Randolph Bourne famously penned that war is the health of the State, a grim reality that has haunted the American populace for over eight decades. We are taught in state-funded schools that the military goes abroad to fight for our freedoms, yet every single conflict since the end of the Second World War has been explicitly used as a mechanism to systematically dismantle the liberties of the domestic population. Iran is no different, and in fact, may be much worse.
Foreign emergencies are consistently the Trojan horses used by the ruling class to bypass constitutional constraints, normalize mass surveillance, and entirely erode the principles of liberty right here at home.
The blueprint for the modern imperial presidency was drafted during the Korean conflict, a war that permanently altered the relationship between the executive branch and the limits of power. When Harry Truman decided to intervene in Korea, he completely bypassed Congress and Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, setting a dangerous precedent that the president could unilaterally commit the nation to bloodshed without a formal declaration of war. By framing it merely as a “police action” for the United Nations, Truman fundamentally shifted the war-making power into the hands of a single, unaccountable individual.
But the usurpation of power didn’t stop at sending men to die in foreign lands; it immediately bled into domestic tyranny. In 1952, Truman issued Executive Order 10340, attempting to literally seize control of the nation’s privately owned steel mills to ensure production for his undeclared war. While the Supreme Court ultimately rebuked this specific overreach in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the die was cast, proving the executive branch viewed private property as entirely subordinate to the machinery of war. Sound familiar? Think, Anthropic.
As the warfare state rolled into the jungles of Vietnam, the financial and social costs required an entirely new level of domestic subjugation. To fund an unwinnable war without sparking an open revolt through direct taxation, Richard Nixon famously closed the gold window on August 15, 1971, entirely severing the dollar’s tie to physical gold. This singular act of financial warfare against the American public ushered in the era of fiat currency, allowing the Federal Reserve to print infinite money to fund infinite wars, guaranteeing the insidious, hidden tax of inflation that continues to crush the middle class today.
Domestically, the state recognized that an awakened public was its greatest threat, prompting the FBI to launch COINTELPRO, a massive, covert operation detailed in the Church Committee Report that treated peaceful dissent, civil rights leaders, and anti-war activists as literal enemies of the state. The political establishment also moved aggressively against free speech, passing the 1965 Draft Card Mutilation Act to ensure that young men who publicly burned their draft cards to protest forced conscription could be violently thrown in cages. The message was clear: criticize the war machine, and you will be targeted, surveilled, and aggressively prosecuted.
Hellbound and Down 