Once upon a time the left worried about a surveillance state in America. Liberal judges ruled against the FBI monitoring or maintaining files on left wing subversive groups. But now, after these same subversive groups have taken control of the media and the intelligence agencies, a Democratic Congressman, in charge of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is monitoring conservatives and (evidently) maintaining files on them. (See https://www.scribd.com/book/438107041.)
We might summarize what has happened since 2016 in the following way: The Democratic Party, in pursuit of power and political advantage, has weaponized U.S. intelligence and the House Intelligence Committee, to spy on a conservative President, a conservative congressman (Nunes), a journalist — and even to log the private phone calls of the president’s lawyer (Rudy Giuliani).
This we learn from reading the Schiff Report (see previous blog post). The arrogance of the report is only matched by its hypocrisy. The report ignores the principles of law used (in decades past) to neuter the counterintelligence functions of the FBI and CIA. Now the Democrats, who once loathed counterintelligence, move to reinstate it with a vengeance; only now the counterintelligence function will bear down on the opponents and critics of the left.
There can be no question, as of this moment, that the left is employing a strategy of intimidation. It openly uses the technical surveillance capabilities of the state to threaten conservatives, to allege secret crimes and conspiracies arising from the Republican side of the aisle, to allege collusion with hostile foreign powers, to attempt entrapment, to portray legal activities as illegal. Every Republican politician has been warned: — Your phone calls are recorded, your secret deals will be used against you. Resistance is futile. We can frame you for crimes on circumstantial evidence. We will call witnesses from our own ranks, suppress witnesses in your favor and — to top it off — we will try you in the media, make your guilt an accepted public fact, and reduce you to the status of a traitor or criminal.
Today the so-called liberals raise no protest against these abuses of power. It is now apparent that our left-of-center civil libertarians were not really interested in liberty. Their past arguments against the CIA and FBI only held while these organizations were fighting communism. Now that these institutions are under leftist management, they are openly weaponized against the conservatives.
Since conservatives are evil, and communists are good, the left has no qualms about violating a conservative’s right to privacy. It was never okay to ask a communist, under oath, whether he was a member of the party. But today it is the left’s position that conservatives are the enemies of the planet. Any or all measures, however extraordinary, must be employed to criminalize their political activity, to cripple their means of self-protection, and eliminate them from the country’s political life.
That is the meaning of what we see today. The left has reached the conviction that they are not only right but righteous; that those who disagree with them should have no rights, no voice, no share in power. The events of today are a warning. The left is not going to be constrained by principle, by law, or decency. It has no regard for the truth. There are individuals on the left who may be principled, law abiding and decent; but the political powers of the left, which dominate our media and our government, have a totalitarian coloration.
The hypocrisy of what we are seeing is beyond anything we could have anticipated. How could Americans go along with this? How could they not see what has happened?
Whatever party you think you belong to, it’s time to open your eyes. The enemy is inside the gate. The totalitarian countries, under the leadership of Russia and China, are building their forces for the coming war. The threads of external danger are woven together with threads of internal subversion.
Though it does not appear likely to the casual observer, all these threads belong to communism — an ideology which has shape-shifted, taking up various disguises; yet its revolutionary core remains the same. This serves to explain the totalitarian essence of the left’s practices, narratives and aspirations.
The U.S. surveillance state and its operatives, now under the left, can only be understood if we view the whole process underway — in the growing fleets and armies of Russia and China, in the sly questioning of America’s role in Europe, in Beijing’s warnings to Australia, and the media’s unwillingness to address the sudden reappearance of a renewed communist bloc, with many new member-states around the globe.
Using a country’s institutions against itself! The communists’ approach of a “long march through the institutions” has paid them off nicely. Given their control over the news media, the education system, increasingly the judiciary, the intelligence arena, as well as the body politic proper: Who can still stop them? As prescient Ann Barnhardt put it in one of her video presentations back in 2012:
“… With Obama in there, they’ve overthrown the entire government. This is going to be the coup de grâce. Don’t kid yourself. This is it. They are not going to walk away. They have been gunning for this, literally, for centuries. Because if we fall, the entire world falls to these jackals. THEY ARE NOT GOING TO WALK AWAY, NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS…
“You have to understand that Washington D.C., right now, is hopeless. The horse is dead. You stand over it and you beat it all you want, and you have, ‘Rah-rah! Cheer! Oh boy, the horse is gonna get up and run like Secretariat!’ No, it’s not! It’s dead! You’ve got to get a new horse in, or there’s no hope! Sorry, I know that that’s bleak. And, ‘Oh, we’ve got to have hope!’ You’ve got to have hope, but you can’t have hope in something that is impossible and futile. You have to refocus your energies and that hope and that faith into something that’s going to work! And that cesspool in Washington D.C., as it stands now, is not reformable, and it will never work. There’s going to have to be a hard reset. You’re gonna have to get all of those people out of there, every last one of them at the same time, and repopulate it from scratch! Sorry, but that’s the situation. It’s our fault because we let it get to this. We let it get to this, and now we’ve made this bed and by God we’re gonna have to sleep in it; not stand over the dead horse – and rah-rah! – and wave our flags. That’s not gonna work…”
I have great respect for Ann Barnhardt’s analysis — especially when she made this statement (above). It is a bleak truth, and one that comfortable people will not face up to. Only a person of principle can even talk about it, and only a very dedicated patriot can attempt to live by it, urging others to do the same. The problem follows that the person of principle, living in a society that puts comfort first, may be subject to very harsh administrative measures; that is, to live out her life in the margins as a kind of outlaw. To engage in a tax strike, urging others to do this as an exercise in civil disobedience, was not politically sensible. Almost no one was going to follow her down this road. All who took an interest in her courageous “call to truth” dared not follow her path. A father could not follow her because of the impact on his small children. An elderly person could not follow her because they could not long survive without becoming homeless. A person suffering from a chronic illness could not follow her because it would entail their death by losing access to those amenities which a precarious state of health must have. Dying for something can be a noble thing. But dying slowly because you are living in your car, unable to work within the system of law, unnoticed and despised by society, may or may not be good for the soul; yet one thing is certain: it will not accomplish the political purpose it was envisioned to serve. Sir Thomas Moore was martyred by King Henry VIII because he would not swear a false oath that would, if he swore it, damn his soul. He was not trying to make a political statement or begin a revolution. In the case of Barnhardt, her tax strike was conceived as a political tactic to avoid a future civil war. It was a last-ditch attempt pull a nation from the brink of a Marxist abyss. Barnhardt was right in everything she was warning about. Her heart was in the right place. Marxist “psychopaths,” as she called them, had taken our institutions by the throat. But her tax strike could not have worked. What she accomplished by her sacrifice, however, was to set an example of resistance against an evil power long before her countrymen would recognize the extent of the evil. She led by example, though none would follow. This offers nothing to the present but everything to the future in the sense of higher politics. A terrible war is coming, and Barnhardt knows it. This war will be a civil and a world war. She knows this as well, which is an unusual gift of knowing (only granted to the pure of heart). These coming wars will involve mass death and destruction on a scale unknown to previous history. Few can even imagine what I am referring to, let alone credit its inevitability. A country and a civilization cannot slide as far as we have into wickedness and stupidity without the gravest consequences known to history; for we are at the pinnacle of civilization and technology, only held aloft by the bygone wisdom of our ancestors and the virtue of our countrymen. But this virtue and this wisdom is gone, or has dwindled to insignificance. There is nothing — I am sorry to say — that can stop what is going to happen. That has been clear to some of us for over thirty years. When events spiral out of control, persons like Miss Barnhardt will no longer be shunned as she has been. People will no longer call her a fanatic because, on a deeper level, events will compel them to acknowledge her authority as one who spoke the truth and stood up for it in a way nobody else would. In a time of barbaric violence only the brave will be taken seriously. The comfortable will not have any place of honor. A change in our cultural norms will occur. If she lives, if the country survives, she might become an instrument of Providence. I am glad to see her quoted in this blog.
Really great entry and discussion here in the comments. Glad to see your are back to writing Mr. Nyquist! I saw you take a break for a while but now you are back and I’m glad.
I especially liked your line in the entry about the intertwining foreign threat and internal subversion. Very well put.
Absolutely hilarious how you say all this now but 2 weeks ago you scoffed at my suggestion that a revolution is needed for America to survive.
I think you misunderstand. You were advocating revolution, Barnhardt advocates counterrevolution. These are not the same.
Jeff, TroubledEuropean and etc
I am going to write how fake the Hong Kong Democracy Movement/Hong Kong Independence Movement really is. For the readers who are unaware, the Hong Kong Independence Democracy Movement/Hong Kong Independence Movement which also has a presence in the Hong Kong Legislative Council mainly the Hong Kong Democratic Party, well they have voted in favour of legislation which turned Hong Kong similarly into Xinjiang, Hong Kong is implementing ‘smart lamp posts’ which has Facial Recognition Technology and it is known the Chinese Communist Party has access to the Hong Kong Facial Recognition System, in reality Hong Kong is a Surveillance State and to have learned the Hong Kong Democracy Movement/Hong Kong Independence Movement as nothing more than a movement working directly with the Chinese Communist Army.
Also, the Hong Kong Democracy Movement/Hong Kong Independence Movement mainly the Hong Kong Democratic Party has voted in favour of legislation that allows the Chinese Communist Party to implement the Chinese Social Credit System in Hong Kong as well.
Which shows us that you have been 100% correct all along. I think I read a statement by some Red-Chinese official a few months ago (but can’t find it any more) to the effect that Beijing will not have to use military force in Hong Kong, as it has “more mature” means at its disposal. “More mature” of course being a not-so-veiled hint to advanced Leninist tactics. And now we see that they let their controlled fake opposition implement the same hi-tec surveillance dystopia they are building on the mainland. Absolutely chilling!