Tools Of The Oppressor

We all understand what overt totalitarianism looks like. We have ample evidence of how repressive regimes quash the liberties of their citizens. We err, however, when we look at those countries as “other,” as “it could never happen here, so it’s academic.” We err because, despite our Constitution’s protections, the oppressors have many ways to quash our liberties.

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Ukranian-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev references “Censorship Through Noise,” the drowning out of facts, important stories, and relevant information by bombarding media channels and public forums with garbage, false narratives, lies, and distractions. If you spend any time on social media, you know this well.

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Bureaucracies high and low make doing things more difficult, and sometimes impossible, even when they have not overtly banned those things. Consider this reel about the impediments to rebuilding in Malibu after the wildfires. It lists the following required permits:

• Building Permit

• Grading Permit

• Foundation Permit

• Electrical Permit

• Plumbing Permit

• Mechanical Permit

• Demolition Permit

• Encroachment Permit

• Fire Department Permit

• Septic Permit

• Water/Sewer Connection Permit

• Energy Compliance Permit

• Environmental Permit

• Zoning Permits

• Tree Removal Permit

• Solar Panel Permit

• Swimming Pool Permit

• Retaining Wall Permit

And all that those permits require in terms of compliance, paperwork, and professional involvement. Then, there’s the final hurdle, the Certificate of Occupancy, which is a catch-all empowerment of the bureaucracy to say “no” to your efforts to rebuild your home.

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We have a right to keep and bear arms, one protected by the Constitution, yet for decades a number of states retained the right to arbitrarily deny individuals that right by making them prove they had a compelling and exceptional reason to exercise that right. When the Supreme Court said, “no, you can’t do that,” some states chose to make the permitting process arduous and expensive in order to deter individuals from pursuing the special piece of paper that allows them to do what the Constitution guarantees.

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Consider “tolerance.” We all know what it means in a general sense, but we don’t think too much about its nuances. Tolerance always has limits. Our society, for example, doesn’t tolerate murder. Because tolerance has limits, tolerance is always selective. This enables the weaponization of tolerance as a tool for selective oppression.

The tolerance that our Best-and-Brightest demand is a one-way street. It only flows upward in the grievance hierarchy. If you can claim more oppression points, aka greater “intersectionality,” you can be as intolerant of those below you on the totem pole as you wish. Their excuse is that bigotry involves a power dynamic, therefore the person whose identity is traditionally less powerful cannot by definition be bigoted against the person whose identity is traditionally powerful. Yes, that means that four black street thugs can engage in racially motivated attacks against an old white man without it being dubbed a hate crime.

“Tolerance” is also an excuse for the over-righteous to weaponize intolerance. Consider the story of Carson King, a 24 year old who went viral with a placard during a college football game asking for some Venmo crowdfunding so he could buy more Busch Light beer. He ended up raising $1.7M, which he donated to a children’s hospital. The notoriety even garnered him a partnership with Anheuser-Busch. Then, some self-important jackass deep-dove into his social media, unearthing a couple eight year old tweets that were deemed offensive, and that prompted A-B to cancel the arrangement. Despite his being only 16 at the time of the tweets and apologizing, the cancellation happened, and whatever future money might have gone to the children’s hospital got cancelled with him.

Philosopher Herbert Mancuse coined the phrase “repressive tolerance” in a 1965 essay, wherein he draws the conclusion that:

the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what it was in its origins, at the beginning of the modern period--a partisan goal, a subversive liberating notion and practice.

In other words, if you don’t like current society, declare it “intolerant” and use that assertion as justification for intolerant attitudes toward the existing. This is why multiculturalism, in practice, means exalting other cultures while denouncing our own, and ignoring the merits of each. This is why the Best-and-Brightest bend the knee to Islam despite its intolerance for so many things they venerate, and why they support those who use a variety of tools to quash criticism of Islamist ideas and practices.

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There are endless laws imposed on us by our purported “public servants.” In the classic “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” coined by Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police, ours is a society where just about anyone can be charged with some sort of transgression by a sufficiently creative prosecutor.

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Finally (for today at least), there is the matter of Flock Safety cameras. Ostensibly just license plate readers, they actually gather data on vehicular movements into a gait database that can then be searched by law enforcement to determine an individual’s movement patterns and history.

Without a warrant.

There are credible accusations that such data has been used to identify people traveling to abortion clinics and to protest locations, that police officers have used the system to track ex-spouses or hot girls or people they don’t like or suspects for whom they have no probable cause/warrant to track via GPS tracking devices.

Imagine a government that not only tracks all your movements, but runs Big Data software on those movements to figure out whether and when you’ve been “naughty.” According to them. And that’s before we consider mistakes made by the software powering the cameras (one source reports a 7% error rate on license plates). Imagine having the cops come after you because a machine thought O was 0?

Our freedoms are under relentless attack by both do-gooders and the people we trust to protect them. They are suffering “death by a thousand cuts,” and are being slowly boiled like frogs in a pot. Awareness, aka “eternal vigilance,” is vital to the endless fight to preserve them.