They Don’t Trust Us, So We Don’t Trust Them

A guest post by Brooks Eason

Editor’s Note: Today we host a new guest blogger, an “internet friend” with whom I interact regularly, and who definitely “gets it” as to the nature of the citizen-government relationship. Do show him some love!

Who are they? And who are we? They are the elites who control the most powerful institutions in America, both in and out of government. We are everyone else. 

They have proven repeatedly that they don’t trust us. They believe we’re rubes and can’t be trusted to make our own decisions, and they’re willing to lie to us so we’ll do what they want. 

Consider one example, the COVID vaccine. We’ll ignore their conduct about masks, lockdowns, and the lab leak theory, though all three would also serve as excellent illustrations of their perfidy. 

The elites, backed by Big Pharma, went all in on the vaccine. They decided both that it was the key to ending the pandemic and that we all had to get multiple jabs. But did they make the case for the jabs with the truth? Did they level with us? They did not.

President Biden declared that if we got the jab, we wouldn’t get COVID. It wasn’t true, and he and the rest of the elites knew it wasn’t true. The jab didn’t stop us from getting COVID or giving it. 

But they—Biden and the public health commissars—lied to get us to do what they wanted. Evidence of dangerous side effects and deaths from the vaccine was suppressed. All of it was justified in the name of the greater good of convincing everyone to get the jab, including young men who had almost no risk of serious COVID infection and died from the jab.

When some still resisted because they saw that officials were lying, the elites changed their strategy from dishonesty to tyranny. Get the jab or get fired, kicked out of the military, and barred from traveling. No matter that the jab didn’t prevent transmission and that young people had only a minuscule risk of serious harm from COVID, they still wouldn’t let us assess the costs and benefits for ourselves. They did that for us, decided what was best, and ordered us to obey or be punished. 

There was a time when elites satisfied themselves with studying risks, providing information to the public, and letting us make our own decisions. Eating double cheeseburgers with extra mayo, riding bicycles helmetless, and smoking cigarettes all came with risks, but they would give us the facts and let us decide for ourselves. It’s a free country—that’s what we always used to say. 

But the elites increasingly refuse to let us decide for ourselves, and we’re not as free as we used to be. Mandates and bans have become the order of the day. We must do this; we can’t do that. They won’t even let us decide for ourselves what to read. Those who questioned the efficacy of COVID vaccines weren’t answered with debate. They were censored. Elites in government worked hand-in-hand with elites in media to silence those who dared dissent from the approved narrative. We were not allowed to see true stories about side effects. Blatant violations of the first amendment were justified in the name of combating “disinformation” and vaccine hesitancy. 

Why? Because they don’t trust us. We might read something they don’t want us to read, think for ourselves, and come to a decision of which they disapprove. The elites think they must think for us to save us from ourselves. 

And so we now have thought police, both in government and out, all paid for at great expense with our tax dollars. We are now paying elites to decide what we should be permitted to read and think and buy and do. Think about that. 

Just who appointed these elites to police us? Who chose them to decide what social media posts we can read, what light bulbs we can use, and whether we must wear helmets when we pedal our bikes along the sidewalks of our leafy neighborhoods? Every action they take shrinks our freedom and pokes another hole in the wall securing our liberty. 

I’m a grown man. Let me decide what to read, what lightbulbs to use, and whether I need to wear a damn helmet to ride a damn bicycle. If I’m competing in a race on a busy road, I’ll wear one. If I’m pedaling slowly through my neighborhood, I won’t. But I, by God, should be the one to decide, not some meddlesome bureaucrat who believes he knows what’s best for me. 

It’s often said these days that there’s a crisis in the land, that we have lost trust in our governing institutions and the elites who run them. The implication seems to be that the loss of trust is somehow our fault. But whose fault is it really? The elites have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt both that they don’t trust us and that they can’t be trusted. How can they possibly expect us to trust them?

Brooks Eason is an author and mostly retired lawyer. He lives in Madison, Mississippi, with his wife Carrie, three rescue dogs, and an orange tabby cat named the Count.