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2024 Is the New 1984: Big Brother and the Rise of the Security Industrial Complex
By John & Nisha Whitehead
Source: The Rutherford Institute
“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell, 1984
2024 is the new 1984.
Forty years past the time that George Orwell envisioned the stomping boot of Big Brother, the police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state.
Fueled by a melding of government and corporate power—the rise of the security industrial complex—this watershed moment sounds a death knell for our privacy rights.
An unofficial fourth branch of government, the Surveillance State came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military.
It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.
This is the new face of tyranny in America: all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful.
Tread cautiously.
Empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, the Surveillance State is making the fictional world of 1984, Orwell’s dystopian nightmare, our looming reality.
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”
Indeed, in our present age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives.
Everything is increasingly public.
What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.
This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.
In this way, 1984, which depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism, has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.
There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.
Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.
With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.
As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.
What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.
It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy enshrined in the Fourth Amendment and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.
The police state has become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector.
Over the past 50-plus years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.
The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.
The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.
The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.
Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.
Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”
In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.
The fourth revolutionary shift may well be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.
While the guarantee of safety afforded by these surveillance nerve centers remains dubious, at best, there is no disguising their contribution in effecting a sea change towards outright authoritarianism.
For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.
As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.
These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.
Finally, 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.
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.”
No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.
After all, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Surveillance State never sleeps.
Disinformation, 1984-2023
By Peter Van Buren
Source: We Meant Well
Orwell, again. 1984 was prescient on so many concepts that it seems it was written for the Biden era. Underlying it all is the concept of disinformation, the root of propaganda and mind control. So it is in 2023. Just ask FBI Director Chris Wray. Or Facebook.
George Orwell’s novel explores the concept of disinformation and its role in controlling and manipulating society. Orwell presents a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime, led by the Party and its figurehead Big Brother, exerts complete control over its citizens’ lives, including their thinking. The Party employs a variety of techniques to disseminate disinformation and maintain its power. One of the most prominent examples is the concept of “Newspeak,” a language designed to restrict and manipulate thought by reducing the range of expressible ideas. Newspeak aims to replace words and concepts that could challenge or criticize the Party’s ideology, effectively controlling the way people think and communicate (unhomed, misspoke, LGBQTIAXYZ+, nati0nalist, terrorist.)
Orwell also introduces the concept of doublethink, which refers to the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept them both as true. This psychological manipulation technique allows the Party to control the minds of its citizens and make them believe in false information or embrace contradictory ideas without questioning (masks which do not prevent disease transmission are still mandatory.) The Party in 1984 alters historical records and disseminates false information through the Ministry of Truth. This manipulation of historical events and facts aims to control the collective memory of the society in a post-truth era, ensuring that the Party’s version of reality remains unquestioned (war in Ukraine, Iraq, El Salvador, Vietnam, all to protect our freedom at home.)
Through these portrayals, Orwell highlights the dangers of disinformation and its potential to distort truth, manipulate public opinion, and maintain oppressive systems of power. The novel serves as a warning about the importance of critical thinking, independent thought, and the preservation of objective truth in the face of disinformation and propaganda.
Disinformation is bad. But replacing disinformation with censorship and/or replacement with other disinformation is worse. 1984 closed down the marketplace of ideas. So for 2023.
In 2023 America the medium is social media and the Ministry of Truth is the Executive Branch, primarily the FBI. Topics the FBI at one point labeled disinformation and sought to censor in the name of protecting Americans from disinformation include but are not limited to the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Covid lab leak theory, the efficiency and value to society of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, speech about election integrity and the 2020 presidential election, the security of voting by mail, even parody accounts mocking the president (about Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter.)
When asked before Congress to define disinformation, FBI Director Christopher Wray could not do it, even though it is the basis for the FBI’s campaign to censor Americans. It’s a made up term with no fixed meaning. That gives it its power, like “terrorism” was used a decade or so earlier. Remember “domestic terrorism”? That stretched to cover everything from white power advocates to J6 marchers to BLM protestors to Moms for Liberty. It just can’t be all those things all the time but it can be all those things at different times, as needed. The term “hate speech” is another flexible tool of enforcement and is why efforts to codify banning hate speech under the First Amendment must be resisted so strongly. Same for QAnon. We’ve heard about QAnon for years now but still can’t figure out if it even exists. To read the MSM, you would think it is the most powerful and sinister thing one can imagine yet seems to be imaginary, another Cthulhu. Do they have an office, an email address, a lair somewhere?
In simple words: the government is using social media companies as proxies to censor the contrary thoughts of Americans, all under the guise of correcting misinformation and in direct contrivance of the First Amendment.
How bad does it get? As part of its 2023 investigation into the federal government’s role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms, the House Committee on the Judiciary issued a subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent of Google and YouTube. Documents obtained revealed the FBI, on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian intelligence service, requested and, in some cases, directed, the world’s largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online about the war in Ukraine.
Another tool of thought control is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was supposed to be used to spy on foreigners but has been improperly used against thousands of Americans. Over 100,000 Americans were spied on in 2022, down from three million in 2021.
Does it sound familiar? An amorphous threat is pounded into the heads of Americans (Communism and Red Scares, Covid, terrorism, disinformation) and in its name nearly anything is justified, including in the most recent battle for freedom, censorship. The wrapper is that it is all for our own protection (Biden himself accused social-media companies of “killing people,” the more modern version of the terrorism-era’s “blood on their hands”) with the government assuming the role of knowing what is right and correct for Americans to know. The target in name is always some Ruskie-type foreigner, but in reality morphs to be censorship of our citizens ourselves (stained as “pro-Putin.”) Yet Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the government asked Facebook to suppress true information. He said during the Covid era the scientific establishment within the government asked “for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”
Under President Joe Biden, the government has undertaken “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge in Missouri v. Biden. The case exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and its federal agencies have gone to bully social-media platforms into removing political views they dislike. The White House is appealing and attained a stay, hoping to retain this powerful tool of thought control right out of 1984. A victory for censorship of Americans and their thoughts could be the greatest threat to free speech in American history.
Technology and a Tyranny Worse than Prison
By Bert Olivier
Source: Brownstone Institute
In an outstanding piece of political-theoretical writing, titled ‘The Threat of Big Other’ (with its play on George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’) Shoshana Zuboff, succinctly addresses the main issues of her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, Hachette, 2019), explicitly linking it to Orwell’s 1984.
Significantly, at the time she reminded readers that Orwell’s goal with 1984 was to alert British and American societies that democracy is not immune to totalitarianism, and that “Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere” (Orwell, quoted by Zuboff, p. 16). In other words, people are utterly wrong in their belief that totalitarian control of their actions through mass surveillance (as depicted in 1984, captured in the slogan, “Big Brother is watching you”) could only issue from the state, and she does not hesitate to name the source of this threat today (p. 16):
For 19 years, private companies practicing an unprecedented economic logic that I call surveillance capitalism have hijacked the Internet and its digital technologies. Invented at Google in 2000, this new economics covertly claims private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Some data are used to improve services, but the rest are turned into computational products that predict your behaviour. These predictions are traded in a new futures market, where surveillance capitalists sell certainty to businesses determined to know what we will do next.
By now we know that such mass surveillance does not merely have the purpose – if it ever did – of tracking and predicting consumer behaviour with the aim of maximising profits; far from it. It is generally known among those who prefer to remain informed about global developments, and who do not only rely on the legacy media for this, that in China such mass surveillance has reached the point where citizens are tracked through a myriad of cameras in public places, as well as through smartphones, to the point where their behaviour is virtually completely monitored and controlled.
Small wonder that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF) does not let an opportunity pass to praise China as the model to be emulated by other countries in this respect. It should therefore come as no surprise that investigative reporter, Whitney Webb, also alluding to Orwell’s prescience, draws attention to the striking similarities between mass surveillance that was developed in the United States (US) in 2020 and Orwell’s depiction of a dystopian society in 1984, first published in 1949.
In an article titled “Techno-tyranny: How the US national security state is using coronavirus to fulfil an Orwellian vision,” she wrote:
Last year, a government commission called for the US to adopt an AI-driven mass surveillance system far beyond that used in any other country in order to ensure American hegemony in artificial intelligence. Now, many of the ‘obstacles’ they had cited as preventing its implementation are rapidly being removed under the guise of combating the coronavirus crisis.
Webb proceeds to discuss an American government body that focused on researching ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) could promote national security and defence needs, and which provided details concerning the “structural changes” which American society and economy would have to undertake to be able to maintain a technological advantage in relation to China. According to Webb the relevant governmental body recommended that the US follow China’s example in order to surpass the latter, specifically regarding some aspects of AI-driven technology as it pertains to mass surveillance.
As she also points out, this stance on the desired development of surveillance technology conflicts with (incongruous) public statements by prominent American politicians and government officials, that Chinese AI-technological surveillance systems instantiate a significant threat for Americans’ way of life), which did not, however, prevent the implementation of several stages of such a surveillance operation in the US in 2020. As one knows in retrospect, such implementation was undertaken and justified as part of the American response to Covid-19.
None of this is new, of course – by now it is well-known that Covid was the excuse to establish and implement Draconian measures of control, and that AI has been an integral part of it. The point I want to make, however, is that one should not be fooled into thinking that strategies of control will end there, nor that the Covid pseudo-vaccines were the last, or worst, of what the would-be rulers of the world can inflict upon us to exercise the total control they wish to achieve – a level of control that would be the envy of the fictional Big Brother society of Orwell’s 1984.
For example, several critically thinking people have alerted one to the alarming fact that the widely touted Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are Trojan horses, with which the neo-fascists driving the current attempt at a ‘great reset’ of society and the world economy aim to gain complete control over people’s lives.
At first blush the proposed switch from a fractional reserve monetary system to a digital currency system may seem reasonable, particularly in so far as it promises the (dehumanising) ‘convenience’ of a cashless society. As Naomi Wolf has pointed out, however, far more than this is at stake. In the course of a discussion of the threat of ‘vaccine passports’ to democracy, she writes (The Bodies of Others, All Seasons Press, 2022, p. 194):
There is now also a global push toward government-managed digital currencies. With a digital currency, if you’re not a ‘good citizen,’ if you pay to see a movie you shouldn’t see, if you go to a play you shouldn’t go to, which the vaccine passport will know because you have to scan it everywhere you go, then your revenue stream can be shut off or your taxes can be boosted or your bank account won’t function. There is no coming back from this.
I was asked by a reporter, ‘What if Americans don’t adopt this?’
And I said, ‘You’re already talking from a world that’s gone if this succeeds in being rolled out.’ Because if we don’t reject the vaccine passports, there won’t be any choice. There will be no such thing as refusing to adopt it. There won’t be capitalism. There won’t be free assembly. There won’t be privacy. There won’t be choice in anything that you want to do in your life.
And there will be no escape.
In short, this was something from which there was no returning. If indeed there was a ‘hill to die on,’ this was it.
This kind of digital currency is already in use in China, and it is being rapidly developed in countries like Britain and Australia, to mention only some.
Wolf is not the only one to warn against the decisive implications that accepting digital currencies would have for democracy.
Financial gurus such as Catherine Austin Fitts and Melissa Cuimmei have both signalled that it is imperative not to yield to the lies, exhortations, threats and whatever other rhetorical strategies the neo-fascists might employ to force one into this digital financial prison. In an interview where she deftly summarises the current situation of being “at war” with the globalists, Cuimmei has warned that the drive towards digital passports explains the attempt to get young children ‘vaccinated’ en masse: unless they can do so on a large scale, they could not draw children into the digital control system, and the latter would therefore not work. She has also stressed that the refusal to comply is the only way to stop this digital prison from becoming a reality. We have to learn to say “No!”
Why a digital prison, and one far more effective that Orwell’s dystopian society of Oceania? The excerpt from Wolf’s book, above, already indicates that the digital ‘currencies’ that would be shown in your Central World Bank account, would not be money, which you could spend as you saw fit; in effect, they would have the status of programmable vouchers that would dictate what you can and cannot do with them.
They constitute a prison worse than debt, paralysing as the latter may be; if you don’t play the game of spending them on what is permissible, you could literally be forced to live without food or shelter, that is, eventually to die. Simultaneously, the digital passports of which these currencies would be a part, represent a surveillance system that would record everything you do and wherever you go. Which means that a social credit system of the kind that functions in China, and has been explored in the dystopian television series, Black Mirror, would be built into it, which could make or break you.
In her The Solari Report, Austin Fitts, for her part, elaborates on what one can do to “stop CBDCs,” which includes the use of cash, as far as possible, limiting one’s dependence on digital transaction options in favour of analog, and using good local banks instead of the banking behemoths, in the process decentralising financial power, which is further strengthened by supporting small local businesses instead of large corporations.
One should be under no illusion that this will prove to be easy, however. As history has taught us, when dictatorial powers attempt to gain power over people’s lives, resistance on the part of the latter is usually met with force, or ways of neutralising resistance.
As Lena Petrova reports, this was recently demonstrated in Nigeria, which was one of the first countries in the world (Ukraine being another), to introduce CBDCs, and where there was initially a very tepid response from the population, where most people prefer using cash (partly because many cannot afford smartphones).
Not to be outdone, the Nigerian government resorted to dubious shenanigans, such as printing less money and asking people to hand in their ‘old’ banknotes for ‘new’ ones, which have not materialised. The result? People are starving because they lack cash to buy food, and they do not have, or do not want, CBDCs, partly because they lack smartphones and partly because they resist these digital currencies.
It is difficult to tell whether Nigerians’ doubts about CBDCs is rooted in their awareness that, once embraced, the digital passport of which these currencies will comprise a part, would allow the government complete surveillance and control of the populace. Time will tell whether Nigerians will accept this Orwellian nightmare lying down.
Which brings me to the significant philosophical point underpinning any argument about resisting the drive for dictatorial power through mass surveillance. As every enlightened person should know, there are different kinds of power. One such variety of power is encapsulated in Immanuel Kant’s famous motto for enlightenment, formulated in his famous 18th-century essay, “What is Enlightenment?” The motto reads: “Sapere aude!” and translates as “Have the courage to think for yourself,” or “Dare to think!”
This motto may be said to correspond with what contributors to the activities of Brownstone Institute engage in. Hence, the emphasis on critical intellectual engagement is indispensable. But is it sufficient? I would argue that, while speech act theory has demonstrated, accurately – emphasising the pragmatic aspect of language – that speaking (and one could add writing) is already ‘doing something,’ there is another sense of ‘doing.’
This is its meaning of acting in the sense one encounters in discourse theory – which demonstrates the interwovenness of speaking (or writing) and acting through the imbrication of language with power relations. What this implies is that language use is intertwined with actions that find their correlate(s) in speaking and writing. This is compatible with Hannah Arendt’s conviction, that of labour, work and action (the components of the vita activa), action – the verbal engagement with others, broadly for political purposes, is the highest embodiment of human activity.
Philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have shed important light on the question of the connection between Kant’s “Sapere aude!” and action. In the third volume of their magisterial trilogy, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2009; the other two volumes being Empire and Multitude), they argue that although Kant’s “major voice” shows that he was indeed an Enlightenment philosopher of the transcendental method, who uncovered the conditions of possibility of certain knowledge of the law-governed phenomenal world, but by implication also of a practical life of dutiful social and political responsibility, there is also a seldom-noticed “minor voice” in Kant’s work.
This points, according to them, towards an alternative to the modern power complex that Kant’s “major voice” affirms, and it is encountered precisely in his motto, articulated in the short essay on enlightenment referred to above. They claim further that the German thinker developed his motto in an ambiguous manner – on the one hand “Dare to think” does not undermine his encouragement, that citizens carry out their various tasks obediently and pay their taxes to the sovereign. Needless to stress, such an approach amounts to the strengthening of the social and political status quo. But on the other hand, they argue that Kant himself creates the aperture for reading this enlightenment exhortation (p. 17):
[…] against the grain: ‘dare to know’ really means at the same time also ‘know how to dare’. This simple inversion indicates the audacity and courage required, along with the risks involved, in thinking, speaking, and acting autonomously. This is the minor Kant, the bold, daring Kant, which is often hidden, subterranean, buried in his texts, but from time to time breaks out with a ferocious, volcanic, disruptive power. Here reason is no longer the foundation of duty that supports established social authority but rather a disobedient, rebellious force that breaks through the fixity of the present and discovers the new. Why, after all, should we dare to think and speak for ourselves if these capacities are only to be silenced immediately by a muzzle of obedience?
One cannot fault Hardt and Negri here; notice, above, that they include ‘acting’ among those things for which one requires the courage to ‘dare.’ As I have previously pointed out in a discussion of critical theory and their interpretation of Kant on the issue of acting, towards the conclusion of his essay, Kant uncovers the radical implications of his argument: if the ruler does not submit himself (or herself) to the very same rational rules that govern the citizens’ actions, there is no obligation on the part of the latter to obey such a monarch any longer.
In other words, rebellion is justified when authorities themselves do not act reasonably (which includes the tenets of ethical rationality), but, by implication, unjustifiably, if not aggressively, towards citizens.
There is a lesson in this as far as the ineluctable need for action is concerned when rational argument with would-be oppressors gets one nowhere. This is especially the case when it becomes obvious that these oppressors are not remotely interested in a reasonable exchange of ideas, but summarily resort to the current unreasonable incarnation of technical rationality, namely AI-controlled mass surveillance, with the purpose of subjugating entire populations.
Such action might take the form of refusing ‘vaccinations’ and rejecting CBDCs, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that one will have to combine critical thinking with action in the face of merciless strategies of subjugation on the part of the unscrupulous globalists.
Humilitainment: How to Control the Citizenry Through Reality TV Distractions
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
Source: The Rutherford Institute
“Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours…. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”—Professor Neil Postman
Once again, the programming has changed.
Like clockwork, the wall-to-wall news coverage of the latest crisis has shifted gears.
We have gone from COVID-19 lockdowns to Trump-Biden election drama to the Russia-Ukraine crisis to the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings to Will Smith’s on-camera assault of comedian Chris Rock at the Academy Awards Ceremony.
The distractions, distortions, and political theater just keep coming.
The ongoing reality show that is life in the American police state feeds the citizenry’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama.
Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today: as long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.
We don’t even have to change the channel when the subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the programmers (the corporate media).
“Living is easy with eyes closed,” observed John Lennon, and that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.
As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.
Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.
“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.
On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.
This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or foreign entities.
Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.
This holds true whether the reality programming is about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in the bedroom.
It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”
A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.
“Humilitainment” largely explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the government’s brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment as things happening to other people.
The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.
This explains how we keep getting saddled with leaders in government who are clueless about the Constitution and out-of-touch with the needs of the people they were appointed to represent.
This is also what happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a language of force.
Ultimately, the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role in the business of self-government.
Look behind the political spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama, and you will find there is a method to the madness.
We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.
This is mind-control in its most sinister form.
How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.
In totalitarian regimes where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.
In countries where tyranny hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination, infantilism, the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.
As George Orwell recognized, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Orwell understood only too well the power of language to manipulate the masses.
In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of Oldspeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted).
Truth is often lost when we fail to distinguish between opinion and fact, and that is the danger we now face as a society. Anyone who relies exclusively on television/cable news hosts and political commentators for actual knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake.
Unfortunately, since Americans have by and large become non-readers, television has become their prime source of so-called “news.” This reliance on TV news has given rise to such popular news personalities who draw in vast audiences that virtually hang on their every word.
In our media age, these are the new powers-that-be.
Yet while these personalities often dispense the news like preachers used to dispense religion, with power and certainty, they are little more than conduits for propaganda and advertisements delivered in the guise of entertainment and news.
Given the preponderance of news-as-entertainment programming, it’s no wonder that viewers have largely lost the ability to think critically and analytically and differentiate between truth and propaganda, especially when delivered by way of fake news criers and politicians.
While television news cannot—and should not—be completely avoided, the following suggestions will help you better understand the nature of TV news.
1. TV news is not what happened. Rather, it is what someone thinks is worth reporting. Although there are still some good TV journalists, the old art of investigative reporting has largely been lost. While viewers are often inclined to take what is reported by television “news” hosts at face value, it is your responsibility to judge and analyze what is reported.
2. TV news is entertainment. There is a reason why the programs you watch are called news “shows.” It’s a signal that the so-called news is being delivered as a form of entertainment. “In the case of most news shows,” write Neil Postman and Steve Powers in their insightful book, How to Watch TV News (1992), “the package includes attractive anchors, an exciting musical theme, comic relief, stories placed to hold the audience, the creation of the illusion of intimacy, and so on.”
Of course, the point of all this glitz and glamour is to keep you glued to the set so that a product can be sold to you. (Even the TV news hosts get in on the action by peddling their own products, everything from their latest books to mugs and bathrobes.) Although the news items spoon-fed to you may have some value, they are primarily a commodity to gather an audience, which will in turn be sold to advertisers.
3. Never underestimate the power of commercials, especially to news audiences. In an average household, the television set is on over seven hours a day. Most people, believing themselves to be in control of their media consumption, are not really bothered by this. But TV is a two-way attack: it not only delivers programming to your home, it also delivers you (the consumer) to a sponsor.
People who watch the news tend to be more attentive, educated and have more money to spend. They are, thus, a prime market for advertisers. And sponsors spend millions on well-produced commercials. Such commercials are often longer in length than most news stories and cost more to produce than the news stories themselves. Moreover, the content of many commercials, which often contradicts the messages of the news stories, cannot be ignored. Most commercials are aimed at prurient interests in advocating sex, overindulgence, drugs, etc., which has a demoralizing effect on viewers, especially children.
4. It is vitally important to learn about the economic and political interests of those who own the “corporate” media. There are few independent news sources anymore. The major news outlets are owned by corporate empires.
5. Pay special attention to the language of newscasts. Because film footage and other visual imagery are so engaging on TV news shows, viewers are apt to allow language—what the reporter is saying about the images—to go unexamined. A TV news host’s language frames the pictures, and, therefore, the meaning we derive from the picture is often determined by the host’s commentary. TV by its very nature manipulates viewers. One must never forget that every television minute has been edited. The viewer does not see the actual event but the edited form of the event. For example, presenting a one- to two-minute segment from a two-hour political speech and having a TV talk show host critique may be disingenuous, but such edited footage is a regular staple on news shows. Add to that the fact that the reporters editing the film have a subjective view—sometimes determined by their corporate bosses—that enters in.
6. Reduce by at least one-half the amount of TV news you watch. TV news generally consists of “bad” news—wars, torture, murders, scandals and so forth. It cannot possibly do you any harm to excuse yourself each week from much of the mayhem projected at you on the news. Do not form your concept of reality based on television. TV news, it must be remembered, does not reflect normal everyday life. Studies indicate that a heavy viewing of TV news makes people think the world is much more dangerous than it actually is.
7. One of the reasons many people are addicted to watching TV news is that they feel they must have an opinion on almost everything, which gives the illusion of participation in American life. But an “opinion” is all that we can gain from TV news because it only presents the most rudimentary and fragmented information on anything. Thus, on most issues we don’t really know much about what is actually going on. And, of course, we are expected to take what the TV news host says on an issue as gospel truth. But isn’t it better to think for yourself? Add to this that we need to realize that we often don’t have enough information from the “news” source to form a true opinion. How can that be done? Study a broad variety of sources, carefully analyze issues in order to be better informed, and question everything.
The bottom line is simply this: Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, a populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.
It’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.
If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.
Oceania Has Always Been At War With Russia
By Doug “Uncola” Lynn
Source: The Burning Platform
We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
– William J. Casey, 1913-1987, Director, CIA (Republican), Statement at his first CIA staff meeting, 1981
And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars…
– King James Bible, Matthew 24:6
In the years prior to the new millennium, most readers of George Orwell’s novel “1984” would have considered the book to be a stark warning to mankind. However, in light of world events over the last 22 years it appears Orwell’s book was, instead, an instruction manual for the world’s financial elite.
The setting of 1984 took place in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic Great Britain which was a part of “Oceania”, a world super-state alternately engaged in never-ending warfare with two other global powers: Eurasia and Eastasia.
The INSOC Party was a totalitarian regime led by a figurehead known only as “Big Brother” and the “Ministry of Truth” promoted war hysteria to unite the citizens of Oceania by continuously broadcasting propaganda that simultaneously subverted autonomous thought and action.
Today, it appears the U.S. Military Industrial Complex of which President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address, has assumed the role of Orwell’s Oceania; along with the other English-speaking nations that comprise the “Five Eyes” global surveillance network: Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. In endless propaganda purveyed to rile and unify the masses, this Anglo intelligence apparatus ostensibly wages war against Islamic terror, Russia, China, and Covid-19, alternately, contingent upon which puppet politicians are appointed to rule at any given time.
What began as Operation Mockingbird during the Cold War, has been perfected in modern media as news agencies, like the Associated Press and Reuters, continually broadcast state-sponsored narratives which are, in turn, repeated by online “fact-checkers”.
Currently, 90% of the modern mainstream media is owned by six corporations doing big business with Big Business: Time-Warner, Comcast, News Corp, Sony, Viacom, and Disney.
Of course, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is near the top-of-the-pyramid where Big Brother, Big Government, and Big Business all merge into the modern-day INGSOC Party also known as the New World Order (NWO).
Orwell considered war as the means by which a collectivist oligarchy could maintain a hierarchical society by purging the excess production of material goods from the economy; thus, keeping the masses impoverished and ignorant:
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
— Orwell, George. ”1984”: part 2, chapter 9
That meant, as Orwell claimed, wars around the world are not to be won, per se, but, rather, to be continuous in order to keep the masses forever alarmed, confused, deceived, misinformed, and poor.
With this in mind, I wrote the following in the commentary of a blog post on August 20, 2021:
The Afghanistan debacle marks the official end of U.S Global Hegemony. As the globalists are sifting the nations into the NWO, they now want China to absorb Taiwan and Russia to invade Ukraine. The Fall of Afghanistan® paves the way. Dissolve & coagulate. Of course, it will look like World War III, but it’s all part of the plan because Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia but not Eastasia; except the times it has fought against Eastasia but not Eurasia.
Just like Orwell’s Oceania, we know the global ship of state (i.e. military-industrial complex) is fueled by these manifestations:
1.) War
2.) Propaganda
3.) Tyranny
Furthermore, the War on Covid-19, like the War on Terror, like Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, et al, all demonstrate how these materializations are actualized through false justification and plausible deniability.
For example, most recently, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau utilized false justification and plausible deniability (i.e. the War on Covid) to violently push back against the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa (tyranny) as Trudeau and the Orwellian Media labeled the truckers as racists, white nationalists, and a “fringe minority”. (propaganda).
Why? Because Oceania has always been at war against its citizens.
Indeed, Orwell’s vision has become an ideal lens by which to interpret current world events and circumstances.
The Truck Drivers Demonstrated the Dangers of Thoughtcrime
The Canadian Freedom Convoy cornered the globalists between a rock and a hard place: They could not lose the battle of Ottawa without sacrificing vaccine passports which are crucial to establishing a global control grid built upon comprehensive digital identification.
Yet, at the same time, the Ottawa protest demonstrated to the entire world the modus operandi of the authoritarians as follows:
1.) First, the tyrants smeared and slandered
2.) They spouted false narratives that were, in turn, propagated by the Orwellian Media
3.) They threatened the enforcement of “laws” citing justification under the guise of a faux morality
4.) As the first three steps above progressed, the totalitarians continued gathering on-the-ground intelligence on those protesting for liberty (i.e. the opposition)
5.) The sources of funding were attacked
6.) The tyrants attempted to remove, or diminish, on-the-ground support and logistics (i.e. stolen fuel)
7.) A false flag was implemented so the Orwellian Media could propagate and, seemingly, “prove” previous and current false narratives thus further justifying an aggressive response (i.e. truckload of firearms and ammo). The false flag also confused, deceived, and discouraged the non-violent protesters.
8.) While steps 1-7 above were commencing, the tyrants strategized enforcement and mustered stormtroopers who were willing to follow orders
9.) An aggressive offensive was launched against non-violent protesters by means of the stormtroopers following orders. Leaders were arrested at the start of the offensive in order to decapitate the protest. (Paradoxically, the stormtroopers were paid by tax monies collected from the very citizens who were violently removed.)
10.) The Orwellian Media propagandized the aggressive offensive against non-violent protesters as having been necessary and morally justified
Surely, these revelations did not benefit Big Brother as the eyes of the proles watched from around the world.
And look what the Canadian truckers accomplished:
– Trudeau ran and hid like a little girl then said he had Covid (in spite of his three shots) for the entire world to see.
– Multiple Canadian provinces dropped Covid mandates
– GoFundMe and the Orwellian Media were completely exposed
– More people around the globe were awakened to the tyranny we all now face
– Canadian premiers, and various political pundits, and national organizations, criticized Trudeau’s actions. A U.S. congresswoman from New Mexico even proposed the Canadian Truckers be offered political asylum.
– Frozen bank accounts generated a loss of faith in the corrupt banking system and revealed to the world the genuine dangers of a digital financial system.
– The American People’s Convoy began in California and steered toward Washington D.C. which caused corrupt D.C. party leaders to weaponize the national guard against blue-collar working-class Americans in the nation’s capitol city.
However, in spite of the world peeking behind Big Brother’s curtain in Canada, vaccine passports remain the World Economic Forum’s line in the sand. This is because digital identity and tracking are crucial to transitioning the entire globe into a cashless financial system and social credit scores.
Additionally, vaccine passports corral the compliant, identify and isolate “the resistance”, and seemingly facilitate a global depopulation agenda.
Even so, the globalists have another big problem: The truth about vaccine injuries and deaths are getting out and, thus, threatening the mainstream narrative – especially the propaganda claiming Covid vaccines are “safe and effective”.
After all, dictators like Trudeau have weaponized a faux morality (i.e. false justification and plausible deniability) by claiming vaccine mandates protect people. But what is occurring now in the bodies of the vaccinated has the potential of tipping Big Brother’s narrative upside-down.
Ignorance is Strength, Sickness is Health, Fauci is Wise, and Covid Vaccines are Safe and Effective
In late 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book “The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” was published in time to land under living room pine trees at Christmas. Robert Kennedy is former president John F. Kennedy’s nephew; he is politically liberal, an environmental activist, a children’s advocate, and his book contains 2,194 well-documented citations – all of which are extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth to dispute.
Furthermore, on January 6, 2022 U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled against the FDA to suppress data on Covid vaccine adverse events for 75 years. The recently released documents have revealed “1,291 different adverse events following vaccination”, according to “data Pfizer submitted to FDA from its clinical trials in support of a COVID-19 vaccine license”.
Pursuant to a January 24, 2022 roundtable discussion on Covid vaccine “efficacy and safety”, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin regarding data from the Department of Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) provided by three military whistleblowers and showing a “significant increase in registered diagnoses on DMED for miscarriages, cancer, and many other medical conditions in 2021 compared to a five-year average from 2016-2020.”
In response, the military and online “fact-checkers” claimed the DMED data was not correct for the years 2016 through 2020. But how could data glitches have been addressed in 2021 that weren’t made known until this year?
Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was criticized in February for withholding data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 and the effectiveness of booster shots, for fear the information might be “misinterpreted” and “lead people to question the vaccines’ effectiveness”.
Moreover, funeral directors, embalmers, and life insurance executives, are expressing alarm over strange blood clots discovered in Covid-vaccinated individuals as well as double-digit excess mortality rates which are not attributed to Covid-19.
Even the Ministry of Truth’s online purveyor, Microsoft News Network (MSN), had turned against Oceania’s chief Covid advisor, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director, Anthony Fauci.
Obviously, Big Brother needed to change the channel from Covid to something else.
But, to what exactly?
After all, Covid had been a center of focus for the entire world for two years. What could possibly transition away from such a massively successful propaganda campaign?
How about World War III?
Consider the timing: The official departure date of the People’s Convoy from California was Wednesday, February 23, 2022. That same day Canadian PM Trudeau, seemingly under duress, revoked his self-assigned emergency powers. Then, the very next day, on February 24, 2022, Vlad Putin changed the world headlines to World War III.
Big Brother Said: “Change the Channel! Change the Channel!”
It was too late. The tin-pot tyrant Trudeau could never walk back his previous slander, and aggressive action, against the Ottawa protesters.
Certainly, the dreamweavers within the modern-day Ministry of Truth own the media so they can create reality by spinning narratives; and, for us proles, it is like watching a movie but with real consequences. We witnessed the Orwellian Media’s power to deceive with Trump’s Russiagate, impeachment hearings, the 2020 Presidential Election heist, and the January 6th “insurrection”.
Trudeau’s hard-line approach, and non-compromising, action against the Ottawa protesters was surely gamed out some time ago. He merely read from a pre-written script and the Orwellian Media took it into production.
But, by late February, much damage had been done.
The propaganda channel had to be changed.
Putin in Russia, like Trudeau in Canada, like Macron in France, and like other political and economic leaders throughout the Orwellian West and elsewhere are all Klaus Schwab hand-picked selections from the WEF young leaders program. In fact, until recently, Putin had his own page on the WEF website.
Of course, the first causality of war is truth.
As Putin took military action in Ukraine, plausible deniability was afforded to Big Brother and false justification was used to change the narrative on COVID, diminish and vilify the American People’s Convoy (because we are at WAR, dammit!), legitimize inflationary economic collapse, and… eventually…. shut down the internet and blame Putin for responding to economic sanctions and/or military retaliation with… wait for it…. cyberattacks..
Even “conservative” pundits like Hannity, O’Reilly, Levin, and others, immediately jumped upon the jingoistic war train and with expectations for a red wave in the mid-term elections; peace through strength, and all that jazz.
The point is this: The channel was changed to Russia and Ukraine, all the time, for both Democrat and Republican politicos and pundits alike.
Now, many reading this may believe current world events are naturally occurring, and, perhaps they are happening spontaneously. Or, on the other hand, it remains possible that those peering out from behind the eye of the pyramid, or rather, the most elite of the elite puppetmasters, are, indeed, pulling all the strings from behind the watchful eye of Big Brother.
Since Trump’s election in 2016, consider how the propaganda channels have transitioned so smoothly from one media narrative to another: Russiagate, Ukrainegate, impeachment, Covid, trade wars with Eastasia, and, now, actual war with Eurasia.
Although the geopolitical dynamics prior to Putin’s invasion, the actual warfare, and the ensuing consequences are all genuine – I believe Russia versus Ukraine is, ultimately, comparable to Coke versus Pepsi and Republicans against Democrats: endless ad campaigns saturating our televisions as the Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street investment firms rule them all from behind the cameras.
Think about it this way: Communist Russia is fighting the neo-Nazis in Ukraine that does the dirty work of the U.S. Deep State that is in bed with communist China.
Ukraine had about as much of a chance of joining NATO as Donald J. Trump being invited to join John Kerry’s, Al Gore’s, and Mitt Romney’s acapella serenade at Greta Thunberg’s birthday party. But any consolation for Vlad in that regard was just a bridge too far, even under the potential of an early nuclear winter.
It doesn’t compute.
Thus, the considerations then become a matter of ideological proximity: For the pundits on the field it looks as though the diplomacy game was lost by means of poor judgment manifesting into a comedy of errors.
But, from out here in the cheap seats, it becomes a matter of considering the timing of events and calculating the odds of specific outcomes occurring in the exact right wrong sequences – and all paired to cui bono.
At this point, any number of plausible scenarios could lead to Russian energy blockages in Europe and, ultimately, to Red Dawn the Reality Show in America.
Ironically, “Red Dawn”, a movie about Russia invading America, was released in 1984.
But I digress.
Hopefully, WWIII will not go thermonuclear, but it would be a mistake to put anything past Big Brother. Because, it seems, the globalists always have a plan.
In fact, if the Covid plandemic has shown us anything, it’s that Klaus & the Build Back Betters still have a few obstacles to their New World Order:
A.) The U.S Constitution.
B.) Red States
C.) More than 400 million guns in civilian possession.
Even now, world citizens in many places are required to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test before crossing certain local, regional, and national borders. Given what we have seen with the rise of the Freedom and People’s Convoys, as well as daily revelations on vaccine injuries and deaths, how long will vaccine passports be tolerated by peaceful protesters?
Soon, the Covid War could go hot and when that happens during WWIII, Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth will surely label the resistance as Russian-backed nationalists waging a domestic terror campaign.
Again, as history has revealed: The one-way road to hell has two lanes: false justification and plausible deniability.
World War III has allowed for further dissolution and coagulation on a global scale; and, paradoxically, brought to us by the same Big Brother who still seems quite concerned about us proles catching the flu.
So, whether as a temporary distraction or an event generating genuine, ever-expanding, negative long-term global consequences, it appears WWIII, started as a diversion and, seemingly, for purposes of propaganda and tyranny.
In a real war, Putin would not have kept Ukraine’s internet intact so Zelensky could become an international hero bravely fighting against the tyrannical Russian Bear.
The propaganda sells itself. And, last week, I overheard 4th graders talking amongst themselves and cheering on Ukraine like WWIII was a football game.
2 + 2 = 5: Hegelian Wars Benefit Big Brother & the Globalists
A puppet government may be installed in Ukraine, or it could be Russia becomes bogged down for the war to remain continuous, or, the worst-case scenario, mushroom clouds sprouting into skies all over the world.
In any of these scenarios, however, Putin’s aggression validates the global order.
It’s that simple.
Order out of chaos.
What do communists and Covidists have in common? Both weaponize the collective against the natural rights of individuals who wish to live peacefully, prosperously, and free.
Therefore, all communists and Covidists are puppets in one way or another.
Nationalists like Putin and Trump are not stupid. They fully understand what is going on behind the scenes. And, if they truly loved their countries, they would have defended their nation’s citizens from medical tyranny. Instead, however, both have facilitated, and continue to expedite, the global Great Reset by pretending to be nationalists.
In other words, controlled opposition acts as a quickening agent in the dissolution and coagulation alchemy that is transitioning traditional globalism into the New World Order.
The circles are closing and Big Brother cannot rule without permission from the plebes. Hence the deceptive narrative wars that are not meant to be won, per se, but to remain continuous.
Consider what this latest Ministry of Truth “channel change” has done to infinitely malleable minds: Ukraine has demonstrated how the Political Left is genuinely concerned about defending borders, arming citizens, and shielding neo-nazis from communists.
2 + 2 = 5
Doublethink, much?
Furthermore, as these words are typed, Canada’s Justin Trudeau is in Europe and meeting with allies “about the intensifying situation in Ukraine.” Boom. Vladimir Putin has turned an embarrassingly desperate tin-pot tyrant into an international statesman during a time of war. Just like that.
World War Three has made the Political Left heroes once again, valiantly fighting against Vlad the Bad, in ways that make Orwell’s “Two-Minutes of Hate” look like afternoon tea at Buckingham Palace. At the same time, Trump supporters, the Freedom Convoy, and the People’s Convoy are now labeled as Russian-backed terrorists and war criminals, according to Oceania’s Ministry of Truth (i.e. the mainstream media).
This is because Big Brother has identified the real enemy: The truth, those who tell it, and the spirit of free people who refuse to yield their natural rights.
Division is Unity! Stronger Together!
Vlad Putin starting WWIII has allowed political bootlickers like Mitt Romney to excoriate disgusting pro-Putin republicans as “almost Treasonous” while the Ministry of Truth has scolded the true Emmanuel Goldstein of our time, Donald J. Trump, for praising the Ukrainian president he once “tried to extort”:
Donald Trump praised the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a “brave man” for his handling of the Russian invasion – nearly three years after he tried to extort him for political dirt on Joe Biden.
The revelation that the then-president was secretly linking military aid to opening an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden, his son, led to Mr Trump’s first impeachment by the House of Representatives.
The Republican Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, has called for Vladimir Putin’s assassination as Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, and Democrats, Nancy Pelsoi and Adam Schiff, cheer in unison.
But, amidst all of the war propaganda, jingoistic patriotism, and political infighting, always remember the original timing of events:
The official departure date of the People’s Convoy was Wednesday, February 23, 2022. The very same day Canadian PM Trudeau revoked his self-assigned emergency powers and then, the next day, on February 24, 2022, Vlad Putin invaded Ukraine.
Also on February 24, 2002 Forbes published an article entitled: “A National Vaccine Pass Has Quietly Rolled Out – And Red States Are Getting On Board”:
Even as the omicron variant loosens its grip on the world, destinations continue to require travelers to show proof of vaccination. And, increasingly, a paper CDC vaccination card is not cutting it.
While the United States government has not issued a federal digital vaccine pass, a national standard has nevertheless emerged. To date, 21 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico offer accessibility to the SMART Health Card, a verifiable digital proof of vaccination developed through the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), a global coalition of public and private stakeholders including Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, the Mayo Clinic and other health and tech heavyweights.
And very soon, at least four more states will be rolling out access to SMART Health Cards. “We’ve seen a notable uptick in states that have officially launched public portals where individuals can get verifiable vaccination credentials in the form of SMART Health Cards with a QR code,” says Dr. Brian Anderson, co-founder of the VCI and chief digital health physician at MITRE.
If Covid vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission of the virus, then how do vaccine passports make sense? In truth, they don’t. But, to Big Brother, Covid mandates were never about health anyway.
On March 3, 2022 the Council of the European Union, in coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO), began negotiations on an “international pandemic treaty” that would be “legally binding under international law” and “enable countries around the globe to strengthen national, regional and global capacities and resilience to future pandemics.”
According to the European Council, the “10 incentives and benefits of an international treaty on pandemics” are as follows:
1.) Faster and better information for signatory countries about pandemic threats
2.) Greater certainty for citizens regarding equitable access to pandemic countermeasures (e.g. diagnostics, medicines, vaccines)
3.) Cost-effective solutions, based on regional and global planning, for stockpiling and production of pandemic supplies in, or near, a given country
4.) A guaranteed “seat at the table” for national leaders at all treaty for a where decisions on pandemic preparedness and response will be taken
5.) More secure global supply chains and sufficient healthcare workers during pandemics
6.) Clarity about each country’s core capacities
7.) Insight and research and development on pandemic solutions, and better sharing of R&D solutions
8.) Great confidence that all partners are doing their part, through fair accountability systems
9.) Integration of the ‘one health’ approach into the global health architecture, thereby improving prevention by connecting the health of humans, animals, and the planet
10.) Partnership and networking with national counterparts in overcoming the threat of future pandemics, and with all other relevant actors (international organisations, civil society, private sector)
What could go wrong? For citizens of once-free nations… everything; because once the circles close on digital identity and vaccine passports in a cashless system, liberty will have been just a mere memory.
In summary, as Big Brother was creating order out of chaos, truck drivers spontaneously threatened to turn the Great Reset narrative upside down. Hence the TV remote was given to Vladimir Putin so he could change the global news channel to WWIII.
False flags have been utilized to start previous wars throughout history and, at the very least, we must always consider the impeccable timing of events in correlation with specific outcomes.
The war in Ukraine now serves as cover for the final stages of a global control grid constructed both in plain sight and behind the scenes as WWIII was initiated to coagulate the new world order in the same Hegelian way WWI delivered the League of Nations and WWII produced the United Nations.
Now, if the reader refuses to accept such massive conspiracy theories on a global scale, then, at least, consider the following:
On February 26, 2022 the New York Times published an ad hominem hit piece on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in an effort to disparage Kennedy’s aforementioned book, “The Real Anthony Fauci”.
But if the War on Covid is over, as the Ministry of Truth now reports, then why the need to disparage Kennedy and his book – especially just two days after WWIII appeared to begin as Russian forces invaded Ukraine?
Perhaps because the War on Covid remains continuous. It is not over by a long shot (pun intended).
And the warfare is being waged against the formerly free societies around the world; even as WWIII begins in Ukraine.
CONCLUSION
At the end, we must understand the real war is between truth versus deception, good versus evil, and free will versus totalitarianism. Political dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn said the battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. Author and theologian C.S. Lewis claimed evil comes by the abuse of free will and, for me, this raises specific questions:
Can one stop a monster without becoming a monster too? And, if not, can Big Brother be defeated by peaceful protests?
Food for thought.
C.S. Lewis, furthermore, asserted that a good person understands both good and evil but a bad person understands neither – mainly because good people have experience fighting evil but bad people do not.
As Orwell wrote in his “1984” instruction manual:
…. no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
– Orwell, George. ”1984”: part 3, chapter 3,
Certainly, there are decent citizens in Ukraine now suffering. And their pain is real. But they are mere pawns in the revolution.
The war is meant to be continuous and Eurasia has always been at war with Ukraine.
Here, in Oceania, if a political puppet of the Inner Party willingly claimed victory in a fraudulent presidential election and later attempted to coerce citizens to choose between their livelihoods or experimental medical procedures, and was later overruled by the Supreme Court, then, surely, the puppet forfeited even the constitutional authority he knows he never had.
The proles must awaken before Big Brother’s economic, political, and societal control circles are fully closed and the real lockdowns begin.
Federal elections were surrendered under Trump and, as Covid has demonstrated, local and state are the new battle lines against Trump’s Operation Warpspeed and Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset. This is why U.S. states with GOP governors and legislatures are passing laws to secure future elections as Oceania’s Inner Party has recently attempted to pass federal election legislation – complete with an Orwellian name: The “Freedom to Vote Act”.
The actions and mandates of public health organizations, Democrats, and Blue State authoritarians are a matter of historical public record. What must occur now is for true freedom fighters to continue revealing Covid vaccine injuries, ailments, and deaths, so the vaccine passport agenda can be stopped before it’s too late.
Those who would resist tyranny must not focus upon distant wars. Instead, local parallel structures must be established, and then networked, beyond the reach of an unjust dystopia. This can be accomplished by communities centered upon common values. And, certainly, this sort of engagement is far more advantageous than blindly succumbing to the divide and conquer propaganda spewed by Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth.
An 8-year-old child in my area recently died as a result of unknown reasons. Yes, unknown reasons. Was the child vaxxed? I don’t know. But if hospital personnel, military whistleblower, insurance mortality rates and funeral industry revelations continue, people just might start asking the right questions.
And, if the right questions are asked and answered, Big Brother will be exposed.
In other words, 2 + 2 must be made to equal 4 again.
The Metaverse Is Big Brother in Disguise: Freedom Meted Out by Technological Tyrants
By By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
Source: The Rutherford Institute
“The term metaverse, like the term meritocracy, was coined in a sci fi dystopia novel written as cautionary tale. Then techies took metaverse, and technocrats took meritocracy, and enthusiastically adopted what was meant to inspire horror.”—Antonio García Martínez
Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, sees this digital universe—the metaverse—as the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.
Yet while Zuckerberg’s vision for this digital frontier has been met with a certain degree of skepticism, the truth—as journalist Antonio García Martínez concludes—is that we’re already living in the metaverse.
The metaverse is, in turn, a dystopian meritocracy, where freedom is a conditional construct based on one’s worthiness and compliance.
In a meritocracy, rights are privileges, afforded to those who have earned them. There can be no tolerance for independence or individuality in a meritocracy, where political correctness is formalized, legalized and institutionalized. Likewise, there can be no true freedom when the ability to express oneself, move about, engage in commerce and function in society is predicated on the extent to which you’re willing to “fit in.”
We are almost at that stage now.
Consider that in our present virtue-signaling world where fascism disguises itself as tolerance, the only way to enjoy even a semblance of freedom is by opting to voluntarily censor yourself, comply, conform and march in lockstep with whatever prevailing views dominate.
Fail to do so—by daring to espouse “dangerous” ideas or support unpopular political movements—and you will find yourself shut out of commerce, employment, and society: Facebook will ban you, Twitter will shut you down, Instagram will de-platform you, and your employer will issue ultimatums that force you to choose between your so-called freedoms and economic survival.
This is exactly how Corporate America plans to groom us for a world in which “we the people” are unthinking, unresistant, slavishly obedient automatons in bondage to a Deep State policed by computer algorithms.
Science fiction has become fact.
Twenty-some years after the Wachowskis’ iconic film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a blue pill or a red pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.
We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing human beings and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives.
In The Matrix, computer programmer Thomas Anderson a.k.a. hacker Neo is wakened from a virtual slumber by Morpheus, a freedom fighter seeking to liberate humanity from a lifelong hibernation state imposed by hyper-advanced artificial intelligence machines that rely on humans as an organic power source. With their minds plugged into a perfectly crafted virtual reality, few humans ever realize they are living in an artificial dream world.
Neo is given a choice: to take the red pill, wake up and join the resistance, or take the blue pill, remain asleep and serve as fodder for the powers-that-be.
Most people opt for the blue pill.
In our case, the blue pill—a one-way ticket to a life sentence in an electronic concentration camp—has been honey-coated to hide the bitter aftertaste, sold to us in the name of expediency and delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.
Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.
Look around you. Everywhere you turn, people are so addicted to their internet-connected screen devices—smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions—that they can go for hours at a time submerged in a virtual world where human interaction is filtered through the medium of technology.
This is not freedom. This is not even progress.
This is technological tyranny and iron-fisted control delivered by way of the surveillance state, corporate giants such as Google and Facebook, and government spy agencies such as the National Security Agency.
So consumed are we with availing ourselves of all the latest technologies that we have spared barely a thought for the ramifications of our heedless, headlong stumble towards a world in which our abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos is grooming us for a future in which freedom is an illusion.
Yet it’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.
If ever Americans find themselves in bondage to technological tyrants, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.
Indeed, we’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.
Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.
The key word here, however, is control.
In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have—and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in—will be connected and talking to each other.”
By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”
As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.
It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.
This “connected” industry has become the next big societal transformation, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.
Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. (By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.)
These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.
Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.
The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.
Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries. As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”
For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street. For that matter, how do you defend yourself against a robotic cop—such as the Atlas android being developed by the Pentagon—that has been programmed to respond to any perceived threat with violence?
Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.
It is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:
Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.
In other words, the IoS will rely on technology being able to access and act on your thoughts.
Fourtane outlines several trends related to the IoS that are expected to become a reality by 2030:
1: Thoughts become action: using the brain as the interface, for example, users will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination.
2: Sounds will become an extension of the devised virtual reality: users could mimic anyone’s voice realistically enough to fool even family members.
3: Real food will become secondary to imagined tastes. A sensory device for your mouth could digitally enhance anything you eat, so that any food can taste like your favorite treat.
4: Smells will become a projection of this virtual reality so that virtual visits, to forests or the countryside for instance, would include experiencing all the natural smells of those places.
5: Total touch: Smartphones with screens will convey the shape and texture of the digital icons and buttons they are pressing.
6: Merged reality: VR game worlds will become indistinguishable from physical reality by 2030.
This is the metaverse, wrapped up in the siren-song of convenience and sold to us as the secret to success, entertainment and happiness.
It’s a false promise, a wicked trap to snare us, with a single objective: total control.
George Orwell understood this.
Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.
The Metaverse is just Big Brother in disguise.
George Orwell’s 1984 Has Become a Blueprint for Our Dystopian Reality
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
Source: The Rutherford Institute
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”— George Orwell, 1984
Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21, 1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.
It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.
Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.
“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell
Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.
Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell
The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.
Orwell understood what many Americans are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs.
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell
Even our ability to speak and think freely is being regulated.
In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.
In my debut novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the dystopian future that George Orwell predicted for 1984 has finally arrived, 100 years late and ten times as brutal. In this post-apocalyptic world where everyone marches to the beat of the same drummer and words like “freedom” are taboo, Erik Blair—Orwell’s descendant and unwitting heir to his legacy—isn’t volunteering to be anyone’s hero. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always go according to plan. To save all that he loves, Orwell will have to travel between his future self and the past.
And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.
“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell
Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
Say hello to the new Thought Police.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has been working on an artificial intelligence system designed to anticipate your every move. Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence) has been designed to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS.
What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange.
So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?
We’re running out of options.
Whether you’re dealing with fact or fiction, as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
After the Crash 