Sorry I haven’t published in here for a while. It’s been hard to motivate, what with the news cycle and some personal things going on. This is one thing about the current situation in the country (no, not COVID-19). It makes it hard to motivate to work or create. A 250-year-old democracy is sliding into fascism. You could argue that happened way back in 2000, when a Supreme Court ruling de facto said, “We don’t want to know what the people want, want the vote count is. We just want to declare this man the winner.” And then the Cheney administration used 9/11 to put in place laws that would make fascist actions taken on behalf of the US government “legal.”
I have seen several documentaries that were not widely seen and certainly not widely enough to influence voters to rise against what was happening. But they help understand what is going on and why. One (maybe this one; see bottom for more) was by a former CIA employee who was told to hand in a report on the hidden arms of a perceived enemy. When he turned in a report that there were no such weapons, he was given one more chance. His bosses let him know that they wanted a report that said there were such weapons, whether that was true or not. He was fired for not doing so. He made the documentary to try to warn people about what the CIA (and other government agencies) were becoming. The government is no longer interested in addressing realities that may be leading to our demise. They are interested in manufacturing lies that allow them to run a foreign policy that allows them to stay in power and reap profits. 
The Power of Nightmares 
by BBC’s Adam Curtis showed how neoconservatives such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz “envisioned restructuring America by uniting the American people against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy” (as Wikipedia puts it). I believe that history will eventually reveal that these men (and maybe George W. Bush) knew that the attack was imminent, but let it happen so that they had the political environment needed to pass their agenda. I have often said the only options are that they did know and let it happen (which is evil) or that they did not know when their job was to be monitoring the country’s safety (which would be incompetent).
Recently, we saw the ultimate outcome of these trends and events. 
The US government is using its military troops against its own citizens. The government views as its enemies anyone who disagrees with their agenda even when (if not especially when) based on what can be easily shown to be lies.
In the final scene of the recent HBO miniseries Chernobyl, the man put in charge of determining the cause names it: “lies.” The information that could have prevented the catastrophe was out there, but the government would not allow access to that truth. Truth is pursued by science and academia. 
Both of these are also under attack now, as the politicians denies science access to data that could save lives (COVID-19 information) and as politicians paint colleges as bastions of anarchy (meaning they question the government’s portrayal of “truth”). Perhaps some will say there is no such thing as truth (try designing a cog to work in machine while denying the truth of pi). Perhaps some think it is folly to expect societies and governments to face uncomfortable truths. But we should at least recommit to trying. As Browning says, “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” 
1. I can’t confirm if this is the documentary I mean, but I suspect it is. The director is listed as James L. Otis, but further Google searches with that name and CIA showed ONLY results for the movie. I don’t know, but this is exactly the kind of thing I would expect if he were a former CIA employee who made an expose.
