The market is now crowded with books that document the curtailment of civil rights and the functional elimination of the U.S. Constitution as it was originally intended. This book describes how "over a thousand years of legal protections" have evaporated, so that, ultimately, no American is safe.

"Truth is the plea bargaining process's greatest casualty. Yet, the justice system's movers and shakers -- prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers -- show little concern for truth. This is apparent from how the plea bargaining process works. Terror, not truth, is its hallmark." (p. 86)

"To uphold justice, the sovereign cannot stain itself by violating the law to bring a guilty person to justice. That is the majesty of law. Prosecutors who suborn perjury to convict innocent persons are evil incarnate. They desecrate the law." (p. 16) So state the authors, and I, myself, witnessed repeatedly the degree to which truth had no bearing in the court room.
When my prosecutor told one of my attorneys (in response to how he could present information he knew to be false), "you do your job, or you lose your job," he only confirmed what these authors portray: that the criminal justice system, a reflection of the corrupt sewage that now runs through all branches of U.S. government, is nothing more than a "career-driven conviction mill." (p. 6) The cynicism behind this truism is what has coined one of the most common expressions you will hear in Federal prison: "There are only two kinds of people behind bars: those who pled and those who wish they'd pled." The very notion that any person charged with a crime would do anything whatsoever to actually defend themselves (and that means going to trial) is now so infuriating to authorities that sentences can be up to ten times greater for the very same charge between the individual who "pleads out" and the one who is convicted in court. The extended sentence isn't for the crime itself. The extended sentence is intended to send a message: "DO NOT DARE to question our authority. You plead to whatever we come up with or we will destroy your life."
I remember one op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that said that any prosecutor could "indict a ham sandwich." The situation on the tale end is worse: if the prosecutor comes up with a plea agreement that says you conspired with Romulans to take over the Klingon Empire, that's what you plead to.
And the Federal Judge in your case will have no problem accepting it.
You can make no bigger mistake than to think that Truth -- or any vestige of provable fact -- that resides outside the objectives of the prosecutor (i.e. convict at all cost) has any place in a Federal court of law.
It has no place at all.
This was only confirmed during my meeting with Ron Helo.
The authors of "Tyranny" go farther than anything I've seen to show that the plea bargaining process is a form of coercion and torture. In my own case, when I told Federal Judge Tucker Melancon that I didn't agree with what was being read (by my own attorney, Lewis Unglesby) from the Pleading, what was his response? He instructed me to go back and meet with my attorney in private. In other words, let's recess so your attorney can advise you on 'how things work around here.'
Long ago, writes the authors, "English jurists recognized that a guilty plea could be provoked by needs other than the alleviation of a bad conscience. Perhaps the plea was a fraud, prompted by a bribe . . . [truth in my case, as described in an upcoming chapter] . . . Maybe threats had been made against his wife, children, or estate. [In my case, all three.] . . . Guilty pleas in the absence of a trial prevented the judicial search engine from finding out what actually had happened, thus impeding the pursuit of truth. The easy convenience of a guilty plea had the stink of malfeasance. (p. 84-85). For these sound reasons, "There was no plea bargaining in felony cases in the eighteenth century . . . " Moreover, "The parallels between the modern American plea bargaining system and the ancient system of judicial torture are many and chilling." (p. 85)


Kaminski travels where few American intellectuals dare tread. The volume above is just a small sampling of his work -- a monument to a man who, to draw from a lesson we'll examine in Chapter 4, has fully seen behind the cruel lies of our 'common narrative.'
His work is relevant in this chapter because if the Department of Justice were even as corrupt as Dick Armey makes it out to be ("out of control"), then one would think that this problem might be systemic: that it might infect other parts of the U.S. Government.
Kaminski uses powerful polemics to show that it does.

". . . the prognosis is terminal. There can be no recovery of a system that is infected with this much criminal activity. There is no fixing this, especially by voting, which has degenerated into widespread electronic fraud . . . What will happen is what is happening now. The nation is collapsing into a criminal police state, where the only thing that counts is how much the payoff is. No matter how noble or honest individual sheriffs or legislators are; they're going nowhere against the massive web of corruption now strangling the life out of our once sincere republic. The Constitution is gone and America is dead. Most people haven't noticed because they're spiritually and intellectually dead themselves. Too much TV and bad schools. Too many life lessons that taught it was not profitable to be honest. You won't read about this in the newspapers, or hear it on TV. Honest analyses of what's really going (on) are bad for business, not conducive to the marketing of all these unneeded and deceptive products. In conducting America's autopsy report, there was a fundamental rule to be followed: If it was good for business, it was bad for people. This is why the disease of greed was fatal. Our leaders stopped telling the truth a long time ago, and when the time came when telling the truth became essential for our survival, they just couldn't remember how. Because they were paid not to." (p. 135-6)

The problems described in this chapter are systemic, and the analogy I use in talking to people is that of a systemic disease. If a man has malaria, it doesn't matter where the doctor draws the blood: from the neck, the hip, a leg or arm -- no matter where the blood comes from, the patient's blood will still reveal, when properly examined, that the patient has malaria.
In later chapters, I create logical constructs -- an expansion of the rhetorical concept of "synecdoche" -- to show how examining each part and finding malaria wherever you go, strengthens the argument that each part is infected. Likewise, by examining our Global Cultural Operating System our understanding of this systemic corruption, as a whole, is reinforced on multiple layers of understanding.
And yet, in the end, when our polemics and arguments have been exhausted, we will still not arrive at a place that is more advanced than the position from which Kaminski now speaks.
But we will own the knowledge ourselves, so we don't have to take his word for it.


If it is true, as Kaminski intimates, that "the false fabric of history is unraveling beneath an avalanche of pathological lies," then, as it relates to American life, shouldn't sociological measurements be able to quantify this implosion on the level of localized community.
Yes, it should.
And it does.
Written in 1996, Putnam's work now seems dated. A bulwark within a relatively new movement in sociology called "neo-Tocquevillianism," Putnam tries to escape "the declensionist narrative" -- that is, the recounting of rise and fall that are retold in every civilization whose members still care to recall their collective past. (p. 24). Instead, he strives to paint himself as an optimist championing the revival of American community.
His recommendations, from my perspective -- and I've read his latest follow up book, Better Together -- strike the keen observer as 'too little, too late.' They marginalize the negative policies of a highly centralized government, do little to nothing to factor in the effects on community of a highly diminished resource base, and cluelessly circumvent the obvious: that in a world where globalism reigns, sucking communities dry of their own internal resources in the same way that the Core has sucked Peripheral third-world countries dry for most of the last 500 years, the regeneration of community life is impossible until after some form of "Crash." Such a cataclysm must be sufficiently deep so as to cause a complete rewriting of our global cultural operating system, such that transformation will eliminate its non life-supporting, suicidal tendencies.
The signs pointing to such a near-term event are too numerous to mention, but come from diverse arguments, sources, disciplines, and times. Such an event is described as crash and die-off (see Catton), purification and change of "cycle" (see Hopi prophesy in Waters, p. 333-334), earth change (numerous examples in works on Edgar Cayce), armageddon (John of Patmos, with focus on Revelations, Chap. 18), dark age (see Berman's Dark Ages America or Vacca's Coming Dark Age), collapse (apply lessons learned from Tainter), systemic decline (Spengler), breakdown (Toynbee) -- pick your term and its proponents, it doesn't matter. Again, you can't begin the next experiment in humanity without first cleaning out the petri dish.

America and the cultural operating system that has created it are beseiged by a resource-centripetal Military Industrial Complex, an overarching Medical Industrial Complex (to which a sizeable portion of this book is addressed) -- so why should there not be a Prison Industrial Complex that exhibits the very same psychotic behavior?
The insanity behind this system is addressed in any number of books, the notable ones written within the last seven years. My favorite was Joel Dyer's The Perpetual Prisoner Machine : How America Profits from Crime. The same message, however, can be gleaned from Parenti's Lockdown America, Joseph T. Hallinan's Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation, or Tonry's Thinking About Crime: Sense and Sensibility in American Penal Culture.
No amount of reading, however, can prepare a person for the horrors one witnesses from the inside. No amount of television viewing concerning penal life -- which do no justice to the actual experience, and no amount of conversation with those who've "been down," serve as an accurate substitute for the experience. It is not without irony that on Monday, March 13, 2006 -- the day I was released from "Beaumont Low" -- that the guard bringing me to the foray to be released said, "I hear you're an author . . . that you write books."
"Well . . . a couple . . ." I replied meekly.
"Good . . . because somebody needs to write about what goes on inside this place."
What the guard didn't know is that there have been quite a number of good works already written that warn the American public about the nature of its penal system and culture. The problem is that very few people read them, and if they did, they still wouldn't fully grasp the systemic flaws it reveals about America at large.
The reason for this is obvious to one who has seen both sides: the bulk of American myth and the common narrative that propagates it -- not to mention the propagandistic orientation of American corporate media -- stand in such contrast to these truths. Accepting the horror of what America's penal culture has turned into and what is says about America means confronting a cognitive disonance that few can accept. We explore this phenomena more extensively in the second section of the next chapter.


With so many people now going to prison, you now have a growing field of consultants who advise people who are about to "go down." This was bound to happen, sooner or later, simply because even the highest paid criminal defense lawyers know little to nothing about the BOP (Bureau of Prisons), nor do they give a shit. The same can be said of Federal prosecutors and their partners-in-crime: the Federal judges who sentence defendants -- doing so very rarely in a way that does not largely comport with the prosecutor wishes.
I, myself, consulted a "prison consultant" before I "went down." In fact, I bought a copy of David Novak's Downtime before I had to self-report to prison on September 24, 2004.
Does it do the job? Does it provide reliable instructions so that if you follow its guidelines you will have a smoother transition into prison life -- America's fastest growing lifestyle non-choice?
Only marginally so.
But don't blame the author. He does his best. And there were a handful of suggestions my wife and I found helpful.
The problem is that American prisons are islands unto themselves. Yes, they do have rules. But they break them routinely, another reflection of a kind of ubiquitous God-complex which undergirds prison administration. ("We do what we want. When we want. And if people don't like it, they can shove it up their ass," as I heard on any number of occasions inside prison).
In this sense, we once again find in America's penal culture a microcosm of the very same authoritarianism that runs rampant at virtually all levels of American Empire.

As mentioned in brief in the primary text, MLM Fraud is an excellent case study in the effective dismantlement of civil rights in America -- in this case, the right to "freedom of speech."
My purpose in writing MLM Fraud was not -- as my detractors 15 years ago attempted to portray -- a case of "sour grapes." I didn't write the book because of envy, or because I inherently disliked my former partners, or because, like the renegade FDA agents I talk about, somebody put money in my pocket. Quite the contrary, I loathed the tactics to which I was an eyewitness. I saw innocent people get hurt -- some of them lose their lifesavings. I wanted the public to know that most MLM operations are carefully-crafted pyramid schemes, and I wanted to provide methods whereby entrepreneurial people could identify the better opportunities from those where the game was rigged. The aim of the book was to even the odds a little bit.
With meticulous detail I provided as many facts, figures, names, events, and primary source documents as I could in the book -- and then to top it off, I opened the book with the results of my own professionally-administered lie-detector test. The book didn't read like an expanded tabloid article, because it wasn't tabloid material. Moreover, I took consider risk in self-publishing the book, because I knew I was going after wealthy, vested interests -- and not just my former partners.
Did any of this make any difference in the ability of those who wanted to shut me up in reaching their goal?
Of course not.
In the next chapter, we cover the suppression of the work of Wilhelm Reich and the U.S. Court order to have his books burned. Those who become acquainted with Reich's case automatically assume that this case (which took place in 1954) is isolated, that "freedom of speech" is largely protected and that the suppression of sensitive material that is threatening or embarrassing to vested interests is the exception and not the rule.
Those who make such assumptions are simply wrong.
Today the core partners of what began as Consumer Express (Tom Schreiter, David Bertrand, and Jana Mitcham) operate under yet another new entity, Vitamart. I doubt that even a fraction of their current distributors are familiar with the fields of financial dead bodies that have preceeded their current corporate incarnation.
In a land where it is so easy to use the courts to suppress "freedom of speech," how would they know?

Many will find it improbable that someone like Kevin Trudeau is "working for the dark side." After all, the self-styled "Mr. Mega Memory," has made his most current fortune by preaching a gospel that exalts natural living and excoriates the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, many of the positions that Trudeau takes in his best-selling book, Natural Cures "They" Dont' Want You To Know About read as if they were lifted straight out of Alpha Omega Labs -- material I wrote as long as 12 years ago.
I, myself, dismissed, early-on, the evidence that Trudeau was actually WORKING as a snitch for the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. I was able to dismiss this evidence because I knew that, on the surface, Trudeau was regularly at odds with this federal agency, as well as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Why would someone cooperate with a governmental agency that was a frequent and regular adversary? Additionally, Trudeau had an axe to grind because of both the publication of MLM Fraud and my online creation of the MLM Credit Bureau. His working with the FDA and George Ackerson to pose problems for me was, in my mind, insufficient proof that he was working with governmental pharmaceutical thugs in cases outside my own.
In the end, the approach of people whom I would come to regard as helpful "snitches to the snitches" proved to be too overwhelming. I simply could not discount the obvious: Trudeau had been co-opted. A simple pact had been reached between Trudeau and the U.S. Government, which, in effect, said, "You can continue making wild, unsubstantiated claims about your books and other products, if you agree to pay the occasional fines [after all ... it always comes down to the money], and help us prosecute those who come to you with competitive treatments from the alternative health care community. After all, the People trust you now. They listen to you. You're in a better position to find out which practitioners, chemists, and small manufacturers are making products or developing procedures that could compete with our clients at the big pharmaceutical companies than we are. Congratulations -- you're on our team now!"
An abundance of such Faustian pacts is a requirement of modern governnance --- for legitimacy's true role is to permit the dominant polity to burden the citizenry without molestation from prospective invaders. Such control cannot be maintained without co-optation of perceived opposition. (See The Prince, p. 26, for Machiavelli's description of the opportunity provided to Moses by the lack of observance of this principle by the Egyptians.)

From May 18-20, 2007, Cathryn and I attended a seminar in Sedona, Arizona, where we had an opportunity to talk to another well-known author about the Trudeau matter. His comment on what we were observing was illuminating: "Trudeau is very big in the media now, and no one --- and I mean, no one -- who gets to that level of exposure and success in this country and takes a position critical of reigning government policy, lasts very long unless they have cut a deal to secretly work for the other side. And this is particularly true if the subject is having to cross lines of legality to sustain their success, thus requiring special favors."


I read the first edition of Trudeau's book while I was in U.S. prison (2005). To be fair in my appraisal, I found many of the themes similar to my own and many of the positions taken grew out of the same observations. On the other hand, the number of inaccurate statements or comments that fly in the face of all scientific evidence was startling for such a widely published work. The first couple editions contained no footnotes or index and wildly false statements are made to support our common positions. (I have not kept up with the most recent editions, if there are any). Although Trudeau provides a caveat early on (i.e. "Everything I say in this book is my opinion." p. 5)), even opinions should have some basis in reality. A small sampling of the more outlandish:

"Animals in the wild have virtually no disease and no illness and live three to five times longer than humans." (Comment: What animals is he talking about? Do they reside on this planet? . . . ridiculous). (p. 14)
"Animals don't get cancer, diabetes, arthritis, or virtually any of the common human diseases . . . animals do not exercise and have no obesity or weight problem." (Comment: Is there an editor in the house?) (p. 60)
"When you are toxic, your body becomes highly acidic. Your body pH should be alkaline. When your body pH is acidic you are susceptible to illness and disease. When your body pH is alkaline, you virtually can never get sick!" (Comment: In India, they have a saying, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." There is clear evidence that certain pH-balancing therapies can be beneficial. In fact, we discussed this on Alpha Omega Labs' site and provided an easy, non-toxic way to alkaline specific body fluids. However, the operative word here is "specific." You'd never know from Trudeau's exposition, for instance, that the blood must be maintained between pH 7.35 and 7.45. If you "alkaline" it, you die. My attitude towards alkaline-balancing approaches changed, however, after 2003, when I met privately with Dr. Vladimir Volkov in St. Petersburg, Russia. The details are too extensive to cover here.)
"Virtually all fruits and vegetables are, in today's day and age, manmade . . . Virtually all fruits and vegetables have been genetically modified by man to become more disease resistant." (FACT: Only a small fraction of all food crop types have GMO versions, even though they include among the most important, including corn and soybeans. But the larger issue is that many countries now ban GMO crops -- something you'd never know by reading Trudeau's work. Here in Ecuador we have hundreds of non-GMO variations of corn and beans --- many of which are a true source of pride, especially among the indigenious.) (p. 67)
"Virtually everything made by man is a poison . . . All of our fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts and seeds are grown with highly poisonous chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides." (Too outlandish and sweeping for comment . . . By the way, the organic fruits I purchase here in Ecuador don't have any "manmade chemicals." As in any other third world countries, many farmers are too poor to use expensive chemical additives; they aren't necessary to obtain a good harvest in many cases; and, quite often, they genuinely know better.) (p. 68)
"There are thousands and thousands of chemical additives put into the food, and many of these additives are not listed on the label at all . . . there are over 15,000 toxic chemicals that are allowed to be added to food without being listed on the label " (FACT: I am no friend of the FDA -- which I regard to be little more than a racketering operation for Big Pharma, but this is absurd. I was a food manufacturer as the owner of Lumen Foods from 1986 to 2007. I also founded PreservX, which I was forced to sell in 2003 because of my federal legal problems, and is now known as Global Preservatives, Inc.. So I feel I quality to speak as an expert. A simple perusal of CFR 21 -- the regulatory bible of the American food and drug industry -- reveals that it does not even CONTAIN "thousands and thousands" of additives. In each additive category, you really only have a handful of additives which serve the modern food processor -- be it in microbial preservation, anti-oxidation, coloring, flavoring, emulsification, etc. To quality as something you are even allowed to use, it must be GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe). There are not "thousands and thousands of additives" on the GRAS list. I will not argue that there are many additives on the GRAS list that should never have been placed there; and there are additives that are NOT on the GRAS list that should be. (Example: I regard "stevia" as a superior sweetener to any of the GRAS-approved sweeteners. [11]] It is shameful that the most widely used GRAS approved sweeteners are carcinogenic. [12] (p. 71 and 75).)
"You take a pot and you put soil in it. You put in ten pounds of soil, and you put in one little tiny seed, and every day you add some water, and at the end of a year you have this big plant. Well, take the plant out, shake off the soil from the roots and weigh the soil. Guest what? You still have ten pounds of soil." (Comment: Ooopps . . . No conservation of mass? Well, there just went the First Law of Thermodynamics . . . I know, I know -- stop complaining. Just because a person writes about soil doesn't mean they're required to have ever grown anything in it.) (p. 74)
"Margarine is produced by . . . taking oil and spinning it until it becomes solid." (Too ridiculous for comment; p. 78).
"A person who snores wakes themselves up an average of 300 times per night." (p. 98)
"Driving a car . . . raises stress levels in the body up to 1,000 times normal levels. When a person is driving a car combined with talking on a cell phone, stress levels can go as high as 5,000 times the norm." (Rubbish -- where's the research? p. 99).
"I believe that the human body, like all mammals, should live to be well over 100 years old." (Of course, "like all mammals." p. 106).
"A conventional animal is usually aged, which means the animal flesh is hung in a dark room and allowed to rot. A green mold covers the rotting animal flesh. This green toxic mold is bacteria that tenderizes the meat, but also fills the meat with more toxic poisons." (Comment: Okay. Got it. Fungus is bacteria . . . and meat that is not organic and kosher is required to rot before processing. p. 118)
"The human body virtually goes into toxic shock by consuming pork . . if you didn't eat pork for thirty days and then had some, there is an excellent chance you would be violently ill." (Comment: I, myself, had said for years that a healthy diet excludes meat. It is the central point of my first book. But this kind of hyperbolic nonsense destroys the credibility of the other beneficial messages in Trudeau's book. p. 129)
"More people die from eating shellfish than any other food." (Research? p. 129)
"Music has a powerful effect on the physiology . . . In just five minutes, the music can turn the body from acid to alkaline." (Comment: Again -- just how many millions of Americans bought this book? p. 131).
"Fat free" does not mean "healthy." When you see "fat free" on the label, be assured that the company is trying to deceive you, so don't buy it. Most fat free products are simply loaded with unbelieveable amounts of sugar." (Rubbish. Many foods are just naturally fat free. You wouldn't add sugar because the food itself doesn't call for it. Real beef jerky comes to mind. p. 132)
"Regular table salt is poison. Sea salt is infinitely better for you. This one small change can also make you lose between five and ten pounds in the first thirty days." (Comment: Sea salt is preferably, to be sure -- but (1) not infinitely so, and (2) not as a formula for weight loss. By in large, the body treats sodium chloride like sodium chloride. Sea salt contains more adjunctive minerals than table salt, making it generally healthier." p. 133)
"Corn oil is a man-made product. If you took an olive you could squeeze it and you would have oil. But you can't squeeze corn and get oil. Remember, if it is man-made, don't eat it." (Comment: The process of producing olive oil, particularly extra virgin olive oil, is less intensive, to be sure. But to say that the oil fraction of the corn is man-made is incorrect. p. 142.)
"Most food companies have chemical laboratories where thousands of chemical additives are researched and tested. These laboratories are in secret locations and have tighter security than CIA headquarters . . . " (Oh please. Was this book a bestseller in the non-fiction or fiction category? p. 156)
"There is virtually nothing in a supermarket that is not loaded with toxins, stripped of nutrition, and altered energetically." (Again, it is this ridiculous hyperbole, which runs rampant throughout Trudeau's work, that detracts from elements of his message that are positive, useful, and actually TRUTHFUL. p. 168)
"The food industry has lobbied Congress to pass legislation allowing chemicals to be called spices. They are not spices. They are man-made, deadly chemicals, but legally they can be called spices." (Same argument. Moreover, chemicals have scientific names, and except for certain chemicals, which added in small amounts, are allowed to be treated as 'incidental levels' and not listed on the label, you simply cannot call a man-made chemical a spice. No chemical additive I know of is permitted to be called a spice under prevailing labelling law. p. 172.)
"It's estimated that over 95 percent of all food purchased has as many as 300 chemicals added to each product that are not listed on the label." (Nonsense to the point of comedy. p. 186.)


In a later chapter we will discuss the limitations on the mind placed on those educated in the West -- engrained as they are with the burden of a mind-numbingly fictitious "common narrative." Repeatedly I use the film, "The Matrix," as a metaphor for explaining this phenomenon.
Because I readily acknowledge this artificial mileau, it is even easier to acknowledge that most readers will feel that elements of my personal story -- regardless of the amount of documentation -- is exaggerated or embellished . . . that I have a bone to pick and/or are able to creatively weave together enough 'Anti-American' rubbish to make seductive arguments with half-truths.
The beauty in the work of authors like Rodney Stich is that they present you with such an avalanche of evidence which demonstrate the systemic disease that is the current state of Americanism that any reader with but a modicum of objective receptivity will be made to see the dots.
Moreover, I use the work of Stich and others to make the case that this isn't even a commentary about the U.S. Indeed, I make the case that the problem rests in an underlying Global Cultural Operating System in chapter 5, such that any dominant faction within our species would end up behaving similarly.
Similarly badly.
No other book holds the mystique, reverence, and garners the unsolicited worship as the ultimate Bible on the American experience as does Democracy in America. It is adored across the political spectrum -- by people like the left-leaning scholar and journalist Max Lerner ("the greatest book ever written on America") and right-leaning political scientist Edward Banfield ("the greatest book ever written by anyone about America") (p. xii). I have heard too many political speeches singing its praises to attempt to count. And that's just the beginning . . .
Given how much evidence that Tocqueville provides as to America's fatal flaws, I am compelled to ask the obvious: have any of the geniuses in the media, literature, politics, or academia who swoon in praising this thing -- obstensibly caught in their own altered state of masturbationally ecstatic, cultural self-glorification -- actually read it?
I mean . . . I accept that $100,000 a year speechwriters are able to pick it up and quote an obligatory line or two. That's what they're paid to do. And, of course, let's not forget students of political science. This is required reading -- so . . . please . . . let's have a round of Clif Notes on the house!
But who really goes beyond a meandering perusal and studies this 870 page tomb?

The question itself does not pose bias as to content, nor is it inherently anti-American. We are talking about our zeitgeist here --- in a world brimming with Marxists who have never read Das Capital; capitalists who have never lifted a copy of Wealth of Nations; proselytizing Christians who don't know their Old from their New Testament . . . well . . . you get the picture.
More to the point, please consider the following -- a mere small sampling of Tocqueville's contrary observations that hardly represent a glowing report on nascent American culture:

Tocqueville clearly describes the paradox of America's bias in suppressing freedom of speech. "I know of no country where there is generally less independence of thought and real freedom of debate than in America." (p. 297, para 4). Well over a century before the writings of George Orwell, Tocqueville makes clear that even in his time (the 1830's), the seeds of tyranny against independent thought were fully manifest: "In our day, the most absolute sovereigns of Europe cannot prevent certain thoughts hostile to their authority from circulating secretly in their states . . . Not true (in) America; as long as the majority cannot make up its mind, speech is allowed; as soon as it has pronounced its irrevocable decision, speech is silenced." (p. 297, para 2)
Tocqueville uses the strongest possible language of his time to describe an intolerance to the very spirit of the First Amendment -- worse than the Inquisition. "If America has not yet found any great writers, we should not look elsewhere for reasons; literary genius does not thrive without freedom of thought and there is no freedom of thought in America. [emphasis added] The Inquisition was never able to stop the circulation in Spain of books hostile to the religion of the majority. The power of the majority in the United States has had greater success than that by removing even the thought of publishing such books. You come across skeptics in America but skepticism cannot find an outlet for its views." (p. 299)
Tocqueville derides democracy as practiced in America as the finding the lowest common denominator. The "tyranny of the majority" is a constant theme throughout his work, stunting the development of great character, attracting moral midgets to public office ("it is not always the ability to choose men of merit which democracy lacks but the desire and inclination to do so" p. 230), and inducing a Orwellian kind of patriotic mood-making. "The consequence is a much more universal lowering of spiritual standards." (p. 301, 304) He even goes as far as to quote Jefferson, whom he regards as "the most powerful apostle democracy has ever had" as predicting a coming tyranny that will "in turn" spread from the legislative branch ("the most forbidable dread at present") to the executive "at a remote period" (p. 305) -- [How prescient: it took 200 years] . . . Imagine . . . and this is coming from democracy's "most powerful apostle"?
The self-destructive tendencies of democracy are "modified" by its conservative legal tradition -- which ultimately serves to undermine the very thing it modifies. Tocqueville then goes on to comfort us by arguing how readily lawyers can be made to be part of the Aristocratic "family" -- thus trashing the very thing they modify by becoming "instruments of power." How nice. (p. 307-315)
Tocqueville identifies a tendency towards a lack of true moral values, honor, and virtue in democracies in general and America in particular. In place of a respect for "honor" (which Tocqueville defines within a historic context) is a love of money and respect for success unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. (p. 714-728) "All constantly wish to acquire material possessions, reputation, and power; few have a lofty conception of all these things . . . I believe that one must seek the cause for this fact mainly in the state of society and the democractic customs of the Americans." (p. 728)
Tocqueville argues that democratic nations have a natural desire for peace but their armies will always have a propensity to seek war. When he describes "the restless ambitions of its armed forces," whose "first thought is to provide a goal for this inconvenient ambition by going to war," he is unwittingly describing the seed behind America's unending military "inside jobs" --- from the Boston Tea Party of December, 1773, to the CIA-backed downing of the World Trade buildings (all THREE of them: 1, 2, and 7) on 9/11/2001.
Tocqueville describes contradictory conditions within Americanism and correctly predicts an end to civil liberties. He describes these "effects on the omnipotence of the majority on the arbitrary power of American public officials" as corrosive to the very liberties that are the backbone of the American common narrative. "Thus, habits are forming," he concludes, "which one day could be fatal to its liberties." (p. 296-297)
Since the execution of the 911 false flag operation of September 11 -- which was so badly botched due to intel agency fingerprints which were all over it that that it has spawned its own Truth Movement, we find with the "Patriot Act"-styled destruction of civil liberties that have ensued, that Tocqueville's prediction has become past tense.
In closing : Tocqueville was not an advocate of democracy -- or even the American experience. He fancied himself an impartial observer, which I feel is an accurate self-assessment. His "Author's Note to the Second Volume" is typical: "I hope the impartiality which people seemed to observe in the first work will be found in this second. Placed in the midst of contradictory opinions which divide us, I have tried for the moment to remove from my heart both those sympathies in favor and those feelings against which exert any influence on me . . . " (p. 490)
This is why the misinformed way in which Tocqueville's work is represented -- containing, as it does, such vivid descriptions of and powerful arguments for the self-destructive elements of the grand American experiment -- is worth noting. Moreover, we see throughout Tocqueville's work, a series of coded prophecies for which we are only now witnessing the harrowing end result. [13]