Federal Farmer

Emergency, he said, slight and sometimes even imperceptible innovations, occasional usurpations founded upon the pretended emergency of the occasion or upon former unconstitutional precedents.

And Federal Farmer understood the playbook.

If you want to expand government power, you can't let the people have the time to stop and think.

You've got to make them panic.

Now is the critical moment which must be seized or all will be lost.

and to shut the door against free inquiry whenever conscious the thing presented has defects in it, which time and investigation will probably discover.

And this wasn't some new tactic even in 1787 when the federal farmer wrote that essay.

This has been the historical rule of tyrants.