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Posts tagged ‘Totalitarianism’

The Twitter Files Illustrate How Intelligence Agencies Can Rig Politics


BY: JOY PULLMANN | DECEMBER 14, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/14/the-twitter-files-illustrate-how-intelligence-agencies-can-rig-politics/

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Perhaps the most important outcome of these releases is the broadening recognition that Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.

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It’s not clear whether Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is hostile.

Musk could be motivated by deeply personal reasons to battle Big Tech’s enforcement of Marxist identity politics. Or he could be attempting to do damage control for the regime by duping people who have reason to distrust the regime into believing Twitter is now more trustworthy. There are many other possibilities, too, and it’s impossible for outsiders to know which is true.

After all, the Twitter Files haven’t so far released that much new information. We already knew Big Tech was colluding with federal officials to deny Americans free speech and therefore self-government. We already knew the internet’s dominant infrastructure is completely rigged. We already knew Donald Trump’s Twitter defenestration was based on Twitter employees’ personal animus against him, not any objective reading of company policy.

We already knew Joe Biden is likely owned by foreign oligarchs who pay his son Hunter for access and influence, and that the Hunter Biden laptop story’s suppression was a deep state influence operation that tipped the 2020 election.

Whatever is going on behind the release of the Twitter Files, good things can come of it. This wormhole likely goes very deep, and even what we’re seeing now, quite close to the surface, is alarming and indicative enough. Perhaps the most important outcome of these releases is the broadening recognition that Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.

This is very likely why we’ve been hearing increasing alarms about “protecting democracy.” The existence and prevalence of this chant online is itself a strong indicator that democracy, or the concept of self-rule through free and fair elections, as the basic bloke thinks of it, doesn’t really exist anymore. At least, that’s certainly the case if Big Tech, in collusion with unelected officials who are almost as far-left as Twitter’s employees, selects what information voters may receive.

This Twitter-capade reveals further details about Big Tech’s function as an arm of U.S. “national security” and “intelligence” agencies. Decades ago, these agencies started going rogue on the formerly inalienable constitutional rights of American citizens, with tacit acquiescence from Congress through repeat authorizations and increased funding. These agencies and the entities they’ve colonized now treat the American people like occupied foreign territory, subject to psychological manipulation and institutional infiltration in a manner reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Party.

In fact, this whole affair emits more than merely a whiff of totalitarian collectivism, both communist and fascist. For one thing, the Twitter Files details about the revolving door between U.S. intelligence agency employees and Twitter — and surely also Google and Facebook — recall that Germany’s infamous National Socialists embedded party operatives on “private” company boards. So does today’s Chinese Communist Party.

One must also consider the possibility, if not absolute likelihood, that many of these “former” U.S. military and intelligence agents working at Twitter and Co. are not actually former, but covert government agents. I hear the practice is called “sheep dipping.” Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker certainly fits that description. So does Vijaya Gadde.

It’s also noteworthy that a number of these types, including Baker and big fat lying former CIA Director John Brennan, seem to be laundered through CNN and MSNBC stints as “security analysts.” I.e. to use TV to spread regime-desired disinformation, such as to help quash the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.

This use of spycraft against American citizens seems to be an increasingly recurring and increasingly visible aspect of our post-2016 dystopia. Recall that it appears to have been a feature of the Jan. 6, 2021 “insurrection,” the 2020 Michigan tyrant “kidnapping” false flag operation, the Spygate operation, the attempted FBI entrapment of Sen. Ron Johnson, and many more.

While the vast majority of Americans don’t use Twitter, it has a massive, outsized influence on every American’s everyday life. We saw that in real-time with the consent spiral manufactured, possibly by national security agencies, to impose unprecedented lockdowns in 2020.

Twitter has a fraction of the users of every other major online network, yet it controls the political conversation because of who uses it and how they use it. It’s helpful, even if not literally true, to think of Twitter as an influence operation targeted at Congress, the executive agencies, the corporate media that control the ruling Democrat Party, and other members of the ruling class. That’s who its users overwhelmingly are, especially the most active.

Twitter is where people go to link up to the woke hive mind. That’s why it’s poison to everyone, but especially Republican officeholders.

This is why Republican politicians make some of their stupidest decisions when framed by what they see on Twitter, because the Twitter “consensus” reflects the opposite of their constituents’ views. (This disconnect is a major reason The Federalist exists.) It’s simply a pressure tool for the leftist mob. That’s also why big business leaders are idiots to respond to Twitter mobs — the majority of their customers don’t pay any attention to Twitter.

This information asymmetry has been highly destructive to the American republic but highly useful to the nefarious actors who run our deeply corrupt federal agencies. For one thing, it has allowed the veiled imposition of a vast information iron curtain across Western countries where many people believe themselves to be free citizens. Twitter is the tip of the spear for this growing censorship regime now consisting of a shadowy web between federal officials, social media-sponsored “fact checking” censorship hacks, Big Tech, corporate media, intelligence agencies, and who knows what other entities.

Twitter has been the typical initiator of bans on a person, organization, idea, or conversation from an online voice — and sometimes from basic life necessities such as banking. Then Facebook, Apple, Google, and others follow suit. The other colluding entities get Twitter to do the heavy lifting of canceling a dissenting person, political movement, conversation, or idea, then just file behind and copy Twitter so they avoid blowback.

We now have more evidence to add to the growing pile establishing that Twitter wasn’t just functioning this way because almost all of its employees were far-left Democrat activists. It also has been rigging public conversation, and therefore public life and elections themselves, at the behest of elected and unelected Democrats using their public positions for deeply partisan gain.

The Biden administration admitted it was flagging specific posts for Twitter to take down. It called for Big Tech to inflict “consequences” on those who disagreed with Democrats, and attempted to publicly formalize its evisceration of this vital tool of democracy — free speech — with a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The Biden administration’s national security apparatus openly declared that anyone who doesn’t agree with Democrat politicians could be investigated as a potential “domestic terrorist”!

These government-entwined monopoly platforms obviously exist to disseminate coordinated information operations and kill competing information. They are staffed with de facto or actual intelligence agents at levels high enough to disappear key internal records. Anyone who claims these are simply “private companies” is either not intellectually competent, in denial, or part of the ongoing psy-op to deny Americans the right to make their own political decisions based on genuinely free and open public discussions.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Here’s her printable household organizer for faith-centered holidays. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is the author of several books, including “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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To Stop Totalitarianism, We Must Understand How It Weaponizes Loneliness


BY: STELLA MORABITO | OCTOBER 12, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/12/to-stop-totalitarianism-we-must-understand-how-it-weaponizes-loneliness/

Weaponization of Loneliness
Victory in the war against tyranny depends more than anything else on understanding how imposed loneliness works on our psyches.

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The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Terror of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” (Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press.)

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.

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Why Tech Totalitarianism Threatens To Turn America into Canada or China Unless We Stop It


REPORTED BY: KARA FREDERICK | FEBRUARY 23, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/23/why-tech-totalitarianism-threatens-to-turn-america-into-canada-or-china-unless-we-stop-it/

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Portions of this article were adapted from the author’s recently published paper at The Heritage Foundation, “Combating Big Tech’s Totalitarianism: A Road Map.”

Last week, our Canadian neighbors mobilized their national security apparatus against working-class citizens protesting government overreach. The Biden administration is no doubt taking notes. In fact, the contours of a similar strategy are already emerging in the United States. First, the FBI reportedly tagged parents opposed to critical race theory with a “terrorism” label under the direction of Biden’s Department of Justice. Then, the DOJ revealed plans to stand up a domestic terror unit fixated on “anti-government or anti-authority” ideologies. Now, a new Department of Homeland Security terrorism bulletin classifies Americans as potential violent extremists if they question the administration’s Covid-19 policies or election integrity narrative by spreading “mis- dis- and mal-information” on social media. This should send a chill up Americans’ spines.

The willingness of the U.S. government to classify movements to the right of leftist ideology as “domestic extremism” lays the groundwork for the purging of these citizens from digital platforms — and all of digital life. We are entering a reality in which tech companies target average conservative organizations, users, and speech as part of this push. Just after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Google co-founder Sergey Brin referred to Trump voters as “extremists” and suggested using Google’s tech incubator, Jigsaw, to shape their opinions. In July 2021, Facebook began testing “extremism” warnings on users who engaged with popular, mainstream conservative accounts. This problem is a small outgrowth of a broader one shaping the new digital atmosphere: the efforts of companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and TikTok to skew the political and cultural environment of this nation and its inheritors.

These corporations interfere in our elections, actively undermine our First Amendment freedoms by silencing speech they don’t like, work together to disadvantage or destroy existing or potential competitors, and partner with government actors to intimidate, surveil, and silence Americans. They’re even purposefully poisoning the next generation, targeting American youth with highly addictive content that has been shown to do legitimate harm. 

Governments are not the only actors capable of encroaching on Americans’ individual liberties. Private, monopolistic corporations should be held accountable if they violate these liberties to the degree Big Tech has in the past two years alone. Efforts to rein them in should reflect an imperative to protect Americans’ natural rights against abuses flowing from the consolidation of power — whether by the government, private corporations, or a combination of the two. Big Tech’s willingness to shut off direct access to digital information, their demonstrated pattern of information manipulation, and their effect on America’s culture of free speech have decisive political and cultural ramifications.

Censorship against viewpoints to the right of center runs across platforms and is pervasive and accelerating. The Media Research Center found in September 2021 that Twitter and Facebook censor Republican members of Congress at a rate of 53-to-1 compared to Democrat lawmakers. By its own admission, Facebook created two internal tools in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory that suppressed “very conservative” media reach on its platform. Google stifled conservative-leaning outlets such as The Daily Caller, Breitbart, and this publication during the 2020 election season, with Breitbart’s Google search visibility reportedly shrinking by 99 percent compared to the 2016 election cycle. Finally, at least 17 digital platforms banned Trump or affiliated accounts within a two-week span in early January 2021 — all while Chinese Communist Party, Iranian, and Taliban spokesmen enjoy a voice on these American-owned platforms.

To contest this imbalance, conservatives attempted to take matters into their own hands and “build their own” digital platform. Yet when such a company, Parler, developed an app that reached the top of the Apple store in the early days of January 2021, Apple, Google, and Amazon Web Services acted within approximately 48 hrs of each other to vanquish it. Parler has yet to recover a fraction of the users it gained during January 2021. The “build your own” argument wilted in the face of concerted opposition by these entrenched juggernauts.

Further, the distinction between the coercive power of the government and that of a private company is negated when they work hand-in-glove to achieve the government’s ends. Jen Psaki admitted from the White House podium in July that the government was “flagging problematic posts” for Facebook to censor. Within a month, the accounts she and the surgeon general surfaced were removed from Facebook. And that’s just what the two Biden officials admitted out loud. In fact, Psaki again took to the podium in February 2022 to declare that media app Spotify could do more regarding comedian Joe Rogan, intimating the private company should expand its censorship of the podcasting star for platforming views that buck the administration’s Covid narrative.

Less than a month earlier, Biden had called on tech companies to police Covid-related speech. Even at the state level, at least one lawsuit alleges that the Office of the Secretary of State for California worked directly with Twitter to flag and scrutinize a conservative commentator over his election skepticism, ultimately resulting in his suspension in February 2021.

Suppression of conservative speech as a response to political pressure is not limited to social media alone. Online payment processors and fundraising platforms, email delivery services, and web hosting services are all taking their cues from and following in Big Tech’s footsteps. What happens in the future when your individual environmental, social, and governance score or level of climate change compliance is unsatisfactory for every online banking service intent on staying in the good graces of the government? In effect, our country is sleepwalking into a CCP-style social credit system.

This type of control also tears at the cultural underpinnings of our society. The disposition toward freedom of expression is central to the American way of life. Supporting an unpopular opinion in the digital public square or donating to political causes should not mean risking your livelihood. These practices erode our culture of free speech, chill open discourse, and engender self-censorship. In a more concrete sense, Big Tech’s practices result in measurable, destructive effects on the next generation of young citizens. Author Abigail Shrier documents social media’s influence on social contagions of the moment, stating that these sites offer an “endless supply of mentors” to fan the flames of gender dissatisfaction among teen girls.

According to Facebook’s own research, 6 percent of teen Instagram users who reported suicidal thoughts traced their emergence directly to Instagram. Teenage girls in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia are likely developing verbal and physical tics by watching influencers on TikTok who exhibit the same habits, in addition to being fed eating-disorder videos, according to The Wall Street Journal. (As of early 2021, 25 percent of TikTok users in America were teenagers or younger.)

Big Tech companies have proven themselves irresponsible stewards of their government-enhanced power. A recalibration of their relationship to the American people is warranted. The answer exists in solutions that promote human flourishing and arrest the infringement of God-given rights by private entities, such as freedom of speech. American policymakers and representatives should take on Big Tech as uniquely deleterious to a healthy body politic and invest in a diversity of tactics to meet the moment. The aggregate effect of these measures should be far more scrutiny, pressure, and oversight over Big Tech companies.

A comprehensive agenda to end Big Tech’s undue influence over Americans’ daily lives and subversion of their rights is necessary. Measures should confront legitimate anti-competitive behavior by these global oligopolies by enforcing antitrust laws and reforming them where necessary. Lawmakers must also ensure that the government does not continue to use tech companies as their agents to chill speech. The deployment of Big Tech’s ad-tech models — the heart of what allows these companies to manipulate and exploit the data of Americans — merits particular congressional scrutiny.

Additionally, Big Tech executives should be held civilly liable for legitimate instances of fraud and breach of contract, just as GoFundMe’s decision to refund the Freedom Convoy donations instead of dispensing them to charities of their choice was likely influenced by threats of a fraud investigation.

Transparency in content moderation practices, algorithmic impacts, and data use should be non-negotiable for these companies. Americans have a right to know how their data is collected, stored, and shared in plain English. Data privacy and a national data protection framework are also critical to righting Big Tech’s wrongs.

In tandem, Americans should be given new ways to fight back when their rights are infringed upon, as well as obtain prompt and meaningful recourse from Big Tech companies. All companies and tech founders should institute expanded user control mechanisms and design privacy-preserving technologies from the outset in their products.

And finally, these tech companies should no longer be permitted to work directly with our adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party.

Sovereign citizens of the United States do not exist solely to serve the economy or maximize gross domestic product. Despite their success in the stock market, Big Tech companies are actively eroding citizens’ ability to maintain a self-governing republic. Absent drastic measures to arrest the progress of this march toward totalitarianism with a tech face, we risk the welfare of a nation. It must end here.

Kara Frederick is a Research Fellow in the Center for Technology Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Her research focuses on Big Tech and emerging technology policy. She helped create and lead Facebook’s Global Security Counterterrorism Analysis Program and was the team lead for Facebook Headquarters’ Regional Intelligence Team. Prior to Facebook, she was a Senior Intelligence Analyst for a U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command and spent six years as a counterterrorism analyst at the Department of Defense.

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Commentary: Mississippi & North Carolina Versus Liberal Totalitarianism


waving flagCommentary By: Dr. David Smith; Posted: Tuesday, April 12, 2016

“Should peaceful non-participation now be made illegal also?”

– Dr. David Smith

Totalitarianism is defined as “a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible. Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through an all-encompassing propaganda campaign, which is disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that is often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror.”*  This definition describes the actions desired by those who want to punish Mississippi and North Carolina for wanting to let their citizens be able to decide for themselves what they want to think and do with their own lives. Liberals want a totalitarian government, not a republic, and not a democracy. They seek to force their viewpoint upon everyone.

Most of the companies that are voicing public objections to the laws passed by states, which want to allow religious freedom, are solely acting to protect their bottom line financially and will shift their actions to whichever way they think the wind blows if it will make them money. The same activists who threaten Mississippi and North Carolina also threaten large corporations if they don’t comply with their demands. If it is okay with people to demand adherence in such a totalitarian fashion, then some other questions should also be asked.

Should Teva Pharmaceutical Industries be boycotted because it refuses to allow propofol to be sold for executions? They are discriminating against what their product is used for on the basis of their belief system even though the death penalty and executions are legal. If Christians should be forced to participate in matters that conflict with their belief system and violates their conscience, then how can one argue that these companies should also not be forced to sell their products without “discriminating”? If it is okay to sue Christians who don’t want to perform a service due to religious and moral objections based on their faith, then should not the states who cannot get the medications sold to them for legal executions be able to bring lawsuits against these companies and force them to do what the law states is okay?

Should physicians who have moral objections to participating in abortions be forced to perform them since abortion is legal and physicians who refuse are “discriminating”? How about pharmacists who won’t fill a prescription for an abortifacient drug and are “discriminating”? Should all of these physicians and pharmacists be labeled as bigots and boycotted for their “discriminatory” practices?

What about the pastors who refuse to participate in a same sex “wedding”? Should they also be labeled and treated in the same way? Are these pastors to be listed on a “hate group” registry and hounded for just not wanting to participate?

What about Muslims who will not sell pork, or prepare it for sale, to others based upon their religious beliefs? Should all the pork-loving people get together and bring boycotts and lawsuits to force the discriminatory Muslims to participate in what they deem objectionable based upon their faith practices?

Should Jewish owned businesses who choose to close their doors on Saturday be forced to stay open and not “discriminate” against those who want to shop on Saturday?

It is not people of faith who are bringing lawsuits and attempting to ruin others through tactics of fear and intimidation. These are the actions of the liberal, totalitarian activists who people of faith need to be protected from. Should peaceful non-participation now be made illegal also? That is also what totalitarian governments do. No dissent is allowed without retribution.

People of all faiths should be allowed to follow their conscience and faith practices as their traditions commonly dictate and not have their belief systems trampled by totalitarian demands. The pharmaceutical companies should be allowed to follow their conscience while the states are free to pursue other options without forcing adherence. Physicians and pharmacists should be free to practice in ways that do not violate their faith while those who want something different are always free to seek to have services they legally want elsewhere. Pastors should continue to be free to choose whom they will agree to marry as they always have. Jewish people should be free to practice all aspects of their faith as there are other options for those who live under different practices. Muslims should be free to practice portions of their faith practice as they desire to do so and people who want something different can do business with others. Those who want to label these laws as hateful only reveal their own heart toward those whom they disagree. For people of faith, it is about protecting their own conscience by not participating.  It is not about doing anything to hurt anyone else. It is about having respect for other people’s faith choices in their lives and giving them the freedom to live their lives with their conscience intact, unlike those within totalitarian regimes who have lost any conscience they might have had. 

(Wikipedia, “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism”).

About the Author:

Dr. David Smith David Smith, M.D. practices as a Family Doctor in Summit Mississippi and is on staff at Beacham Memorial Hospital. More Articles

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Lefty Totalitarianism: Conform or Else!


conformRecently (or perhaps more accurately, finally), I  started reading Mark  Steyn’s After America: Get Ready for Armageddon.

While I don’t intend to write a review for a book two years old, After  America is increasingly relevant as America slowly slides to its own  destruction.

However, something jumped out at me while I plodded through the first 60 or  so pages. It’s something that we, as a nation don’t discuss nearly enough.  Indeed, in our own hubris, we often fail to recognize its reality.

In the modern era — where we are apparently free and liberated to do what we  like, where we like, when we like — America is becoming ever more  homogeneous.

We are expected to conform to the liberal worldview.

The government is seen as a cure-all for society’s problems. Massive  entitlement programs “ensure” that the poor don’t starve or die in the streets.  Those programs protect the wealthiest demographic in America, the elderly, from  poverty.

If you believe that government coddling a significant fraction of its  citizens, far more than are actually destitute, or spending its way to  bankruptcy is wrong, then you hate the poor. You must believe that  welfare are good and no dissent will be tolerated.

Science must always conform to the leftist/secularist worldview. Humanity  must believe in the reality of man-made global change climate, or whatever  moniker they happen to be using this week. We must all believe in the nihilistic  evolutionary theory of the origin of life. Not to do so would be anti-science,  and we can’t have people who aren’t bound by the laws of what the left deems to be the truth,  now can we?

No one should be allowed to openly question Darwinism, lest some start to  believe that God created a globe that goes through natural cycles.

Sex, of course, must always be loose and unbound. Otherwise you’re just a square who doesn’t understand  that loose trousers and spread legs are the way to truly enjoy life. You have to  be some sort of sexually repressed control freak to believe that careless sex  leads to disease, emotional trauma and, worst of all, pregnancy. Millions of  youth never even saw that last one coming, and were encouraged to sleep around  long before they’ve had any real life experience.

Speaking of pregnancy, one must of course conform to the idea that abortion  isn’t murder. It’s the woman’s right. She should have the right to choose  to have her doctor, CNA, corner store butcher (or whoever California wishes to  certify next to perform abortions) plunge a needle into a baby and burn it from  the inside out as it is sucked dry of fluid. Or be forcefully dismembered in the  womb. Our “betters” tell us it is the humane thing to do.

Let us not leave out the leftist view of race, either. If one does not  believe in special treatment for the Black or the Hispanic (not the Asian,  though — they often succeed on their own merits), he is a horrible, racist bigot  only lacking the pointy white hood. And even then, that’s likely tucked away in  some chest buried in the backyard, patiently awaiting the day when it is in  vogue again.

AfterAmericaIt is not like blacks or Hispanics can succeed if  they stay out of trouble and work hard. They must be given special dispensation  to enter the country’s universities or government jobs. After all, institutional racism abolished fifty years ago is still alive and  well.

If there’s a disproportionate number of minorities being disciplined in  schools, it must be due to the schools’ disciplinary procedures. If a  disproportionate number of minorities get busted for committing crimes, clearly  there’s some sort of outside force (likely with lily white skin) that is  responsible.

The media, by and large, excepting the odd element like Fox  News Channel, is on the left to varying degrees. All try to cover for Obama in  one way or another. All celebrate the cause célèbre of the week, whether it’s  the latest state to legalize gay marriage or the newest law cementing the  protected status of the black man. Indeed, ABC has an entire hidden camera  program, “What Would You Do?” dedicated to this self-righteous feel-goodism.

The point of that long list? If you believe some or all of the aforementioned  is bad, you are no good to the left. Even if for the barest of seconds you  express an opinion that does not conform to the status quo, you are shamed until  you believe what the left wants you to believe.  Otherwise, you are  marginalized for your “backwards thinking.”

We live in a world where free-thought  is, in reality, thinly veiled totalitarianism. For without conformity of  thought, Leftism cannot thrive.

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Identical Action with the Same Backdrop. Different Outcome?


 

Hitler Obama with Children

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