Semper Tyrannus—Always a Tyrant
“Land of the free, home of the brave.”
“The Constitution ensures Americans receive due process.”
“Equal justice under the law is a hallmark of the American justice system.”
“We have a government restrained by checks and balances.”
“They hate us for our freedoms.”
“If I put my tooth under my pillow, the tooth fairy will come and exchange it for a dollar bill.”
By now most Americans, minus perpetually ignorant boomers and five-year-olds, know the above statements are fairy tales. Not necessarily on the level of Grimm’s scary nightmare tales, more like big white lies and obsolete constructs repeated in unison by propagandists in order to make us feel good so we don’t ask too many questions.
In the information security business, there is a saying that security by obscurity is no security at all—meaning hiding from hackers is not a winning security strategy. The parallel to this in politics is anonymity is freedom. In other words, I am free as long as the tyrant doesn’t know I exist.
The reality, however, is one can never get small enough or anonymous enough to be free from evil when evil rules the land. Freedom through anonymity is not real freedom—it’s merely an illusion. Illusions are the bread and butter of the tyrant—for if the masses knew the truth they would be ungovernable and the tyrant’s life would be, in Hobbesian terms, a nasty, brutish, and short affair. Because of this, the tyrant strives to keep the necessary illusions alive in the minds of the common people. One of the biggest illusions traditional America clings to right now is that it still retains constitutional rights recognized and respected by its government in Washington, D.C.
If You Build It, They Will Come
In the 1989 classic sports fantasy movie “Field of Dreams,” Kevin Costner’s character, an Iowa corn farmer, repeatedly hears a voice whispering “If you build it, they will come,”—“it” being a baseball diamond. So, despite the craziness of the idea, Costner plows under a portion of his corn crop and builds a baseball field and—long story short—a bunch of old-time baseball heroes show up and play a game . . . his farm is saved from foreclosure, families are reunited, and happy endings all around.
We all like stories with happy endings, but someone, or rather some people, applied the mantra “if you build it, they will come” to the wrong dream. They decided to build the infrastructure of a tyranny—and voilà, guess who showed up? Tyrants.
For the ruling elite, the Constitution has always been a problem. That document, with its Bill of Rights, consistently has prevented the elite’s politicians and bureaucrats from implementing their utopian dreams. The trouble for them is the Constitution is very popular with the majority of Americans and these Americans are not going to let it go.
So, the elites and their loyal apparatchik class decided that instead of trying to go through the Constitution, they would simply go around it—circumvent it . . . all for our safety and security of course.
Know the Tools of Tyranny
Enter the shitshow that was the George W. Bush Administration. In December 2008, during the waning days of the Bush Administration, Attorney General Michael Mukasey promulgated a new, greatly relaxed, set of rules under the “Domestic Investigations Operations Guide” (DIOG). The DIOG is an internal Justice Department document that governs the FBI’s rules for domestic investigations of U.S. persons. Mukasey’s rule changes implemented an entirely new authority for investigations called assessments.
Under these DIOG assessment authorities, FBI agents are permitted to investigate anyone without any predicate or association with a criminal, terrorist, or extremist element. The target of an assessment does not require a factual connection to a crime, an allegation of a crime, or any information whatsoever that the target is, or was, intending to commit a crime. FBI agents are permitted to start an assessment on a U.S. person without any supervisory approval, and without having to report the decision to start an assessment to FBI headquarters or the Justice Department.
Amazingly, the FBI is not even required to maintain records of the assessments, or document when an assessment is opened or closed. There are no time limits on assessments and, once started, they can continue in perpetuity. When conducting an assessment of a U.S. person, an FBI agent can legally use, without a warrant, a wide range of intrusive investigative techniques that include:
- Collecting digital information on you from online sources, FISA section 702 databases, any other government database (Department of Homeland Security, United States Postal Service, Department of Defense) and any commercial database. Under the third-party doctrine outlined in the 1979 Smith vs. Maryland Supreme Court case, this includes any information or business records a U.S. person shares with a third-party—cell phone provider, healthcare provider, business associates, banking institutions, cloud service providers, etc., etc., etc.
- Recruiting, tasking, and paying informants to collect information about you.
- Using FBI agents or contractors to surreptitiously gather information from you, your co-workers, employers, friends, neighbors, and family members without revealing their true identity or true purpose for seeking that information
- Using FBI agents, contractors, or volunteers to conduct physical surveillance of you, day and night, for as long as they want. In other words, 100 percent surveillance, 24/7/365 without end.
During James Comey’s Russiagate testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017, he was asked repeatedly by several congressional representatives to describe the predicates required for various investigations. Comey, being Comey, dissembled and failed to provide adequate answers to any of the questions.
The dirty secret—though secret only to traditional America—is there is no predicate required for the Justice Department or the FBI to launch the most intrusive and potentially abusive investigative actions against citizens. And judging from the responses of the members of the House Intelligence Committee, there is little interest on their part to conduct proper oversight on behalf of Americans.
The Kafka Trap
In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, protagonist Joseph K. is brought up on charges he is not allowed to refute. He is never informed of the crime he has supposedly committed and is never given the opportunity to defend himself. Instead, his denials are used as evidence of his crime and he is hounded by his persecutors as he watches his life slowly being destroyed. In fact, the entire pseudo-legal process in which he is involved is designed to isolate, humiliate, degrade, and eventually destroy him—even though he has committed no crime at all. The goal of his persecutors is to force him to the point of giving up and acquiescing to his own destruction.
The Sixth Amendment is designed specifically to allow the accused to confront his accuser and the evidence against him. Its inclusion in the Bill of Rights is meant to preclude the exact type of circumstances Joseph K. experiences in The Trial. The Sixth Amendment is a critical individual right deliberately intended to prevent the government’s use of whisper campaigns and extrajudicial activities to incriminate a person without affording that person due process.
Right now, traditional Americans are under attack by a ruling elite empowered by the weaponized institutions of justice in America. We are accused of being extremists, terrorists, racists, and white supremacists—all without a shred of actual evidence. Like Kafka’s The Trial, our denials are considered evidence of our crimes. In reality, all of this is merely an attempt to intimidate the elite’s political opposition. Their goal is to silence traditional America as they take control of our once free and independent nation in order to pursue the objectives of an unaccountable oligarchy. Make no mistake, the elites are shouting the command “submit” and preparing to force us into acquiescing to our own destruction.
The elites do not possess sufficient forces to make 80 million Americans submit to their will. Instead, they are betting on their ability to scare the majority of traditional Americans into giving up without a fight. Their plan is to select the low-hanging fruit, the isolated and vulnerable elements of traditional America and publicly eviscerate them using the tools of tyranny that exist within the framework of American counterterrorism authorities. They will painstakingly attempt to avoid allowing traditional Americans the exercise of due process rights, and they’ll use due process-free extrajudicial authorities such as assessments to accomplish this.
Traditional Americans should consider the consequences of what is coming. If an FBI agent approaches your employer and claims you are a potential violent extremist, how do you think your employer will react? Do you think you will still have a job at the end of the week? What about your neighbors? If an FBI agent makes the rounds in your neighborhood and inquiries about your alleged extremist proclivities, do you think your neighbors will still invite you over for the 4th of July BBQ? What happens when the FBI recruits your neighbors or your children’s teachers as informants? What happens when they park an obvious surveillance element outside your house 24/7 for everyone, including you, to see? How can you defend yourself from what is effectively a whisper campaign, the sole purpose of which is to destroy your life and make an example of you for other Americans to see?
Americans can mitigate abusive extrajudicial acts of intimidation by organizing at the local level. Build community-based political movements and support networks to educate, recognize, and neutralize such activity. If you are approached by federal agents and asked to assist them, recognize it for what it is and refuse, then alert those concerned. In other words, if you see something—say something. (If you need a blueprint on organizing, see here and here.)
When government agents can circumvent your due process rights without any legal predicate, you are no longer a free citizen; you are a subject in a tyranny. Traditional Americans need to understand that this is the case right now. You may believe you are free because you are still relatively anonymous to the tyrant, and that is likely true, right up until the point it isn’t.
It’s About Liberty
America’s founders were fully aware of the dangers of an all-powerful and unaccountable government. Having suffered under the Crown’s tyranny, they painstakingly set about to write and implement a Constitution that enshrined the ideas of individual liberty respected and guaranteed by a limited and restrained government. They understood the tendency of human behavior to trend towards tyranny when left to its natural devices. Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 letter to Moses Robinson, wrote:
I sincerely wish with you we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in, and with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind and principles. This is a subject with which wisdom and patriotism should be occupied.
We have arrived at the point that Jefferson feared—the point where bad men with immense patronage (our oligarchy) have taken our liberty, our rights, and our future in order to profit from our subjugation. Now it is up to us to use our wisdom and patriotism to correct the course of our nation and reassert our station as the defenders of liberty and the bearers of our constitutional republic.
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