House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan wants President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice to explain why it targeted Blaze investigative reporter Steve Baker for covering the Jan. 6, 2021 chaos at the U.S. Capitol. Baker, one of the leading conservative journalists covering the fallout from the events at the Capitol, faces four charges connected to his presence while reporting at the demonstrations.
In a letter penned on March 12, Jordan demanded U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. Matthew Graves hand over documents, communications, and other information related to Baker’s arrest and charges as well as “the investigation, prosecution, or arrest of any journalists covering the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
“There are serious concerns about selective prosecution in this case as well as the Department’s commitment to the First Amendment rights of journalists,” Jordan warned. The Republican noted that “other journalists were in the Capitol at the same time as Mr. Baker who have not been charged with crimes” but Baker, “who has been critical of the Department’s handling of the January 6 investigations and prosecutions” was.
“As Mr. Baker’s attorney noted, the Department ‘is not allowed to decide what press coverage it likes and what press coverage offends it and take prosecutorial action based on those judgments’,” Jordan wrote.
The FBI told Baker last month to turn himself in without disclosing the exact charges he would face. When Baker self-surrendered in Dallas on March 1, the FBI “fingerprinted, photographed, handcuffed, and placed Mr. Baker in the back of an FBI vehicle, transported him to the courthouse, and brought him before the magistrate judge in ‘a belly chain, box cuffs, and leg shackles.’”
“Mr. Baker’s counsel, a former federal prosecutor, stated that, in his long career with the Department, he never once saw ‘in an initial appearance on misdemeanor charges where the defendant was told to report first to the FBI to be fingerprinted and photographed before going to the courthouse,’” Jordan noted.
Not only did Jordan say, “this conduct smacks of harassment and selective treatment for a disfavored criminal defendant,” but he also wrote that the DOJ’s actions inherently contradict its alleged principles.
“The disparate treatment of disfavored groups violates the Department’s mission of equal justice under the law,” Jordan
Jordan also noted that members of the Judiciary Committee filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, which is “considering whether the Department has improperly interpreted a financial crimes statute to sentence January 6 defendants to 20-year prison terms,” focused on “explaining how the Department’s conduct criminalizes politics and weaponizes the administration of justice.”
“All of these issues raise concerns about the Biden Administration’s commitment to equal application of the law,” Jordan concluded.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Democrats’ targeting of political opponents entered its next phase Friday, when the FBI arrested Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker over covering the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol.
“This is the most humiliated I’ve ever been in my life,” Baker told independent reporter Breanna Morello following his release. My arrest “is for things I said. … That’s what they’re after; they’re [trying] to suppress our speech.”
Just caught up with journalist Steve Baker just moments after being released from federal custody.@TPC4USA details what he’s had to endure at the hands of the corrupt DOJ.
As The Federalist reported, federal authorities informed Baker and his legal team on Tuesday of a signed warrant for his arrest and instructed him to self-surrender for “alleged J6 crimes” in Dallas, Texas, on Friday morning. Baker has been at the forefront of reporting on the more questionable aspects of the Jan. 6 demonstrations.
While told he was being charged with “non-violent misdemeanors,” federal authorities declined to disclose to Baker or his lawyers what specific crimes underlie the arrest. According to Blaze News, the feds refused to reveal the charges ahead of Friday’s arrest because “they believe[d] Baker [would] post them on social media.” The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals accused of a crime a right to “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”
After being transported to the courthouse on Friday morning in shackles, Baker was charged on four counts related to reporting on the Jan. 6 demonstrations: Knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; Disorderly conduct in a capitol building; and Parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol building.
Blaze Media Investigative Journalist @TPC4USA has now been taken into FBI custody for his J6 reporting
While egregious, Baker’s arrest is sadly unsurprising. The Marxists running Biden’s Democrat administration have gone to extreme lengths to weaponize the powers of government to target and prosecute their political opponents.
Former President Donald Trump is facing 91 indictments from Democrat prosecutors across four different venues, two of which involve charges from the Biden DOJ. These efforts coincide with Democrat attempts to kick Trump — Biden’s primary political opponent — off the ballot ahead of the 2024 election.
The Biden regime has also targeted faithful Christians. Not only have federal authorities infiltrated Catholic churches to surveil Christians attending Latin Mass, they’ve also imprisoned pro-life Christians who peacefully protested outside of an abortion clinic.
Don’t forget the federal government’s censorship-industrial complex. This heavily funded system is strategically designed to censor and silence dissenting voices online — even if the information these users share is true.
.@TPC4USA's first interview since being taken in by federal authorities with @SteveDeaceShow: "All of this is about the suppression of speech and teaching those of us on the Right side of the political spectrum what we can and cannot say and what is allowed." pic.twitter.com/kl12Ol7zPN
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
If you pick me, that’ll be the end of politics, and you won’t have to deal with politics anymore. You won’t have to deal with contested elections, you won’t have to deal with contests or divisions when it comes to power, you’ll have a strongman leader and I’ll just do what I want. And won’t that be a lot simpler? That’s what he’s offering. That strongman model is what the Republican base is enthused about.
Funny, because this also happens to be what Maddow is enthused about. It’s what the officials taking leading presidential candidates off ballots are enthused about. So is Joe Biden, who gives angry speeches demonizing opposition voters and demanding one-party rule. Everyone wants his own dictator. Every president wants to be one. Politics can turn normally rational people into raging authoritarians.
The thing about wanna-be dictators, though, is that they have no real way of pulling it off. Don’t get me wrong: the consequences of an imperial presidency are bad enough. But there will be no military coups in America. There will be no Hitler. No political riot is going to overthrow “democracy.” That’s all paranoia. The reality is much more mundane. It’s what we have now — a slow-motion, tedious corrosion of basic standards.
And both sides aren’t equally at fault. The things progressives detest most about our system—a deliberative Senate, federalism, counter-majoritarian institutions, various inconvenient liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, for starters—compel Trump to deal with “politics.”
Here, for instance, is something I think most Democrats probably know but would never say: If a President Trump blatantly exceeded his constitutional authority, it is highly likely that “conservative” justices would stop him. Yet every time the court renders a decision undercutting the political agenda of the GOP, which is often, the media acts like it’s some big surprise. It’s not. And Trump, for all his bluster last term, didn’t ignore the courts.
Now, if Biden blatantly exceeded his executive authority, as he already often does, what are the chances that a “liberal” majority court would bless his actions? When you have no limiting principles, it all comes down to justifying the morality of the underlying issue. Considering the modern left’s collective superiority complex, that is never a difficult task.
We don’t really need to theorize about how this works, either. Many left-wing politicians and intellectuals — self-styled defenders of “democracy” — not only implore Biden to ignore courts, they press him to declare national emergencies empowering the president to run virtually the entire economy through a massive administrative state. If Trump threatened to take similar power, the media would be convulsing with horror.
Indeed, the contemporary left isn’t working to delegitimize the court because it harbors ethical concerns (the people leading the charge are corrupt), it’s because they want to circumvent a court that still occasionally limits state power and preserves American “democracy.”
Won’t that be a lot simpler? Maybe if Trump wins in 2024, he’ll figure out that the Federalist Society’s principled jurists make no political sense for him and nominate lightweight partisans like Sonia Sotomayor to uphold whatever crackpot theory he wants. Why not?
When the Supreme Court upheld the Civil Rights Act, eliminating racist preferences in schools, Biden said, “We cannot let this decision be the last word. I want to emphasize: We cannot let this decision be the last word.” That is something of a mantra for him.
A few years ago, Biden admitted he didn’t have the constitutional authority to extend (Trump’s) eviction moratorium. An extension would not “pass constitutional muster,” he said. The president, the administration noted, had “not only kicked the tires, he has double, triple, quadruple checked.”
It was illegal, and Biden did it anyway. Congressional Democrats, tasked to protect the interests of their institution, cheered him on. The same goes for the obviously unconstitutional student loan bailout Biden keeps proposing. High-ranking Democrats, in fact, demand that Biden ignores the Constitution and separation of powers.
If Biden feels like he can dismiss SCOTUS on student loans, or anything else, why shouldn’t Texas ignore SCOTUS on protecting its borders? Maybe Texas should think about taking up the Biden method, which would entail erecting a new, slightly different fence every time the court shoots down the idea.
All of it is reminiscent of Barack Obama telling Americans he couldn’t pass the DREAM Act because he was not a “king” or an “emperor,” and then doing it anyway. Indeed, the premise of the Obama presidency was the circumvention of “politics,” summed up neatly in the illiberal notion of political “unity.”
Once Obama lost control of Congress in 2010, he not only acted like a person who didn’t “have to deal with politics anymore,” he became the first president in memory to openly champion working around the law-making branch of government. “If Congress won’t act, I will,” he liked to say. People cheered.
Since then, every time Democrats can’t get their way, we are inundated with stories about how the system isn’t working correctly, rather than stories about how the contemporary left is destroying the system to fix the problem.
Now, I’m not naïve. Most voters couldn’t care less about these idealistic arguments. I don’t know “what time it is,” apparently. That said, protecting the system is not only a high-minded pursuit, but also the most practical way to preserve your own policy achievements and freedoms.
But you can’t expect the opposition to play by rules when you refuse to honor them. You can’t lecture everyone about accepting elections when you won’t. And you can’t keep acting like you’re saving “democracy” when you’re murdering it.
I mean, you can. It seems like the more norm-busting degradation of the system you promise, the more popular you become these days. But that does not bode well for our future.
In a surreal moment at the Country Music Awards last week, co-host Kelsea Ballerini joined with several drag performers to belt out a campy version of her single, “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” an anthem taking aim at Tennessee laws denying wrongly named “gender-affirming care” for children.
The performance was steeped in queerness, both in the pretend “oppression” of performers literally center stage at a nationally-broadcast awards show and in the academic sense, where drag serves as a kind of postmodern harlequin dance. Choreographed to confront its audience, the unspoken subtext of the number was that it’s time for you to pick a side, and you had better be careful which side you pick.
This was a brazen show of strength. Think “shock and awe,” only with lots of bedazzling.
A Vicious Activist Cult
The left picked their side. And the side they picked was the side of a school shooter who became for them an emblem of their cultural movement: Cast as a victim of “hateful” traditional religious values, a tragic figure broken by her desire to “be seen,” the shooter was sainted, her death a kind of religious redemption play. The narrative coalesced around her supposed suffering because the left was never going to surrender its stranglehold on politicized victimhood. That’s where all the power is.
At the tip of the cultural Marxist spear today is the trans cult. Just a year ago, it was the racialist cult of Black Lives Matter. Their presence is smothering in cultural spaces by design. In fact, their defiance of norms is predictable. After all, over the last seven years or so we’ve seen veneers of civil comradery peeled back, or else worn so thin as to become transparent.
A public pause to mouth the platitudes of togetherness is no longer required in a society so clearly divided along ideological lines. Indeed, such niceties are ridiculed as a sign of weakness or inauthenticity. “Where was your Christian god that day?” the left sneered. “Guess your church can’t protect you, after all.”
In glib taunts that displayed their misunderstanding of God’s earthly role in traditional religions, they laid their ideology raw before the bodies of three 9-year-olds were even cold. And that ideology, like the martyr it created when it embraced the killing of Christians as a blasé bump on the road to their utopia, now wants to be seen. The devil wants his due. There can be no other explanation for the leftist urge to celebrate the “visibility” of a vicious activist cult, or to claim“transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul,” especially in the immediate wake of the slaughter of Christians by a trans person. Their ostentatious obeisance to these damaged people was a liturgy performed with rapturous audacity on the American stage. It, too, was meant to “be seen.”
Whether it’s a country music drag act, a trans-identified light beer, a trans-allied wizard, or a march by college students demanding the surrender of natural rights to the state, the memetics of cultural Marxism is performative, phony Maoist struggle sessions delivered in swarms to project strength and to dispirit opponents by displaying the inevitability of the mob and its power. It’s a cultural troll. It’s their way of telling you that they are in charge and that you are helpless. You will conform. You must. What else is there?
It was in response to this attempted coup against Western liberal culture and the Enlightenment itself that I’ve written what I believe to be a clarion call for the individualist; but it, too, was something of a performance: It proclaimed, but it didn’t explain.
Cultural Marxism Demands Cultural Hegemony
Briefly, we must reject the premises of the cultural Marxist because cultural Marxism itself cannot live peaceably with federal republicanism or individual autonomy. In fact, it demands the opposite: All things are constrained by the state and its desires. Rule must be universal. Governing individuals is like herding cats, whereas ruling over a collective molded by both state pressures (law, force) and social forces (shame, shunning) is a more gratifying task, especially because the molding, if done well, creates a populace that reflects back the will of the state to itself. The state is now God, and its citizens, made in the state’s image, are its supplicants.
The whole of the cultural Marxist project is to create and maintain cultural hegemony. It’s that sameness we saw in the uniformed Maoists with identical haircuts, and the sameness we see in our own social justice Red Guard with their ubiquitous cotton-candy hair and tribal piercings. There can be no deviation from the new standards, built atop the rubble of old traditions the Marxists seek to destroy. To create the New Man, you must kill off the Olds. To arrive at Year Zero, you must erase all those years that came before it. To save the culture, you must first destroy it completely.
Cultural Marxism is dystopia peddling utopia through grievance narratives and rank emotionalism. It grants the self-styled dispossessed enormous power over those it casts as oppressors, which is itself determined by an intersectional calculus among victim groups.
Yet this power is temporary. Because what its authors seek, ultimately, is authoritarian. The useful idiots will soon be replaced by a ministerial elite, who will guide the filthies during The Great Reset. With policed conformity. Asceticism. Sameness. Every thought you think, every word you utter, and every move you make, must be approved by the state. And you’ll beg them for that privilege.
Blinded By ‘Being Seen’
The useful idiots enjoy wielding power, but they never seem to recognize that once they’ve ground down all opposition and extirpated all difference, once they’ve rooted out every intolerance they can conjure, there are no more battles to fight, no more ideas to be born, no more purpose left to live. To speak in a language they understand, their project reduces us to the means of production, slaves to the most successful oligarchs, earthly deities who delight in our serfdom, providing us safety and sustenance in exchange for conformity, and a surrender of self to a greater good they determine. Enlightened feudalism, in short. And we’re tilling their fields.
But that’s the endgame, and those who’ve embraced the cultural Marxist paradigm can’t see it coming. Their identity politics and the power their “oppression” yields appeal to their egos. They are blinded by the narcissism of “being seen,” and by the thrill of cultural control, however temporary. They revel in bullying.
All of our major institutions have taken up the trans cause for the same reasons they took up the cause of BLM: to gather power, destroy norms, attack traditions, and create the conditions of tribalism that must exist before the collective comes together out of the ruins of universal cancellation. The last man standing is the New Man, the perfect servant to a benevolent master.
Where we once were conceived of statist authoritarianism as an iron boot forever pressing on our necks, today it’s a Christian Louboutin red-bottomed pump, worn by a dude in a lace dress and zebra thong, stomping on our faces forever. Only we’re compelled to dig the kink.
The revolution will be accessorized, and you’ll learn to like it, or else.
Jeff Goldstein is a lapsed academic and writer living in Colorado. He likes tacos, ’79 Cabernets, and his favorite color is magenta.
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long, crooked political careers have been marked by multiple well-established high crimes and misdemeanors. Not the least of these was Hillary’s decision to commit what amounts to multiple felonies by using an insecure private email system to conduct top-secret public business while U.S. secretary of state under Barack Obama.
This criminal behavior that so-called U.S. justice systems openly and repeatedly refused to punish was undertaken to hide treasonous actions. Those include selling political access and favors to foreign adversaries, as journalist Peter Schweizer and others, including The Federalist and members of Congress, have repeatedly and thoroughly documented.
Selling political favors to foreign opponents, including communist China and authoritarian Russia, is clearly treason. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “treason” as: “The betrayal of allegiance toward one’s own country, especially by committing hostile acts against it or aiding its enemies in committing such acts.” The Clintons got filthy rich from it.
Clinton then compounded that with more treasonous conduct when she lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump.
It is by now well-established that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid various actors to lie to U.S. intelligence agencies about Trump in an operation that eventually essentially negated the 2016 election — including encouraging federal employees’ treasonous behavior and two falsely predicated impeachments — and helped lose Republicans the 2020 election. Her campaign even tacitly confirmed this by paying a slap-on-the-wrist Federal Election Commission fine while still refusing to admit guilt for it a few weeks ago, seven years after the fact.
BREAKING: Last year Hillary Clinton quietly settled a campaign finance violation over reporting the *Steele Dossier* funding as legal services
Did FBI agents ever show up at Hillary Clinton’s house over her clearly criminal and treasonous “documents dispute”? Nope. The FBI’s director instead essentially confirmed she had committed multiple felonies but decided not to investigate or prosecute her for it because she was a presidential candidate for a major political party.
Hillary paid to have Trump falsely smeared as a traitor, laundering the slander through U.S. agencies that are supposed to provide equal justice under the law but now function as weapons to damage Democrats’ political opposition. In conjunction with others in the Obama administration that likely include Obama himself, she colluded with multiple security-state agencies to slander, undermine, hamper, and now threaten with jail time Democrats’ top political opponent.
That’s treason. It’s election erasure. It’s ongoing. And these traitors are all running about totally scot-free, while they jail their political opponents for what at best are misdemeanors, and for which they refuse to prosecute anyone on the left who perpetrates them — from street rioters all the way up to their presidential candidates.
My colleague Elle Purnell pointed out that when Trump countenanced chants of “lock her up” at his rallies over Clinton’s never-penalized repeat criminal behavior, Democrats lost their minds, and insisted this was the stuff of dictatorships, tyranny, and political repression.
“Dictatorships lock up the opposition, not democracies,”said Spygate intelligence official Michael McFaul. “Since when do Americans advocate jailing political opponents?” said top Spygate propagandist Julia Ioffe, then at Politico.
“In a democracy, you can’t threaten to jail your opponents,” Obama said in 2016. “We have fought against those kinds of things.” “In America, we don’t send our political opponents to jail,”tweeted an official Democratic National Committee Twitter account.
REMINDER In 2016 Trump got huge laughs for telling Hillary Clinton she'd be in jail if he was in charge of the law Then there was four years of agitprop about how this proved that Trump was "a dictator who wanted to imprison his political opponents."https://t.co/jJADWmsMSjpic.twitter.com/hNgTVnmI5W
The Clintons are clearly traitors willing to endanger their nation for profit, and it would be fully just to prosecute them as such. Yet as president when he had the chance, Trump decided not to pursue it. According to Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s recently published memoir, “Trump brought up the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and surprised Barr by saying that he had wanted the matter to be dropped after the 2016 election,” according to a review of Barr’s memoir in the fall 2022 Claremont Review of Books.
“‘Even if she were guilty,’ he told Barr, “for the election winner to seek prosecution of the loser would make the country look like a ‘banana republic.’”
Ever since riding down his golden escalator, Trump has been ceaselessly vilified as a tinpot dictator, an evil supervillain, an authoritarian, the second coming of Adolf Hitler. But Democrats cannot change the facts, which include that Trump had fully legitimate justification to prosecute his horribly corrupt political opponent and refused to do so. They can make no such argument for themselves.
So, if it is indeed the stuff of banana republics and ending democracies to jail one’s political opponents, let’s all be clear about which political party is dragging the nation down that route. And let all in authority who care about equal justice under the law begin fiercely applying Democrats’ standards to them until they stop perverting justice to destroy our country.
The no-holds-barred legal shutdown and prosecution of leftist insurrectionists filling state capitols in support of a transgender child murderer would be one such proportionate response.
Revolutionary elites who push utopias are always a small minority. In order to get all of society on board, they must enlist mobs to promote the illusion of compliance with their visions. Mobs enforce the narrative, often through violence. They help censor any competing views through intimidation and various forms of book burning.
We ought to study how radical utopian revolutions got a foothold in the past in order to better understand the 21st-century incarnation. Mob action was a major catalyst for the French Revolution, accelerating Maximilien Robespierre’s brutal dechristianization campaign and Jacobin revisions of history. Private life came under direct attack after Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution. Those attacks reached terrifying new heights during Stalin’s Reign of Terror.
Identity politics and pseudoscience played out to a gruesome degree during Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, causing intense hostilities in the society. And American immigrants from communist China can recall the cruel legacy of mob-led struggle sessions during Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Some have publicly expressed alarm at seeing similar dynamics develop in their adopted homeland.
But many who sense the brewing of a totalitarian revolution in the 21st century are puzzled because it doesn’t appear to have a central operator. Yes, there remain many dictators on the world stage, as always. But there is no single figure like Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Robespierre, or even Oliver Cromwell, who has been at the center driving all the changes. There has been no single nation-state leading the charge. No specific revolutionary party. No one corporation giving directives to all.
Rather, it all seems more hydra-headed, coming from all directions and from many different sources with seemingly different interests. Indeed, Big Tech selectively bans political speech on social media platforms like Facebook. Twitter even suspended the account of a sitting U.S. president. Big Media is a mammoth propaganda operation with little actual news reported. Financial institutions became more apt to regulate the donations of their customers, some eager to freeze bank accounts of citizens they deem politically incorrect.
Then there’s the World Economic Forum, whose founder Klaus Schwab has incessantly spoken and written about a “Great Reset,” which would lead to a more centrally controlled social order of the entire world. Over the years Schwab groomed a coterie of young leaders, including Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau and Prime Minister of France Emanuel Macron, who cooperate to establish such an order.
The 2020s also opened with more federal judges blatantly legislating from the bench, more military officers requiring recruits to be indoctrinated in woke ideologies, medical organizations promoting vaccine mandates, and more pediatricians endorsing hormone regimens and genital surgeries on children without parental consent. Meanwhile, academia continued its war on freedom of expression, and K–12 educrats grew increasingly hostile to the parents of the children they supposedly teach.
People felt gut-punched by so many unexpected invasions of privacy and attacks against free speech in a nation trusted to protect it. How did so much sudden disregard for due process arise, so little regard for reason and reality? And from so many different places?
It’s All Tied Together by the Machinery of Loneliness
Although all these developments have come at us from different directions, they have a machinery in common. The common denominator of such revolutions past, present, and future is the weaponization of loneliness. All its features pit people against one another. All were at work in various ways in past revolutions of modern history. And all result in our further atomization, our further separation from one another.
The most critical features are the forces of identity politics, political correctness, and mobs. Identity politics is clearly meant to divide us into hostile groups, such as oppressor and victim, based on race or sex or any other demographic grouping. Political correctness induces us to self-censor, which means we drive ourselves into further isolation by limiting our exchanges with others to avoid the risk of social rejection. Mobs then serve as agitation forces that push propaganda into action. They intimidate others into silence and compliance and finally can cause any agenda—no matter how fringy—to become policy.
Another way to think about the machinery is as a combustion engine that can’t operate without ignited fuel. The fuel is our conformity impulse, and the spark is our fear. Without them, the machinery of loneliness simply can’t operate. So if we cannot shake off our conformity impulse and fear of isolation, we will remain self-silenced, isolated, and obedient to the mob. We will end up lonelier, more exhausted, and conditioned to repeat the cycle.
There Is Hope
The good news is that there is a wealth of neglected research on these matters of social psychology. We need to make that research common knowledge by discussing it often. In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted experiments on the conformity impulse. Later, Asch’s student Stanley Milgram studied the pattern of obedience to malevolent authorities.
In 1960, acclaimed Nobel laureate Elias Canetti produced his classic study on the behavior of mobs, “Crowds and Power.” In 1957, Vance Packard published his explosive bestseller “The Hidden Persuaders,” which explored the uses of depth psychology by advertisers to manipulate people’s desires and fears.
Eminent psychiatrists like Margaret Thaler Singer and Robert Jay Lifton investigated the practice of coercive thought reform. Singer analyzed cult dynamics that led nearly a thousand people in Jonestown, Guyana, to commit “revolutionary suicide” at the order of Jim Jones in 1978. The term “Stockholm syndrome” had already come into circulation to describe the phenomenon of captives bonding with their captors.
Even earlier, however, scholars were reflecting on the dynamics of mobs, including Gustave LeBon, who in 1895 published “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.” And early in the 20th century, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci theorized that the power of culture, especially as expressed through modern communications, shaped social attitudes far more effectively than any appeal to economic interests.
In the 1930s, the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School accepted and applied Gramsci’s theory. We can see it in today’s aggressive media campaigns, the shift to “social justice” action in academia, and Big Tech’s censorship of dissenting views.
The key ingredient of groupthink has always been the fear of social isolation, which leads us to be swept up by propaganda. It’s a fear so pervasive that—like fish in water—we are rarely aware of the effect it has on us.
We can see how this phenomenon worked in totalitarian societies like Stalin’s Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, where people betrayed neighbors and even family members to avoid becoming “nonpersons” in society. The great irony here is that by breaking bonds of family and friendship, people only dig themselves in deeper. They cement their dependency on the state while also helping the state destroy the private sphere of life, which is their only path to escape and resistance.
Hence, totalitarians have always targeted the private sphere of life for destruction. The rallying cry “Abolish the family!” comes straight from “The Communist Manifesto.” Nothing could be more alienating to a human being than to be deprived of healthy familial bonds. The ramifications are vast because strong communities depend upon strong families.
Tyrannical systems also seek to abolish traditional religions and the fellowship of the faithful. Opportunities for such societal breakdown today have accelerated as never before. In the extremist reaction against the Dobbs decision, we saw how state and corporate actors supported by media propaganda can promote an antifamily ethos that produces atomization.
How Tech Tears Us Apart
The machinery of loneliness is running in high gear due to the revolution in communications technologies. This revolution handed us each a “device” that draws us into the web of the internet, often in literally hypnotic fashion. The seduction is so powerful that one can reasonably ask if the endgame is a vast hive mind.
The technological media constantly distract us, prod us, probe us, and flood us with suggestions. We each end up knowing a whole lot less about a whole lot more. At the same time, we become increasingly disconnected from real life among our flesh-and-blood brethren.
Communications professor Marshall McLuhan famously warned in 1964 that electronic media acts within each of us as an extension of our central nervous system. We may think we are gleaning the medium for content, but any content is incidental to the real message. The real message, he insisted, is in the medium itself, which rewires us neurologically. As we allow our devices to pull us into the cyberworld, we become isolated by detaching ourselves from the real world.
When we delve into the internet or connect to our devices, we are not consumers. Rather, we are products—raw material for advertisers— as we let the whole world know what we like and what we don’t like, who we know, where we are located, our habits, our dreams, our desires.
We may offer such data in a quest to be connected with others. But we don’t realize how that information is also pure gold for developers of artificial intelligence who can use it to develop algorithms that predict and modify our behaviors, and even program behaviors into us that actually isolate us further. No medieval wizard or alchemist could have imagined such a boon for his designs or such an infrastructure to empower him.
People are now more easily separated through social pressures that involve shunning and vilification, often magnified through propaganda that is exponentially amplified through Big Tech and Big Media. In the meantime, all these drivers of social decay result in institutional decay, which further contributes to a dangerous state of atomization. The subversion of education is key because education is upstream from all the other institutions, including our legislatures, courts, media, the arts, the corporate world, finance, medicine, and even the military.
Once that “march through the institutions” is complete, then the primordial institutions that shelter our private lives—family, faith, and community—are set to come under direct attack. So if our isolation continues unchecked, it easily becomes a tool to dismantle freedom, no matter the intentions of those who act to dismantle it. Nothing is left but the vast mass state directing the lives of individuals, all virtually separated from one another.
Victory in the war against tyranny depends more than anything else on understanding how imposed loneliness works on our psyches and how it is an indispensable tool of totalitarianism. Once comprehended, we can begin to neutralize its effects and defend ourselves against its inherent machinery.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She is author of “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” Her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Townhall, Public Discourse, and The Human Life Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, Morabito focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. Follow Stella on Twitter.
Last week, the world glimpsed a future in which vaccine passports are implanted under the skin. A viral video from South China Morning Post profiled a Swedish start-up hub, Epicenter, that injects its employees with microchips.
“Right now it is very convenient to have a COVID passport always accessible on your implant,” its chief disruption officer, Hannes Sjöblad, told the interviewer. Oddly enough, he repeatedly spoke of chipping “arms” when we clearly see a woman opening doors with her hand.
Two years earlier, Sjöblad told ITV, “I want us humans to open up and improve our sensory universe, our cognitive functions. … I want to merge humans with technology and I think it will be awesome.”
Naturally, some Christians see the Mark of the Beast. In a sane world, the idea of having your hand chipped to access public goods or private property—to receive a mark in order to “buy, sell, or trade”—should alarm anyone, regardless of religious persuasion. The same goes for using an implanted brain-computer interface to access the digital realm, as Elon Musk plans to do with Neuralink.
Yet for a growing fringe, this invasive tech isn’t just desirable. It’s already normal. Presently, some 5,000 Swedes use implanted radio frequency identification (RFID) chips to open doors, pay cashless, present medical records, access concert venues, and ride public transportation. According to Ars Technica, as of 2018 an estimated 50,000-100,000 people worldwide have microchip implants, primarily in their hands.
A 2019 analysis in Nature reported about 160,000 people have deep brain stimulation devices implanted in their heads. Currently, this is only done out of necessity to treat disorders like epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease, or even addiction and depression. Of these devices, only 34 are true brain-computer interfaces. However, with current advances in technology, enormous injections of capital, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) recent approval, that number will rapidly climb.
Since the first human-grade RFID implant was patented in 1997, followed by FDA approval in 2004, subdermal microchips have become just another device in a growing cyborg toolkit. Drawing on that cache, the Internet of Bodies paradigm has gained enormous traction among the medical establishment. At the extreme end, the concept of natural-born humanity is to be abolished.
For more than six decades, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funded Human 2.0 projects, with particular interest in brain-computer interfaces. Citing these and many other human-machine hybrids, the World Economic Forum’s chairman Klaus Schwab recently spelled out his vision of civilizational transformation. His widely read books—“The Fourth Industrial Revolution” (2016) and “The Great Reset” (2020)—both describe inexorable progress toward total technocracy. The same idea emerges in a 2019 government analysis by Policy Horizons Canada, entitled “Exploring Biodigital Convergence.” According to the authors, “Digital technology can be embedded in organisms [and today] biotechnology may be at the cusp of a period of rapid expansion—possibly analogous to digital computing circa 1985.” Its success will hinge on sweeping surveillance. The document goes on to describe tracking chips, wearable bio-sensors, internal organ sensors, Web-connected neurotech, swallowable digital pills—merging body and brain with the digital beehive.
Last spring, the UK’s Ministry of Defense published the jarring study, “Human Augmentation: The Dawn of a New Paradigm.” The authors promise this “will become increasingly relevant, partly because it can directly enhance human capability and behaviour, and partly because it is the binding agent between people and machines.” Surveying today’s cyborgs, they write, “Once inserted, these ‘chips’ can…replace many of our keys and passwords, allowing us to unlock doors, start vehicles, and even log onto computers and smartphones.”
All the above authors fret over ethics in a perfunctory fashion, but most accept the “inevitable” fusion of man with machine. If military strategists, corporate elites, and government officials are taking this prospect seriously, so should we.
The New Normal Is Total Digitalization
For people with any sense at all, the notion of having a microchip jabbed into your hand (or your head) triggers animal revulsion. Disturbing as it may be, a more immediate concern is the widespread use of non-invasive biometric systems.
Wherever the New Normal takes hold, access to society is granted or denied on the basis of arbitrary “health and safety” concerns. Today, it’s masks or vaccine status. Tomorrow, it could be ideology. Authorities don’t have to chip you if they can simply scan your smartphone and tell you to get lost, or lock you in your dwelling pod whenever “the numbers” rise.
To cite one common example among many, the biometric company Clear rode the Patriot Act to prominence. Today, Clear is contracting to provide biometric and QR code-based vaxxports to fully jabbed citizens on the go. It won’t stop there. Not without a fight. As Clear’s CEO Caryn Seidman-Becker told CNBC last year, “Just like screening was forever changed post-9/11, in a post-Covid environment you’re going to see screening and public safety significantly shift. But this time it’s beyond airports. It’s sports stadiums, it’s retail, its office buildings, its restaurants.”
Taking a more cerebral angle, tech mogul Bryan Johnson founded Kernel to develop non-invasive brain-scanning helmets to enhance your health and happiness. The devices can also gather users’ neurological data. Last summer, Johnson told Bloomberg Businessweek that by 2030 he’d like to put his BCI helmets in every American household. These people want to completely transform our mental and physical spaces. It isn’t even a secret. They want some form of transhumanism, whether they use the term or not. It’s past time to smash their devices.
America Cannot Let This Happen
One by one across the globe, canaries are falling dead in the digital coal mine. We see implanted vaxxports in Sweden, lockdowns for the unvaccinated in Austria and Germany, and yes, quarantine camps in Australia. The Untact program in South Korea is specifically designed to replace human interaction with social robots and the Metaverse. At the pandemic’s outset, American writers at The Atlantic and CNN urged U.S. leaders to adopt Chinese authoritarianism. Their wish is beginning to come true.
While I doubt any population will be forcibly chipped like wayward housecats—at least not in the near future—no nightmarish policy is truly off the table. In the past 21 months, the United States has seen mandated mRNA gene therapies, QR code-based vaccine passports, mass deletion of supposed “misinformation,” and even drone surveillance to monitor social distancing. Meanwhile, more young adults died from fentanyl overdoses than from any transmissible disease.
If the biosecurity state can force you to wear an obedience mask to buy groceries, what can’t they do? Resist their measures at every turn. Drag these people down from the seats of power. Dismantle the structures they’ve already put in place.
I’m no absolutist. Tools are tools, and every naked ape needs one. For the most part, I couldn’t care less if techno-fetishists chip themselves or refashion their appendages. Had their subculture remained on the fringe, I’d still find such people fascinating. But that’s not what’s happening. Riding waves of germaphobia—the ultimate organic disruption—tech titans and their think tank ministers are establishing a secular religion. The world’s wealthiest men, wielding the most powerful tools on earth, are erecting inescapable systems of control. We can’t combat them if we don’t acknowledge what they are.
Scientism is their faith. Technology is their sacrament. Their cult is a cyborg theocracy. Even if they rain fire from the sky with the press of a button, never bend the knee to their silicon gods.
Joe Allen is a fellow primate who wonders why we ever came down from the trees. For years, he worked as a rigger on various concert tours. Between gigs, he studied religion and science at UTK and Boston University. Find him at www.joebot.xyz or @JOEBOTxyz.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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