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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/despotism_is_the_new_normal_looming_threats_to_freedom_in_2022

Despotism Is the New Normal: Looming Threats to Freedom in 2022

“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution.—Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America

Despotism has become our new normal.

Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy.

These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms.

This present trajectory is unsustainable. The center cannot hold.

The following danger points pose some of the greatest threats to our collective and individual freedoms now and in the year to come.

Censorship. The most controversial issues of our day—gay rights, abortion, race, religion, sexuality, political correctness, police brutality, et al.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support. Thus, while on paper, we are technically free to speak, in reality, we are only as free to speak as the government and tech giants such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow. Yet it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Unfortunately, censorship is just the beginning. Once you allow the government and its corporate partners to determine who is worthy enough to participate in society, anything goes.

The Emergency State. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves. Therein lies the danger of the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security. This is the power grab hiding in plain sight.

Pre-crime. The government is about to rapidly expand its policing efforts to focus on pre-crime and thought crimes. Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage. The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism, a broad label that can be applied to anything or anyone the government perceives to be a threat to its power.

The Surveillance State. This all-seeing fourth branch of government, comprised of a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors, watches everything we do, reads everything we write, listens to everything we say, and monitors everywhere we go. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.

Genetic privacy. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks, because the government—helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget)—has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

Bodily integrity. It doesn’t matter what your trigger issue is—whether it’s vaccines, abortion, crime, religion, immigration, terrorism or some other overtly politicized touchstone used by politicians as a rallying cry for votes—we should all be concerned when governments and businesses (i.e., the Corporate State) join forces to compel individuals to sacrifice their right to bodily integrity on the altar of so-called safety and national security. This debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccines to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

Gun control. After declaring more than a decade ago that citizens have a Second Amendment right to own a gun in one’s home for self-defense, the Supreme Court has now been tasked with deciding whether the Constitution also protects the right to carry a gun outside the home. Unfortunately, when it comes to gun rights in particular, and the rights of the citizenry overall, the U.S. government has adopted a “do what I say, not what I do” mindset. Nowhere is this double standard more evident than in the government’s attempts to arm itself to the teeth, all the while viewing as suspect anyone who dares to legally own a gun, let alone use one in self-defense. Indeed, while it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at, and killed.

Show Your Papers Society. With every passing day, more and more private businesses and government agencies on both the state and federal level are requiring proof of a COVID-19 vaccination in order for individuals to work, travel, shop, attend school, and generally participate in the life of the country. By allowing government agents to establish a litmus test for individuals to be able to engage in commerce, movement and any other right that corresponds to life in a supposedly free society, it lays the groundwork for a “show me your papers” society in which you are required to identify yourself at any time to any government worker who demands it for any reason. Such tactics can quickly escalate into a power-grab that empowers government agents to force anyone and everyone to prove they are in compliance with every statute and regulation on the books.

Singularity. Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Elon Musk has announced his intentions of implanting brain chips in humans sometime in 2022. The digital universe—the metaverse—is expected to be the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one. Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.

Despotism. Even in the face of militarism, fascism, technotyranny, surveillance, etc., the gravest threat facing us as a nation may well be despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money. The American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

It is a grim outlook for a new year, but it is not completely hopeless.

If hope is to be found, it will be found with those of us who do their part, at their local levels, to right the wrongs and fix what is broken. I am referring to the builders, the thinkers, the helpers, the healers, the educators, the creators, the artists, the activists, the technicians, the food gatherers and distributors, and every other person who does their part to build up rather than destroy.

“We the people” are the hope for a better year.

Until we can own that truth, until we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

In such a scenario, no one wins.

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https://www.peakprosperity.com/why-2022-is-going-to-suck/

Why 2022 is Going to Suck  

A good friend called me up in tears last week.  “My dad just tested positive for Covid and has symptoms, and now that we’re home from Christmas, my kids are sick now too. What should I do?”

After we discussed the usual and ordinary early treatment options – which are as numerous as they are effective – her anger then swelled. “I hate the bastards that did this to my kids!”

She wasn’t referring to her immediate family, or really to any other ordinary citizens of her country. She wasn’t referring to people vaccinated or unvaccinated. She was referring to the people who created this virus leading to its eventual escape or release from the Wuhan lab to spread across the world.

It’s now completely obvious that not only was this a lab-manufactured virus, but that various companies, government officials and prominent virologists across the world were up to their proverbial eyebrows in having a hand in this self-inflicted disaster.

Instead of exploring this with full-throated abandon, the majority of the press in the U.S., Canada, and Europe chose to downplay the lab-escape hypothesis and inquiry for as long as possible. Even when they did look into it, finally, their efforts were weak and soon dropped in favor of juicier “scariant” (scary variant) stories.

Why was that? Wouldn’t you think that the fourth estate press would be keenly interested in exploring the genesis of the most powerful story of this century? The one thing that not only impacted the lives of nearly everyone on the planet, but their own personal lives as well?

I certainly thought so. But I was relegated to mainstream pariah status (zero interviews or requests for clarification from the MSM) despite having gotten the lab-leak story pretty much exactly correct in the spring of 2020.

I go into all of this as a matter of providing yet another early warning.

The same institutional failures on display in the lab-leak coverup/disinterest are riddled throughout every other major institution upon which your very life depends. So many once-credible institutions have been revealed to be intellectually compromised or morally corrupt. Or both.

The CDC? Corrupt and nearly worthless. The FDA? Even more so. The Federal Reserve? Ditto. The same is equally true for the institutional counterparts in too many countries. Again, mainly in western leaning countries. Oddly and notably, not Japan, not Vietnam, Korea, Africa, India…and the list goes on and (suspiciously) on.

Leaving that uncomfortable observation and its many implications aside, my main point is this: the people ostensibly running the show have absolutely risen well above their levels of actual competence.  It may seem like they know what they are doing, but only because the media has completely failed to ask the proper questions and the legal system no longer holds powerful feet to the fire.

The future is therefore easy to foretell. If left unchecked, it’s going to suck. Much worse than it needs to.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

The Federal Reserve is busy making it up as it goes along, printing and then printing more. It’s easy. Nobody complains. Later the Mother of All Bubbles blows up and everybody gets hosed. It’s entirely predictable and avoidable.

Administration after administration puts the very worst people into exactly the wrong spots. Ex-Goldman Sachs employees as Treasury Secretaries. Raytheon executives as Defense Secretary. Ex-pharma lobbyists as FDA directors.

Science and medicine become corrupted by rules and incentives that promote money over health and outcomes.

What’s required to turn all this around is for good people to once again rise up and say, “No More!” If we do, we can actually and truly turn all of this around. If we don’t, we will absolutely get what all of us can see coming.

The backdrop to this is that there’s an agenda running. When we clear our minds and hearts, we know that public health has not been anywhere near the top of the lists for any of the conflicted public health authorities in nearly all of the western countries.

These governments still do not promote vitamin D for all their citizens as a generalized immune boosting supplement offering enormous protective benefits against Covid (and many other illnesses). Why not?

These governments have gone to great lengths to block and even intercept Ivermectin shipments to their citizens despite clear signals that it is both very effective and incredibly safe. Why is that?

Well, we can’t know all the actual reasons why, because speculation as to intent is involved, but we can say for sure that these things have been happening. And that every time the CDC elevates a report or promotes a statistic each is invariably supportive of the central policy narrative of the moment. Every. Single. Time.

Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action.

If you needed any more convincing, consider this recent jaw-dropping headline:

Some math: 25% of all yearly deaths happen in the 18-64 category, and there are 3 million total yearly deaths in the US. That means the usual 750,000 deaths in this category ballooned to 1.05 million which means an extra 300,000 people died in this category in the U.S. This is a ball-park estimate because we are extrapolating this one insurer’s findings to the whole population, but directionally it is correct.

Is the CDC all over this explosive finding? Not as far as I can tell. I am unaware of any interest at all. Is the press on the job? No, not the mainstream press. As of this writing, that news has been out for two full days and not a single article has been written in a large mainstream news “source.”

The news is full of hospitals being full, but are they full of these 18–64-year-old victims who haven’t died but experienced some other mysterious ailment that began for some reason in the last year? People who are there maybe “with” Omicron but not there because of Covid?

These would be simple enough questions to answer with some honest inquiry. Inquiry that you and I both know isn’t going to happen.

At the very least, we should be asking ourselves – “why am I just hearing about this now, a year after the fact, from a life insurance company and not the CDC?  I thought they were responsible for tracking such things?” They are responsible, and they’re not doing it. Again, why not? In whose service are they, exactly, and what are their aims?

You know what? It doesn’t matter. Why? Because the very demonstration of such a level of complete rot tells us all we need to know. Those in power have completely lost the plot. The ship has no captain, and there are reefs ahead boiling with large waves.

It didn’t have to be this way.  But it is, and we have to deal with it as best we can.

Darker Before it Gets Brighter

Those of us with access to data know that Covid is terrible for people over the age of 70, but has an IFR equal to or less than the flu for those under 60. Yet that information has been squished and tortured to misrepresent the threat as if it applied equally to all people of all ages and all comorbidities. In other words, Covid has merely been an excuse to advance a larger agenda. If you are nodding your head in agreement, keep reading. If you are shaking your head side to side, I’m surprised you made it this far.

The same systemic corruption and institutional myopia that has infected the CDC and FDA is rampant within the SEC, the Federal Reserve, and many of our formerly respectable universities and colleges.

Which means it’s going to get darker before it gets brighter. How dark? It’s hard to say but the range I hold in my mind spans from “this is going to hurt” all the way to “it’s going to be the worst decline since the Romans pulled out of Europe.”

Eventually, there will be massive economic and financial crises, which are now unavoidable, but those don’t worry me quite as much as the food and energy shortages that are now highly likely.  And those don’t worry me quite as much as the tyranny that’s now afoot and gaining momentum with far too many gleeful advocates who seem to know nothing of history or humans.

That agenda of totalitarian control – once a mere fantasy plot line for fictional movies and books – is now a very obvious aim of many in power. Their seeming naivete about the positive roles of freedom, rights, and private initiative in the development of our shared prosperity is quite alarming, frankly. They seem to know nothing of the role of incentives in shaping behavior or about the complexity of economic systems. They didn’t even appreciate that maybe humans shouldn’t cavalierly monkey about with virus genetics, so how could they possibly care about other more mundane issues like the over-printing of money?....