Government and Standards of Virtue. Standards are essential to be defined, documented, and enforced for the moral operations of large organizations. For example, in a hospital, if you didn’t have consistent quality and patient care standards, and you went in to the hospital for a minor operation, you would be at mortal risk at every turn. Just having a good surgeon would not be enough. The nurse could give you the wrong medication, treatment, or guide you to the wrong surgery. The anesthesiologist could give you the wrong anesthetic or not enough. At every stage, from hospital admissions to hospital sanitation, your vulnerable life could be endangered constantly, without basic standards, quality controls, and oversight. We understand this, and when standards slip, we are rightly outraged and demand change. We don’t have to be members of the board of the hospital to do so. We respect human life and human safety that much as a basic shared more that we will demand this, protest for this, appeal for this, even for private hospitals that we have limited actual “power” over. In the modern world, we expect this as part of normal medical life and practice, as imperfect as it may be. You have to be able to trust them.

But then in our representative federal government of 3 million people about the size of Kansas with massive power over others, we decide that “Virtuous Leaders,” not virtuous standards, are sufficient. Quality controls, standards of operations, oversight, are mostly a shrug to the citizenry, who believe that this is all too complicated for the infantilized citizenry to demand, and “father/mother” government knows best, and we should simply mind our business. But this is a massive hypocrisy in public view of power, how power should be used, and the limitations of power. It is unrealistic to expect the handful of “virtuous leaders” to police massive government infrastructures without quality controls, without standards, without meaningful oversight, and most importantly without value leadership. We expect a trickle-down theory (that would embarrass the most committed advocates of trickle-down theory) from the “Virtuous Leader” to the millions and millions of non-elected representatives. It is simply not responsible or adult civic behavior. It is simply delusion to believe this will happen. And sadly and predictably, of course, it does not. A value-free, standards-free massive organization, whether it a hospital or any other massive organization, is simply an accident waiting to happen.

A virtuous leader, whether it is a hospital chief of staff or a government POTUS, is simply not even in the universe of “enough.” It is not adult to think that it would be, and in fact, we really do have the common sense to know better than this. But we stubbornly believe the virtuous man/woman leader approach works for a government with millions of individual workers.

We choose a different approach for government versus the hospital. At some point, however cognitive dissonance and denial catches up with you and you see things and hear things that you can’t unsee and unhear. Whether it is a point at a relationship with a loved one or a relationship with your government, you find breaking points at which “blissful ignorance” or denial will no longer work for you as a coping mechanism.

Relationship breaking points are easy to see: “I don’t love you.” “I’m not attracted to you.” These are pretty obvious to assess. You know when you are done. Government relationship breaking points are a bit more sophisticated. But assuming (BIG assumption) we share a common set mores and standards for human life, that becomes an easier breaking point to assess. You can see the fractures way way way before that. But when your government takes actual glee in the plan to murder others, responsible adults should reassess their government’s values and quality standards.

I didn’t reach this conclusion easily. I have had a lot of breaking points, and too many hard facts and documents, as well as first hand experience, I cannot deny. .As a lifelong advocate for the USA government, it has been tough and painful to let go of my cognitive dissonance and the excuses that I have made for decades and decades… “but you need to understand the context” I would start. Or “it is not as bad as it sounds” I would opine. But the only one I was fooling was myself. Or God forbid, “I know this is horrible, but they are trying to secure the common good.” I couldn’t even believe this myself, even if the words came out of my mouth. I knew it was a lie. But as I state, at some point you find breaking points. Things you cannot deny anymore. Things you can’t pretend anymore.

There have been so many for me, I could/should write a book. But I will only mention a few, and briefly because they disgust me. And it is entirely possible that they are only “breaking points” or me and others would laugh, wave them away, which is even more troubling. But if we respect human life, not a real “nuance” of a value, we need to ask questions.

1. The Suicide Plot Against Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Long before his assassination on April 4, 1968 by James Earl Ray, someone else wanted him dead. The USA Federal Government, specifically J. Edgar Hoover. In 2014, the archives of unredacted reports were released of an FBI Intelligence plot to threaten and intimidate Reverend King to commit suicide came out, with a letter dripping with venomous hate and attempting to blackmail him if he didn’t kill himself became publicly released. The criminal J. Edgar Hoover’s name remains on FBI Headquarters.
2. Hiring Terrorists. In 2016, Florida faced a terrible terrorist attack at the Pulse nightclub, where 49 Americans were slaughtered, and 53 wounded. The head of the FBI said he was “looking into” the terrorist, Omar Mateen. But in 2018, court records showed that his FBI was looking to HIRE the terrorist Omar Mateen before the attack. They didn’t just “know” him; they were looking to “recruit” him. Also in 2018, we learned that his father, who we knew was a long-time advocate for the Taliban terrorist group, was being paid by the FBI for 11 years.
3. The Terrorist Cop is Allowed to Threat Millions of Lives. Like many major cities, DC has a massive subway system with millions of riders, and this one is largely underground. with millions of individual workers. The riders did not know that police officer Nicholas Young, wearing a badge to enforce the law for these vulnerable subway riders, was secretly plotting with ISIS, and even went to foreign countries for terror training. The USA Government and the FBI knew for YEARS. They knew about his assault weapons practice, his efforts with ISIS, and they just left him there, as millions of passengers were endangered daily. Eventually they got around to arresting him in August 2016. But it was more than incompetence, rather a value structure, where human life is expendable, when the ends justify the means.
4. Court OKs Threats to Murder Family by Government. In doing research on public files about threat of a terrorist plan in Missouri, in 2017, I looked at the public court records on a case involving Robert Lorenzo Hester, Jr. Hester is a troubled, screwed-up guy. He is definitely trouble. I was doing background on what a bad guy he was for a summary of the counterterror case for a public blog, when I discovered that the FBI threatened to knife his family. In reading the court complaint on Robert Lorenzo Hester, Jr., I learned that the FBI undercover agent in the “sting plot” to convince this unbalanced individual to get involved in a fake terror plot: “For emphasis and for mitigating the security threat of HESTER, UC-2 displayed a knife and reminded HESTER that UC-2 knew where HESTER and his family lived among other forceful words.” What type of government threatens to knife someone’s family if they don’t incriminate themselves the way that the government wants them to? Is that “law enforcement”? Because maybe in fascist countries. But here? And the U.S. Federal Court saw nothing wrong with this and imprisoned Hester. Hester is a bad and unbalanced person. But when courts think it is OK that “law enforcement” (sic) can threaten to knife someone’s family to get an arrest, when is next? When values only matter to the “elected leader,” and values are not part of your organization’s operations, this becomes “normal.”
5. FBI Removes “Law Enforcement” from Mission Statement. In 2018, I was writing to urge the FBI to follow not only its legislative history and founding legal authority for its activities. For emphasis, I went to the FBI mission statement to make a point. To my great surprise, it had been changed. The term “law enforcement” had been removed. I tried to figure out what happened. Luckily the Internet has something called the Wayback Machine, where you can see old copies of websites. So I went back to snapshots of the Mission website to see that it had been changed in July 2017. Do you remember any news reports on this? Any announcements? This is the challenge with the belief in the virtuous leader model, not the values of an organization.No one in public knew, apparently no one in government leadership cared, as quality control, standards, and values were never the priority. We trusted that our “virtuous leaders” would handle things.
6. March 2024 – Calls for Murder. This was first-hand experience. I was at an event at a public venue, where business leaders were lauding new plans (also discussed publicly on the Internet in general terms I later learned) to use ways to take over the Internet-based controls of a Tesla automobile and use Government “cybersecurity” (anything but) as a weapon of war to take over the Tesla and crash the car and kill those inside. The corporate and Government leaders found this entertaining and got a great laugh out of this. The “entertaining” concept of assassination, using what is called in “industry” as Offensive Cyber Operations (OCO) – by automobile was robustly and publicly discussed. It was even recorded, although I since learned that the public posted version of these discussions, left this out. They had been practicing with test dummies in automobiles, not to make them safer, but to find ways for the Government to take over the controls of such automobiles to make them more DEADLY. They laughed and laughed. The corporate leader believes they should more publicly and unashamedly promote “skill sets” to develop such assassination by OCO computers as part of corporate sales strategy. They want to believe Murder, Inc. has nothing on them. Except these guys are above the law, because when the Government supports it, it is “legal” murder. A new advocate for this murder by computer came from the U.S. Navy, where as he puts to the public, they “are in the killing business.” This is an individual who appears in the media and at seminars to promote this thinking. He likes this company because he knew they really understand that, and had no inconvenient moral qualms over it. Is that how Americans view their “defense organizations” as a “killing business”? Do any of us remember voting for the USA to “be in the killing business?” One would think that was important enough to ask the voters. Is that our shared mores to have organizations in our “defense” focus on proactive murder of others? Because when that starts, where does that end? Are those the values and standards we agree with as a people, as our “virtuous leaders” either deliberately or through incompetence allow the rest of the massive organization to basically do whatever they want?

I realize some may want to dismiss these concerns as “political,” a convenient label to silence any inconvenient questions. It is not. It is not about “politics,” rather it is about “responsibility” and “accountability.” How far down this path are the American people willing to go? Among all of the important topics of the day, this one gets no attention, and no apparent concern from the institutional human rights community.

It is not a Zero-Sum argument that we can only choose: (a) Support of the Government, or (b) Support of Values of Virtue. We need to reject that as a “choice.” We can choose BOTH and call for a new approach to ensuring ethical virtue is built into the Government, not merely at the highest level, but at EVERY level, with accountability and responsibility at EVERY level as well. That is the future responsible adults must strive towards.