The Politics of Fear; The Great Political Divide in America; The extremely profitable inner workings of digital addiction; House GOP Releases DHS Whistleblower Warning about Tim Walz’s CCP Links
Georgia Supreme Court Blocks Counties’ Late Ballot Acceptance
“A king can stand people's fighting, but he can't last long if people start thinking.” – Will Rogers
—
The Politics of Fear: Laying the Groundwork for Fascism, American-Style
by John W. And Nisha Whitehead
“America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.
The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.
Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.
We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of conformists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government, fear of those on the Right, fear of those on the Left… The list goes on and on.
The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.
Fear makes people stupid.
Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.
Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.
This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.
This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.
All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.
These threats are not to be underestimated.
Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.
This language of fear has given rise to a politics of fear whose only aim is to distract and divide us. In this way, we have been discouraged from thinking analytically and believing that we have any part to play in solving the problems before us. Instead, we have been conditioned to point the finger at the other Person or vote for this Politician or support this Group, because they are the ones who will fix it. Except that they can’t and won’t fix the problems plaguing our communities.
Nevertheless, fear remains the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.
The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, disease, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.
An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America. However, with crime at an all-time low, is such fear rational?
Statistics show those living in the American police state are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.
The government is using the propaganda of fear to terrorize, cower and control the population. In turn, the government’s stranglehold on power and extreme paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats has resulted in a populace that is increasingly viewed as the government’s enemies.
So far, these tactics—terrorizing the citizenry over the government’s paranoia and overblown fears while treating them like criminals—are working to transform the way “we the people” view ourselves and our role in this nation.
Indeed, fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.
As history makes clear, fear and government paranoia lead to fascist, totalitarian regimes.
It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.
A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.
The necessary ingredients for a fascist state are already present in America today.
“Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized. Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect,” writes economist Jeffrey Tucker. “It’s incorrect to call fascism either right wing or left wing. It is both and neither… fascism does not seek to overthrow institutions like commercial establishments, family, religious centers, and civic traditions. It seeks to control them… it preserves most of what people hold dear but promises to improve economic, social, and cultural life through unifying their operations under government control.”
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.
We are at a critical crossroads in American history.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it has become the driving force behind the American police state.
All of which begs the question what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security?
—
The Great Political Divide in America-Minor Issues
“Government’s power to control our lives—its power to tax and spend, and the enormous, but largely cloaked power to print money—has created the “great divide” in America. Unfortunately, it has pitted Americans against each other.”
“Main Street Uncertainty Reaches All-Time High” (Small Business Optimism Index, September 2024): Mises.org/Minor_93_A
—
The Extremely Profitable Inner Workings of Digital Addiction
“Turn the crank of social media / search (SM/S) and you get highly profitable Digital Addiction and social destabilization leading to disorder and breakdown.”
“The extremely profitable inner workings of digital addiction are complex, but the business model is simple: collect user data and sell it to advertisers. The more users you addict, oops I mean attract, and the more time they spend on your platform, the more money you make.
The raison d'etre of social media / search (SM/S) is to collect user data to sell to the highest bidder. To maximize profits, the SM/S platforms stimulate users to post more content and spend more time "engaging" (i.e. creating user data) on their platform.
There are three mechanisms to accomplish this goal:
1. Financial incentives. By offering users a tiny share of the third of the trillion dollars in revenue (of just the top three platforms), users are incentivized to post more content, and optimize that content o attract more views / engagement by other users.
The share earned by the few who attract an audience of millions is substantial, but the modest revenues shared with users posting content follows a power law distribution: a handful make millions, a few make $100,000 or more annually, a small circle make a middle class living ($60,000 annually), and the vast "long tail" earn a pittance at best.
Your song received hundreds of thousands of downloads? Thank you for the content and engagement. Here is your share of the revenues generated: $17. Your content attracted thousands of views, here's your share of advert revenue: $73.
The share is a pittance, but it's enough to drive a Darwinian frenzy that optimizes extremism and clickbait. This extremism can be measured, and as a result of the frenzied competition for attention, extremism is off the charts, with predictably destabilizing social consequences.
2. Self-worth incentives. Given the structure of everyday life, the vast majority of us have little influence or power in the status quo. (For many of us, our power lies not in the status quo but in opting out of the status quo.) Given the zeitgeist of our market-driven global economy, we observe others gaining visibility and income within the digital realm of social media. Since anyone with a phone or laptop / tablet can get online, this digital road to fame and fortune is open to all. This is in marked contrast with the real world, which is characterized by few pathways to fame and fortune, or even being noticed.
I'm worthy of attention is a powerful manifestation of selfhood: if I attract attention / engagement, I'm somebody. Without attention / engagement, I'm nobody.
This self-worth incentive is amplified by glorifying the few winners in the free-for-all competition for attention. No wonder it's called the Attention Economy: attention = user data = trillions in revenue.
3. Optimizing addiction. The mechanisms of addiction are fairly well understood, and these mechanisms function with profitable precision in endless scrolls of feeds and posts and algorithms that amplify clickbait and extremism, for these arouse base emotions that then increase "engagement," i.e. collecting more user data.
The net result is Digital Addiction and social destabilization. Turn the crank of social media / search (SM/S) and you get highly profitable Digital Addiction and social destabilization leading to disorder and breakdown.
Digital Addiction has many destructive consequences. Here is one with profound effects stretching across the entire landscape and far into the future: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024, Jonathon Haidt).”
House GOP Releases DHS Whistleblower Warning about Tim Walz’s CCP Links
Posted byKen Silva
“Because of DHS’s lack of compliance with the Committee’s legal subpoena and unwillingness to cooperate in good faith, the Committee is releasing a small portion of the Department’s internal communications it received from a whistleblower...”
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) “The House Oversight Committee has released a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower disclosure, which warned that the Chinese Communist Party was targeting vice presidential candidate Tim Walz as a potential asset.
Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., included the whistleblower disclosure in a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday. The DHS disclosure released by Comer is a Microsoft Teams group chat, which was sent the day Walz was tapped as Harris’s running mate. The message warns that Harris’s pick “feeds into what [China] has been doing here with him and local gov.”
“It’s seriously a line of the intel. Target someone who is perceived they can get to DC,” the message warned.”
Open link for complete article
—
Georgia Supreme Court Blocks Counties’ Late Ballot Acceptance: A Victory For Election Integrity
“Georgia Supreme Court ruled Monday afternoon in favor of the Republican Party in a case challenging Cobb County‘s attempt to count approximately 3,000 mail-in ballots expected to arrive after Election Day. Fulton County (Atlanta) was also attempting to extend its mail-in ballot deadline. The case centered on the counties’ move to extend ballot acceptance beyond the statutory deadline, sparking questions around election fairness and consistency.”
Open link for complete article
—