by John and Nisha Whitehead, globalresearch.ca
We have been ambushed.
We should be talking about the dangerous, destabilizing things being done to this country.
We should be talking about the data centers spreading across the landscape, draining electricity and water, straining local infrastructure and expanding the technological machinery needed to track, profile and control the population.
We should be talking about the government’s growing network of detention centers and its family-separation policies, which have resulted in an estimated 145,000 American children experiencing the detention of at least one parent—including more than 22,000 U.S.-citizen children whose entire household of co-resident parents has been detained.
We should be talking about license-plate readers, facial recognition, government databases and artificial intelligence capable of turning our movements and associations into a digital dossier on every person in America.
We should be talking about masked government agents, endless war, disappearing constitutional safeguards and an imperial presidency accountable to no one.
Instead, we are trapped in a vicious loop of nonsense, mania, political demagoguery and manufactured spectacle while the country goes to hell in a hand basket.
Every day—sometimes every hour—brings another outrage, another threat, another vulgar display of power, another self-glorifying meme, another political provocation and another distraction demanding our attention.
Before we can fully comprehend one assault on the Republic, another takes its place.
That is not merely the chaos surrounding this government.
It is one of the ways this government maintains power.
Keep the public angry, exhausted, frightened and distracted. Force everyone to chase the latest outrage. Crowd out serious scrutiny with political theater. Then push past another constitutional boundary while no one is able to keep track of what has already been lost.
This is how every crisis appears fleeting and every constitutional violation merely the latest controversy in an endless political spectacle.
Taken together, however, these are not isolated events.
They are tests.
Donald Trump is not defending the Constitution. He is testing how much of it he can violate before anyone stops him.