From the Brownstone Institute

By  Peter St Onge

Authoritarianism is back across the West — from Europe to the Biden-Harris censorship regime that would fit perfectly in Communist China.

I think many of us were surprised during Covid to realize just what the supposedly liberal West has become: Essentially the Soviet Union but with better uniforms — well, better video games, anyway.

Of course, it was decades in the making — Covid just showed their cards.

The question, as always, is What’s Next.

For better or worse, authoritarianism has happened many times in history — it’s kind of the human default. The original state.

Humanity has a lot of experience with authoritarianism.

So how did people protect themselves last time?

Dodging Tyranny in the 1940s

An elegant illustration is the 1940s, where essentially the entire globe went authoritarian socialist and then — as always — went to war.

And the correct response very much depended on where you were.

If you were in New York, you adjusted your stock portfolio.

FDR’s 52nd birthday party, dressed as Caesar. The fasces bottom right is unintentionally apt.

If you were in Britain you moved to the countryside and stockpiled canned food.

If you were in Switzerland you packed a go-bag in case the German army decided to fill in the map.

And if you were in Germany, of course, the only plan was to get the heck out.

The problem is when to pull each trigger: When do you adjust the portfolio? Buy the canned food? Pack the go-bag? When do you get the heck out?

Each of these preparations has a cost. And the more successful you are — the more you’ve built or achieved — the higher those costs go. Moving your family, your business, converting your career to location-independent where you can support your family.

People ask why people didn’t leave Berlin before it was too late, and those costs are why.

The good news is that this means the vast majority of us will stay and fight.

I mean, true patriots will always stay and fight. But those mounting costs mean even apolitical people will fight.

French Resistance taking a Sunday stroll.

They will fight in proportion to the risk — because the cost rises with it. And they will fight in proportion to what they’ve built.

That is, the people with the most to lose – the natural elite – are the most likely to stay.

Every election since George W we’ve been treated to Hollywood liberals threatening to leave the country. You don’t hear influential people on the other side saying that.

We will stay.

The Bleaker It Gets, the Better Our Odds

And stay we should. Because I know I’ve made this point repeatedly in videos, but we are going to win.

Why? Partly tactical. They launched their takeover too soon. Because Covid fell into their lap, and they were still a generation away from the brainwashing it would take for a totalitarian takeover.

Instead, the people rejected it. The Covid state left dangerous remnants, to be sure, that will become malignant if not excised.

Still, it’s striking — perhaps unprecedented — the degree to which a totalitarian regime, once installed, was almost entirely removed. And the reason is encouraging: Because it polled atrociously — you may remember the Dems turning as one just after Biden assumed office.

In other words, even with our shabby election infrastructure, they still fear the people.

What remains post-Covid is an institutionalized left that has lost credibility with the majority. That is overextended, that has completely lost touch with the people.

This loss of legitimacy means they are far weaker than pre-Covid.

And Democracy is coming for them.

Liberty’s Moment

We’re already seeing the backlash with Trump surging in the polls, with Canada on deck next year, and European countries electing populists.

Even more encouraging, if you zoom out rarely in history has liberty had so many advantages. Thanks to the internet — with a big assist from Elon.

Of course, liberty starts out with the advantage that man is not by nature a slave. Slavery is an unstable equilibrium. It’s fragile. Just waiting for the right push.

But this is up against the natural advantage of authoritarianism — it has the money. And money buys guns.

It has the money because it seizes half of what you earn and uses it against you, then prints up whatever else it needs at the central bank. Then it uses that money to control the levers of society, from education to media to finance.

We have the numbers, they have the money.

Trust in Government Collapsing in Both Parties.

What’s Next

If it comes down to numbers vs money, our numbers are growing fast. Moreover, gloriously, the more they push the more we grow.

Meaning they only have 2 options: pull back and hold on for dear life against the backlash. Or keep pushing and they’re out of power. It’s only a matter of time.

In the 1970’s the great economist Murray Rothbard noted that you could fit the entire liberty movement in a New York living room.

Now there are literally a billion of us.

Forget a living room, we couldn’t fit in a state.

Meanwhile their advantage – money – is collapsing before our eyes. Crashing in crippling debt, nervous financial markets, the limits of inflationary printing, and the moribund stagflation that always accompanies it.

In short, we’re getting stronger. They’re getting weaker. And the longer it takes, the more spectacular will be our victory.

A version of this appeared at the author’s Substack

Author

Peter St Onge

Peter is an economist, a Fellow at the Mises Institute, and a former MBA professor.

From the Brownstone Institute

By  Jeffrey A. Tucker

The old meme of the man staying up late typing because “someone is wrong on the Internet” applies now to an entire swath of the ruling class. They want freedom out and the stakeholders in control

The censors are losing patience. They have gone from regretting the existence of free speech and gaming the system as best they can to fantasizing about ending it through criminal penalties.

You can observe this change in temperament – from frustration to fury to calling for violent solutions – over the last several weeks. And it serves as a reminder: censorship was never the end point. It was always about controlling society’s “cognitive infrastructure,” which is how we think. And to what end? A secure monopoly on political power.

This week, Fox reporter Peter Doocy was sparring with the White House spokesperson over whether FEMA is funding migrants even as it cannot help American storm survivors. She immediately shot back and called this “disinformation.” Peter wanted to know what part of his question qualified. Jean-Pierre said it was the whole context of the question and otherwise never said.

It was clear to anyone who was watching that the term “disinformation” means to her nothing other than a premise or fact that is unwelcome and needs to be shut down. This messaging has been further reinforced by a Harris/Walz ad blaming unnamed “misinformation” from Trump for exacerbating hurricane suffering following Hurricane Helene.

This exchange came only days after Hillary Clinton suggested criminal penalties for disinformation, else “they will lose total control.” It’s an odd plural pronoun because, presumably, she is not in control..unless she regards herself as a proxy for an entire class of rulers.

Meanwhile, former presidential candidate John Kerry said the existence of free speech is making government impossible. Kamala Harris herself has sworn to “hold social media accountable” for the “hate infiltrating their platforms.” And well-connected physician Peter Hotez is calling for Homeland Security and NATO to put an end to debates over vaccines

You can detect the fury in all their voices, almost as if every post on X or video on Rumble is causing them to lose their minds, to the point that they are just saying it out loud: “Make them stop.”

Hurricane Milton seems to have caused the censors to flip out in a violent rage, as people wondered whether and to what extent the government might have something to do with manipulating the weather for political reasons. A writer in the Atlantic explodes: “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is. What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis,” while decrying “outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet.”

Catch that? It’s the viewing itself that is the problem, as if people do not have the capacity to think for themselves.

The old meme of the man staying up late typing because “someone is wrong on the Internet” applies now to an entire swath of the ruling class. They want freedom out and the stakeholders in control, somehow forcing the whole of the digital age into a version of 1970s television with three channels and 1-800 numbers. The Biden administration even refounded the Internet, replacing the Declaration of Freedom with a new Declaration of the Future.

YouTube accounts have been demonetized and deleted. Facebook posts have been throttled and banned. LinkedIn’s algorithms punish posts that take issue with regime narratives. This has not slowed down in light of litigation but rather continued and intensified.

The goal is to close up the Internet. They would have done it by now if it were not for the First Amendment, which stands in their way. For now, they will continue to work through university cutouts, third-party providers, phony baloney fact-checkers, pressure on tech firms that provide government services at a price, and other mechanisms to achieve indirectly what they cannot do directly just yet.

Among the strategies is the political persecution of dissenters. Alex Jones is a bellwether here and his company is being bankrupted. Steve Bannon, the philosopher king of MAGA, has been in jail for the entire election season for having defied a Congressional subpoena on the advice of counsel. The protestors on January 6 have been in prison not for damages caused or trespassing but for landing on the wrong side of the regime.

Most of us had an intuition that the Covid vaccine mandates themselves were not entirely about health but rather a tactic of exclusion of those who were not fully trusting of authority. This was rather obvious when it came to the military and the medical profession but less apparent within academia where noncompliant students and professors were effectively purged for their refusal to risk their lives for pharma.

There was an element of malice, too, in the mask mandates. Even though there was zero scientific evidence that a Chinese-made synthetic cloth worn on the face can change epidemiological dynamics, they did serve well as a visible sign to separate believers from unbelievers, and also as a sadistic means of reminding individualists of who is really running the show.

The final means of censorship is violence against person and property, while the end is to control what you think in service of one-party rule. Major tech companies and major media are wholly complicit in bringing this about. Only a handful of services are stopping this and they are all being targeted by the regime through myriad forms of lawfare.

Postscript: as this article is released, the website archive.org has been fully down for the better part of a week, supposedly due to a catastrophic DDOS attack. The private owners say the data has been saved and it will be restored in time. Maybe. But consider: this the one tool we have for having a verified memory of what was posted when. It is how we found that WHO changed its definition of herd immunity. It’s how we found that the CDC was behind the mail-in ballot fiasco of 2020. It’s how we know that FTX funded anti-Ivermectin studies. And so on. The links were stable and good, never down.

Until now, two weeks before the election. We are of course supposed to believe that this shocking collapse is purely a coincidence. Maybe. Probably. And yet without this website – a central point of failure – vast amounts of the history of the last quarter century is deleted. The entire contents of the web can be re-written as vaporware, here one instant, gone the next. Even if this site does come back, what will be missing and how long will it take to figure it out? Will the Internet have been lobotomized? If not this time, could it happen in the future? Certainly.

Author

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.