The NSF has awarded the following nine grants since September 1:
A $330,000 grant to a postdoctoral fellowship that will “develop educational materials to help identify misinformation in media.” The associated program began on September 1, 2023.
A $1.5 million grant to Arizona State University as part of a biological sciences program. The grant will help build “new risk management strategies” and its description claims that the “rapid dissemination of information on the internet is contributing to the spread of misinformation about hazards, risks, and how to manage them.” The associated program began on September 1, 2023.
A $529,609 grant to Florida International University to conduct a study on “detection and containment of influence campaigns” that “distribute and amplify misinformation and hate speech with significant societal impact.” The associated program is due to start on October 1, 2023.
Two grants totaling $600,000 to the University of Rochester and Trustees of Indiana University for a collaborative research program that aims to increase the efficiency of an AI technique that can be applied to various areas, including “identifying misinformation on social media.” The associated programs are due to start on October 1, 2023.
The State Department has awarded the following five grants since September 1:
A $14,500 grant to Paraguay’s American Cultural Center that will be used to implement workshops that “seek to combat misinformation and promote responsible digital citizenship.” The associated program began on September 1, 2023.
A $50,000 grant to New York University to complete the implementation of a speaker series that supports “countering misinformation.” The associated program is due to start on October 1, 2023.
A $50,000 grant to the non-profit Digital Rights Nepal “to create a sustainable network of youth to promote digital rights, safer internet use and a collective resilience towards misinformation and disinformation.” The associated program is due to start on October 2, 2023.
These awards were granted as the Biden admin faces a major lawsuit for pressuring Big Tech to censor content that it deems to be misinformation.
While some of the grants focus have been awarded to non-American organizations, whose misinformation targeting efforts don’t fall under the scope of the First Amendment, these types of programs can result in the speech of Americans being targeted.
“There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame?”— V for Vendetta
Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.
Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.
With Vendetta, whose imagery borrows heavily from Nazi Germany’s Third Reich and George Orwell’s 1984, we come full circle. The corporate state in V conducts mass surveillance on its citizens, helped along by closed-circuit televisions. Also, London is under yellow-coded curfew alerts, similar to the American government’s color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System.
Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?
As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”
Clearly, those we appointed to represent our interests have stopped following the Constitution and listening to the American people.
What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?
In V for Vendetta, as in my novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the subtext is that authoritarian regimes—through a vicious cycle of manipulation, oppression and fear-mongering—foment violence, manufacture crises, and breed terrorists, thereby giving rise to a recurring cycle of blowback and violence.
Only when the government itself becomes synonymous with the terrorism wreaking havoc in their lives do the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny.
V, a bold, charismatic freedom fighter, urges the British people to rise up and resist the government. In Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.
Acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.
This way lies madness.
Then again, madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.
It is time to recalibrate the government.
For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.
By “government,” I’m not referring to the farce that is the highly partisan, two-party, bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.
We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.
Crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.
That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.
This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.
“The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”
Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.
There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.
The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.
So, what we can do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?
It won’t be easy.
We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.
This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.
We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.
We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.
We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.
We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.
In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.
That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.
In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.
The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.
In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.
Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.
How to do this? It’s not rocket science.
There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.
Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.
Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.
Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.
“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” ― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Enough already.
Enough with the distractions. Enough with the partisan jousting.
Enough with the sniping and name-calling and mud-slinging that do nothing to make this country safer or freer or more just.
We have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny go on for too long.
We have seen this convergence before in Hitler’s Germany, in Stalin’s Russia, in Mussolini’s Italy, and in Mao’s China: the rise of strongmen and demagogues, the ascendency of profit-driven politics over deep-seated principles, the warring nationalism that seeks to divide and conquer, the callous disregard for basic human rights and dignity, and the silence of people who should know better.
Yet no matter how many times the world has been down this road before, we can’t seem to avoid repeating the deadly mistakes of the past.
This is not just playing out on a national and international scale. It is wreaking havoc at the most immediate level, as well, creating rifts and polarities within families and friends, neighborhoods and communities that keep the populace warring among themselves and incapable of presenting a united front in the face of the government’s goose-stepping despotism.
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, disguised as “the better good,” marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and carried out by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
For too long now, the American people have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing—asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on—because they were the so-called lesser of two evils.
Yet the unavoidable truth is that the government—through its acts of power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny—has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
At its core, this is not a debate about politics, or constitutionalism, or even tyranny disguised as law-and-order. This is a condemnation of the monsters with human faces who walk among us.
Many of them work for the U.S. government.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released thirty-five years ago and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.
Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.
Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.
In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.
In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.
In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.
A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: what we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”
We have bought into the illusion and refused to grasp the truth.
From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.
The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, pandemics, mass shootings, etc.).
They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.
They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
We are little more than expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.
In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.
Sound familiar?
Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.
We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.
Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.
But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is transforming the populace into fearful, compliant, pacified zombies content to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.
When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society, and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”
We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Injustice is growing. Inequality is growing. A concern for human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.
Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
So where does that leave us?
The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.
Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.
When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hypno-transmitter in They Live, he delivers a wake-up call for freedom. As Nada memorably declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
In other words: we need to get active and take a stand for what’s really important.
Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.
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 real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.
All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.
Wake up, America.
If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.
“Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Authoritarian control freaks out to micromanage our lives have become the new normal or, to be more accurate, the new abnormal when it comes to how the government relates to the citizenry.
This overbearing despotism, which pre-dates the COVID-19 hysteria, is the very definition of a Nanny State, where government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.
Indeed, it’s a dangerous time for anyone who still clings to the idea that freedom means the right to think for yourself and act responsibly according to your best judgment.
This tug-of-war for control and sovereignty over our selves impacts almost every aspect of our lives, whether you’re talking about decisions relating to our health, our homes, how we raise our children, what we consume, what we drive, what we wear, how we spend our money, how we protect ourselves and our loved ones, and even who we associate with and what we think.
You can’t even buy a stove, a dishwasher, a showerhead, a leaf blower, or a lightbulb anymore without running afoul of the Nanny State.
In this way, under the guise of pseudo-benevolence, the government has meted out this bureaucratic tyranny in such a way as to nullify the inalienable rights of the individual and limit our choices to those few that the government deems safe enough.
Yet limited choice is no choice at all. Likewise, regulated freedom is no freedom at all.
Indeed, as a study by the Cato Institute concludes, for the average American, freedom has declined generally over the past 20 years. As researchers William Ruger and Jason Sorens explain, “We ground our conception of freedom on an individual rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and property as they see fit, so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.”
The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; community-wide lockdowns and health mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.
Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.
When the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the individual rights of the citizenry, we’re in trouble, folks.
Federal and state governments have used the law as a bludgeon to litigate, legislate and micromanage our lives through overregulation and overcriminalization.
This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.
Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal, and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.
You don’t have to look far to find abundant examples of Nanny State laws that infantilize individuals and strip them of their ability to decide things for themselves. Back in 2012, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg infamously proposed a ban on the sale of sodas and large sugary drinks in order to guard against obesity. Other localities enacted bans on texting while jaywalking, wearing saggy pants, having too much mud on your car, smoking outdoors, storing trash in your car, improperly sorting your trash, cursing within earshot of others, or screeching your tires.
Yet while there are endless ways for the Nanny State to micromanage our lives, things become truly ominous when the government adopts mechanisms enabling it to monitor us for violations in order to enforce its many laws.
Nanny State, meet the all-seeing, all-knowing Surveillance State and its sidekick, the muscle-flexing Police State.
You see, in an age of overcriminalization—when the law is wielded like a hammer to force compliance to the government’s dictates whatever they might be—you don’t have to do anything “wrong” to be fined, arrested or subjected to raids and seizures and surveillance.
You just have to refuse to march in lockstep with the government.
As policy analyst Michael Van Beek warns, the problem with overcriminalization is that there are so many laws at the federal, state and local levels—that we can’t possibly know them all.
“It’s also impossible to enforce all these laws. Instead, law enforcement officials must choose which ones are important and which are not. The result is that they pick the laws Americans really must follow, because they’re the ones deciding which laws really matter,” concludes Van Beek. “Federal, state and local regulations — rules created by unelected government bureaucrats — carry the same force of law and can turn you into a criminal if you violate any one of them… if we violate these rules, we could be prosecuted as criminals. No matter how antiquated or ridiculous, they still carry the full force of the law. By letting so many of these sit around, just waiting to be used against us, we increase the power of law enforcement, which has lots of options to charge people with legal and regulatory violations.”
This is the police state’s superpower: empowered by the Nanny State, it has been vested with the authority to make our lives a bureaucratic hell.
The groundwork laid with COVID-19 is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
Consider how many more ways the government could “protect us” from ourselves under the guise of public health and safety.
For instance, under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.
When combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, these preemptive mental health programs could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”
This is how it begins.
On a daily basis, Americans are already relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—their biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.
Having conditioned the population to the idea that being part of society is a privilege and not a right, such access could easily be predicated on social credit scores, the worthiness of one’s political views, or the extent to which one is willing to comply with the government’s dictates, no matter what they might be.
COVID-19 with its talk of mass testing, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports, and snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities was a preview of what’s to come.
We should all be leery and afraid.
At a time when the government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state, it won’t take much for any of us to be considered outlaws or terrorists.
After all, the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. The Department of Homeland Security broadly defines extremists as individuals “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”
At some point, being an individualist will be considered as dangerous as being a terrorist.
When anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism, “we the people” have little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
In an age of overcriminalization, you’re already a criminal.
All the government needs is proof of your law-breaking. They’ll get it, too.
“Method, Method, what do you want from me? You know that I have eaten of the fruit of the unconscious.” – Jules Laforgue, Moralités légendaires
The other day my wife attended an event at a well-appointed home in town where men in dark suits stood around to provide a sense of security that no harm would come to the visitors, even though the angel of death had visited this house on previous occasions, for it was a funeral home, well-steeped in boxing people up for the journey to the underworld. So to call it a “home” is really a misnomer; that might sound cozy, but it is really a way station for the dead. A layover.
Mistakenly thinking that she was attending a traditional wake and the dead person’s corpse would be there in a coffin, I suggested that she check out the casket and, if she liked its wood and the softness of its velvet liner, to inquire whether they had any sales going on, especially if they had a buy-one-get-one-free sale like the local supermarket often has for English muffins and other goodies.
I think she forgot to ask, but she did tell me that the elderly woman who died had been cremated weeks ago and that her ashes were in a box on a table. Boxes, ah, little boxes.
***
I have long wondered why so many people are enchanted by sunsets, why they travel to see them and gasp in wonder that the sun disappears and night comes on. Colorful yes, but not as glorious as the sunrise, the rosy-fingered dawn of every new day. Why celebrate the death of the day and our journey into the underworld of sleep and the cave of dreams rather than the dawn of our awakening and new life. Jokes aside, morbidity is not life-affirming. The true apocalypse – Greek apokalyptein, uncover, disclose, reveal – is every dawn’s epiphany when we can dream while awake and create.
***
In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses there is the story of Cupid and Psyche, the former being a male god and the latter a female human. Psyche, who has lost her lover Cupid but wants him back, is tricked by the goddess Aphrodite who challenges her, if she wants Cupid back, to take the dangerous journey to the underworld to retrieve a box of beauty cream. Psyche goes and gets the box but is tempted to open it since it would enhance her already beautiful human appearance. When she does, she falls into a deathlike sleep. It’s an old story, forever new. Switch the sexes if you wish. Take 200 vitamin pills a day as many billionaires and other assorted crazies do intent on becoming immortal gods. Good luck. Get uploaded or downloaded into a computer, whichever it is, and live forever. Maybe watch the sun set or perchance wake up. And although Psyche is given a Hollywood ending when she is saved by Zeus and made immortal with the other gods in Olympus, that’s just an old movie. We live by facts these days, not myths. Ah, boxes.
***
The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles Such as promises All lies and jest Still a man hears what he wants to hear And disregards the rest, hmm
***
Children love boxes within which they often hide their collections for safekeeping. Give a child a box with a lid and it will be filled in no time. Filled with little things that symbolize for children the vast infinity of secret space that is their hold on time. Children are born poets and philosophers who over time are usually dulled by adults around them from whom they learn to hide their secrets and the questions these secrets raise. The secrets often fester and die, only to live on in repressed lives. I knew a man who collected cigar boxes. They were everywhere in his house when he died. Most were empty. His wife outdid him with her collection of empty boxes: shoe boxes, jewelry boxes, every kind of box imaginable. All empty. Were they waiting to be filled? With what? Secrets? Another woman I knew had a box with an envelope inside marked, “My Father’s Magic Envelope – AKA Miracles.” It was empty. She pictured herself as a boxer in a sketch she drew, a child without a face with boxing gloves. I can only guess at the secrets she was fighting to remember or forget. The experimental method is based on repetition, but so too is trauma. Internment is not just for the dead.
***
Boxed in, boxed up, housed, enclosed. trapped, contained, caged , enveloped, bounded, penned, corralled, trapped: calling from my cell for help? The screen lights up with a concatenation of phantom images that seize the mind, what the Greeks called eidolon.
***
Let’s forget about Pandora’s box, which was actually a jar in the original story. Its last content being hope. I once knew a girl named Hope. She was very seductive. But I sensed she was trouble and escaped when she started to open up about her secrets. I wasn’t very curious, just afraid. So long, Hope, “it’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.” Thanks, Leonard.
***
There are countless political analyses of what drives the United States’ ruling forces in their systematic, brutal, and remorseless wars of aggression around the world. The perpetual effort to expand an empire originally built on the blood of indigenous people. The refusal to live in peace within national boundaries. The pushing of NATO expansion up to Russia’s borders. It seems insane, which of course it is. But what is behind such madness? The secret may be quite simple. Again the ancient Greeks come to mind as Roberto Calasso writes in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, quoting the historian Jacob Burckhardt, when he wrote of the secret of war-loving Sparta: “But the power of Sparta seems to have come into being almost entirely for itself and for its own self-assertion, and its constant pathos was the enslavement of subject peoples and the extension of its own dominion as an end unto itself.” Power as an end in itself. Realizing this is apocalyptic in the revelatory sense, for it opens the box on the secret nihilism of the U.S. ruling elites.
***
I am waiting to get some intimations of immortality by recollecting my early childhood and I am waiting for the green mornings to come again youth’s dumb green fields come back again and I am waiting for some strains of unpremeditated art to shake my typewriter and I am waiting to write the great indelible poem and I am waiting for the last long careless rapture and I am perpetually waiting for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn to catch each other up at last and embrace and I am waiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “I Am Waiting,” for jazz accompaniment
This image is symbolic of everything that is wrong with modern society.
A gas leak from Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal in 1984 resulted in around 560,000 injured (respiratory problems, eye irritation, etc.), 4,000 severely disabled and 20,000 dead.
Not only that, but the pesticides produced at the factory and the model of farming promoted has caused well-documented misery for farmers, harm to soil, water sources and the health of the population and a radical transformation of social relations in rural communities. And these issues apply not only to India but also to other countries.
That old advertising brochure dating from around the early 1960s encapsulates the arrogance of billionaires and their companies that think they are the hand of God, that they are the truth and the science, and that we should all be in awe of the technology they produce.
Facilitated by the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they uproot highly productive traditional agriculture, saying it is deficient. They poison the soil, the food, the waterways and people. But that’s not enough. They pirate, own and genetically engineer the seeds. The chemicals and engineering do not result in more or better food. Quite the opposite. Diets have become narrower, and the nutritional content of many food items has progressively diminished (see McCance and Widdowson’s the Mineral Depletion of Foods). Moreover, food secure regions have become food insecure.
But it goes beyond this.
Consider the amount of killer-chemicals that the likes of Union Carbide’s promised techno-utopian consumer society (Union Carbide produced numerous other similar brochures to the one presented above, promoting the role of science and technology across all sectors) has gifted to humanity in everyday products from shampoos to toys, pans, packaging, sofas and tins.
It is notable that glyphosate, the world’s most used agricultural herbicide, began life as an industrial chelator of minerals in metal pipes to prevent blockages and deterioration. It now ensures mineral depletion/nutrient deficiencies in the human body. Glyphosate affects human soil – the gut microbiome – which directly feeds the major organs. Little wonder we witness a proliferation of illness and disease.
But forget about what has become modernism’s spiralling public health crisis – don’t forget to take that money-spinning experimental booster jab because, remember, they said that they really care about you and your health.
Meanwhile, bioscience parks across the world expand and promise an even more marvellous techno-dystopia than the one already created. They are working on injecting you with nanotechnology to ‘cure’ you of all the diseases that the modernist type of thinking, products and technology created in the first place – or on manipulating your DNA-physiology to hook you up to the internet (of things). The patents are there – this is not speculation.
And as these bioscience parks expand, their success is measured in annual turnover, profits and ‘growth’. They want more and more ‘talent’ to study life sciences and health subjects and to take up positions at the biotech companies. And they call for more public subsidies to facilitate this. More kids to study science so that they can be swept up into the ideology and practices of the self-sustaining paradigm of modern society.
Of course, ‘sustainability’ is the mantra. Sustainability in terms of fake-green, net-zero ideology but, more importantly, sustainable growth and profit.
Meanwhile, across the world, most notably in the Netherlands, these parks demand more land. More land for expansion and more land to house ‘global talent’ to be attracted to work. That means displacing farmers under the notion that they are the major emitters of ‘greenhouse gases’, which, in the Netherlands at least, they are clearly not. Look towards other sectors or even the US military if you require a prime example of a major polluter. But that’s not up for discussion, not least because military-related firms are often intertwined with the much-valued bioscience-business ‘ecosystems’ promoted.
And once the farmers have gone and the farmland is concreted over under the concept (in the Netherlands) of a Tristate City, do not worry – your ‘food’ will be created in a lab courtesy of biosynthetic, nanotechnological, biopharmaceutical, genetically engineered microbes and formulas created at the local bioscience park.
Any carbon-related pollution created by these labs will supposedly be ‘offset’ by a fraudulent carbon credit trading Ponzi scheme – part of which will mean buying up acres in some poor country to plant trees on the land of the newly dispossessed.
This brave new ecomodernism is to be overseen by supranational bodies like the UN and the WHO. National uniparty politicians will not be engaged in policy formation. They will be upholders of the elite-determined status quo – junior ‘stakeholders’ and technocratic overseers of an algorithm/AI-run system, ensuring any necessary tweaks are made.
Of course, not everything that happens under the banner of bioscience should be dismissed out of hand, but science is increasingly the preserve of an increasingly integrated global elite who have created the problems that they now rollout the ‘solutions’ for. It is a highly profitable growth industry – under the banner of ‘innovation’, cleaning up the mess you created.
But the disturbing trend is that the ‘science’ and the technology shall not be questioned. A wealthy financial-digital-corporate elite funds this science, determines what should be studied, how it should be studied and how the findings are disseminated and how the technology produced is to be used.
As we saw with the COVID event, this elite has the power to shut down genuine debate, prevent scrutiny of ‘the science’ and to smear and censor world-renowned scientists and others who even questioned the narrative. And it also pulls the strings of nation states so much so that former New Zealand PM Jacinda Arden said that her government is ‘the truth’. The marriage of science and politics in an Orwellian dystopia.
The prevailing thinking is that the problems of illness, hunger, malnutrition, unemployment, pollution, resource usage and so on are all to be solved down at the bioscience park by what farmer/author Chris Smaje says through technical innovation and further integration into private markets which are structured systematically by centralised power in favour of the wealthy.
The ecomodernist ideology we see embedded within the mindsets of those lobbying for more resources, land and funding have nothing much to say about how humanity got ill, infertile, poor, dispossessed, colonised, depressed, unemployed or marginalised in the first place. Driven by public funding, career progression and profit, they remain blinkered and push ahead with an ideology whose ‘solutions’ only produce more problems that call for more ‘innovation’ and more money.
At the same time, any genuine solutions are too often dismissed as being driven by ideology and ignorance that will lead us all to ruin. A classic case of projection.
As I have written previously, current hegemonic policies prioritise urbanisation, global markets, long supply chains, commodified corporate knowledge, highly processed food and market dependency at the expense of rural communities, independent enterprises and smallholder farms, local markets, short supply chains, indigenous knowledge, diverse agroecological cropping, nutrient-dense diets and food sovereignty.
And this has led us to where we are now.
Trade and agriculture policy specialist Devinder Sharma once said that we need family farms not family doctors. Imagine the reduction in illnesses and all manner of conditions. Imagine thriving local communities centred on smallholder production, nutrient-dense food and healthy people. Instead, we get sprawling bioscience parks centred on economic globalisation, sickness and the manipulation of food and human bodies.
Although a few thousand immensely powerful people are hellbent on marching humanity towards a dystopian ecomodernist future, we can, in finishing, take some inspiration from the words of John Seymour (1912-2004), a pioneer of the self-sufficiency movement.
Seymour was described as a one-man rebellion against modernism by writer and ecologist Herbert Girardet. But as a farmer himself, Seymour regarded himself a ‘crank peasant’ and offered solutions in terms of localism, small-scale economics, a return to the land and organic agriculture.
The tiny amount you and I can do is hardly likely to bring the huge worldwide moloch of plundering industry down? Well, if you and I don’t do it, it will not be done, and the Age of Plunder will terminate in the Age of Chaos. We have to do it – just the two of us – just you and me. There is no ‘them’ – there is nobody else. Just you and me. On our infirm shoulders we must take up this heavy burden now… Tomorrow will be too late.”
“Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”
~ Terence McKenna
The word civilization from Latin is civis, which means citizen, and civitas, which means city-state. It is seen as ‘enlightened culture’ instead of barbarism. A more modern take on the Latin root of this word would be a society which has developed a writing system, government, production of surplus food, division of labor, and ‘urbanization.’ The two trouble spots here are the false belief in the necessity of government and of urbanization. Both indicate collectivism instead of the individual and independent rule, in what should properly be a voluntary society. Regardless, a so-called ‘civil society’ today is what would be thought of as a mature, progressive, and non-barbarous state of ‘superiority.’ The ancient Greeks clarified this as far back as the fifth century BCE, and felt themselves above others who were not as worthy in their minds. As time passed, a citizen was not just a resident of a particular area, but in reality, became the property of the State, or more accurately, a lifetime indentured servant.
A common truth that should be recognized, is that in order to be a citizen in the modern world, one must be considered of secondary importance to the State or nation, and therefore a pawn or slave of that State or nation. After all, initially, ‘citizenship’ is decided simply by state of birth, or by parent’s state of birth. Each individual has no say in their original and usually lifetime citizenship, and this classification, as in herd animals, is a label decided by the ruling political class. This is not any indication of freedom, as should be quite obvious, but is a pronouncement of inferiority to rule, which negates from birth the individual in favor of the State. There is no need to get further into the particulars of this type of human ownership in this discussion, but sufficed to say, how can one be considered to be free when born a slave?
The subject here is the fate of what is considered Western Civilization, and why it is doomed to not only failure, but complete collapse as a political and ruling force. In fairness, all civilizations eventually fail, and in my opinion, this is mainly due to the false belief that a system of top-down rule, restrictive laws, and completely concentrated co-existence, is necessary for sustained survival. While the division of labor is extremely useful in many if not most aspects of modern life, total concentration of populations is not mandatory for civilization to survive and prosper. But it is the desired outcome by those who rule, (consider ‘smart cities’) because it allows for easier control over the masses of common people, who always far outnumber the ruling class, and are therefore considered a continuous threat to their power.
The ‘West’ has claimed to be the most superior, most benevolent, most enlightened, and most powerful group of nation-states for centuries, but it is coming apart at the seams so quickly that its influence and grip on the rest of the world could end in short order. But is that the designed plan, or is it due to outrageous arrogance, criminal excess at every level of existence, devastation of the monetary and economic systems, widespread brutal aggression, or all the above?
Western civilization is certainly on the brink of extinction, and the sought after replacement is that of a technocratic world governing system run by the very few. It seems the further man supposedly advances, the more backward is his pretend progress. Certainly, and positively in the U.S, intelligence levels and the ability to think critically have all but disappeared; this in a time when western society is ‘claimed’ to be the most ‘educated.’ In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as schooling in this country has caused mass ignorance and stupidity over generations, all by design. In order to control the people, the West decided long ago to purposely dumb down the common population, and indoctrinate them to such an extent, as to make impotent the idea of individual legitimate thought, and any ability to question authority. This tactic by the State was successful in its mission, but also successful in creating its own demise. This is quite the irony, but then that is the way of the madness of humanity.
Consider our current reality for a moment, and then consider the outcome of this political experiment. This nation, although never totally free, was one of wonder for a good portion of its history. 170 years ago, nearly 100% literacy was common, classical education was brilliant, and children were intelligent, driven, responsible, and grown up by the time they were in their mid-teens or before. Most all were entrepreneurs and understood moral principles, self-responsibility, and the importance of family. They based their lives on logic and reason, and due to these attitudes, were incredibly valuable to the building of independent, honest, virtuous, and vital societies. If one is to compare that to today’s population, an awakening should immediately occur.
Currently, this country is in the midst of a complete and total mental breakdown of the masses, in that they are not, generally speaking, responsible for themselves, and are dependent on an evil and heinous government. The intellectual capabilities of the general population have descended into the realm of effective illiteracy of the majority, regardless of age. Hate is the new norm accepted by the proletariat, sexual perversion is in full view of all, and promoted by the State. Theft, looting, property destruction, and violence at every turn, are openly ignored, while being sanctioned by government and its complicit mouthpieces in the rotten media. Constant war is tolerated, the murdering military is lauded as heroes, while truthtellers are shamed, threatened, and ostracized, and in some cases eliminated. ‘Reverse’ racism is rampant and applauded, while society has become married to victimization as a way of life. Self-esteem, confidence, responsible behavior, empathy, and the drive to succeed have disappeared from view. Total government control, destruction of wealth of all but the super-rich, blanket surveillance, lockdowns, ludicrous and immoral mandates, mass bio-weapon tyranny, tremendous property theft, and purposeful murder of innocents is routine, and mostly ignored. Entire towns and cities are being intentionally destroyed, thousands burned to death with microwave or directed energy weapons, or by other atrocious means, while those affected clamor for more government assistance, instead of eliminating the criminal and murderous State that is at the heart of all this barbarous madness.
The governing systems of Western societies have no intention, and never have, to free or protect the people, as the only goal sought by these evil ruling monsters, is power and control of all by brute force, lies, propaganda, and murder. Western civilization will be purposely relegated to the dustbin of history; the result being the swift and merciless destruction of life and all societal cohesion. Without mass dissent and non-compliance, bogus ‘climate change,’ currency destruction, digitization of all aspects of life, concentration of populations, famine, property theft, war, and transhumanism, will lead to even more perverse behavior, idiocy, and mass indifference of the majority.
This will signal the end of an era, and the beginning of a permanent hell on earth. This was caused by the masses of collective hordes ignoring their responsibility to themselves, in favor of the expectation of total dependence instead of individual excellence. No one can hide from reality forever, as it will eventually catch up and swallow you whole.
The State cannot rule successfully unless the people voluntarily allow it, and choose to surrender to obedience and a life of slavery. Only people who will accept and be convinced of truth, and have the courage to act on that truth, can be of use to freedom. All others, those who do not want to know the truth, those who continue to cling to the State’s false narratives, and who seek a master, should be absolutely avoided, as they will never help or improve themselves, and therefore will be of no value to those who seek real freedom.
“Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.”
~ Nicolas Gomez Davila, 1913-1994, Columbian writer
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman
Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.
The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.
Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
This last point is particularly disturbing.
Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.
In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.
Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.
Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.
Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.
Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Interceptreported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.
Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.
Flagging you as a danger based on your correspondence. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.
Don’t believe it.
As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.
Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.
They definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
And they certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting police brutality and racism, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.
After the Crash 