Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Bovard’s line lands like a civics lesson delivered with a smirk: the tragedy isn’t ignorance, it’s who gets to write the lesson plan. By framing the problem as “most learn most,” he’s not arguing that government information is always false; he’s pointing to a structural imbalance where the dominant narrator is also the main suspect. It’s a critique of epistemic monopoly: when the state supplies the facts, the frame, and the moral of the story, dissent becomes not merely unpopular but unintelligible.

The sentence works because it compresses a whole media ecosystem into a simple loop. “About the government from the government” is a closed circuit, an echo chamber with a seal. The repetition is the rhetorical trick: it mimics the redundancy of official messaging, the way press releases, public school curricula, patriotic ritual, and “civic” branding can converge into a single, self-justifying voice. “Tragedy” signals stakes beyond policy disputes; it implies a democracy hollowed out by asymmetry of information, where consent is manufactured less by coercion than by curated understanding.

Bovard, a libertarian-leaning critic of state power, is writing in the shadow of modern administrative government and post-9/11 security politics, where secrecy and messaging discipline intensified. The subtext is suspicion of “official sources” culture: reporters stenographing, citizens outsourcing skepticism, and institutions laundering their own record through sanctioned narratives. He’s challenging the comforting assumption that civic knowledge is neutral when it’s often a product, distributed by the very institution it ought to scrutinize.