The new Deep State
Lie detector tests, more correctly referred to as “polygraphs,” are pseudoscience. Period. That is why the results of polygraph tests are inadmissible in a court of law. Polygraphs aren’t just frequently wrong, they’re dangerous. False positives and false negatives abound. The problem is polygraphs are still used by law enforcement and by some employers.
If they could be said to be useful at all they might be instructive in a suspect’s attitude toward them. An innocent man or woman might demand one. A guilty man or woman might refuse one. But their demand or refusal might be predicated on their awareness of the unreliability of the test. So even then there’s cause for concern. The whole industry ought to be scrapped.
The Facebook page “Alt National Park Service” — created by the National Park Service in 2017 as a resistance to Trump — announced that “the Trump administration has subjected around 80 staffers to lie detector tests.” Why are they doing this? To “assess federal employee loyalty.” A polygraph in the hands of a dictator will say whatever the dictator wants it to say, of course.
This is an ominous development in an ocean of ominous developments. Not content to upend and invade our civil rights, social security, Medicaid and the right to the quiet enjoyment of our lives, Trump wants to know what we’re thinking. Inevitably he will want to tell us what we’re thinking and then indict us for our thoughts. That is Orwellian thoughtcrime on steroids. At least in Orwell’s fictional universe they waited for you to commit thoughtcrime, they didn’t deliberately entrap you into it.
For Trump and company, enough is never enough. They want to systematically dismantle our rights until there’s nothing left. The only thing of ours that Trump values is our money and our loyalty, as human beings we are dispensable.
Watch for the polygraph to become an emerging tool of Trump’s fascism. It will then be as dreaded as Orwell’s “room 101.” As they say on the Alt National Park Service Facebook page, “America, please understand — this is not normal.”
Incidentally, brothers and sisters, if you don’t already follow Alt National Park Service on Facebook I encourage you to do so. They represent employees of the NPS who despise Trump, what he’s done and is planning to do to America’s national parks, including subjecting 50% of America’s national forests to logging and drilling for oil.
The Alt National Park Service Facebook page is an example of an underground groundswell of resistance cropping up everywhere in the United States federal government. It’s ironic that for years MAGA has complained about the “deep state,” a fiction believed in by morons. Now a kind of deep state is emerging in actuality and in response to Trump’s tyranny. The New Deep State is a loosely organised group of federal employees and other Americans who will not permit the fascist bastard to rob us of our freedoms.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.