Tag: police state

14 Signs of Totalitarianism

We all know the cons of Twitter, but one of the pros is discovering new and interesting people.

One of my favorite new follows is Benjamin Carlson, a public relations guru and former editor at The Atlantic. Carlson’s tweets are among the best you’ll find on Twitter, and he clearly has a keen understanding of the intersections between media and government, power and propaganda (both current and historically).

One of his recent tweets caught my eye, and I share an adaptation of it below.

1. Dissent is equated to violence

2. Media is controlled

3. The legal system is co-opted by the state

4. Power is exerted to quash dissent

5. State police protect the regime, not the people

6. Rights—financial, legal, and civil—are contingent on compliance

7. Mass conformity of beliefs and behaviors is demanded

8. Power is concentrated in inner ring of elite institutions and people

9. Semi-organized violence is permitted (in some cases)

10. Propaganda targets enemies of the state regime

11. Entire classes singled out for persecution

12. Extra-legal actions are condoned against internal regime opponents

13. Harsh legal enforcement against unfavored classes

14. Private and public levers of power are used to enforce adherence to state dogmas

The list is a bit troubling. At the very least, some of these techniques are playing out before our eyes. This is certainly not to say that the US is a totalitarian state, however.

There are many definitions of totalitarianism, and I don’t believe one can seriously argue that the United States has arrived there. But authoritarianism is certainly in the air, and it emanates most strongly from our nation’s capital.

While both the political Right and the political Left accuse each other of harboring tyrannical ambitions, the philosopher Karl Popper offered a clue as to when a legitimate government crosses the line and becomes a tyrannical one.

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Marijuana Law Reached Peak Absurdity in 2022

Banning a plant with hundreds of industrial and medical uses was never going to work out well, but 2022 saw marijuana prohibition reach peak absurdity, not to mention peak confusion for consumers and new businesses trying to make sense of it all.

At first glance, cannabis reform appears to be humming along smoothly. Maryland, Missouri and Rhode Island approved legalization initiatives in 2022 as states such as New Mexico and New York raced to establish regulations for legal recreational sales. New laws in mostly blue states expunged cannabis arrests from criminal records for thousands of people. President Joe Biden made moves to pardon federal marijuana prisoners and reconsider the federal “scheduling” of marijuana, a baby step toward potentially ending federal prohibition administratively. Lawmakers debated cannabis reform bills in Congress, even if the vast majority were never passed into law.

A look under the hood, however, reveals regulatory chaos in a nation where marijuana remains illegal at the federal level. For many people, 2022 will be remembered as the year “legal THC” hit the shelves, including in almost every state still under prohibition. The hemp industry, which previously brought us non-inebriating CBD in countless forms, leveraged sketchy chemistry and legal loopholes to evade regulation and sell various synthetic THC products that will absolutely get customers high regardless of where they live, making a mockery of what remains of prohibition.

Unlike traditional cannabis sold in legalized states, researchers know little about the potential risks of using synthetic THC, but “legal THC” products are now commonly sold online and in convenience stories. Sales are booming in states where traditional marijuana remains illegal, particularly among novice consumers and medicine seekers who prefer to avoid running afoul of the law. While the hemp industry has expanded access to cannabis edibles that can relieve conditions such as pain and insomnia, unregulated vapes and powerfully psychoactive synthetics are raising public health concerns.

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Was Obama the Architect of the FBI and Big Tech Illegal Censoring Machine?

With the release of the Twitter files by Elon Musk, we learned that the FBI was working with Twitter in censoring and managing messaging on the social media site.  From information being gathered in the case between Missouri and Louisiana and the US government, where The Gateway Pundit is the lead plaintiff, we have also learned that this was taking place with other government departments and other Big Tech companies.

Jason Goodman at Crowdsourcethetruth.com reminds us that Barack Obama signed an Executive Order in 2015 that ties all of this together.

In 2015, long after Ayers and Dohrn helped the obscure Illinois State Senator rise to international prominence, President Obama held a technology summit at Stanford University. After delivering remarks on the future of technology and industry, Obama signed Executive Order 13691 Promoting Private Sector Cybersecurity Information Sharing. In it, the President commanded that, “private companies, nonprofit organizations, executive departments and agencies (agencies), and other entities must be able to share information related to cybersecurity risks and incidents and collaborate to respond in as close to real time as possible.” Stanford students in attendance were probably unaware, but this order codified long standing FBI demands to supersede the fourth amendment and investigate anyone they wanted. This paved the way for the Neo-fascism now being exposed in the ongoing releases of the “Twitter Files”.

Making good on his campaign promise, Obama ensured that America would be fundamentally transformed from a Constitutional Republic into a Neo-fascist Technocratic Autocracy. This new authority would be enforced by a digitally enabled Super-Stasi made up of FBI InfraGard members, (https://www.infragard.org/) and other contractors including hundreds, perhaps even thousands of ordinary citizens patrolling on-line as America’s Secret Police.

Such an Orwellian overthrow would be calculated to happen without anyone noticing until it was too late. The merger of government and corporate technological power enabled a class of politically aligned bureaucratic elites to maintain control by monitoring and stifling opposition rather than allowing open debate in a free marketplace of ideas. These traitors have trampled the Constitution and destroyed the most fundamental aspect of American greatness.

EO 13691 states the following [emphasis added]:

Section 1. Policy. In order to address cyber threats to public health and safety, national security, and economic security of the United States, private companies, nonprofit organizations, executive departments and agencies (agencies), and other entities must be able to share information related to cybersecurity risks and incidents and collaborate to respond in as close to real time as possible.

Organizations engaged in the sharing of information related to cybersecurity risks and incidents play an invaluable role in the collective cybersecurity of the United States. The purpose of this order is to encourage the voluntary formation of such organizations, to establish mechanisms to continually improve the capabilities and functions of these organizations, and to better allow these organizations to partner with the Federal Government on a voluntary basis.

Such information sharing must be conducted in a manner that protects the privacy and civil liberties of individuals, that preserves business confidentiality, that safeguards the information being shared, and that protects the ability of the Government to detect, investigate, prevent, and respond to cyber threats to the public health and safety, national security, and economic security of the United States.

One section of this EO states that agencies are required to share assessments of their agency’s activities and provide those assessments to the DHS.   It may be helpful to get ahold of these assessments.

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VP Kamala Harris says she would “require” social media to work with The White House to protect “democracy”

Vice President Kamala Harris said that social media companies should work with The White House to combat misinformation and disinformation to protect “democracy.”

Harris made the comments in an interview with NPR on Monday. Asked about her thoughts on the changes made by Elon Musk on Twitter, the Vice President said:

“I think about this issue a bit differently, which is my deep and profound concern about how misinformation and disinformation have infiltrated information streams in our country.”

Vice President Harris referenced her role as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, where she was involved in the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections.

She alleged that the investigation proved that there was a “profound amount of intentional disinformation and misinformation targeting specific demographics to take advantage of what might be pre-existing disparities and skepticism about the role and importance of government,” and that it was done to weaken democracy in the US.

“When I see how social media is used in that way, it causes me a very deep level of concern,” Harris said. “So, what I would say about any social media site is this: I fully expect and would require that leaders in that sector cooperate and work with us who are concerned about national security, concerned about upholding and protecting our democracy, to do everything in their power to ensure that there is not a manipulation that is allowed or overlooked that is done with the intention of upending the security of our democracy and our nation.”

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It Was Always About Control

Early on in March 2020 I was leery of the hysteria surrounding Covid and decided my course of action was to be wait and see. At the time I was under the impression that I was a freeborn citizen with a number of unalienable rights, including sovereignty over my bodily choices.

So when the talk started about new vaccines being imminent, I again decided I would wait and see whether the vaccines were all they were cracked up to be. This was then, and is now, an entirely reasonable position to take, screeching from media and Twitter hounds notwithstanding. I didn’t expect it would turn out to be more like “wait and see how totally out of hand this will get.”

  • Wait and see how the government will forcibly close businesses
  • Wait and see how treatments will be suppressed
  • Wait and see how hysteria captured the media
  • Wait and see how healthy populations will be subject to house arrest
  • Wait and see how police will shoot protesters
  • Wait and see how a pregnant mother will be arrested for a Facebook post
  • Wait and see how medical services across state borders will be denied
  • Wait and see how ‘wait and see-ers’ will be demonized
  • Wait and see how family and friends will betray their loved ones

Well, I’ve waited long enough and I’ve seen more than enough. Thankfully the worst, most violent excesses have abated for now, if you exclude the ongoing carnage of short and long-term vaccine injury. There are lingering abominations from the blitzkrieg of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, but generally there is a sense that an uneasy peace, or maybe a phoney war, has descended on us.

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Banks Might Start Closing Accounts Of Customers Who Buy Too Many Guns Or Too Much Ammo

For more than half-a-century, Uncle Sam has been giving banks the legal tools to snoop into the otherwise-private affairs of their customers. Now, they are monitoring the exercise of their Second Amendment rights. 

Thanks to a recent move by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO, headquartered in Switzerland), U.S. banks are starting to build databases on their customers’ purchases of firearms and ammunition. And, of course, they are ready and quite willing to share that information with federal law enforcement in the name of providing a public service to identify “mass shooters.”

This invasion of privacy began in earnest with enactment of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which mandated that banks assist federal law enforcement in uncovering, investigating, and ultimately prosecuting violations of federal law. 

Banks have long complained about the burdens of compliance with the 1970 law and several related laws signed since then due to the multi-faceted regulations they spawned. But the trove of data these procedures have allowed banks to gather and database has more than paid for the costs of compliance.

These laws’ main focus, according to the Treasury Department, which has primary responsibility to their enforcement, has been money laundering. Over the years, however, the many-headed hydra we call the system now includes virtually any banking customer activity that a bank employee might consider to be suspicious. In fact, banks’ primary tool in this regard is a document called a “Suspicious Activity Report” or “SAR.”

Then there is the USA PATRIOT Act, passed in the immediate aftermath of the 911 attacks.

The vast reach of the Patriot Act has been a shot of adrenaline to bank “secrecy” laws, creating new sets of problems for banking customers, especially those who operate lawful businesses overseas or engage in transactions with foreign persons or businesses. Banks have at times decided it is easier to simply close down accounts of customers with overseas connections, rather than run the risk of coming under suspicion from Uncle Sam.

The paperwork required of any current or prospective customer of a financial services institution looking to borrow funds for a home, car, or other legal purpose, has ballooned since the Patriot Act’s passage. 

As troublesome as this absurdly massive paperwork burden has become for homebuyers and vehicle purchasers, the banking sector is now zoning in on something far more problematic: customers’ exercise of their Second Amendment rights here at home.

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We Now Know Why NPR Called Hunter Biden’s Laptop a ‘Non-Story’

In October 2020 when news of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop broke, which contained salacious details about his close business partnership with his father Joe Biden, National Public Radio quickly worked to bury the story. In fact, the outlet issued a lengthy explanation about why the laptop was a “non-story” and “waste of time,” despite receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funding each year through as series of federal grants.

Now, thanks to Elon Musk, we know exactly why NPR refused to cover the story. They knew it was coming and planned damage control with the FBI. 

Making matters worse, the FBI was using taxpayer dollars to pay media outlets to censor the story. After the story was wiped from Twitter and the vast majority of media outlets, with bans issued on accounts that shared the original New York Post reporting, executives sent the FBI a note of thanks for their work. The gratitude was spearheaded by former FBI attorney James Baker, who was working as Twitter counsel until last month. During his time at the FBI, Baker was behind the infamous Steele Dossier and the false Russia collusion narrative used against President Donald Trump. 

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Elon Musk endorses Church-style committee to probe FBI’s engagement in social media censorship

New Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday endorsed the idea of creating a commission, similar to the historic Church Committee, to probe why the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community are involved in online censorship.

“Hear, hear!!” Musk tweeted in response to a tweet from venture capitalist David Sacks, who said: “We need a new Church Commission to investigate why the FBI and Intelligence Community are engaged in social media censorship, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden story.”

The so-called Twitter Files have revealed federal law enforcement’s questionable involvement in suppressing news stories, such as the one about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Sacks’ tweet was in response to a video from 1975 posted by Blaze Media CEO Tyler Carditis. The video showed Idaho Sen. Frank Church telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “The United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. … Now that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies we must know. At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left.”

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Bipartisan Bill Would Let Americans Voluntarily Give Up Gun Rights

Congress is trying to pass a bill to allow the federal government to pressure people to give up their Second Amendment rights in the name of suicide prevention. At the same time, newly released documents show multiple federal law enforcement agencies have effectively done this to people without congressional approval.

On Thursday, Gun Owners of America (GOA), put all its evidence online that shows the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has permanently disarmed people. The gun rights group is lobbying on Capitol Hill to stop this practice from being codified.

The bipartisan bill called the “Preventing Suicide Through Voluntary Firearm Purchase Delay Act” passed the Judiciary Committee last week. It says the FBI would create a new database for people who volunteer to be blocked from buying or possessing a gun. The “delay” in the bill title refers to the period from which the person put themselves into the database and potentially subsequently took themselves out of it.

The FBI program, which claims it ended in 2019, and the House bill both use a “self-submission” program to make people prohibited who could not be blocked from having a gun under current law. The Brady Law of 1993 created the NICS system of background checks to help enforce the nine prohibited categories of people (from the Gun Control Act of 1968 ) from buying guns.

The House bill would upend federal background check gun law by making it arbitrary who loses the right to own or buy a gun. Under current law, a person is prohibited from buying or owning a firearm for mental health reasons only due to being adjudicated as mentally defective or involuntarily committed to a mental institution. The House bill makes it so people in this new FBI database who have not experienced these situations would still be committing a federal crime by possessing a gun.

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DOJ to Charge ABC News Journalist Who “Fell Off the Face of the Earth” After FBI Seized Classified Documents From His Laptop in Home Raid

As previously reported, an Emmy-winning investigative journalist went missing after the FBI raided his Virginia home and seized classified information from his laptop in April.

James Gordon Meek, 52, went missing after the feds raided his Arlington penthouse apartment, the Rolling Stone reported.

Meek produced the Hulu documentary “3212 Unredacted” which detailed the 2017 Pentagon coverup of the deaths of US special forces in Niger.

The “lightning raid” was conducted after a search warrant was approved by a federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court, Rolling Stone reported.

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