{"id":64078,"date":"2021-01-21T11:41:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-21T17:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=64078"},"modified":"2021-01-21T11:41:12","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T17:41:12","slug":"64078","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=64078","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Collaboration Between Government and Big Tech Giving Rise to Totalitarianism, Experts Warn<\/a><\/p>\n

The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.<\/p>\n

While many have warned about the rise of fascism or socialism in \u201cthe land of the free,\u201d the ideas have largely been vague or fragmented, focusing on individual events or actors. Recent events, however, indicate that seemingly unconnected pieces of the oppression puzzle are fitting together to form a comprehensive system, according to Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University.<\/p>\n

But many Americans, it appears, have been caught off guard or aren\u2019t even aware of the newly forming regime, as the idea of elected officials, government bureaucrats, large corporations, the establishment academia, think tanks and nonprofits, the legacy media, and even seemingly grassroot movements all working in concert toward some evil purpose seems preposterous. Is a large portion of the country in on a conspiracy?<\/p>\n

The reality now emerges that no massive conspiracy was in fact needed\u2014merely an ideological alignment and some informal coordination, Rectenwald argues.<\/p>\n

Despite the lack of formal overarching organization, the American socialist regime is indeed totalitarian, as the root of its ideology requires politically motivated coercion, he told The Epoch Times. The power of the regime is not yet absolute but it\u2019s becoming increasingly effective as it erodes the values, checks, and balances against tyranny established by traditional beliefs and enshrined in the American founding.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The effects can be seen throughout society. Americans, regardless of their income, demographics, or social stature are being fired from jobs, getting stripped of access to basic services such as banking and social media, or having their businesses crippled for voicing political opinions and belonging to a designated political underclass. Access to sources of information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult. Some figures of power and influence are sketching the next step, labelling large segments of society as \u201cextremists\u201d and potential terrorists who need to be \u201cdeprogrammed.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the onset of the regime appears tied to events of recent years\u2014the presidency of Donald Trump, the\u00a0CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus<\/a>\u00a0pandemic, the Capitol intrusion of Jan. 6\u2014its roots go back decades.<\/p>\n

Is It Really Totalitarian?<\/h2>\n

Totalitarian regimes are commonly understood as constituting a government headed by a dictator that regiments the economy, censors the media, and quells dissent by force. That is not the case in America but it\u2019s also a misunderstanding of how such regimes function, literature on\u00a0totalitarianism<\/a>\u00a0indicates.<\/p>\n

To claim power, the regimes don\u2019t initially need to control every aspect of society through government.<\/p>\n

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, used various means to control the economy, including gaining compliance of industry leaders voluntarily, through intimidation, or through replacing the executives with party loyalists.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the regime rearing its head in America relies on corporate executives to implement its agenda voluntarily but also through intimidation by online brigades of activists and journalists who take initiative to launch negative PR campaigns and boycotts to progress their preferred societal structure.<\/p>\n

Also, Hitler initially didn\u2019t control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the \u201cbrown shirts,\u201d who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.<\/p>\n

The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to \u201ccancel\u201d and \u201cshut down\u201d public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.<\/p>\n

Dissenting media in America haven\u2019t been silenced by the government directly as of yet. But they are stymied in other ways.<\/p>\n

In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google. Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.<\/p>\n

Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems \u201cauthoritative.\u201d\u00a0Search results indicate<\/a>\u00a0the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative. Such media can then\u00a0produce hit pieces<\/a>\u00a0on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the \u201cauthoritativeness\u201d of the dissenters.<\/p>\n

Facebook employs third-party fact checkers who have the discretion to label content as \u201cfalse\u201d and thus reduce the audience on its platform. Virtually all the fact checkers focused on American content are\u00a0ideologically aligned with Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Attempts to set up alternative social media have run into yet more fundamental obstacles, as demonstrated by Parler, whose mobile app was terminated by Google and Apple, while the company was kicked off Amazon\u2019s servers.<\/p>\n

To the degree that a totalitarian regime requires a police state, there\u2019s no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly. But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement. Signs go back to the IRS\u2019s targeting of Tea Party groups or the difference in treatment received by former Trump adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn and former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe\u2014both allegedly lying to investigators but only one getting prosecuted. The situation may get still worse as the restrictions tied to the CCP virus see broad swaths of ordinary human behavior being considered \u201cillegal,\u201d opening the door to nearly universal political targeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the means by which a police state is being set up is the demonization of Trump supporters and the likely use of medical passports to institute the effective equivalent of social credit scores,\u201d Rectenwald said.<\/p>\n

While loyalty to the government and to a specific political party plays a major role, it\u2019s the allegiance to the ideological root of totalitarianism that gives it its foot soldiers, literature on the subject indicates.<\/p>\n

Totalitarian Ideology<\/h2>\n

The element \u201cthat holds totalitarianism together as a composite of intellectual elements\u201d is the ambition of fundamentally reimagining society\u2014\u201cthe intention to create a \u2018New Man,\u2019\u201d explained author Richard Shorten in \u201cModernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present.\u201d<\/p>\n

Various ideologies have framed the ambition differently, based on what they posited as the key to the transformation.<\/p>\n

Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, viewed the control of the economy as primary, describing socialism as \u201csocialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature,\u201d in his Das Kapital.<\/p>\n

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, viewed race as primary. People would become \u201csocialized\u201d\u2014that is transformed and perfected\u2014by removing Jews and other supposedly \u201clesser\u201d races from society, he claimed.<\/p>\n

The most dominant among the current ideologies stem from the so-called \u201ccritical theories,\u201d where the perfected society is defined by \u201cequity,\u201d meaning elimination of differences in outcomes for people in demographic categories deemed historically marginalized. The goal is to be achieved by eliminating the ever-present \u201cwhite supremacy,\u201d however the ideologues currently define it.<\/p>\n

While such ideologies commonly prescribe collectivism, calling for national or even international unification behind their agenda, they are elitist and dictatorial in practice as they find mankind never \u201cwoke\u201d enough to follow their agenda voluntarily.<\/p>\n

In Marx\u2019s prophecies, the revolution was supposed to occur spontaneously. Yet it never did, leading Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, to conclude that the revolution will need leadership after all.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea is that you have some enlightened party \u2026 who understand the problem of the proletariat better than the proletariat does and is going to shepherd them through the revolution that they need to have for the greater good,\u201d\u00a0explained James Lindsay<\/a>, author of \u201cCynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity\u2014and Why This Harms Everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elements of this intellectual foundation can be found in ideologies of many current political forces, from neo-nazis and anarcho-communists, through to progressives and to some extent even neoliberals and neoconservatives, Lindsay acknowledged.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is why you see so many people today saying that the only possible answers are a full return to classical liberalism or a complete rejection of liberalism entirely as fatally disposed to create progressivism, neoliberalism, etc.,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say these ideologies are openly advocating totalitarianism but rather that they inevitably lead to it.<\/p>\n

The roadmap could be summarized as follows:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. There\u2019s something fundamentally and intolerably wrong with current reality<\/li>\n
  2. There\u2019s a plan to fix it requiring a whole society buy-in<\/li>\n
  3. People opposing the plan need to be educated about the plan so they accept it<\/li>\n
  4. People who resist the persuasion need to be reeducated, even against their will<\/li>\n
  5. People who won\u2019t accept the plan no matter what need to be removed from society.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \u201cI think that\u2019s the general thrust,\u201d Lindsay said. \u201cWe can make the world the way we want it to be if we all just get on the same page and same project. It\u2019s a disaster, frankly.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Points four and five now appear to be in progress.<\/p>\n

    Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos recently labeled the widespread questioning of the 2020 election results as \u201cviolent extremism,\u201d which social media companies should eradicate the same way they countered online recruitment content from the ISIS terrorist group.<\/p>\n

    The \u201ccore issue,\u201d he said, is that \u201cwe have given a lot of leeway, both in traditional media and on social media, to people to have a very broad range of political views\u201d and this has led to the emergence of \u201cmore and more radical\u201d alternative media like OAN and Newsmax.<\/p>\n

    Stamos then mused about how to reform Americans who\u2019ve tuned in to the dissenters.<\/p>\n

    \u201cHow do you bring those people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us all back into the same consensus reality?\u201d he asked in a\u00a0CNN interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    \u201cAnd can you? Is that possible?\u201d CNN host Brian Stelter added.<\/p>\n

    The logic goes as follows: Trump claimed the election was stolen through fraud and other illegalities. That has not been proven in court and is thus false. People who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and managed to break inside and disrupt the electoral vote counting did so because they believed the election was stolen. Therefore, anybody who questions the legitimacy of the election results is an extremist and potentially a terrorist.<\/p>\n

    With tens of thousands of troops assembled to guard the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) recently\u00a0told CNN<\/a>\u00a0that all guard members who voted for Trump belong to a \u201csuspect group\u201d that \u201cmight want to do something,\u201d alluding to past leaders of other countries who were \u201ckilled by their own people.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Former FBI Director James Comey\u00a0recently said<\/a>\u00a0the Republican party needs to be \u201cburned down or changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

    \u201cThey want a one party state,\u201d commented conservative filmmaker Dinesh D\u2019Souza\u00a0in a recent podcast<\/a>. \u201cThat is not to say they don\u2019t want an opposition. They want a token opposition. They want Republicans where they get to say what kind of Republican is ok.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Just as Marx blamed the ills of the world on capitalists and Hitler on Jews, the current regime tends to blame various permutations of \u201cwhite supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

    \u201cExpel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup,\u201d said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in a recent tweet, garnering some 300,000 likes.<\/p>\n

    She was referring to the Republican lawmakers who raised objections on Jan. 6 to election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Their objections were voted down.<\/p>\n

    \u201cCan U.S. Spy Agencies Stop White Terror?\u201d Daily Beast\u2019s Jeff Stein asked in a\u00a0recent headline<\/a>, concluding that a call for \u201csecret police\u201d to sniff out \u201cextremist\u201d Americans \u201cmay well get renewed attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Under the regime, allegations of election fraud\u2014de facto questioning the legitimacy of the leader\u2014have become incitement of terrorism. YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook, and Twitter have either banned content that claims the election was rigged or are furnishing it with warning labels. Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey was recently recorded as saying that banning the president\u2019s account was just the beginning.<\/p>\n

    The approach closely mirrors that of the Chinese communist regime, which commonly targets dissidents for \u201csubverting\u201d the state or \u201cspreading rumors.\u201d<\/p>\n

    What\u2019s the Alternative?<\/h2>\n

    If calls for radically reorganizing the world are inherently totalitarian, how is the world to avoid them? The question appears to be its own answer. If totalitarianism inherently requires allegiance to its ideology, it can\u2019t exist in a society with a lack of such allegiance.<\/p>\n

    The United States were founded on the idea that individual rights are God-given and unalienable. The idea, rooted in traditional beliefs that human morality is of divine origin, stands a bulwark against any attempt to assail people\u2019s rights even for their own good.<\/p>\n

    \u201cIf you\u2019re not a believer in actual God, you can posit a God\u2019s ideal on the matter \u2026 We have to posit some arbiter who\u2019s above and beyond our own prejudices and biases in order to ensure these kinds of rights. \u2026 Because otherwise you have this infinitely malleable situation in which people with power and coercive potential can eliminate and rationalize the elimination of rights willy-nilly,\u201d Rectenwald said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Collaboration Between Government and Big Tech Giving Rise to Totalitarianism, Experts Warn The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies. While … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,75,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-media","category-scratch-a-lib-find-a-tyrant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64078"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64079,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64078\/revisions\/64079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}