionally destroy whistleblowers, make the 2020 election easy to steal via mail-in ballots, then earn many more billions for Big Pharma companies and millions for Fauci personally. No wonder the Cheney family is all in for Kamala Harris, now that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has endorsed Donald Trump.

In Part 3, I’ll offer strategies for exposing, resisting, and destroying institutions that have been built to live by lies.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.