- the US has a government funded k-16 education system
- almost all political journalists rely on government press credentials to do their reporting
- most journalists rely on cultivating strong relationships with the permanent civil service in order to get the inside dirt on politicians.
Now consider these three outrageous claims:
- the New Deal was among the worst things to happen to America in the last 100 years
- forcing universal suffrage democracy on Zimbabwe was a tragic mistake
- the American revolution was accompanied by an incredible amount of mob violence on innocent colonists. It would have been better for everyone if the instigators had been caught and hung. Instead, they won and set up our current government, so we remember them as heroes.
No respectable person believes these last three claims. Indeed, the fact that I even posted such claims indicates that I may be a barbarian from Digg who somehow found his way onto Hacker News. There are two possible reasons why these claims seem so repellent: 1) these views really are crazy and wrong, or 2) believing these three things would undermine the legitimacy of our entire government, including its education system. Thus, via self-selection and overt-selection, no one in the education system or mainstream media defends these claims. We spend our entire life only hearing one side of the story. Americans views of FDR end up being as inaccurate as the Chinese view of Mao.
If you are willing to entertain the idea that #2 may be a possibility, Sydney George Fisher is a fine place to start. Take a look at Chapter 8 of his history of the American Revolution: http://books.google.com/books?id=YmFMcvSIwOEC&printsec=f...
I don't have a one stop source for the claims about FDR and the New Deal. But these three are a good start: John Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth ( http://mises.org/books/rooseveltmyth.pdf ), this podcast on the New Deal ( http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2008/Higgsgreatdepres... ), and this book on the origins of World War II: ( http://mises.org/books/perpetual.pdf ).
And I humbly suggest that the reason references to "the Establishment" and "the Man" sound laughable to you is that the faction making those references has since the 1960s completely trounced the referent and are in control of the New York Times, the universities, etc, which I suggest are the central organs of power in the U.S. because of their influence on public opinion and public discourse, which in the U.S. and the U.K comes not from police powers but from gravitas, credibility and the ability hold attention -- and that gravitas, credibility and attention-holding are maintained by whole occupational groups of highly skilled "paid 'internet commentators'".
Still, we should prefer such 'soft censorship' to the hard, real censorship where dissenting voices wind up in 'Re-education Through Labor' detention camps, or are 'disappeared' entirely. If China moves more to the subtle control we know and love in the West, everyone wins.
For my comment to make sense, "the U.S. Government" has to be defined in a nonstandard way to include for example Time Magazine, the New York Times, Harvard University, the misleadingly-named "non-governmental organizations", and as of the last few years professional bloggers like the ones at Daily Kos -- but I advocate such a nonstandard definition. Added: thanks to non-professional blogger Mencius Moldbug for teaching me the nonstandard definition.