Why Did Ronald Reagan Call “I’m from the Government, and I’m Here to Help” the Nine Most Terrifying Words in the English Language?
“The whole aim of practical politics,” wrote H.L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
One would think the staffs of many government agencies, from their director to their research scientists to those who compose their labyrinthine regulations, were all required to memorize that quote—and implement it.
If you ever doubted that, doubt no more.
Dr. Frank Schnell, a retired toxicologist from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, lays out the stunning, infuriating evidence in Modus Operandi: How the EPA and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry Keep Your Fears Alive.
This new booklet from the Cornwall Alliance shows how these and other government agencies, supposedly tasked with keeping Americans safe, instead twist language, science, and statistics to generate fears.
Why? Because they know that a public filled with fear will turn over more and more power to them.
From this booklet you’ll learn exactly how the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the ATSDR
- give esoteric meanings to simple terms like “risk,” “known,” “similar,” “equivalent,” and “toxic”—meanings that nobody in the public, or for that matter in Congress, would ever recognize, but meanings that enable them to claim to be solving massive problems when in reality they’re doing nothing to enhance public safety but everything to fleece the taxpayers and grab power for themselves;
- ignore basic principles of toxicology to claim that almost infinitesimally small exposures impose high risks of cancer and other diseases;
- having once achieved safe levels of environmental exposure to various chemicals, constantly push the permitted levels downward, justifying their own existence while saddling producers, consumers, and taxpayers with upward-spiraling costs that actually put them at more risk.
If you followed the media’s reporting, and the politicians’ grandstanding, about the lead-in-water trouble in Flint, Michigan, you might have wondered why there never were any reports of people who died, or suffered serious illness or mental retardation because of it.
Once you’ve read Dr. Schnell’s booklet, you’ll understand exactly “how the public was fooled into believing that the incidence of drinking water-related cases of lead poisoning reached crisis proportions at Flint” when in fact “there were none.”
The result? Millions of dollars wasted on Flint’s water system. Millions of dollars wasted on bottled water. Thousands of parents and children overwhelmed with fear, when in fact there was nothing to fear.
And that story gets told over—about risks, real or imagined or exaggerated, from DDT, Dioxin, lead, mercury, and on and on. The costs mount, and all of us lose.
President Ronald Reagan famously said, “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
Dr. Schnell’s Modus Operandi is so powerful, so clear, so concise, that I want everyone who reads this newsletter to read it, too.
The original of this article was published as a circular e-newsletter on May 2, 2019.
© 2019 Used by Permission
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