The fears and possibilities of Artificial Intelligence have probably lurked in the human brain since human beings started telling stories. Pygmalion and his statue could be seen as members of the AI Universe. So, too, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But A.I. has moved out of science-fiction and into reality, impacting various workplaces in ways which would have seemed far-fetched just a couple of years ago. Franklin Ritch’s “The Artifice Girl” is a thought-provoking film that examines the ethics of A.I., moving into even the existential aspects of the concept of artificial intelligence. Any deep inquiry into A.I. is also an inquiry into what it means to be human. Ritch, who wrote, directed, and also appears in the film, keeps the story tightly controlled, so the sole focus is on the mental and emotional challenges facing us when we’re dealing with our preconceived notions of reality and authenticity.
This calls to mind “Blade Runner,” and its source material, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? If a memory is implanted into an android’s brain, a “personal” memory of a childhood that never happened, then isn’t that memory a real thing to the android? The android can’t tell the difference. It feels real. At a certain point, what is or is not “real” is irrelevant. This is when things get unsettling, and “The Artifice Girl” sits in that very unsettling place.
Broken up into three sections, each of which is about half an hour long, “The Artifice Girl” starts off in a very small, dark, windowless room, where a man named Gareth (Ritch) has been brought in for questioning. The two agents in charge (Sinda Nichols and David Girard) take a very rough approach, terrifying and intimidating Gareth (who is not as naive as he initially appears). The issue is an ongoing project designed to combat the spread of pedophiles and predators operating online, devising technological ways to lure these perverted creeps out into the open. Their newest tactic is Cherry (Tatum Matthews), a digitally created nine-year-old girl who hangs out in chat rooms, going on live chats, logging her persistent viewers, the ones who show up, who message her. She’s an effective decoy. She has also developed beyond her original programming, beyond the humans who designed her.
“The Artifice Girl” isn’t plot-heavy. Each scene occurs in a single location, making the film extremely claustrophobic. The characters sit or stand, or pace in windowless rooms, grappling with weighty subjects, throwing around references to the Turing Test, game theory, the uncanny valley, and NLP; all while trying to deal with the complications surrounding either the sentience of “Cherry“, or their own perception of her sentience. In one scene, Gareth and the two agents argue over whether or not Cherry, the digitized child, can consent to something. She looks so real. The thought of her in all those chat rooms is horrifying. It’s almost like the “adults” in charge of Cherry have to keep reminding themselves: “She’s not real, she’s not real, she’s not real.”
To speak more about how the story is structured would be to give too much away. Ritch’s script is thoughtful and intense, making “The Artifice Girl” a mentally engaging and challenging work. The small cast is excellent, particularly young Matthews, whose dialogue is dauntingly technical and delivered in a monotone. There’s a lot of dialogue, and yet “The Artifice Girl” doesn’t feel like it’s too “talky” (except for the third and final scene, where the long monologues drag). The issues at hand are intellectual and cerebral as much as emotional. There’s a great moment where Cherry, the A.I., is being questioned about what she feels about something. Cherry replies, in a flat voice, “Human nature is not something I aspire to.” Considering all she has “seen” online, one can’t blame her.
Today, we are witnessing the nudging (manipulation) of the population to accept a ‘new normal’ based on a climate emergency narrative, restrictions on movement and travel, programmable digital money, ‘pandemic preparedness’ courtesy of the World Health Organization’s tyrannical pandemic treaty, unaccountable AI and synthetic ‘food’.
Whether it involves a ‘food transition’, an ‘energy transition’, 15-minute cities or some other benign-sounding term, all this is to be determined by a supranational ‘stakeholder’ elite with ordinary people sidelined in the process. An undemocratic agenda designed to place restrictions on individual liberty, marking a dramatic shift towards authoritarianism.
In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulation-privatisation neoliberal globalisation agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, driving home the primacy of ‘free enterprise’, individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the role of the state, trade unions and the collective in society.
We are currently seeing another ideological shift: individual rights and freedoms are said to undermine the wider needs of society and the planet – in a stark turnaround – personal freedom is now said to pose a threat to national security, public health or the climate.
As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by an economic impulse. This time, the collapsing neoliberal project.
The Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, says that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. This is similar to the response of Rob Kapito, co-founder of the world’s biggest asset management firm, BlackRock. In 2022, the unimaginably rich and entitled Kapito said that a “very entitled” generation of (ordinary working) people who have never had to sacrifice would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives.
While business as usual prevails in Kapito’s world of privilege and that of major arms, energy, pharmaceuticals and food companies, whose megarich owners continue to rake in massive profits, Kapito and Pill tell ordinary people to get used to poverty and the ‘new normal’ as if we are ‘all in it together’ – billionaires and working class alike. They conveniently use COVID and the situation in Ukraine as cover for the collapsing neoliberalism.
But this is part of the hegemonic agenda that seeks to ensure that the establishment’s world view is the accepted cultural norm. And anyone who challenges this world view – whether it involves, for instance, questioning climate alarmism, the ‘new normal’, the nature of the economic crisis, the mainstream COVID narrative or the official stance on Ukraine and Russia – is regarded as a spreader of misinformation and the ‘enemy within’.
Although the term ‘enemy within’ was popularised by Margaret Thatcher during the miners’ strike in 1984-85 to describe the striking miners, it is a notion with which that Britain’s rulers have regarded protest movements and uprisings down the centuries. From the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 to the Levellers and Diggers in the 17th century, it is a concept associated with anyone or any group that challenges the existing social order and the interests of the ruling class.
John Ball, a radical priest, addressed the Peasants’ Revolt rebels with the following words:
Good friends, matters cannot go well in England until all things be held in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.”
The revolt was suppressed. John Ball was captured and hung, drawn and quartered. Part of the blood-soaked history of the British ruling class.
Later on, the 17th-century Diggers movement wanted to create small, egalitarian rural communities and farm on common land that had been privatised by enclosures.
The 1975 song ‘The world Turned Upside Down’ by Leon Rosselson commemorates the Diggers. His lyrics describe the aims and plight of the movement. In Rosselson’s words, the Diggers were dispossessed via theft and murder but reclaimed what was theirs only to be violently put down.
Little surprise then that, in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher used the state machinery to defeat the country’s most powerful and trade union and the shock troops of the labour movement, the National Union of Mineworkers – ‘the enemy within’. She needed to do this to open the gates for capital to profit from the subsequent deindustrialisation of much of the UK and the dismantling of large parts of the welfare state.
And the result?
A hollowed-out, debt-bloated economy, the destruction of the social fabric of entire communities and the great financial Ponzi scheme – the ‘miracle’ of deregulated finance – that now teeters on the brink of collapse, leading the likes of Kapito and Pill to tell the public to get ready to become poor.
And now, in 2023, the latest version of the ‘enemy within’ disseminates ‘misinformation’ – anything that challenges the official state-corporate narrative. So, this time, one goal is to have a fully controlled (censored) internet.
For instance, US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) recently awarded Accrete a contract for Argus to detect disinformation threats from social media. Argus is AI software that analyses social media data to predict emergent narratives and generate intelligence reports at a speed and scale to help neutralise viral disinformation threats.
In a recent press release, Prashant Bhuyan, founder and CEO of Accrete, boasts:
Social media is widely recognised as an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning vulnerabilities and manipulate behaviour through the intentional spread of disinformation. USSOCOM is at the tip of the spear in recognising the critical need to identify and analytically predict social media narratives at an embryonic stage before those narratives evolve and gain traction. Accrete is proud to support USSOCOM’s mission.”
This is about predicting wrong think on social media. But control over the internet is just part of a wider programme of establishment domination, surveillance and dealing with protest and dissent.
The authors of the article ask us to consider some of the ways the US government is weaponizing its surveillance technologies to flag citizens as a threat to national security, whether or not they have done anything wrong – from flagging citizens as a danger based on their feelings, phone and movements to their spending activities, social media activities, political views and correspondence.
The elite has determined that the existential threat is you. The article ‘Costs of War: Peterloo’, written by UK Veterans for Peace member Aly Renwick, details the history of the brutal suppression of protesters by Britain’s rulers. He also strips away any notion that some may have of a benign, present-day ruling elite with democratic leanings. The leopard has not changed its spots.
As we saw during COVID, the thinking is that hard-won rights must be curtailed, freedom of association is reckless, free thinking is dangerous, dissent is to be stamped on, impartial science is a threat and free speech is deadly. Government is ‘the truth’, Fauci (or some similar figure) is ‘the science’ and censorship is for your own good.
The economic crisis is making many people poorer, so they must be controlled, monitored and subjugated.
The transitions mentioned at the start of this article along with the surveillance agenda (together known as the ‘Great Reset’) are being accelerated at this time of economic crisis when countless millions across the West are being impoverished. The collapsing financial system is resulting in an interrelated global debt, inflation and ‘austerity’ crisis and the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history.
As a result, the powers that be fear that the masses might once again pick up their pitchforks and revolt. They are adamant that the peasants must know their place.
But the flame of protest and dissent from centuries past still inspires and burns bright. So, with that in mind, let’s finish with Leon Rosselson’s lyrics in reference to the Diggers movement (Billy Bragg’s version of the song can be found on YouTube):
In sixteen forty-nine To St. George’s Hill A ragged band they called the Diggers Came to show the people’s will They defied the landlords They defied the laws They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs
We come in peace they said To dig and sow We come to work the lands in common And to make the waste grounds grow This earth divided We will makе whole So it will be A common treasury for all
Thе sin of property We do disdain No man has any right to buy and sell The earth for private gain By theft and murder They took the land Now everywhere the walls Spring up at their command
They make the laws To chain us well The clergy dazzle us with heaven Or they damn us into hell We will not worship The God they serve The God of greed who feed the rich While poor man starve
We work we eat together We need no swords We will not bow to masters Or pay rent to the lords We are free men Though we are poor You Diggers all stand up for glory Stand up now
From the men of property The orders came They sent the hired men and troopers To wipe out the Diggers’ claim Tear down their cottages Destroy their corn They were dispersed Only the vision lingers on
You poor take courage You rich take care The earth was made a common treasury For everyone to share All things in common All people one We come in peace The order came to cut them down We come in peace The order came to cut them down
This list of perpetrators is not meant to be exhaustive, but it can help us begin a conversation that should lead to indictments for treason, in addition to other crimes. The harms these perpetrators are doing must be stopped. Survival is at stake.
If COVID-19 was a laboratory-created disease for which people were denied palliative treatments and forced to receive harmful injections, then that was treason.
If global warming is occurring because of refusals by coal, oil and gas producers to curb those uses and switch to renewables, then that conduct was treason.
If coal, oil and gas producers knew of new energy technologies that could have eased our environmental crisis and stood in the way of their implementation, then that was treason.
If anyone in authority knew of new or unique energy technologies that could have eased our environmental crisis and stood in the way of implementation, then they were guilty of treason.
If harsh weather patterns and damaging weather events are being created that are destroying regions and parts of this country, then those manipulations of the weather are acts of treason.
If earthquakes, tsunamis, and fires are being created by weapons of war, like HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) and DEW (directed energy weapons), then bringing about that devastation is treasonous conduct.
If high-flying airplanes are spraying nanoparticulates of toxic metals and harmful materials upon the population, then those bombardments, which sorely affect physical health and mental acuities, are acts of treason.
If the communications industry persists in expanding wireless technology without allowing governmental oversight to make reasonable regulations for safety against harmful EMF (electro-magnetic frequency) exposures, then that conduct is treason.
If World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2 and 7 came down, not as a result of airplane collisions, but by controlled demolition, then that was treason.
If the Pentagon was struck on 9/11, not by an airplane but by one of our own missiles, then that was treason.
If U.S. weapons-grade anthrax was used against Congressmen who were holding up passage of the USA Patriot Act after 9/11, then that was treason.
The American people are now beset with harms from an extraordinary array of toxic chemical exposures that began four generations ago. If the large agricultural and industrial interests continue to harm our significantly burdened population with toxic exposures, then that will be treason.
The American people are now experiencing extensive health deficits, including physical, mental and behavioral declines. Our health-care system was created in the early 1900s. It was and continues to be dominated by allopathic medicine to the exclusion of a great number of safe, effective and inexpensive healing modalities. Pharmaceutical companies are the major beneficiaries of an insurance-funded allopathic system that’s incapable of bringing about adequate and preventive health care for all. Continued resistance by the pharmaceutical companies to necessary changes that must be made can and should be considered treason.
What Is Treason?
The crime of treason is set forth in the U.S Constitution. “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” See Article III, Section 3, Clause 1. A number of states have identical treason provisions.
The punishment for those who owe “allegiance to the United States” and commit treason is death or imprisonment for not less than five years and a fine of not less than $10,000. See 18 U.S. Code, Chapter 115, Section 2381.
People often make the mistake of believing that we need to be at war for there to be an indictment for treason. That is incorrect. To commit the crime of treason (the levying of war part), one need only use force to prevent the carrying out of laws or to affect the public policies of the nation.
For example, our history books are filled with charges of treason that were leveled against those who used force in efforts to stop the capture and return of runaway slaves before the Civil War. Defendants were charged with treason because they interfered with the Fugitive Slave Acts. Abraham Lincoln, as a young lawyer, participated in those cases.
And the case of United States v. Aaron Burr, Circuit Court, D Virginia, 25 F. Cas 49 (1807) is most instructive. Chief Justice John Marshall presided over the trial of Aaron Burr who was charged with treason. Marshall carefully instructed the jury that they could find Burr guilty of treason only if they had proof that he used force in an effort to interfere with laws or public policies of the United States. Planning alone was insufficient, said the Chief Justice. There had to have been some force—like actually having soldiers marching with weapons to do harm.
The perpetrators listed above went far beyond planning. They used force to poison us, to kill us, to make this Earth less habitable for us, and to take us into unnecessary wars. They trampled upon our most sacred public policies of respect for due process, the expectation of health protections, and the basic right of reliance upon representative government to act on our behalf.
Misprision of Treason
Prosecutions for the crimes of treason will be relatively easy as a result of 18 USC, Chapter 115, Section 2382, which provides: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States and having knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals and does not, as soon as may be, disclose and make known the same to the President or to some judge of the United States, or to the governor or to some judge or justice of a particular State, is guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both.” A few states have identical misprision of treason statutes.
There are millions of upstanding and brave witnesses to the ongoing crimes of COVID-19. Thousands of them have been unfairly vilified and falsely charged with lying.
And so many witnesses know the details about how global warming was allowed to occur and how weather has been made into a weapon of mass destruction.
The bombing of people with nanoparticulates of poisonous materials requires meteorologists, air traffic controllers, and pilots to abide by the official story that trails in the sky are merely water vapor, even though the trails remain in the skies indefinitely. Anyone who has ever used a humidifier knows differently. Water vapor evaporates quickly.
Anyone with an eighth-grade science background can see through the falsehoods of the official story of the 9/11 attacks, especially the way in which Building 7 came down. It came down in its own footprint, seven hours after Buildings 1 and 2, having experienced nothing more than a few sporadic office fires.
Similarly, anyone who has any observational skills knows that an airplane with wide wings, massive engines, and a tall tail could not have hit the Pentagon on 9/11, leaving no aircraft debris and only one circular hole in the outside wall and circular holes in a succession of interior walls.
Everyone involved in the anthrax investigation knows that the anthrax used against U.S. Congressmen to assure passage of the USA Patriot Act was manufactured at a particular U.S. Army base.
And scientists who continually create new versions of things like forever chemicals are firsthand witnesses to how agricultural and manufacturing interests continue to knowingly make the world more toxic by the day.
Finally, the medical profession is filled with practitioners who have come to understand that there are gentler ways to assure that their patients survive and thrive. And millions of us have been successfully treated by alternative methods which are safe and inexpensive.
A Last Line of Defense
There are thousands of federal, state, and county prosecutors across the United States. All have a sworn obligation to investigate and bring crimes to the attention of grand juries in their jurisdictions.
They should be thought of as our last line of defense. We might have only a decade before this Earth reaches the point of no return concerning habitability. Vested interests have largely captured both state and federal regulatory systems. The two major political parties are incapable of bringing forth adequate responses and leaders capable of quickly making necessary changes for our protection.
Meanwhile, public health continues to deteriorate. In 1970, René Dubos, a world renowned microbiologist, in an essay titled “The Limits of Adaptability,” pleaded for us to stop the toxic exposures that are so far beyond human tolerance. Not stopping the exposures, he feared, will lead us to the development of “a form of life that will retain little of true humanness.”
The evidence all around us makes it apparent that we are fast approaching that point. Certainly, the skills to bring about major analyses of current affairs is slipping away, as are the abilities to bring about large societal changes. Indeed, human consciousness itself is waning. So now, as never before, we need the prosecutors to fully investigate and prosecute the crimes of treason, while there is still time to turn this world around.
The treasons that are now being carried out are interfering with and violating our basic rights. The perpetrators are making a mockery of what should be the blessings of life, liberty and justice.
Although losing a war and taking a blow to prestige can be a painful process, the American people’s interests require the dismantling of the American empire.
Back in my high-school debating days, policy debate teams frequently concluded their arguments with an extreme and somewhat absurd parade of horribles. This was a testament to their intelligence and creativity, plus being dead wrong carried few consequences. Through convoluted chains of logic, they argued that some small change in environmental or trade policy would lead to nuclear war or America’s domination by the “global south.”
Even then, this all struck me as ridiculous. How could the Third World, with its periodic famines and coups, ever threaten the United States? Back then we were fully dominant over the entire world after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.
A lot has changed.
The Birth of the Nonaligned Movement
During the Cold War, the various nations on the periphery acted, in some ways, as judges of the two competing systems. While the United States and Soviet Union were accused of manipulating the Third World for selfish reasons, the manipulation went both ways. Being coy, Third World leaders often managed to squeeze real benefits, like infrastructure projects, discounted military equipment, and other forms of aid by siding with one side or the other.
During the Cold War, the nations of the Third World were wary of being compelled to take sides, risking conflicts orthogonal to their own interests and sacrificing their sovereignty through excessive dependence on a patron. This is why the nonaligned movement gained power, with India in particular at the forefront, where it was joined by interested Middle Eastern, African, and Latin American nations.
These nations, which had gained sovereignty only very recently from their colonial masters, were understandably touchy about their independence. They did not want to exchange a formal colonial structure for an informal one.
When the Cold War ended, the United States remained the sole superpower for some time, but, rather than achieving worldwide assent, this instead fueled envy, fear, and resentment. No longer able to chart their own path, every nation became subordinate on some level to American power.
Aggressive Idealism Fuels Anti-Americanism
At the height of its military power, starting during the Clinton presidency, American leaders began to embrace an aggressive “idealism” that set out to change the character, values, and customs of other countries. Purely “humanitarian” interventions like Kosovo and Somalia became common.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, this idealism meant feminism and democracy. In Eastern Europe, it meant the promotion of gay rights and secularism, alienating the conservative and religious people who once idealized the United States. In Latin America, idealism demanded capitalism and loosened trade restrictions.
The invocation of “Freedom” and “Democracy,” while it sounds noble and idealistic to our ears, began to sound like a threat to nations who were out of step with the West’s ruling classes. Unilateral American military intervention in such diverse places as Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Syria, and Libya made nations on the sidelines wary that they could be next.
Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa—the so-called BRICS—do not have much in common. They have diverse economic and political systems, distinct languages, very different histories, and members appeared on both sides of Cold War alliances. But they share a common orientation to American power: our aspirations to maintain “sole superpower” status threatens their national power and independence. Perceiving this as a zero-sum game, they seek to pivot world attention, prosperity, and power away from the United States and its Western European allies.
Among these American competitors, China and Russia stand out most of all. Through their de facto alliance, they now dominate the Eurasian landmass. Their industrial capacity has revealed significant advantages in a war of attrition. And, finally, with their history as former American enemies, they have a habitual and strong resistance to American interference with their destinies.
While Russia and China’s conduct is easily understood, the growing and diverse anti-American coalition, along with these other nations’ willingness to accept Russian and Chinese leadership, needs explanation. The heart of the matter is sovereignty. American demands and desires currently constrain each of the BRICS nations and the many smaller nations of the Third World, whether it is in energy, central banking, sanctions, trade, or even domestic policies on issues like feminism and gay rights.
The proposed “multipolar world” has a lot of momentum because it does not require submission to a particular Chinese or Russian model for internal governance. Russia and China are mostly agnostic about internal affairs, unlike the “idealistic” United States. Rather, the alternative promotes a more organic (and potentially chaotic) distribution of power from the current system.
Finally, neither Russia nor China could displace the United States. Thus, at most, they can usher in a world of “multipolarity,” where all countries will be less constrained, and larger countries like them have, at most, regional strength.
Ukraine War Now Existential for the American Empire
The current war in Ukraine is bringing a lot of things to a head. The United States and Europe imagined the rest of the world would view the conflict as a morality play: a big, powerful bully dominating its innocent and unassuming neighbor. This, indeed, is how most leaders and many people in the West perceive events.
But this has been a tough sell in the Third World, which is the chief reason sanctions have faced resistance. While Russia is bigger than Ukraine, Ukraine is big relative to its separatist eastern provinces, with whom it has had a conflict since 2014. Since most developing nations began as anti-colonial movements for national liberation, Ukraine’s attempts to forcibly reintegrate the East does not look so different from the types of struggles Brazil and India had during their independence movements.
Moreover, with Ukraine aligned so closely with the West—using NATO tanks, NATO mercenaries, and NATO money to prosecute its defense—much of the world does not perceive a bully pushing around its stalwart neighbor, but rather an American bully using its Ukrainian lackey for realpolitik designs against Russia. This is a particularly popular view in China, of course. But, judging from editorials and open source comments, it is also widely held in places like Africa and India, where many people view Russia in a positive light because of its opposition to the United States.
Until now, American power rested on actual American superiority in economics, military power, and cultural influence. The United States soundly defeated Iraq in the first Gulf War, emerged from the Cold War intact and wealthy, and soon proceeded to project power with great skill in the early days of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. But since that time, we have departed Afghanistan and Iraq without a victory. In parallel, we spread chaos in Libya and Syria, failing to conclude regime change operations in the latter.
American military prowess is no longer undisputed or inevitable, undermining the broader claim of America as the “sole superpower.” This was all avoidable, but having overextended itself, the visible evidence of American decline is now confirmed. This is what happens when a nation is ruled by disloyal, short-sighted, and foolish people.
To state the obvious, losing wars is never good for an empire. The Ottoman and Russian empires dissolved under the stresses of the First World War. While part of the victorious allies, World War II cemented the subordinate status of France and the United Kingdom, and their empires fell apart after the war. Finally, and most recently, the Soviet Union broke apart after its costly and controversial campaign in Afghanistan.
Russia’s attempts to assert power in its near-abroad fueled America’s interest in the current Ukraine War. The theory was that we would pursue our interests on the cheap, prevent challenges to American hegemony, with the added benefit that Ukrainians would be doing the dying. Because of our military and economic superiority, supporters claimed the war would kill Russians, weaken their military, and destabilize Putin’s hold on power.
Proponents of the war did not really consider what would happen in the reverse case. What if not Russia, but the United States found itself strained economically, losing critical and hard-to-replace weapons in a war of attrition, visibly demonstrating its impotence and weakness on the world stage? Wouldn’t the same dire consequences intended for Russia now happen to us?
Indeed, they would. Luckily, actual American security does not depend on the continuation of America’s dominance of the globe, nor does American prosperity. Indeed, our prosperity has declined as the requirements of the military industrial complex and the behemoth welfare state devalue our currency and impoverish taxpayers. Further, our aspirations to maintain sole superpower status has endangered us by fueling anti-Americanism, while encouraging significant moral compromise at home.
Although losing a war and taking a blow to prestige can be a painful process, the American people’s interests require the dismantling of the American empire. Our current course risks manifesting the dire and once-implausible scenarios popular on the high school debate circuit. It is time to change course.
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman
Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.
The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.
Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
This last point is particularly disturbing.
Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.
In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.
Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.
Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.
Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.
Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Interceptreported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.
Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.
Flagging you as a danger based on your correspondence. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.
Don’t believe it.
As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.
Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.
They definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
And they certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting police brutality and racism, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.
On September 7th, NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, acknowledged that the war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, like Western ‘news’-media say, but much earlier, in 2014, and that Russia’s invasion in 2022 resulted from NATO’s efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO and to bring NATO’s military forces closer to Russia’s borders: “He [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” In other words: Russia’s invasion actually was defensive, not aggressive, on Russia’s side. And Stoltenberg proudly proclaimed that Russia has been defeated in that defensive objective, because instead both Sweden and especially Finland (one of the nearest nations to The Kremlin, other than the nearest of all, which is Ukraine) rushed to join NATO as a direct result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Stoltenberg was so proud of having turned to dust Putin’s goal of making Russia safer, that Stoltenberg repeated many times NATO having done the exact opposite of what Putin was urging. Stoltenberg was clearly proud to have overseen the frustration of Russia’s need for a defense against a possible blitz-nuclear attack by NATO.
Furthermore: Stoltenberg acknowledged that this war is and has been good for NATO because it’s forcing NATO member countries to increase their expenditures on military weapons, and is thereby forcing down these countries’ expenditures on other matters that voters usually care more about.
The war didn’t start in February last year. It started in 2014. The full-fledged invasion happened last year, but the war, the illegal annexation of Crimea, Russia went into eastern Donbas in 2014.
Since then, NATO has implemented the biggest adaptation on this Alliance in modern history, in decades. And part of that is to invest more in defence. I think I’ve told you before that I know it’s hard to allocate money for defence, because most politicians want to spend money on health, on education, on infrastructure instead of defence. …
The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty, that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.
The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.
So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite. He has got more NATO presence in eastern part of the Alliance and he has also seen that Finland has already joined the Alliance and Sweden will soon be a full member.
Stoltenberg’s speech on September 7th ignored America’s coup, and he even ignored that the coup was quickly followed by the breakaway of Crimea because a plebiscite was held there on 16 March 2014, which produced a 90%+ vote for Crimea to again be a part of Russia, of which Crimea had been a part from 1783 to 1954. And he ignored that the breakaway of Donbass resulted after the Obama-installed Ukrainian government started in April 2014 an ethic-cleansing invasion of Donbass because over 90% of the voters there had voted for the Ukrainian President whom Obama’s coup had replaced, and Obama didn’t want those voters ever again to vote in a Ukrainian election.
So, although what Stoltenberg said there was true, it was very incomplete, because it failed to mention the coup, and the coup-regime’s ethnic-cleansing campaign, though those American initiatives were actually the things that started the war in Ukraine.
American society spawns trauma and this trauma expresses itself in a variety of self-destructive pathologies, including the erosion of democracy and rise of neo-fascism.
Corporate capitalism, defined by the cult of the self and the ruthless exploitation of the natural world and all forms of life for profit, thrives on the fostering of chronic psychological and physical disorders. The diseases and pathologies of despair — alienation, high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, morbid obesity, mass shootings (now almost two per day on average), domestic and sexual violence, drug overdoses (over 100,000 per year) and suicide (49,000 deaths in 2022) — are the consequences of a deeply traumatized society.
The core traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt — are celebrated. The virtues of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice, are belittled, neglected and crushed. The professions that sustain community, such as teaching, manual labor, the arts, journalism and nursing, are underpaid and overworked. The professions that exploit, such as those in high finance, Big Pharma, Big Oil and information technology, are lavished with prestige, money and power.
“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in The Sane Society.
The classic works on trauma by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Gabor Maté and Dr. Judith Herman state bluntly that what is accepted as normal behavior in a corporate society is at war with basic human needs and our psychological and physical health. Huge segments of the American public, especially the tens of millions of people who have been discarded and marginalized, endure chronic trauma. Barbara Ehrenreich in “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” describes the life of the working poor as one long “emergency.” This trauma is as destructive to us personally as it is socially and politically. It leaves us in a state of dysphoria where confusion, agitation, emptiness and loneliness define our lives. Whole segments of American society, especially the poor, have been rendered superfluous and invisible. As Dr. van der Kolk writes, “trauma is when we are not seen and known.”
“Our culture teaches us to focus on our personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms,” Dr. van der Kolk notes.
Trauma numbs our capacity to feel. It fractures our self. It disconnects us from our bodies. It keeps us in a state of hyperarousal. It makes us confuse our desires, often artificially implanted by the consumer society, with our needs. Traumatized people view the world around them as hostile and dangerous. They lack a positive image of themselves and lose the capacity to trust. Many replace intimacy and love with sexual sadism, which is how we became a pornified culture. Trauma creates what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls a “counterfeit” world defined by phantom enemies, lies and dark conspiracies. It negates a sense of purpose and a life of meaning.
Trauma, Dr. Herman writes, “impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately.” It induces feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, she writes, “as well as the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that occurs in daily life. Trauma severely compromises the capacity for intimacy. Trauma can dramatically reduce focus to extremely limited goals, often a matter of hours or days.”
“If trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce trauma,” Dr. Maté writes. “Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources — these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”
Trauma also drives many to flee into the arms of those who are orchestrating the abuse.
Systematic and repetitive trauma, whether by a single abuser or a political system, destroys personal autonomy. The perpetrator becomes omnipotent. Resistance is accepted as futile. “The goal of the perpetrator is to instill in his victim not only fear of death but also gratitude for being allowed to live,” Dr. Herman writes. This trauma lays the foundation for the most insidious characteristic of all tyrannies, large and small. Total control. Prolonged trauma reduces its victims to a state of psychological infantilism. It conditions them to plead for their own enslavement.
“We are not content with negative obedience, not even with the most abject submission,” George Orwell wrote of the ruling “Inner Party” in his novel “1984.” “When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.”
Christian fascism, the subject of my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” preys on this trauma. It replicates systems of control common to all tyrannies, including cults. Christian fascists skillfully break down adherents, severing them from their families and communities. They manipulate their shame, despair, feelings of worthlessness and guilt – the byproducts of their trauma – to demand total obedience to the church leadership, who are almost always white and male. These leaders, supposedly spokespeople for God, cannot be questioned or criticized. The connecting tissue among the disparate militia groups, QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-abortion activists, right-wing patriot organizations, Second Amendment advocates, neo-Confederates and Trump supporters that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 is not only this Christian fascism but trauma.
“Totalitarian governments demand confession and political conversion of their victims,” Dr. Herman writes. “Slaveholders demand gratitude from their slaves. Religious cults demand ritualized sacrifices as a sign of submission to the divine will of the leader. Perpetrators of domestic battery demand that their victims prove complete obedience and loyalty by sacrificing all other relationships. Sex offenders demand that their victims find sexual fulfillment in submission. Total control over another person is the power dynamic at the heart of pornography. The erotic appeal of this fantasy to millions of terrifyingly normal men fosters an immense industry in which women and children are abused, not in fantasy but in reality.”
Donald Trump is a perpetrator and savior. He personifies the callous indifference of patriarchy, wealth, privilege and power towards the vulnerable, as well as the promise that once his cultish followers surrender to him they will be protected. He inspires in equal measure fear and solace.
“People who embrace the small tyrannies are much more susceptible to embracing the large ones,” Dr. Herman told me. “When you have a political party that embraces the subordination of women, the subordination of people of color, the subordination of gender non-conforming people, and the subordination of non-Christians, then it’s not a party that embraces democracy. It’s a party that is looking for a fascist leader and is going to find one.”
In Dr. van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” he opens with stark statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that “one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.”
The endemic trauma in American society, which is getting worse under the onslaught of the gig economy, pronounced social inequality, indiscriminate police violence, the climate crisis and the seizure of the political process and most institutions by corporations and the ruling oligarchs, is our most serious public health crisis. It has grave individual, social and political consequences.
“If trauma is truly a social problem,” Dr. Herman in “Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice” writes, “then recovery cannot simply be a private individual matter. The wounds of trauma are not merely those caused by the perception of violence and exploitation. The actions or inactions of bystanders, all those who are complicit in or who prefer not to know about the abuse or who blame the victims, often cause deeper wounds.” “Full healing,” she adds, “because it originates in a fundamental injustice, requires a full hearing within the community to repair through some measure of justice the trauma survivors have endured.”
You can see my recent two-part interview with Dr. Herman here and here.You can see my interview with Dr. Maté here.
“Recovery has to take place in relationships,” Dr. Herman said in my interview. “When people feel reconnected to their communities and re-accepted in their communities, then the shame is relieved and the isolation is relieved, and that really creates the platform for healing.”
The key is community. Not virtual communities. But communities where we can reconnect and see in our wounds the wounds of others. It requires access, without onerous medical bills, to mental health professionals. It requires dismantling the corporate structures of oppression. It demands a new ethic, one that values empathy and self-sacrifice. We must reject the cynicism, indifference and cult of the self that all tyrannies inculcate in those they dominate to keep them passive. We must reach out to our neighbors, especially those in distress and those who are demonized. We must uncouple from consumer society and turn away from the allure of our cultural narcissism.
The moral philosopher Bernard Williams argues that resentment and indignation are as important as empathy and connection to solidify social bonds. It is not only our own dignity we must protect, but the dignity of others. These “shared sentiments” he writes “bind people together in a community of feeling.” Acts of resistance around these “shared sentiments,” this “community of feeling,” establish ourselves as distinct, autonomous beings. We may not defeat these tyrannies, but by battling against them we free ourselves from the grip of the small and large tyrannies that deform American society.
After the Crash 