Tag: authoritarian

Freedom Is the Only Way to Beat Authoritarianism

Andy Kessler writes in his latest Wall Street Journal column that the U.S. “is strong precisely because we don’t all think the same way. New ideas come from new ways of thinking.” Kessler puts it so well. We individuals generally see the present and future very differently, and it’s this very division praised by Kessler that powers so much advance.

The entertainment industry explains the business meaning of Kessler’s thinking well. Chevy Chase was offered the role of Otter in Animal House, but chose Foul Play instead. Donald Sutherland was offered $20,000 plus gross points in Animal House, but instead held out for $35,000 minus the points given his deep belief that the small movie wouldn’t generate much box office.

Chase and Sutherland’s errant business choices remind us that the good and great decisions are rarely obvious at the time. The previous truth would in a better world awaken the political class to how wrongheaded its actions vis-à-vis TikTok are. Implicit in their attacks and their legislative role in a TikTok ban is that TikTok’s alleged CCP-generated popularity will be used to spy on Americans with an eye on bringing the CCP’s authoritarian ways to the United States.

More realistically, data on Americans is the most valuable in the world, and it’s already sold around the world for exactly that reason. Which is a reminder that data on the American people already existed (and will exist) in abundance with or without TikTok, and it will be sold around the world (including to producers, politicians, or both in China) with or without TikTok.

At the same time, the desire among the world’s producers to know about us Americans is something to celebrate, not legislate against: they want to know about us because we’re the most productive people on earth. The better they understand us, the better their ability to meet and lead our needs.

What’s important is that the prosperity of the American people is, per Kessler, borne of freedom; of Americans disagreeing about everything and getting to vivify their discordant viewpoints in the marketplace. Economic progress is the happy end result of disagreements expressed. We generally describe those who express disagreements via the profit motive as entrepreneurs.

Bringing the genius of disagreement back to TikTok, protectionist U.S. politicians shouldn’t seek a ban, rather they should allow commerce in the U.S. to freely run its course. And they should do so confidently based on what happens every day in the United States.

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The Political Left Has Proven Beyond a Doubt That They Are Authoritarians

Nearly 20 years ago when I started my work in the independent media the common mantra among my peers was noting the existence of the “false left/right paradigm” – The idea that Democrats and Republicans were essentially the same and were working towards the same exact authoritarian goals. This was before the Ron Paul movement and the libertarian/patriot shift within conservative circles when Neocons (fake conservatives) dominated all Republican discourse.

In the 16 years since there has been some interesting developments at the state level, with a return to true conservative and constitutional principles. Conservative ideals were on the verge of death in the early 2000s, but thanks to Ron Paul and others there has been a resurgence. The false left/right paradigm still applies in many ways and we have to remain vigilant, but the most blatant RINO frauds are quickly losing favor.

Wells, Sarah M.Best Price: $2.02Buy New $7.60(as of 12:43 UTC – Details)Nihilists (and paid federal provocateurs) will constantly claim we aren’t making any progress, but consider this: Decades ago conservatives used to clamor to defend people like John McCain, Lindsay Graham or Mitt Romney, now they despise such fakes (McCain was hated by most conservatives well before he died). Times are changing; this is a fact, and we need to acknowledge the positive move forward.

This is not to say that Americans should rely on politics to fix our national problems, but it would be a lie to claim that there are no political representatives on our side. A common argument against right leaning movements is that conservative ideals are “poorly defined” and that we “don’t stand for anything.” This is simply not true.  In fact, it’s leftists that are constantly changing their positions like they have schizophrenia. Conservatives have been far more consistent in comparison.

The guidelines are relatively easy to understand – Conservatives and liberty activists support a return to constitutional governance, the protection of the Bill of Rights, free markets, meritocracy, the right to choose associations, truth in media, secure borders, the protection of children from exploitation, keeping America out of foreign entanglements, moral and accountable leadership, etc. The degree to which leaders can adhere to these parameters determines how much trust they earn, and trust is the only currency that matters these days.

Do we disagree on certain nuances of these issues? Of course. We aren’t like leftists following a central hive mind, always afraid of being canceled by the mob; we argue. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as we unify on basic tenets and principles.

Democrats (and leftists in general) on the other hand have gone in the complete opposite direction. If there was ever a time when the average leftist and conservative could find common ground, that time was LONG gone. Many leftists used to be pro-individual rights; today they argue incessantly against personal liberty as if it’s dangerous to society. They used to be anti-war; now they froth at the mouth over countries like Russia and press for WWIII without any rational thought. Their methods have become violent, vicious, egregious in execution as they adopt an “ends justify the means” approach.

The political left does not care about what is right. They do not care about what is true. They only care about “winning.”

It is this leftist infatuation with the dark side that is driving the US to the edge of civil war. Would a candidate like Trump be taken as seriously under normal political conditions? It’s hard to say – He wasn’t taken very seriously in 2012. However, when Democrats started to go full bore authoritarian suddenly Trump became very appealing to conservative voters.

Why? Because he represents a big middle finger to the communists, a bull in the china shop. If you want to piss off authoritarian Democrats trying to control what you say and what you think, you put Trump in their faces for another 4 years. Does this fix our underlying national problems? No, not in the slightest. In fact, I still believe Trump distracts patriots from what really needs to be done. I’m convinced that, at this stage, only war will resolve the issue. Voting for Trump is a good way to enrage the woke cry-bullies, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for wanting that, but any real return to honor and order would have to be implemented by the public, not the government.

The deeper problem is one of unavoidable cultural division – Conservatives and patriots cannot live side-by-side with rabid leftists, nor can we accept a leftist controlled government. They have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they intend to destroy every aspect of western culture and institute a regime of oppression.

So much has happened recently that I fear many Americans will become overwhelmed and forget the recent trespasses of leftists.  In case you had any doubts at all or know people that still defend them, here are just a handful of examples of the worst authoritarian crimes committed by Democrats in the past four years alone…

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A total eclipse of the smart

We had our small respite from things as they are, languishing as we all mostly were here in the gloom of the moon as it traversed the sun. For a small few minutes we were insignificant, mere pinpricks of importance on the face of a planet in this immeasurable cosmos.

Our small worlds rendered foolish in the vastness.

We can be, if nothing else, grateful to science for understanding and predicting the eclipse and perhaps religion and folklore for its explanations because it must have been quite a ruckus for primitive tribes once upon a time. The not understanding drives us humans to understanding and explanation. Some of us. We don’t want the unpredictable.

We want to know why something is the way it is. It is in our nature. It is why, now presumably understanding the movement of celestial things, we can rest watching an eclipse with the quietened birds and the colours drifting to dark, saturated. Watching as it gradually returns to normal and not be afraid.

As if normal existed now.

It is a distance too far to bridge almost now… the path to normal. We are watching a changing world. To see it from both sides right now is an experience. The far left is convinced that the far right are totalitarianisms and the far right is utterly convinced that the far left are. It boggles the mind some days. How can both be true? But they can be. It is perhaps in this that we can find the long sought end to divisiveness among us all: Totalitarianism is totalitarianism. Both sides can agree. It is what it is, no matter what it is labelled.

Totalitarianism shifts its shadow over the light of all we humans have fought for throughout history: the right to freedom of a society and the individual and peace and the pursuit, albeit difficult sometimes, of happiness. But then there are those who live in a mechanized world where there is a black and white answer to everything and all things need to be controlled so that a prescribed outcome will happen.

Predictability is all they want and they can only achieve it through a kind of worship of power and a kind of blind obedience to a vision of a utopian future. For these groups, there are no greys nor discussion nor other options.

So many of the things the new ideologues want could never be achieved in a free democratic world and so that has to change. They can do it from the left or they can do it from the right but it is almost inevitable the way things are going. And when these things happen, people change. People change. Sometimes, most times, not for the better. The shadows drift at the edge of lives down through the generations. The broken hope. The famished trust. The bewildered pain. The misplaced anger. The children of the world’s history of atrocities will never feel safety again.

How many generations it will take to replace the fear is anybody’s guess. We still see 2,000 year old fear as if it were yesterday in the world today. It rages on the streets and fuels wars and shatters hope. We have not lived long enough perhaps. I do not know.

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The New Abnormal: Authoritarian Control Freaks Want to Micromanage Our Lives

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.

As Liz Wolfe writes for Reason, “Little things that make people’s lives better, tastier, and less tedious are being cracked down on by big government types in federal and state governments.”

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.”

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From Covid To Climate Change: Vehicles For Global Authoritarianism

As I have noted in the past, the Western world came within a knife’s edge of being completely subjugated and placed under perpetual medical tyranny by a coalition of government officials, globalist interests and corporate partners. Liberty movement analysts have talked often of “open conspiracy,” but it was not until the pandemic response that we truly witnessed the mask come off and the greater agenda revealed.

Not more than five years ago the most common retort from skeptics was that such a conspiracy was “impossible” because it was “too elaborate to organize.” Today these people look rather foolish. It is undeniable – there is a cabal of power elites, they are highly organized around the globalist ideology and they want total centralized control of society. It is an immutable fact supported by endless proof. The debate is over. The covid response ended it.

The list of crimes against civil liberties is long. The establishment and the political left (with the help of a handful of Neocons) tried to implement unprecedented authoritarian measures from business and church shutdowns to forced masking (studies show the masks are useless) to forced vaccination using experimental mRNA products with no long-term safety testing. In some countries (including New Zealand and Australia) covid camps were actually built to imprison not just citizens traveling overseas, but non-traveling citizens as well. Legislation to build such camps was pushed in the US.

A large percentage of Democrats in polls supported even more extreme policies, including:

55% of Democrats wanted fines for unvaxxed Americans.
59% of Democrats wanted the unvaccinated forcefully confined to their homes.
48% of Democrats wanted prison time for anyone that questioned the vaccines.
47% of Democrats were in favor of government tracking of the unvaxxed.
29% of Democrats were in favor or taking children away from the unvaxxed.

So, if someone tells you there “are no sides” and that the conflict is an illusion created by the “false left/right paradigm,” you know they are full of manure. There are definitely sides and the globalists are not our only concern. And though there are always nuances to take into consideration, exceptions to the rule do not change the rule.

As many leftists openly admitted during the mandates, the goal was to make life so miserable for the unvaccinated that they would eventually comply in order to survive. In this way, establishment elites and leftists could claim that people “volunteered” for the vaccines and no one was forced. What they really meant was, no one was forced at gunpoint, but we all knew that threat was coming next.

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What Just Stop Oil really wants

Everyone’s fed up with Just Stop Oil. The eco-extremist troupe’s recent stunts – bringing traffic to a standstill with their ‘slow marches’ through London; disrupting play at the snooker, the cricket and now the tennis – have turned off even its natural allies. Last week, Californian millionaire Trevor Neilson, who once helped bankroll the group, said its activities had become ‘performative’ and ‘counterproductive’. Even Swampy (aka Daniel Hooper), the notorious, tunnel-digging eco-warrior of the 1990s, has distanced himself from Just Stop Oil. When asked by The Sunday Times whether he would storm the pitch at Lord’s, as JSO did last week, he said ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, no’, adding that greens today should focus on ‘bringing communities together’. When Swampy is telling you to tone it down, you know you’ve lost the room.

The penny finally seems to be dropping among the chattering classes that Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and all its other spawn aren’t the wonderful campaigners they once thought. Working-class people, of course, had their number from the beginning, given their antics disproportionately affected those with real jobs. But since JSO decided to switch from disrupting the lives and leisure activities of the working class to those of the upper-middle class, from blockading builders to storming Harrods, from ruining the snooker to interrupting the Glyndebourne opera festival, it seems its support among the bourgeois set is starting to waver, too. Its latest exploits certainly haven’t received the gushing, uncritical coverage that Extinction Rebellion first enjoyed when it burst on to the scene, blocking roads and bridges, in 2018.

But there’s a problem. The media seem to talk endlessly about Just Stop Oil’s tactics, about whether or not they are turning people off, even though they quite obviously are and have been from the beginning, all with barely a mention of what this group actually stands for – of what sort of society it is agitating to bring about, and what principles guide its irksome activism. The great and good seem to take it as read that Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion et al have their hearts in the right place. Tennis star Andy Murray summed up this sentiment ahead of Wimbledon this week: ‘I agree with the cause – just not always how they go about expressing it.’

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At Davos, conformity is required, and debate is a cancel-worthy sin

If you’re watching the World Economic Forum’s annual ruling class confab in Davos this week, you might be surprised by the lack of disagreement among the rich and powerful there. Every panel in Davos acts as a reinforced echo chamber in which there is one problem, one objective, and only one solution. Regardless of who populates these panels and speeches, whether it’s invited corporate media, governmental officials, and/or business executives, there’s never any apparent dissent or difference of opinion expressed.

Given that the World Economic Forum is best understood as a narrative and ideas generator for the global ruling class, one might be under the impression that Davos would be a place for a healthy, robust debate. That’s why many new observers in the space have been understandably baffled by the incredible conformity expressed by speakers and attendees at the Swiss retreat.

Many noticed as former CNN host Brian Stelter, who claims to defend the importance of a free press, smiled and nodded at a co-panelist’s vicious attack on open speech. 

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Is New Zealand A Beta Test For Western Governments Micromanaging The Populace?

In the wake of the covid pandemic lockdowns and mandates, many western nations and states in the US witnessed a new eye opening level of government intrusion into the daily lives of citizens.  Some, however, dealt with worse scenarios than others. 

New Zealand in particular has popped up time and time again over the past couple of years with some of the most draconian restrictions on the public, and sadly the trend has not stopped just because the pandemic lockdowns stopped.  The island nation seems to be intent on setting the standard for authoritarian policies and government micromanagement, and a series of recent laws are driving home the reality that they do not intend to relent.  

Flashback: In 2018, New Zealand banned all offshore oil drilling exploration in the name of instituting a “carbon neutral future”, meaning tight energy restrictions are forthcoming in NZ as the decade progresses.  

In 2019, NZ banned all semi-automatic weapons after the Christchurch mosque shootings, punishing millions of law abiding citizens for the crimes of one man.  Video evidence of the Christchurch shootings is suspiciously illegal in NZ, and anyone caught viewing or downloading the event can be prosecuted.  The gun bans were enforced just in time for the pandemic lockdowns.     

In 2020, the government introduced internet censorship legislation which would give them the power to selectively filter “dangerous content.”  Most of the provisions were ultimately scrapped after a public backlash, but future censorship remains a priority for the government. 

In 2021, New Zealand Prime Minister and associate of the World Economic Forum, Jacinda Ardern, openly admitted to constructing a two tier society in which the vaccinated enjoy normal access to the economy, travel and social interaction while the unvaccinated would be deliberately choked with restrictions until they “chose” to comply and accept the mRNA jab.

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