Inverted Totalitarianism

You are here, blinded, patronized, constrained, and contorted in the land of inverted totalitarianism. And it is almost invisible, because they give us bread and circuses to keep us fat and happy.  Robert Malone explains:

Inverted totalitarianism in the United States evolved from the subtle but seismic shift in which corporate and economic powers learned to exert significant control over governance and societal functions through the corruption of both the political arms of government and the administrative state while maintaining the facade of democratic processes.

Inverted totalitarianism operates through the integration of economic with political power to control the levers of government. This system doesn't require a dictator or a single-party state. It thrives on the undue influence of corporations, financial institutions, the censorship-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex while maintaining the facade of a democratic process. Corporations and wealthy elites influence policy through lobbying, campaign finance, and the revolving doors between business and government. This all works to ensure policies that favor corporate economic interests over public interest. The apathetic public is placated into compliance through consumerism, media control, censorship, propaganda, and a political system that offers limited choice within a very controlled spectrum of political thought (“Overton window”). Although elections continue, they are constrained to the range of acceptable candidates and solutions, which are limited to those that corporate-controlled MSM supports and pre-selects through processes that are only partially transparent. The Overton window, which describes the range of allowed public discourse, is actively controlled. The result is that the final candidates in significant elections do not threaten corporatist control of government, and legislative actions are massaged to produce bills favorable to the economic interests that control the State.

This leads to people feeling perpetually powerless, resulting in widespread political disengagement or a sense of political despair. The system allows a culture of limited individualism (within allowed boundaries) and promotes consumerism over collective political action through democratic processes.

Continuous threats linked to infectious disease, terrorism, or economic crises are promoted by the government (psychological bioterrorism and disaster cronyism), and corporate entities acting in tandem with the State actively promote security measures and policies that erode civil liberties, all while maintaining a veneer of democracy.

Digital surveillance, surveillance capitalism, social media, and a globalized economy based on the fusion of corporatism with socialism (ergo, 21st-century Fascism) cooperate to entrench the United States into a managed democracy. Democratic processes have become mere formalities in the face of overwhelming globalist power.

Chris Hedges explained "Inverted Totalitarianism" this way in 2021:
The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations.

Hedges continued:

Now, I know many of us here tonight would like to think of ourselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we are demanding on the political spectrum is in fact conservative, it is the restoration of the rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning democracy, be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system is the supreme act of defiance. This truth terrifies those in power.

See also, "De-Tot," Decentralized Totalitarianism, discussed here by Jonathan Haidt.

The difference between totalitarian and a dictator is that a dictator tells you what he wants, and he’ll kill you if you don’t do it. But totalitarianism means it gets into the totality of your life. “We’re going to control how you raise your kids what to think of the food you eat, the science, everything, control everything.” That’s very hard to do. It’s only been tried a few times, certainly the Russians, the Chinese. Only a few countries have been tried to control everything of your life. And in a way this thing that we call wokeness has elements that are totalitarian, but there’s no person. There’s no authority. So what you have when everybody can record everybody, when everybody can shame everybody, you get human behavior reacting as if you were in a totalitarian country, but yet there’s no totalitarian.

The end result, the great danger of totalitarianism, is dehumanization. Christopher Hitchens:

“I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy; the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.” These totalitarianism tactics work powerfully and insidiously through the process of Mass Formation Hypnosis, detailed by Mathias Desmet (and explained by Robert Malone.''

Continue ReadingInverted Totalitarianism

About Fires in Crowded Theaters and Empty-Headed Candidates for National Office

"VANCE: You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use…

WALZ: Or threatening. Or hate speech.

VANCE: …the power of the government to use Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this political moment… Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas and come together afterwards.

WALZ: You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test!"

Walz is almost completely wrong. He has no working knowledge of one of our nation's most important principles. His wanna-be boss Harris is equally ignorant. Despite his recent rhetoric, Trump falls far short too. The fact that the two major political parties are floating candidates of this caliber is proof of a failed legal system.

Matt Taibbi explains the First Amendment test here:

The “You can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” saw is not only wrong, it’s the most overused anti-speech argument of our era, surpassing even the Karl Popper “Paradox of Tolerance” cartoon that was once meme legend. In 2012, the ACLU’s Gabe Rothman wrote that the “Fire!” bit was “worse than useless in defining the boundaries of constitutional speech.” Lawyers and civil liberties activists are in danger of self-harm every time it’s mentioned. “My head hits my desk every time the ‘shouting fire’ canard is trotted out. I think I have a permanent bruise on my forehead because of it,” says Nico Perrino of the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression, who adds the damage might prevent him from knowing how many times it’s happened.

The “Fire” saw is one of those unkillable nuggets of received wisdom blurted out by people with at least three drinks in them, repeated as fact by a Vice Presidential candidate. Why? It feels like Democrats are intentionally fumbling the issue:

“‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” was never law, nor was it ever a “Supreme Court test,” as Walz insisted. The quote is from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in a 1919 case called Schenck v. United States argued, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” ...

“‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” not only isn’t law, it’s a symbol of one of the darkest chapters in our history, when we passed the aforementioned Espionage Act of 1917 and the similarly heinous Sedition Act of 1918, punishing utterance of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” This was when Attorney General Mitchell Palmer terrorized Americans with deportations, mass arrests, even torture. “Clear and present danger” cast a shadow over expression for decades. Not until the 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio, which established the current standard barring incitement to “imminent lawless action,” was America free of the stain of the case.

The fact that Walz thinks that abomination is still law and also hasn’t corrected his belief that “hate speech” isn’t protected is odd. He first coughed up the latter hairball in a December 2022 interview with MSNBC’s Maria Teresa Kumar . . .

Continue ReadingAbout Fires in Crowded Theaters and Empty-Headed Candidates for National Office

Michael Shellenberger Offers Three Questions to Ask Those who Those who “Oppose” Free Speech

What is a good way to get a real conversation going with someone who claims that free speech is a bad thing? Michael Shellenberger offers three questions. His article at Public is titled, "Why These Three Questions Change People's Minds About Censorship." An excerpt:

How you approach the topic will depend on whether you’re talking with a friend or relative or moderating a presidential debate, but it should include affirming shared values. You might say, “There’s been a lot of debate about censorship and misinformation. Most of us, myself included, care a lot about protecting vulnerable people and countering bad information while protecting people’s right to free speech. I’m curious how you think about these issues, and I wondered if I could ask you how you think about them.”

Assuming you get permission to go further, here are the three key questions I would recommend:

First, “Can you think of examples where free speech helped past movements for political independence, civil rights, and human rights succeed?”

This immediately will slow many people down. They’ll be forced to reflect on what they know about those movements. Some will say they don’t know. But it’s unlikely that many people will respond that those movements succeeded thanks to censorship since so few cases exist.

Second, “Can you imagine a future government ever abusing its powers to censor hate speech and misinformation for political reasons?

A recent Australian poll found that voters were evenly split, 37% to 38%, on whether they agreed or disagreed with the question, “Freedom of speech should be protected online, even if this means wrong, inaccurate or false information may be published.”

However, when pollsters asked voters, “How concerned are you that if ‘misinformation’ laws were to be passed, government officials would use these powers for political purposes (for example, to limit public debate and censor certain opinions)?” between 61% and 78% of voters said they were concerned. And it was young people ages 18-24 who said they were most concerned.

The first question required people to think about what they know, and the second asked people to imagine the future. For various reasons, most people do not have a hard time imagining governments abusing their power for political reasons.

Third, “Is the best solution to hate speech and misinformation free speech or censorship?”

Acknowledging that bad guys have used censorship more than good guys throughout history and that future governments might censor for bad reasons, this last question slows people down further to assess the evidence on both sides. People who endorsed censorship a few minutes earlier may have second thoughts and even reversing themselves.

I would add one more question to this list. "If we decide that censorship is OK, who should be in charge of determining what is true?" That often stops people cold, but not always. Two years ago, a law professor (to my dismay) told me that in the case of COVID, the public health officials would get to decide what is true. It didn't seem to bother him that these "experts" got almost everything wrong about COVID. I asked, "What about non-medical issues," and he (I swear he said this) the FBI and CIA should be in charge.

I like Shellenberger's suggested questions. I'm going to start using them in my free speech conversations.

Continue ReadingMichael Shellenberger Offers Three Questions to Ask Those who Those who “Oppose” Free Speech