First, allow me to thank Mr. Taibbi for his work exposing the social media censorship agenda. The uniparty wanted to skin him alive and hang him out to dry. Taibbi didn’t back down despite ominous threats to his freedom. Thank you, Mr. Taibbi.
Now the tough part. Prior to his wake-up call before the House, Matt was fuzzy on uniparty careerists, for instance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thinks she’s a socialist.
Taibbi writes:
Not long ago I was writing in defense of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When she first entered Congress as an inner-city kid who’d knocked off longtime insider Joe Crowley with a Sandersian policy profile, her own party’s establishment ridiculed her as a lefty Trump. Nancy Pelosi scoffed that her win just meant voters “made a choice in one district,” so “let’s not get carried away.” Ben Ritz, director of the Progressive Policy Institute, an offshoot of the old Democratic Leadership Council, groused, “Oh, please, she just promised everyone a bunch of free stuff.”
But like aggressive, competitive, and often sociopathic government careerists worldwide, Ocasio-Cortez naturally strives for the most powerful and dictatorial seat in Congress, that of Speaker. Taibbi and others are alarmed by Ocasio-Cortez’s demand the state censor Fox News.
“We have very real issues with what is permissible on air,” she said [during an interview with Jen Psaki], adding people like Tucker Carlson are “very clearly” guilty of “incitement to violence,” a problem in light of “federal regulation in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.”
It is a common mistake to not fully comprehend that the political class is deeply Machiavellian. A Machiavellian state will impose “tyrannical methods of rule,” according to the dictionary. The state and its political class are “destitute of political morality; cunning in political management; habitually using duplicity and bad faith; astutely crafty.” This is a standard operating procedure in Congress, the Executive, and across government. It is not difficult to see, that is if one is not “inculcated” with false, misleading, and harmfully deceptive propaganda broadcast daily by the state’s media conduits, which claim to be independent.
Prior to his roasting at the hands of uniparty “democrats,” Taibbi was “attracted to liberalism as a young person precisely because it didn’t want to ban things… liberalism celebrated the belief that truth, tolerance, and forgiveness are the way to reach closed minds.”
Rank and file democrat normies may still believe democrat politicians are all about truth and forgiveness, but that is an optical illusion. Consider President Wilson, a democrat. His administration, with the blessing of Congress, censored and prosecuted speech in opposition to America’s involvement in the “Great War,” WWI. The uniparty of the day considered any such speech sedition.
The liberal icon, FDR, forced “Radio Priest” Charles Coughlin off the air for the sin of not following the Nazi demonization narrative in the lead-up to WWII. Granted, Coughlin overlooked the totalitarian policies of Nazi Germany, and its racist ideology, but the point here is that the state decided to censor and strip Coughlin of his natural right to speech.
Then there was Truman, the man who dropped two atom bombs, incinerating more than 100,000 Japanese civilians. During this democrat’s time in office, the administration and Congress used the Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 to prosecute not only communists, but folks like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and defense attorneys during the McCarthy hearings (run by republicans) were cited for contempt of court and imprisoned.
Clinton pushed through the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, legislation designed to throttle speech on the then-new world wide web. Obama blocked access to government, despite a pledge to support transparency. The Obama administration used the Espionage Act to go after journalists critical of the state.
The uniparty is united on the effort to vilify, intimidate, indict, and prosecute all in opposition to the crony capitalist state, its rigged economics, endless wars, rigged elections, and unwavering service to corporations, banks, and billionaires, while the people are expected to pay for corporate gambling losses and clean up their environmental messes while the commoners slowly sink into poverty.
Unfortunately, it took a fair degree of abuse heaped on Taibbi during a House hearing on the “Twitter Files,” and the threat of perjury, before he finally disinvested himself from democrats, the uniparty faction that likes to pretend it works for “the people,” when in fact it works for a corporatist state, the “defense” (endless war) industry, Big Pharma, the insurance cartel, and, above all, the “financial sector,” that is to say bankers and their enablers at the Federal Reserve and the USG Treasury.
There is nothing mysterious, arcane, and byzantine about what is happening in America. The destruction of the Middle Class, economic warfare, violent regime change, arms shipments to neo-Nazis, bailouts of corrupt and parasitical banks and corporations—all of it plain to see, if one looks—these are not “weaponized” conspiracy theories.
Don’t get me wrong. I am thankful Matt Taibbi has finally seen beyond the facade, the window dressing and propaganda in regard to democrats and the state. As I have said for a couple of decades on crucial issues—economics, war, and peace, the attack on natural rights—there is little difference between the two factions of the corporate uniparty.
To be more accurate, however, the war on free speech is really a war on the right to criticize the government.
Although the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom, every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.
Indeed, those who run the government don’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.
In fact, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.
For instance, as part of its campaign to eradicate so-called “disinformation,” the Biden Administration likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative.
Then again, Trump was not alone in his presidential disregard for the rights of the citizenry, especially as it pertains to the right of the people to criticize those in power.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the FBI to censor all news and control communications in and out of the country in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt also signed into law the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate by way of speech for the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence.
This idea of “dangerous” speech, on the other hand, is peculiarly authoritarian in nature. What it amounts to is speech that the government fears could challenge its chokehold on power.
The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.
Conduct your own experiment into the government’s tolerance of speech that challenges its authority, and see for yourself.
Stand on a street corner—or in a courtroom, at a city council meeting or on a university campus—and recite some of the rhetoric used by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams and Thomas Paine without referencing them as the authors.
For that matter, just try reciting the Declaration of Independence, which rejects tyranny, establishes Americans as sovereign beings, recognizes God (not the government) as the Supreme power, portrays the government as evil, and provides a detailed laundry list of abuses that are as relevant today as they were 240-plus years ago.
My guess is that you won’t last long before you get thrown out, shut up, threatened with arrest or at the very least accused of being a radical, a troublemaker, a sovereign citizen, a conspiratorialist or an extremist.
Try suggesting, as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin did, that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to shed blood in order to protect their liberties, and you might find yourself placed on a terrorist watch list and vulnerable to being rounded up by government agents.
“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Observed Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”
Better yet, try suggesting as Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, John Adams and Patrick Henry did that Americans should, if necessary, defend themselves against the government if it violates their rights, and you will be labeled a domestic extremist.
“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine. “When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.” Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.” And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Then again, perhaps you don’t need to test the limits of free speech for yourself.
One such test is playing out before our very eyes on the national stage led by those who seem to believe that only individuals who agree with the government are entitled to the protections of the First Amendment.
To the contrary, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was very clear about the fact that the First Amendment was established to protect the minority against the majority.
I’ll take that one step further: the First Amendment was intended to protect the citizenry from the government’s tendency to censor, silence and control what people say and think.
Having lost our tolerance for free speech in its most provocative, irritating and offensive forms, the American people have become easy prey for a police state where only government speech is allowed.
You see, the powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
This is how freedom rises or falls.
Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.
We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.
Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.
What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.
Tolerance for dissent is vital if we are to survive as a free nation.
While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.
By suppressing free speech, the government is contributing to a growing underclass of Americans who are being told that they can’t take part in American public life unless they “fit in.”
Mind you, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable to respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of law is labeled an “extremist,” is relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is rounded up when the government deems it necessary.
It doesn’t matter how much money you make, what politics you subscribe to, or what God you worship: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are all potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government.
Substack’s days are numbered. The email newsletter platform is increasingly under attack, most recently by the ADL. The organization wrote on April 3 that Substack “continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”
The latest salvo by ADL against the First Amendment dovetails with a congressional push to further erode liberty with its draconian RESTRICT Act. There are a number of tweets that encapsulate the latest threat to liberty, but Substack no longer allows tweet embeds, thanks to an absurd ego-colliding tiff between Substack CEO Chris Best and Twitter boss, Elon Musk.
The RESTRICT Act is dressed up as a response to Tik Tok and China. Contrary to this propaganda, it will be used primarily to sanitize the internet and squash (and criminalize) all speech diverting from USG narratives.
“The Restrict Act Completes the Overthrow of the US Constitution,” writes Paul Craig Roberts. “The purpose is to silence all dissent from official explanations. Truth is criminalized. Propaganda and lies will reign supreme and unchallenged. The Matrix will be complete.”
With its vague language, the bill gives the government much leeway in defining what qualifies as illegal information. We’ve already seen government officials and their friends in media conflate antiestablishment arguments with foreign disinformation. They’ve even falsely labelled accurate news stories as foreign disinformation. It’s not hard to see these same people using the powers granted to them by the RESTRICT Act to criminalize certain dissenting views under the guise of counterintelligence.
The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian control over free speech is the theatrical SWAT takedown of 21-year-old patsy Jack Teixeira, a low-level National Guard airman that, according to The Washington Post, somehow managed to get his hands on highly classified CIA and DOD documents. This is highly improbable, but then a blindsided American public is routinely fed improbable lies, exaggerations, and omissions by the USG and its corporate propaganda media.
CNN describes the event as a “carefully choreographed arrest,” and I’d agree with that assessment, although not as a result of the “Biden administration’s scramble” to contain sensitive leaks. The theatrical takedown of Mr. Teixeira is a propaganda event designed to bolster further eradication of dissent and grease the skids for the passage of RESTRICT.
The Washington Post has a documented history of working with the CIA to disseminate propaganda, so when we learn that the newspaper “wrote about the presence of problematic content on Substack, noting its use by spreaders of false information,” according to the ADL, we know for certain Substack will be brought to heel. (For more on the CIA’s takeover of the media, see The CIA and the Press: When the Washington Post Ran the CIA’s Propaganda Network, by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn).
Add to this the Digital Services Act. It is “the EU’s latest incoming tech rulebook requiring them to stamp out illegal content on their platforms… including social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. These include quickly taking down flagged illegal content, including hate speech,” Politico reported last October. The corporate propaganda conduit conflated “hate speech” (that is, speech contrary to the narratives of the state) with “child pornography and terrorist videos.”
According to Slate, the Digital Services Act (DSA),
while written to protect EU residents, will almost certainly lead social media firms to change their moderation policies worldwide. Thus, with the DSA, the EU will effectively be doing what the First Amendment ostensibly prohibits our own government from doing: regulating the editorial judgments made by social media platforms on which Americans communicate with each other.
The jaws of the authoritarian vice are tightening. In the near future, the ability to express your opinion will be terminated if it runs counter to official government narratives. All avenues of expression are to be tightly monitored, moderated and censored at the behest of the state.
“The Biden administration is looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to spot classified Pentagon documents circulating online for weeks,” NBC News reported on April 12. “The administration is now looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track.”
Undoubtedly, this will include Substack, one of the last remaining platforms where free speech is permissible without the heavy-handed interference of the state, and the narrowly focused and highly politicized censorship agenda of the ADL and other anti-First Amendment organizations.
First, corporate executives don’t give away $787 million of shareholders’ money without a test of the claim in court. The uncontested amount is so large that one wonders if Fox News itself paid it or whether this almost $800 million was a gift funneled through an uncontested lawsuit to fund Dominion by our ruling elites. Once elections are determined by how voting machines are programmed, the people are disenfranchised.
Second, it is not defamation to report the news. Tucker Carlson reported the claims of experts. That is news reporting. Dominion’s defamation lawsuit should have been filed against the experts. It wasn’t, because the experts had the evidence.
Third, Experts supplied evidence that the Dominion voting machines could be programmed to count votes differently from how the votes were cast; experts supplied evidence that the machines could be hacked; experts supplied evidence that the voting machines were connected to the Internet. Fox News could have called these experts as expert witnesses. By agreeing to settle, Fox News refused the evidence its day in court. Why?
A possible explanation is that Fox News, voluntarily or involuntarily, participated in an orchestration that established the precedent that reporting news different from the narrative, or news that is unfavorable to a person, company, or government institution, is defamation. Think about what this means. A prosecutor who charges a person with a crime has defamed the person. Truth becomes unreportable. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh could be charged for defamation, and for being a Russian agent, for reporting that the US government destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline.
When we see the few truth-tellers who are the stars of their organizations jettisoned–Tucker Carlson from Fox News, Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, James O’Keefe from Project Veritas, President Trump charged under a non-existent law, and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange imprisoned for a decade without due process, we must face the fact that there is an organized conspiracy to suppress truth. We are experiencing the completion of The Matrix in which expressed doubt or even unspoken suspicion of official narratives are criminal offenses.
Truth-tellers receive almost nonexistent support. The inescapable conclusion is that in the Western world truth has no future.
On a video podcast the other day, I made reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics.
Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business model.
I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that talking about what happened to us is verboten on mainstream venues? Sadly, that seems to be where we headed. In big and small ways, and throughout the culture and the whole world, we are bit by bit being trained to forget and hence not learn and thus repeat the whole thing.
This makes no sense since nearly every public issue in play today traces to those fateful days and the fallout thereof, including censorship, the entrenchment of industry-government oligarchs, the corruption of media and tech, the educational upheaval, the abuse of courts and law, and the developing financial and banking crisis.
And yet hardly anyone wants to speak about the topic frankly. It is too upsetting. There is too much at stake. We cannot risk being canceled, the single greatest fear of every aspirational professional in today’s world. Plus too many powerful people were in on it and don’t want to admit it. It would appear that the whole subject is being memoryholed in ways of which they all approve.
For nearly two years, or longer, respectable intellectuals knew not to dissent from the prevailing norms and challenge the whole machinery. This was true of Washington think tanks, which went on their merry way from March 2020 either celebrating the “public health response” or just remaining quiet. The same was true of the leadership of major political parties and third parties.
Most religious leaders stayed quiet too, even as their doors were padlocked for as long as 2 holiday seasons. Civic organizations played along. If you thought that the job of the ACLU was to defend civil liberties, you were wrong: they one day decided that lockdowns, mandatory masks, and forced shots were essential to their mission.
So many were compromised over 3 years. These same people now just want the whole subject to go away. We find ourselves in an odd position, having experienced the biggest trauma in our lives and in many generations and yet there is precious little open talk about it. Brownstone was established to fill this void but we’ve become a target as a result.
The search engines have been gamed for the better part of 3 years to keep the science channeled in only one direction. If web platforms step out of line, it is easy enough for search engines and social-media companies to tag them as problematic and thus throttle their reach. But for Substackers – and they are being targeted now too – it would be hard to find out anything other than what the oligarchs want you to believe.
This silent treatment is filtering down to every aspect of our lives and becoming entrenched in the political culture too. Here is an example from this week.
When Donald Trump returned from his theatrical and ridiculous indictment on nothing in New York, he flew immediately back to Mar-a-Lago where he told his story to people gathered in a pastiche-baroque ballroom. He told of the fake news, the attempted impeachments for Russia and Ukraine, the plots and schemes, and onward to the fake ballots and the FBI raid on his home, and now this preposterous new thing.
It was a solid narrative overall. But his story left out a hugely important detail. He said not one word about Covid lockdowns and Operation Warp Speed that was supposed to be the great fix for the virus but flopped. This was a rather important detail to leave out since it wrecked the economy, the Bill of Rights, education, and led to a massive demographic upheaval in addition to the continuing fallout in terms of culture, economics, and everything else.
It also caused him to lose the presidency, whether because the shock resulted in mass demoralization (this was certainly not a path to making America great again) or because of the mail-in ballots made possible by Covid restrictions, or probably both. However you look at it, it was the most disastrous decision of his presidency or possibly any presidency in history.
How in the world are we just supposed to pretend that this did not happen? And yet he is playing along simply because he does not want to admit error. He thinks it makes him appear weak. Nor does he still slam the successor presidency for mask and shot mandates even though hundreds of millions were affected by them. He would rather not bring up the topic at all, lest doing so raises questions about his own judgment in those fateful days of March 2020.
Meanwhile, the DNC does not want to admit that it celebrated and built on Trump’s biggest disaster while the RNC does not want to discuss that the policies they decry from the DNC actually began under the RNC. And so you have a kind of “mutually assured destruction” pact between them that needs no plot or contract. In silencing all talk about this, each party is only doing what is in its interest.
We can fully expect that these issues will be locked out of the campaign narratives in 2024 just as they were in 2020 and 2022. Everyone seems to agree: the less said the better. And this is precisely why the announced candidacy of Robert Kennedy, Jr., has triggered the usual and expected gaslighting from the mainstream media. The plan is to flog him into marginalization. And if that doesn’t work, they will flog and flog again.
We are seeing a real-time example of how history is really written. The narrative is more self-serving than we knew. If all the power centers in society get something tremendously wrong, an informal conspiracy of silence develops around it, with the hope of just wiping it from the history books.
As Michael Senger has written, “Lockdowns met little resistance in part because they reinforced existing power structures. The rich got richer, the Zoom class got a vacation, workers got stimulus, while some business owners, their employees, and the most vulnerable had to sacrifice everything for this fantasy.”
And we can add to that: government gained vastly more power. In fact, Covid became the template for the biggest expansion of government power over the population in world history, more effective than ancient myths about god-like rulers, heresy trials and witch burnings of the Middle Ages, sedition purges of the 18th and 19th centuries, red scares of the 20th centuries, the Cold War, or even the wars on terror. Fear of infectious disease was more effective than all of them for ratcheting up despotism.
When something works this well for the most powerful people in society, why not just keep quiet about it?
The tellers of tales can write stories but they cannot invent their own realities. There will be no restoration of liberty, rights, and truth until we come to terms with what happened, why, and how to prevent it in the future. Playing along with this conspiracy of silence surrounding a policy that effectively blotted out every advance in human rights since the Magna Carta is a disastrous error that could lead to the entrenchment of a new dark age.
As technology has disrupted key elements of society, Technocrats have taken advantage of the chaos to not only implement their own agenda but also to erect barriers to competition or resistance. If this had been recognized early enough, it could have been easily blocked. Now, the mere barriers have hardened into fortresses.⁃ TN Editor
The First Amendment is at a critical juncture. Recent congressional hearings on the Twitter Files brought the matter into full public view. Freedom of speech and of the press are hanging by a precarious thread. Do we want a future in which information flows freely, or one in which an information elite controls those flows “for our own good?” The choices we make over the next few years will determine which of those futures we get.
It’s tragic that we have let the problem reach this dangerous state. What heightens the tragedy, however, is that the war against America’s most cherished freedoms was predictable and preventable. If those of us who value freedom want to win, we’re going to need a strategy grounded in a clear understanding of what’s happening and why.
The Twitter Files story is shocking. Allegations that big tech and social media manipulate information have been around for as long as we’ve had tech and social media companies. Allegations of bias among the mainstream media are even older. In recent years, however, both the allegations and the supporting evidence have ratcheted upward to unprecedented levels.
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he opened his company’s internal archives to scrutiny. He assembled a team of journalists with a curious pedigree: registered Democrats with a distaste for Donald Trump and his supporters, whose track records skewed considerably left of center, and whose recent work has demonstrated deep concern about the politicization of journalism.
Musk gave them unfettered access. They found a deep, broad, and disturbing pattern of collaboration between big government and big tech designed to promote “official stories” on multiple issues, throttle competing theories and arguments, and sanction those who dared to question government propaganda.
When two of those journalists – Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger – testified before Congress, their Democratic inquisitors sought to belittle their credentials, question their motives, and tar them as part of some Republican-funded, far-right conspiracy. The still-left-leaning journalists are trying to absorb their shock at the depths to which the formerly civil-libertarian left has fallen.
Far from shocking, however, that fall was predictable – and predicted. In 2001, amidst the public disgust with tech companies following the collapse of the dotcom bubble, I set out to make sense of life during the transition from the late industrial age to the early information age. I analyzed what I called the first four front-page stories of the information age: the dotcom bubble, the Microsoft antitrust trial, the rise of open-source software, and the Napster-driven wars over digital music. Contrary to popular opinion of the time, I believed that these stories were far from distinct. I saw them as four manifestations of a single underlying phenomenon. My goal was to understand that phenomenon.
I found it. It appeared most clearly in the digital music arena, but it ran through all four stories – and through much that has happened since. It appears just as clearly in today’s war on free speech. It involves an entirely predictable pattern of opportunity, action, and reaction.
The starting point is digitization and quantification. The Internet changed the economics of information. Throughout human history, information was scarce, hard to acquire, and expensive to process. Skilled professionals – spies, scholars, lawyers, accountants, clerics, doctors – could command a premium for their knowledge. When the Internet went public, anything that could be digitized and quantified suddenly flowed freely. Information was there for the asking. The premium shifted to filtering – the ability to discard unwanted information and arrange what remained.
Economic shifts generate massive opportunities for creative, entrepreneurial people and bring glorious benefits to millions of consumers. The Internet was no exception in this regard, and neither was the predictable backlash against it. Anything that benefits new businesses and empowers consumers is a warning shot across the bow of powerful incumbents who’d grown accustomed to serving those consumers in a predictable, profitable, manner.
In the music industry, anything that let individual consumers share digital music files reduced the revenues, profits, power, and control of record labels. Pre-digitization, these powerful incumbents determined what music got recorded and how it was packaged, distributed, presented, and priced. It was a comfortable business model that gave us the music industry “as we knew it.” The Internet undermined it entirely.
Powerful incumbents never fade quietly into the night when challenged. They fight, using whatever weapons they can muster. In our society, the most effective ways to undermine new technological and economic opportunities tend to lie in law, regulation, and public policy. The record labels fought – largely successfully – to apply and reinterpret existing laws and to change laws in ways favorable to their interests.
There’s the pattern: Technology creates opportunities. New businesses exploit those opportunities. Consumers benefit. Powerful incumbents fear their loss of control. Threatened incumbents seek allies in government. Government changes laws and regulations to protect incumbent interests. Media campaigns “educate” the public on the merits of the new policies. The new laws ensure that the next wave of technological change runs largely through the powerful incumbents, rather than against them.
By 2003, I had distilled this pattern, showed numerous ways that it had already unfolded, predicted that it would soon hit parts of our economy and our lives far more significant than the music industry, and suggested some ways that we might prepare ourselves for the coming battles.
It took another two years to get my analysis published. It went largely unnoticed. Twelve years later, then-Senator Ben Sasse described the ways that this pattern had forever disrupted the dynamics of employment. This, too, went largely unnoticed.
Today, we see that disruptive pattern threatening the most basic of our civil liberties. Its manifestation in the arenas of speech, propaganda, and censorship is clear. Consider how each step in the process I identified above has played out here:
Technology creates opportunities. The Internet opened entirely new vistas for the creation and exchange of ideas, information, theories, opinions, propaganda, and outright lies.
New businesses exploit those opportunities. The companies founded since 1995 that created and control the world’s most important conduits for information have joined the ranks of history’s most powerful entities.
Consumers benefit. The centrality of these communication systems to our lives (for better or for worse) proves that they confer real value.
Powerful incumbents fear their loss of control. The twin political shocks of 2016 – Brexit and Donald Trump – highlighted the extent to which official channels had lost control of the narrative. With the entirety of elite media, government, big business, and the intelligentsia aligned behind Remain and Hillary, the newly empowered masses understood – for the first time – that there were viable alternatives to the official story.
Threatened incumbents seek allies in government. A coalition of elite forces assembled quickly, laser-focused on stomping out the populist threat. Masses empowered to conduct their own analyses, draw their own conclusions, and share their opinions among themselves threatened the stability of the power structure “as we know it.”
Government changes laws and regulations to protect incumbent interests. Prior to Musk’s Twitter, the entirety of Silicon Valley committed itself to “protecting” the public from “disinformation,” roughly defined as anything that threatened to undermine an official, sanctioned narrative. Allies throughout the administrative state, Congress, and the Biden White House are working to embed those “protections” in law.
Media campaigns “educate” the public on the merits of the new policies. The same mainstream media that vilified Napster, Grokster, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing is now working to turn public opinion against the evil purveyors of alleged “disinformation.”
Will the information age be an era of informed, empowered citizens – or an era of a dominant, information-controlling elite? Stay tuned. That’s the question we need to answer.
As has been carefully documented, under cover of the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative, the Global Elite is implementing long-planned and profound changes to 200 areas of human life.
Needless to say, with some people already resisting and more people likely to perceive the truth of what is happening and join the resistance with the passage of time, policing the imposition of this program will be a critical factor in ensuring its success.
As indicated then, just one area in which profound change will take place is policing.
Future policing will be done by a smaller number of militarily-equipped police, transhuman police and technocratic police supported by corporate private security technology. In this article, I will briefly outline the key changes to policing, in these three distinct categories, and also explain why these changes must be resisted and how we can do this most effectively.
Fewer and MilitarizedPolice
Reflecting a longer term trend, in 2019 the International Association of Chiefs of Police reported that ‘Law enforcement agencies across the United States are struggling to recruit and hire police officers.’ While police killings of innocent civilians – see ‘Mapping Police Violence’ and ‘Not just “a few bad apples”: U.S. police kill civilians at much higher rates than other countries’ – failed to rate a mention in the report, it did at least acknowledge ‘Scrutiny of the police, cellphone recordings of interactions between the police and public, media coverage, and popular entertainment portrayals of police have led many young people to view police differently than their parents may have.’ See ‘The State of Recruitment: A Crisis for Law Enforcement’.
In late 2021, two years into policing the pandemic, US police reported a substantially increased rate of retirement and resignation among police officers, with more than five times as many police leaving the New York Police Department in 2021 as left in 2020. According to the report: ‘In the wake of a spasmodic year of protests and pandemic, plus an aftermath of violent crime, the profession may be fast approaching a generational and possibly historic reckoning.’ See ‘Law enforcement faces unprecedented challenges in hiring and keeping recruits’.
But on top of long-standing issues in relation to police numbers exacerbated by political direction of policing behaviour while enforcing ‘pandemic’ lockdown measures, it is clear that the number of serving police has been reduced throughout the past three years by using two additional mechanisms: In many places, forcing those who resisted the ‘kill shot’ to resign from service – see, for example, ‘Victoria Police facing exodus due to draconian Covid rules’ – and, everywhere, by killing off a proportion of the police who were mandated to take the shot (which will continue to have impact in the years ahead).
Apart from this, the damaged reputation police suffered as a result of their role in enforcing the Elite program against those people willing to nonviolently protest the violation of their constitutional and human rights, has meant that the conscience-based resignation rate of police has risen – see, for example, ‘Conscientious Resignation of Police Officer in Australia’ – while recruitment has suffered in many places.
In any case, two critical questions to ask are these: Were government policies that led to police violence during the pandemic designed to provoke public anger and induce police retirements and resignations as ways of reducing police numbers easily? And was official interference in police decisions about whether or not to investigate injection deaths partly designed to disenchant conscientious officers and induce further resignation/retirements?
Why would governments do this? Could it be part of a plan to facilitate the transformation of how policing is conducted? After all, the World Economic Forum has been clear about the Elite intention to robotize the workforce, with more than half of human workers projected to be replaced by robots within a few years. See ‘Machines Will Do More Tasks Than Humans by 2025 but Robot Revolution Will Still Create 58 Million Net New Jobs in Next Five Years’. So why should we expect police to be forced out of the workforce, one way or another, at a lesser rate than elsewhere?
Moreover, there is an additional problem: Any human police officer with a reasonably ‘normal’ psychological profile has a conscience. And these will not serve well in enforcing the coming technocratic order.
Separately from the numbers issue, the ongoing militarization of police forces around the world has been noted by many scholars. For a summary of some issues in relation to policing in the USA, see this article written in 2017: ‘Why are Police in the USA so Terrified?’
But it is clear that the trend to militarize policing has been accelerating for some years. In a recent article US constitutional attorney John Whitehead succinctly elaborates this trend as just one of the features to be expected from the US government in 2023:
‘Militarized police. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are moving into the next phase of the transformation, turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.’ See ‘What to Expect from the Government in 2023? More of the Same’ and ‘Stingray Tracking Devices: Who’s Got Them?’
So police numbers are being reduced and police are being militarized. But that is not all.
Transhuman Police
A critical component of the Elite program is to turn those not killed into transhuman slaves.
While many people involved in this field are concerned with treating disabilities to improve the life experience of those afflicted, and some are engaged in ongoing discussions to consider the ethical issues this raises, it is clear that this is the sanitized version of a program that has far more hideous implications. For a sanitized version, watch this video of a World Economic Forum discussion held on 24 January 2020: ‘When Humans Become Cyborgs’.
But, for the Elite, there is little point deploying these technologies unless they can be controlled by Elite agents. After all, as the World Economic Forum made clear in 2016, by 2030 ‘You’ll Own Nothing. And You’ll Be Happy.’ See ‘8 predictions for the world in 2030’.
Obviously, if you are to own nothing and be happy about it, either you have reached some exalted state of human consciousness in which possessions no longer matter or someone is messing with your mind so that you believe what is not true.
And the best way to mess with someone’s mind is to implant a microchip into their body that enables control of that mind by someone else.
After all, altering what people think, feel, believe and do – through genetic manipulation and implanting technologies – is the very essence of transhumanism. So, to reiterate, transhumanists don’t want individuals with free will, they want individuals whose thoughts, feelings and behaviour can be controlled; that is, they want slaves. While this is explained at some length in the article ‘Beware the Transhumanists’ above, it is also made emphatically clear by World Economic Forum spokesperson, Professor Yuval Noah Harrari, in a 3-minute video which includes these words:
COVID is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize, total biometric surveillance.
We now see mass surveillance systems established, even in democratic countries which previously rejected them, and we also see a change in the nature of surveillance. Previously, surveillance was mainly above the skin, now it’s going under the skin….
In summary then, the technology now available after decades of effort enables receiver nanochips to be sprayed, injected or otherwise implanted into human bodies. With the ongoing deployment of 5G (which includes extensive space and ground-based technologies: see ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’), just one outcome of these combined technologies is that it will be possible to direct the individual behaviour of each person so implanted with directions from an external source.
You can watch a description of how the Covid-19 shots have been used to inject nanotechnology into the bodies of people which, under the direction of other individuals via EMF signals, can be assembled to establish a permanent communication and control link between the transhuman and those responsible for controlling it. Watch Maria Zeee’s interview of Dr. David Nixon who shows real time video footage of the nanotechnology inside the Covid-19 injections assembling robotic arms that guide the nanotechnology development: ‘World First: Robotic Arms Assembling Via Nanotech Inside COVID-19 “Vaccines” – Filmed in Real Time’.
There is another excellent video interview by Dr. Faiez Kirsten of Dr. Ana Mihalcea discussing the transhumanist agenda. This includes consideration of how geoengineering – by spraying metal particulates (such as aluminium, barium and strontium) and synthetic biology into the atmosphere – is being used to modify all life on this planet (‘to modify every cell, every microbe, to digitize it and then to fuse it in its natural state with synthetic biology’), the role of electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) such as 5G in this scheme, and the purpose of nanotechnology ingredients in the injections. In essence, they conclude,besides killing vast numbers of people, they want to control the minds of those left alive. In summarizing, Mihalcea emphasised that her research demonstrates that the unvaccinated are not safe and they must take further action to defend their health from the synthetic biology attacks through atmospheric geoengineering and contaminated food.
‘We are running out of time as the human species and our planet is being destroyed via synthetic biology. If you want to survive and you want your children and grandchildren to have a chance of survival you must rise now and you must fight.’ Watch ‘A Discussion with Dr Ana Mihalcea on Transhumanism and EDTA Chelation’.
Moreover, given that the control technology of its transhuman slaves will be owned by corporate executives, this means that the Elite will be able to control everything from the launch of nuclear weapons (by using remote control to direct the chosen individual in a particular chain of command to order [or execute] the launch of one or more nuclear weapons at the target[s] nominated at the time[s] specified), deploy ‘cyborg soldiers’, ‘cyborg workers’ and ‘cyborg consumers’ to do as directed and, of course, ‘cyborg police’ to carry out the orders issued by those controlling the command technology.
In the case of transhuman police, this could range from duties resembling those now performed by police to any other task whatsoever to which they are assigned. And because the implanted chip will override free will, the transhuman individual will have no awareness of choice and will simply robotically perform the tasks delivered by an artificial intelligence program to the technological implants in its body and brain.
So whether programmed to issue a fine, kill a noncompliant individual, forcibly relocate one or more people from a rural area to the nearest ‘smart city’ or simply go home, the cyborg police officer will do as directed without thought or feeling of its own.
Technocratic Police and Corporate Private Security
And this is clearly evident in relation to police work where, beyond even the measures outlined above, a substantial range of new technologies will robotize policing, particularly in relation to primary functions: surveillance and control.
In essence, an increasing number of policing functions are being technologized to make policing more ruthlessly efficient. This involves use of a range of technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Bodies (IoB), the Internet of Places (IoP), artificial intelligence (AI), geofencing, digital identity, surveillance and facial recognition (3D) cameras, smart street poles and lights (which gather data via facial recognition cameras and environmental sensors, display digital signage and use speakers to instruct the immediate population how to behave), license plate readers and vehicle kill switches as well as autonomous and electromagnetic weapons.
But how these technologies are combined and deployed varies. To illustrate this, consider the Israeli private security company Gabriel Protects which offers a suite of surveillance and control services: ‘Preempt and contain physical threats in real time with smart technology. Billions are spent monitoring and recording security incidents. Gabriel detects and responds to them. Gabriel’s next generation security technology instantly detects and automates the response to violent threats, saving precious time and lives.’
As Whitney Webb explains: ‘much of the company’s future vision coincides with the vision of the intelligence agencies backing it – pre-crime, robotic policing and biometric surveillance.’ Hence, under the guise of stopping mass shootings ‘a surveillance system backed by top Mossad, CIA and FBI officials is being installed in schools, houses of worship, and other civilian locations’ throughout the USA. The Gabriel system includes the company’s ‘threat detection’ technology, which involves the use of ‘smart cameras’ that use AI as well as facial recognition and related technologies to detect weapons, ‘fights’ and ‘abnormal behavior’ in a particular area. The cameras throughout a facility, along with ‘smart shield’ panic buttons which can be activated both manually and remotely, are meant to act as ‘activation triggers’, with the triggering largely automated and managed by AI. When a trigger is set off, the Gabriel system enters the appropriate ‘alert mode’, which includes emergency, panic, silent panic and yellow (for minor incidents). Once activated, the panic button offers two-way communication, a live video feed and gunshot detection by acoustic means. See ‘CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US’ and ‘Anonymous Philanthropist Gifts Israeli Life-Saving Tech to 500 US Synagogues and Schools’.
As one would expect, given the company is providing technologies that enable implementation of the Elite program to lock us all into their ‘smart cities’, Gabriel intends to expand far beyond schools and houses of worship to retail stores, warehouses, data centers and banks and is already heavily reliant on AI and machine learning while using drones and robots as security tools. Beyond this, it intends to develop predictive policing (‘pre-crime’) capabilities. See ‘Incident Response Solutions’ and ‘Disrupting Legacy Security’. Of course, ‘pre-crime’ protocols are designed to ‘eliminate public dissent’. See ‘CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US’.
Gabriel is not the only corporation researching and providing technologies in these fields. Another prominent corporation is Palantir Technologies. There are others.
Needless to say, these corporations have close ties to the academy, the military and the intelligence community as well, all of which are also playing key roles in imposing the Elite program.
Obviously, these surveillance and control technologies are being widely deployed around the world with countries like China, Israel (including in Palestine) and the United States leading the way.
But ‘explosive ordnance disposal robots’ have been used offensively since 1993 when a one-metre tall, 218-kilogram remote-controlled robot was sent into an apartment, used a television camera to locate a suspect hidden in a cupboard and then, under the remote-control direction of a technician, used a high-pressure water gun to knock the shotgun out of the suspected gunman’s hands, enabling the county police department’s version of a SWAT team to arrest him.
More dramatically, a police ‘killer robot’ has already been used to kill a suspected gunman. In 2016, police in Dallas in the USA crudely attached a bomb to a robot originally designed to investigate and safely discharge explosives and then deployed it near a suspect where it was detonated remotely. See ‘How the Dallas Police Used an Improvised Killer Robot to Take Down the Gunman’.
The fundamental point is that human police officers are being replaced by a series of technologies guided by artificial intelligence and ending with the use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS).
And these technologies are already being widely deployed and used as part of the ongoing Elite program to build a technocratic state that will subvert human identity, privacy, dignity, volition and freedom.
How Can We Resist this Technocratic Policing Model Effectively?
A long-planned, vast range and parallel sequence of measures is being rapidly implemented to capture political, social, economic, medical and technological control of the human population. The intention is to kill off a substantial proportion of humanity and imprison those left alive as transhuman slaves in the Elite’s technocratic (surveillance and control) ‘smart’ cities, which will be policed by a range of current and emerging technologies.
And, as I have explained previously – see ‘We Are Being Smashed Politically, Economically, Medically and Technologically by the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’: Why? How Do We Fight Back Effectively?’ – because the Global Elite controls conventional political, economic, financial, technological, medical, educational, media and other important levers of society, the Elite has control of how events unfold while simultaneouslygiving it control of the narrative about what is taking place. As a result, the truth about the Elite planis easily concealed. Consequently, effective resistance to this complex and sophisticated program requires a response based on a full understanding of the Elite’s deeper agenda and that is equally sophisticated.
This means that we cannot rely on any conventional channel, political, legal or otherwise.
Hence, the most effective defence against any aspect, including the technocratic policing model, of the full program that Elite agents in the World Economic Forum and elsewhere are imposing on us is to take action now that prevents foundational components of their program from being put into place.
Obviously, this requires us to clearly identify the foundations on which the Elite program is being built and to then mobilize as many people as possible, in as many countries as possible, to nonviolently noncooperate with the building of these foundations or, to the extent they exist already, to disrupt them so that they cannot function effectively.
And the time to do this is now.
If we do this effectively, the technologies – including 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), digital ID, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), geofencing, a plethora of ‘Smart’ devices, and the surveillance and facial recognition cameras – that will make the technocratic policing model possible will be stopped before they are fully deployed.
So if you are interested in being strategic in your resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.
One of these strategic goals reads as follows:
‘To cause the police and security personnel to resist the introduction and use of those surveillance and control technologies – including (among many others) 5G, 6G, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), geofencing, smart street poles and lights (which gather data via facial recognition cameras and environmental sensors, display digital signage and use speakers to instruct the immediate population how to behave), digital identity, surveillance and facial recognition cameras, license plate readers, vehicle kill switches, drones (used as aerial police), robots (including as a ‘deadly force option’), autonomous and electromagnetic weapons – that are being used to transform policing to collect your data and control your behaviour as part of the ongoing Elite program to build a technocratic prison that will subvert human identity, human dignity, human volition, human privacy and/or human freedom.’
So one vital role that you can play is to talk to individual police officers that you know personally, inform them of the role they are slated to play in the coming technocratic order, and invite them to consider the implications of this for them and their loved ones, and then listen to them as they talk about it.
And you can visit your local police station or write them a letter to raise awareness of what is happening and ask them to consider whether this is a future they wish for themselves or their family.
In addition, you can download the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 23 languages (Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Slovak and Turkish) with several more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘One-page Flyer’.
Moreover, if this strategic resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).
And if you want to organize a mass mobilization, such as a rally, at least make sure that one or more of any team of organizers and/or speakers is responsible for inviting people to participate in this campaign and that some people at the event are designated to hand out the one-page flyer about the campaign.
Ideally, prior to any such event, a liaison team should visit the police responsible for policing the event to discuss it but also raise awareness of how police are being used by the Elite in this context. See ‘Nonviolent Activism and the Police’ and ‘How To Do Police Liaison’.
At this point too, it is worth keeping in mind that in virtually all contexts, including when dealing with police, it is invaluable to listen, deeply. This should help you understand the other person better and might help open a door to greater awareness on their part in the future. In any case, it is a great gift, whatever its immediate outcome. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.
In parallel with our resistance, we must create the political, economic and social structures that serve our needs, not those of the Elite. That is why long-standing efforts to encourage and support people to grow their own biodynamic/organic food – see ‘23 Reasons You Should Start a Garden in 2023’ – participate in local trading schemes (involving the exchange of knowledge, skills, services and products with or without a local medium of exchange), such as Local Exchange Trading Systems and Community Exchange Systems, as well as develop structures for cooperation, governance, nonviolent defence and networking with other communities are so important.
Conclusion
To summarize very simply: human police officers are being militarily-equipped in the short term, to be rapidly replaced by transhuman police as well as ‘technocratic police’: artificial intelligence (AI) that will direct policing and involve transhuman police, drones, robots and autonomous & electromagnetic weapons systems (AWS). This is one small but vital part of the comprehensive Elite program to kill off most of us, enslave those left alive, enclose the Commons forever and capture all wealth.
Hence, one valuable function we can perform is to inform police of this and invite them to resist it.
Of course, it is not a message that will resonate with every police officer or every member of the community, for that matter. As you already know.
But it is crucial that we keep telling the truth and giving people chances to perceive the deeper Elite program and what it portends for humanity. Because it is not a future any human being, including police officer, should want to embrace if they value human identity, privacy, dignity, volition and freedom for themselves or their children.
Hence, our persistence in presenting the information, while listening well when appropriate, is crucial to mobilizing the resistance we need to succeed.
4/2023
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
The U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card.
The government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.
According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.
As the Editorial Board for the Washington Post warns:
“The nation has reached a hazardous moment where what it owes, as a percentage of the total size of the economy, is the highest since World War II. If nothing changes, the United States will soon be in an uncharted scenario that weakens its national security, imperils its ability to invest in the future, unfairly burdens generations to come, and will require cuts to critical programs such as Social Security and Medicare. It is not a future anyone wants.”
The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.
In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in.
The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.
Interest payments on the national debt are estimated to top $395 billion this year, which is significantly more than the government spends on veterans’ benefits and services, and according to Pew Research Center, more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.
According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”
We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.
None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making while the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.
Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.
If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.
Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.
We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.
In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.
“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.
Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.
We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.
We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.
It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”
Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.
On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.
It’s all gone downhill from there.
Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.
While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.
To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
Of course, we’re the ones who have to repay that borrowed debt.
For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.
Mind you, that’s only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.
As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex continues to get richer, while the American taxpayer is forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.
This is no way of life.
Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.
We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.
There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.
Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.
Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.
Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.
And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.
But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?
What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?
What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?
After the Crash 