Wednesday Morning Rant [Joe Mannix]

Yesterday, "Foundation for Freedom Online" published their assessment of documents they recently acquired from the DHS through a FOIA demand. JJ covered part of this in this morning's Morning Report as well.

I think there are two major goals or conclusions to draw from this, but that one is more important than the other. The first is that it defines pretty well who the government sees as the enemy: anyone who questions the preferred policies of the government. This is not the era of Bush 43. Unlike the assertions of all the "journalists" of that era, dissent is not patriotic. Objection is dangerous. Dissent is sedition. Heterodoxy is treason. This is nothing new.

The DHS and FBI have long asserted that "domestic extremists" - which never include left-wing extremist groups like Antifa - are the greatest persistent threat to American security. Leaked documents from DHS (reported by Politico) covered this years ago. They're not drifting off-course in these new documents that focus on pro-life people, "white supremacists," "conspiracy theorists," and "anti-government extremists." The only surprising thing is that eco-terrorists remain on the list.

From the standpoint of who the government sees as its internal enemies that must be destroyed, there is nothing new here. What I find much more interesting is what this new release actually is. The new release is the transcript from an interactive video series being developed. They introduce a scenario, show a clip, and then the participant can choose what to do from a menu of available options. After the choice, there is a summary of the consequences of the choice and then the next part of the scenario plays out. This continues until the end of the scenario.

The choices all lead one direction. You can snoop on the subject using social media, you can call the subject's friends or family or authority figures, you can pump the subject for more information, etc. As the scenarios progress, the choices grow more invasive. "Do nothing" disappears as a choice, and new options like calling the sheriff enter the list. Doing nothing vanishes from the menu of options, and at no point is agreeing with the dissident presented as an option at all.

The prior work was to set the stage within the agency and other agencies to ensure that they all work on the same target: dissidents. This new thing has a different purpose: recruitment. This is designed to make people think that they must intervene to "fix" potential dissidents and bring them back into the fold or, failing that, snitch on them to remove the threat. This is exactly how the GDR operated. The Stasi wasn't big enough to spy on everyone all the time, so they recruited everyone as informal deputy agents. Everyone was a snitch, and everyone was snitched on. Your neighbor spied on you and you spied on your neighbor. The goal was to chill dissent and sow distrust among the people as well as to feed remaining dissidents into the Stasi's machinery. It resulted in a totalitarian hellscape and its effects remain an open sore on German society.

And it's stuff like this that promotes the Stasification of a country.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:00 AM

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