Back in the 1960s and 1970s, hippies hated both corporations and the government. To them, the government was a suspect police state while the corporations were evil capitalist tools that exploited people. Now those same hippies have grown up, and they, and their physical and intellectual progeny, have all entered the government and the corporate world. And because history is always ironic, the former hippies and their heirs have made both the government and corporations as evil as the institutions those same hippies long ago feared.
What we've witnessed in the last twenty or so years is a fusion between big corporations, from Big Tech on down, and the federal government. Both institutions have complete fealty to a Democrat-run state and will do all in their power to preserve it.
The Constitution? Feh! Just a ragged old piece of paper that — as they correctly understand — has meaning only if people believe that it has meaning. Silly little things like the Fourth Amendment don't matter if the Democrat party is threatened.
You remember the Fourth Amendment, right?
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It turns out that the Fourth Amendment is as easily ignored as the First Amendment...if you get corporations to do the jobs the Constitution forbids to the government.
Once upon a time, only the government was powerful enough to censor people, and it was only the state that had the criminal laws and police power that made illegal searches an issue. Now, though, corporations have taken over the public squares in which speech once took place, and they possess every bit of private information we own.
Because the corporations and the federal government share common values (after all, they all went to the same colleges and were taught the same way of thinking), they are tag-teaming: the Democrat-run bureaucracy, White House, and Congress express an unconstitutional desire, and the corporations fill it without implicating that hoary old document.
Letter of the law? Feh!
Spirit of the law? Feh!
And that gets me to Tucker Carlson's report on Thursday night. It turns out that Bank of America voluntarily got on the computer and searched its databases — that means that it searched your private financial records — to learn whether you traveled to D.C., stayed anywhere within a vast radius of D.C., bought anything at a weapons store in D.C. (whether ammo or a can opener), and bought airline tickets to anywhere.
Stalin's head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, once said, "Show you the man, and I'll show you the crime." Biden's new government/bank fusion says, "Show me the bank records of a visit to D.C., and I'll show you a radical white supremacist insurrectionist who needs to be dragged in for questioning." After all, that's what happened to this man.
If you're not terrified right now — whether or not you were anywhere near D.C. — you're not reading the situation right. What we're witnessing the federal government's police power and the corporate world's information power coming together to perform a complete end-run around the United States Constitution.