As usual, the innocent have nothing to fear

Discussing the latest TSA horror (involving an elderly woman in bad health who was injured during a TSA stripdown search) Mark Steyn makes an important observation:

America is now a land where 85-year old grannies are strip-searched without probable cause. You’re extremely naive if you think that, once government acquires a taste for that, it will remain confined to the airport.

Many Americans do not want to think about such things. They don’t want to believe that we have malevolent rulers who do things like that. OTOH, they DO want to believe government reassurances. And they like to cling to an irrational belief that people who get messed with must have been doing something wrong. (Which is similar to the belief that the victims of crime were somehow asking for it.)

Nice girls don’t have images of guns on their purses! (Obviously, she must be stupid trailer trash…)

Such thinking is precisely what the ruling class want to encourage.

I’m still trying to track down the exact origin of the “innocent have nothing to fear” quote. For now, I’m coming up dry. But I did like this explanation:

Pop quiz, who said “Anyone who is innocent has nothing to fear”? Answer, just about every politician ever who was arguing for an increase in state powers, especially powers of surveillance.

Of course, if the popular view is correct — that people who get in trouble must have been doing something wrong — then the idea that the innocent have nothing to fear becomes self executing.

Neat trick.