The Robin Hood Effect

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

In a previous essay, I broached the topic of popular nullification in the context of rejecting the State’s propaganda.  Citizens are increasingly seeing through the lies Western governments regularly tell their populations in order to buttress their authority and maintain effective social control.  As awful as COVID’s lockdowns and other rank authoritarian mandates were, they proved salubrious in educating the public as to how government institutions (including health agencies) fabricate scientific evidence and betray basic medical ethics in pursuit of broader totalitarian agendas.  Part of the heightened pushback to expensive “green energy” directives and farming regulations stems from enhanced public awareness that Western governments flood the information space with fake news meant to justify more expansive and intrusive government control.

For critical thinkers who are cognizant of governments’ longstanding use of psychological and sociological “dark arts” to manipulate their own citizens, the public’s “awakening” may seem too late, slow, or insignificant.  On the contrary, it is accelerating.

Shattering existing paradigms is like escaping from an intellectual prison.  For most people, that prison is all they have ever known.  A lot of lone escapees look back at their former cages from a distance and presume that those who remain locked up will never find the strength to break free.  The problem, however, is not a lack of strength, but a paralyzing misapprehension that the prison trapping so many minds represents the limits of what is possible.

Right now the rate of intellectual liberation seems slow because inmates escape one at a time.  When enough critical thinkers are able to demolish prison walls with the force of their reason, no government lie will be able to stop those who wish to be free.

Every social revolution begins with a trickle and ends with a downpour.  It’s a good time to invest in wellies and raincoats.

Popular nullification of prevailing paradigms occurs when a critical mass of the population refuses to play by the current rules.  Respect for the rule of law is usually the first to go.  Up to this point in time, TPTB have been lucky in that the vast majority of Westerners have been unwilling to break the law in pursuit of personal political aims.  In times of relative civic peace, people who identify as “good” citizens generally refrain from committing criminal acts.  If governments enforce reasonable laws in an impartial way, conscientious citizens will dutifully comply.  The criminal code becomes an integral part of the social mores that guide an individual’s behavior and expectation of behavior from others.  When law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and courts are instead seen as applying criminal statutes in an unequal, discriminatory, and malicious fashion, then the legal system is understood as nothing more than a partisan political weapon.  Once such legitimacy is lost, it is not easily restored.  In fact, corrupt legal systems tend to produce a “Robin Hood” effect, in which the moral stigma of being an outlaw disappears.

The U.S. and other Western governments have so eroded the public’s trust in their respective criminal justice systems that they risk mobilizing “Robin Hood” resistance forces on a national scale.  Throughout the West, significant budget expenditures are utilized to aid and abet illegal immigration.  Government offices assist foreign nationals in skirting existing work rules, identification requirements, and other domestic laws.  Meanwhile, when law-abiding citizens object to such flagrant criminality, police officers and prosecutors in too many jurisdictions direct their resources toward punishing the locals for violating some vague prohibition against “hate speech.”  Dissent is criminalized so that officers of the law can participate in ongoing criminal conspiracies without the burden of exerting any effort to conceal their culpability.

When the government is in cahoots with a foreign criminal class and intimidates honest people for noticing, respect for the rule of law vanishes quickly.  Just as an immoral law is no law at all, an unjust legal system requires moral people to seek justice elsewhere.

Denver, Colorado is the latest crime-supporting enclave to announce that it will defund police and fire departments and divert those critical tax dollars toward services and housing for illegal aliens.  A dispassionate observer might conclude that State agents are involved in a criminal conspiracy meant to keep blue-collar wages low, while sustaining hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballot recipients who may influence public policy by voting illegally.  Democrat politicians in Denver parrot the same Orwellian language used in other crime-sponsoring jurisdictions by insisting that illegal aliens be called “newcomers.”  When government agents employ euphemisms to hide their own criminal activities, honest citizens take note.  Police and fire departments feel the pain of remaining silent while the political class engages in indefensible criminality.  Because venal government agents put the public’s safety at risk, law-abiding citizens learn that they cannot stake their families’ lives on the defunct rule of law.

The fact that public officials break the law so shamelessly adds to the widespread perception in the United States that elections are rigged.  For decades, American citizens have called for secure elections that ensure that only legally permitted voters cast ballots.  Instead, politicians and election officials in too many states have worked to limit photo identification and signature verification requirements.  They have transformed Election Day into Election Season — providing political operatives the time to collect ballots for weeks both before and after important contests.  And they have taken advantage of COVID hysteria to normalize the use of mail-in ballots.  With many states running elections as nothing more than ballot-gathering operations in which political partisans print and mail millions of untracked ballots for their political allies to fill out and return, elections have never been more vulnerable to fraud.  Unlike elections outside the United States, American elections are not transparent, timely, or reproducible.

In an electoral system that invites fraud, tens of millions of illegal aliens provide criminal conspirators with ample opportunity to sway elections in battleground states that routinely come down to a few thousand votes.  Adding insult to injury, states that help illegal aliens break the law are perversely rewarded by receiving additional Electoral College representatives for their inflated populations.  It’s a rigged game, and American voters know it.  When hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens showed up in D.C. to protest for free and fair elections on January 6, 2021, however, the same criminal officials who condone fraudulent elections abused their powers to torment and imprison conscientious Americans.  As writer Dave King recently noted, “if you peacefully enter the Capitol Building, you go to jail,” but if you are a Muslim immigrant shouting, “Death to America” in Michigan, President Biden and Democrats will join your side and celebrate the terrorists in Hamas.  That kind of grotesque double-standard creates a profound “Robin Hood” effect.

Where is all this heading?  The social order will continue to disintegrate as respect for the rule of law withers.  Because those who have been entrusted to enforce the law have instead chosen to become criminals, law-abiding citizens will learn to protect and police themselves.  As the stigma of being branded an “insurrectionist,” “extremist,” or “domestic terrorist” disappears, more and more “Robin Hoods” will openly defy the State.

There is substantial evidence that such popular nullification of the State’s authority is well underway.  The corrupt FBI and DOJ have taken unprecedented steps to imprison President Trump for the rest of his life.  These Gestapo forces have persecuted Trump’s allies, ordinary conservative voters, Christians, pro-life advocates, and parents attending school board meetings.  Instead of effectively demonizing or intimidating their targets, however, the goose-stepping thugs providing muscle for the federal government’s criminal empire have only emboldened Americans to support the “villains” more vigorously.  When “outlaws” have more honor than governments, paradigms come crashing down, and widespread prison breaks begin.