The federal government spies on every email, text, and call you make. It uses your phone’s location services to pinpoint where you are at all times. It knows which I.P. addresses are associated with online comments that have been deemed “politically incorrect.” Its partnerships with Amazon and Walmart let it know what you’re reading and buying. Its partnerships with Google and Facebook let it know what you’re thinking. Its partnerships with Twitter and Hollywood allow it to censor unapproved messages before too many brains have the opportunity to consider new thoughts. Its alliance with credit card companies allows it to track all your financial transactions and thereby understand your habits, preferences, choices, and addictions. Its alliance with cellular companies allows it to monitor all your movements, contacts, and associations. And all of these consumer comforts that are used by the “national security” surveillance state to watch everyone in real time constantly measure every American’s potential for subversiveness, even when that American is engaged in the most mundane things during the course of an ordinary day.
Now, whom does the government fear most under these conditions? Hint: It is not the millions of illegal aliens who pour through our uncontrolled borders (during supposedly the greatest pandemic threat in a century), or foreign governments that bankroll American elected officials (How else could Biden and other lifelong politicians be millionaires?), or the threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack taking out America’s aging electrical grid (because Congress’s “infrastructure” spending won’t bother fixing actual infrastructure when there are so many campaign donors and special interest groups to pay off).
Rather, it is the person who has no problem walking away from the government’s panopticon to go hunting in the woods, who decides to pay in cash, or who has woken up to the reality that the federal government is in the business of control. It is the solitary American capable of questioning the government’s official State narrative and willing to think for himself who scares the bejesus out of the powers that be. It is the patriotic grandmother who has the temerity to show up at the nation’s capitol after a heavily disputed election to wave a Trump flag while drinking hot chocolate. It is the parent who has the gall to believe that the public should be in charge of public education. It is the humble police officer publicly outed and fired for privately giving a word of encouragement to an innocent teenager politically persecuted for defending his life against a State-sanctioned Antifa mob. It is the health care worker, firefighter, blue-collar worker, or soldier who refuses to let Big Brother pump him full of experimental gene therapies for the remainder of his life just because people who wear their prestige like crowns proclaim, “You must because we say.” In other words, governments pretending to protect freedom are most afraid of individuals who insist on being free.
Does this seem like a system that is destined to survive?
Although I am deeply sympathetic with those Americans who throw up their arms in hopelessness and fatigue at the growing authoritarian State that is visible everywhere, I would point out that self-sustaining human systems function best when individual, voluntary acts interchange organically and invisibly to keep the societal machine running from the bottom up. When coercion and surveillance are required to artificially keep society intact through a top-to-bottom tyrannical squeeze, the whole system is at risk of collapse from a single dissenting voice that chooses to throw sand into the rusting, brittle cogs. When the social fabric is knit together with individual free will, you get an American flag for which people are willing to die. When governing elites choose to push their sinister interests upon the masses through the threat of punishment and the attractiveness of cheap rewards, you get a meaningless, multicultural ball of yarn that free-thinking people learn to kick around for sport.
