Slide toward Totalitarianism

by Josh Mitteldorf | Sep 27, 2024

You may have noticed that in recent decades freedoms we formerly took for granted have narrowed, as power accumulates in the hands of the Usual Suspects. Last week, I read two articles that put these trends in historical context, and help us understand them.

David A. Hughes tells us that the roots of the Deep State are in a class struggle, going back to the robber-barons of the 1890s. The Rockefellers and the Bushes know that their power cannot survive true democracy, and have worked over decades to subvert democratic government. The JFK assassination in 1963 was a turning point and their influence has increased steadily since then.

Barry Lynn, writing in Harpers, tells us that Google has the power to control what people think, combining individually-targeted messages with mob psychology, and they have put their mind control at the service of the Deep State, which helps explain their success (as Hughes documents) in undermining democracy.

Wall Street, the Nazis, and Crimes of the Deep State

Hughes begins his story in the 1920s, when a Who’s-Who of American Businesses actively supported Hitler’s rise to power, not just with rhetoric, but also loans and investments. Ford and GM, IBM, bankers led by Brown Brothers Harriman, J P Morgan, Prescott Bush, and John D Rockefeller were all cheerleaders for Hitler.

Hughes reminds us that in 1933, Wall Street sponsored a military coup against Franklin Roosevelt, seeking to install General Smedley Butler as a dictator. Gen. Butler played along to gather evidence, then came out dramatically as a whistle-blower, denouncing the plot. Here is how the New York Times reported at the time. Prescott Bush was a prime mover, as were prominent members of the DuPont family and executives of J. P. Morgan.

Not one of these was ever charged with a crime. Compare this very real plot to overthrow the US government with the manufactured “insurrection” of January 6, 2021.

After the Second World War, the Nazi braintrust was recruited to come to America and design weapons systems, rockets, and biowarfare for the USA. The Dulles Brothers represented the monied interests that had supported the Nazis in forming America’s foreign policy under Eisenhower. Allen Dulles, as head of the CIA, created a secret government within the government, subverting populist movements abroad, overthrowing legitimate, elected governments in Iran, Panama, Guatemala, Syria, Brazil, and, later Chile. Operation Gladio engineered terrorist bombings and blamed them on “communists” in order to de-legitimize the European trend toward democratic socialism.

Eisenhower was aware of the Deep State, and warned us on his way out, in the speech which introduced America to the term “military-industrial complex”. Kennedy learned about the Deep State during his first months in office, when the CIA tried to snooker him into invading Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Bobby Kennedy, as Attorney General, took firm steps to rein in the CIA and for two years it looked as though the elected government had the Deep State under control.

On November 22, 1963, history turned about face, and the elected government has been under the thumb of the Deep State ever since. Truman wrote a WaPo op-ed a month after the assassination.

LBJ and Nixon established the US as a colonial power.

Reagan and Clinton turned the Federal government from an employer to a contractor, with huge profits for corporations at the expense of the American taxpayer.

9/11 was engineered by the Deep State as an excuse for a permanent emergency (“terrorism”), providing a rationale for suspending the Constitution. The Patriot Act legitimized jailing Americans without a trial and surveillance of innocent civilians without a warrant. Terrorists lost all their Constitutional rights, and the definition of “terrorist” was gradually broadened to include people who took pictures through the fence of factory farm conditions and doctors who argued that ivermectin was a better COVID strategy than mRNA.

Voting was computerized beginning in 2001, making possible the central manipulation of elections.

Starting with “Operation Mockingbird” in the 1960s, the Deep State had infiltrated the mainstream media, Republican and Democratic newspapers and broadcast stations on which Americans relied for a “balanced” picture of the world. During the first two decades of this century, the Deep State consolidated control over the digital media as well.

In 2016, the Democrats and the Obama Administration actually promoted the candidacy of Donald Trump because of the ease with which he could be painted as a dangerous despot. Thus was born the idea that the First Amendment only protected speech that was truthful, and it was up to government agencies to decide what was the truth. The crime of “misinformation” was invented….

…and handily, in time for the COVID deception of 2020-22. Totalitarian control reached the everyday lives of Americans and most other peoples around the world. Schools and churches, theaters and concert halls, restaurants and even parks were closed. People were afraid to talk to each other. Families were split apart.

We were told that this was an extraordinary biological event, a historic first; in fact, the death toll from COVID was comparable to the flu epidemic of 1968, which made no headlines at the time. But the fix was in, and aspects of totalitarian control remained after the emergency ended. It was a new normal.

Hughes tells us this was a long-prepared leap in the globalists’ plan for world-wide, centralized control.

How could they have gotten away with a lie this big, with a deception so pervasive, with demanding and receiving cooperation from a docile public? This is where Lynn’s story takes over.

The Antitrust Revolution

Mainstream media, social media, web-based news, and search engines have all been complicit in normalizing global totalitarian control. Independent news sources (I consider myself a bit player in this realm) are the holdouts, and even with our limited reach, we are dangerous to the globalist agenda. Truth is a lion, wrote St Augustine. Hence excuses have been fashioned to censor us. Private companies have been enlisted to perform censorship from which the US Government would be barred by the First Amendment. The tedious details have been delegated to ham-fisted AIs. The Supreme Court has not quite ruled this is Kosher, but last June they signaled their reluctance to look at the practice. See below.

Something Lynn doesn’t say is that the lies have become so obvious and so brazen that our government cannot risk open debate or a free press or even an informed electorate — lies about COVID, about 9/11, about manipulation of our elections, about America’s belligerent foreign stance, about weather warfare. Narrative management can no longer be realized without bare-fisted censorship.

You may think of yourself as a free thinker, but our thought and our oh-so-personal opinions are socially formed to a far greater extent than we are aware. The news media and social media are points of intervention, from which social dynamics can be leveraged to change the attitudes and opinions of entire populations.

Lynn frames his story in terms of the historic dangers inherent in concentration of power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. To Lynn, broad dispersion of power is the beating heart of the American experiment.

“The Constitution, in this light, is the greatest anti-monopoly document in history, a blueprint for an intricate structure of walls and dikes designed to enable people to prevent any ultimate concentration of power in any one office, corporation, church, clique, or person.”

Lynn traces the problem to the Bork Revolution in the 1980s. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 had been interpreted for a century as a broad bulwark against accumulation of all the sorts of powers that accrue with a monopoly. Judge Robert Bork wrote a series of essays and opinions greatly narrowing the scope of Sherman, saying that the law had only been intended to protect consumers from price-gouging. The ease with which his argument held sway was a measure of the extent to which large corporations had come to dominate American politics. Bork himself was surprised at how easily his ideas prevailed.

The result, forty years later, is that Google’s aggressive monopoly tactics in the fields of advertising and information management have been held to be innocuous because Google gives a fine deal to its consumers — for whom most of its services are nominally free.

But aggregation of power in Google’s executive suites has far more insidious effects than price gouging. Google has the power to make or break companies, by directing customers toward or away from their products. Google leaches ad revenue from news media, which are now on life support as a consequence.

“[O]ne or another of Google’s platforms today stands between you and your parents, between you and your children, and between you and your friends. Between you and your doctor, your druggist, and your therapist. Between you and your mayor and your representative in Congress and your president. You and your co-workers and professors. You and your car, electricity, and airlines. You and your movies and sports.”

In the past, the “middleman” has been the radio station or the telephone company or the mail service. Lynn points out that all these media are Federally regulated, and required not to play favorites, but to provide the same service to everyone. Google is not regulated, and their ability to pick winners and losers is what makes them so enormously profitable — and enormously dangerous.

Lynn has been educating the public through his Open Markets Institute. In an independent effort over at the TechWatch Project, Robert Epstein has a program for monitoring Google search results and search suggestions, in preparation for a lawsuit on tortious election interference. The challenge in documenting Google’s bias is that every search result is uniquely targeted to the user, based on Google’s extensive knowledge of each individual’s tastes, habits, and politics. So TechWatchProject has engaged thousands of incognito users in all 50 states, and arranged to automatically collect (de-identified) “ephemeral experiences” from their searches. IMO, this is the kind of lawsuit that can have more impact on Google’s behavior, compared to Biden’s DoJ.

Role of the Biden Administration

The core of Lynn’s message is that Google has far more power than can be safely entrusted to any institution. This is true. This is important. But his proposed solution is a Biden Justice Dept lawsuit to break up Google’s monopoly. He has completely missed the fact that the Biden Administration has been colluding with Google and other tech companies to shape the narrative for their own purposes. No elected official can be counted on to bite the hand that feeds it.

It’s true that Trump has made no bones about his hunger for power, and that the Biden Administration has taken steps to break up Google.

But the Twitter Files revealed to us that Biden’s CDC, the Justice Department, and even the DNC were issuing daily requests to all the Tech Giants, telling them exactly what web postings they were to take down. All the Tech platforms complied. Twitter was later sold to Elon Musk, which is the reason we know about this. Two years later, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has made a public admission, stained with crocodile tears.

A number of victims of the most blatant censorship were consolidated in the Supreme Court case which is now titled Murthy v. Missouri. It was Biden’s appointee, Ketanji Brown Jackson who was most outspoken in support of censorship. “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.” My view: You bet your democracy that the First Amendment had damn well better hamstring the government’s ability to suppress dissent against its policies.

Last June, Brown Jackson’s position prevailed in the Court’s ruling in Murthy. The ruling was on a technicality — the Court claimed the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” to bring the case — but the implication is disturbing. The majority suggested that the government is free to censor based on content as long as they do so even-handedly and don’t single out who is the target of their censorship. Plaintiffs in Murthy are now seeking to remedy this fault by bringing in Robert Kennedy Jr as a plaintiff; Kennedy was explicitly named in the Administration’s censorship requests. If the Court enjoins censorship on this thin basis, it will be a Pyrrhic victory; the government will be able to determine what opinions are expressed, what “facts” are true, and pressure all the tech giants to de-platform anyone who contradicts them. All semblance of a free press in America will have been lost.

“The past three years have been the greatest period of anti-monopoly enforcement in U.S. history. The DOJ’s cases against Google are but two of the many pioneering antitrust lawsuits Jonathan Kanter’s team has argued, including one against Apple. Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile has sued Amazon and Microsoft, while moving forward a case against Facebook.”

I beg to differ. The past three years have seen a disastrous collusion between the Biden Administration and exactly these companies, promoting government lies and taking down all dissenting opinions. Eight years ago, they invented the idea of “misinformation” and associated it with Donald Trump. His message was too dangerous to be permitted. Do you remember, “extremely dangerous to our democracy”?

It was the Deep State that created a “public health emergency” (on their second try) as another excuse to toss the First Amendment. Wrong ideas about medicine could not be allowed because people might die; and who but the government can best judge which medical practices are based on Science™. Half a world away, Jacinda Ardern told us that the government “will continue to be your single source of truth.”

In this case, a trumped-up pandemic was managed in a way that maximized fear and totalitarian control, breaking with established public health practice of the last century. The result was millions of unnecessary deaths from COVID, from predictable side effects of the lockdowns, from withholding early treatment, and from fraudulent gene therapy products hastily tested and sold to the public as “vaccines”.

The most deadly of the Big Lies was “safe and effective”. The month that the mRNA shots came out, vaccine injury reports to the FDA’s VAERS website shot up a hundred times higher than baseline. And what limited efficacy the shots had in suppressing severity of the disease was gone in four months. Long-term effects of the mRNA shots include impaired immune function, myocarditis, blood clots, increased cancer risk, and neurological damage. Health of at least a billion people worldwide has been permanently impaired.

This is a glaring omission in the Harpers article. Aside from the lies of the COVID era, there are many topics which Google will direct you away from, helping to keep government or corporate secrets out of the public eye. Good luck finding the truth from Google about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Or who murdered Seth Rich? Or how Building 7 came down. Or the murder of Paul Wellstone. Or anything at all about Mike Connell. Or electronic corruption of voting machines. Or the presence of George H. W. Bush in Dallas the day JFK was shot. Or geo-enginering (AKA chemtrails.) Or Kamala’s history jailing people for possessing marijuana. Or the start of her political career as Willie Brown’s mistress. Or her brother-in-law who covers up crimes for the DoJ.

(I’m not saying that Trump and the Republicans are better; only that Google makes it easy to find the dirt on Trump, but they hide comparable dirt on Harris.)

Google has enormous power to shape our beliefs.

Summary

The bottom line is that we the people are indeed under attack. But “World War III” is a misleading characterization. “War” implies two organized, opposing armies. But we the people are not organized, and indeed we are being paid to attack one another. On the other side, there are globalists and transnational corporations, the CIA and Big Pharma. But these are a layer in the chain of command that we can see and identify. It may be that these organizations have just identified a community of interest and are cooperating passively…it may be, but I doubt it. I suspect there is a higher level in the chain of command, maybe ancient wealth or the power elite or something more exotic. Underground breakaway civilizations? Alien overlords? Morlocks? Catherine Austin Fitts calls them Mr Global, and that’s as good a label as any.

Information has always been the pivotal element in politics as in war. In our Internet Age, technology for disseminating information has made possible an overwhelming democratization. A free and open internet is potentially a boon to enlightened self-governance the world over.

Mr Global has seen this possibility, and regards it with horror. They have worked for decades to head off the democratizing influence and even to reverse it.

In a true democracy, the people have a right to know everything about their government, with narrow exceptions for security in time of war. At the same time, the government has no right to know anything about citizens unless they present a case for probable cause to a judge, and obtain a search warrant.

What we have today is precisely the opposite. Mountains of government papers are “classified” for obscure reasons, and Congressional sausage is made behind doors, at the same time that domestic surveillance using AI exposes our private lives to a government floodlight.

Our internet has been taken over by the Thought Police, operating with a toolkit that Orwell could not have imagined.

We must take back the Internet before we take back our government. It’s getting late.

The darkest hour is just before dawn

This is that moment in the movie when all hope seems to be lost, just before the final surprise victory. This is the part of the symphony when the music dies away into nothing, just before the triumphant final chords.

This is our moment of deepest engagement, our time to come together.

I am grateful for the community of truth-seekers who will pull this off, who even now are expanding virally, exponentially, explosively. I am grateful to you, dear reader, for the role that you are playing, patient with your silence when there is no receptivity to our message, passionate in your truth when the time is right to shout from the rooftops.

The Deep State will be vanquished, and we will emerge into a time of de-centralized culture, abundance, and a flourishing of science and the arts.

We will witness this miracle together. We will co-create it.