07-28-2023, 03:13 PM
https://cdn.getmidnight.com/6908ab1f9a9e...re-War.jpg
The Culture War Against Thinking Individuals by the Vast Ideologically-Motivated Insane
Gary D. Barnett
“Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else’s views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others.” ~ J.P. Moreland
It is natural human proclivity to run and hide from critical thinking, in what has become a society consumed by spurious headlines, ignorance of fact, and extreme propaganda, but fear not the truth. Understanding the culture war that seems to be perpetually ongoing, is not as daunting as it may appear. All that is required in order to capture the importance of this line of thinking, is a modicum of logic and reason, a desire to know reality over fiction, and to accept certainty above all else. It is imperative to expose the constant lies fed to the collective herd, and to isolate them so as to discover the legitimate truth, so that the State’s false narratives can be abandoned once and for all. Once this awakening occurs, if in fact that is even possible today, and a psychological escape from the insanity of this supposed ‘civilization’ materializes, one’s mind will be free of fear, anxiety, confusion, and hate. It is a wonderful state of being in which to dwell.
We are in a culture war, and the antagonist in this nefarious plot, and evil enemy of all sane thinkers, is the State, its controlling ruling class, and all those who would support, recognize, and enforce, its mandates and illegitimate laws. This includes those who would expect all others to live and act as they do, to blindly accept what they accept, and to bow to authority instead of depending on self. The term “culture” from its Latin root could have come from different source terms, and over time, multiple meanings have been applied, but generally in the context here, it means: institutions, behaviour, traditions, ‘norms,’ and way of life. This takes in a lot of territory, but does include the societal whole. This in essence leads to the assumption of a collective society, or collectivism, which in turn, means for the ‘good’ of the group at the expense of the individual. As should be presumed, this would always be a closed society, based on totalitarianism, obedience, and rule, and completely detrimental to freedom. As one should know, but few seem to, this is never the way forward.
Consider just our recent history, and you will come away with a better understanding of our revolutionary departure from independence and responsibility, into the hell hole of collective madness. Just considering the near term, beginning with the ‘covid pandemic’ fraud, the hatred toward one another in this country has escalated exponentially. All so-called ‘cultures’ have collided at once, just as planned by the puppet masters, and caused dissension at such levels among every societal entity, that mass hate has been the result. This has been the ultimate in the strategy of divide and conquer, and due to premeditated and purposeful State agitation, most of the people are at each other’s throats, while the overriding collective mindset is to censor, shun, and condemn the truthtellers; thereby making them out to be non-conforming dangerous terrorists. Those who can help others the most by exposing the global takeover plot, those thinkers who dare to challenge the State, those speaking out against the criminality of the ruling class and its enforcers, have now become the shunned minority.
The entirety of the ‘Great Reset’ plot is based on fear. The ‘covid’ scam bears this out, and all State actions since, have continued to lead to separation from community, family, and friends, elimination of the individual, universal loss of empathy, concentration only on self and self-fulfillment, mass hatred, and total chaos. State allowed rioting, thievery, violence, looting, and the resulting phenomenon of isolation from community in favor of ‘cultural groups,’ have led to a mob indifference never before seen in this country. Diversity and ‘tolerance’ now mean accepting any and all behavior, regardless of the completely immoral nature of it, or the great harm it causes, especially against the targeted children. So many heinous things are now considered the ‘norm,’ and due to astounding apathy, fear of rejection, and ostracism, most just pretend to see no evil and hear no evil, and do not speak out about the atrocities they are confronted with every day, which means that they are certainly condoning by silence, evil intent and actions.
The dominating aspects of any culture war create an aggressive and antagonistic atmosphere so steeped in anger, censorship, and hatred, that little actual civil conversation and debate can take place. What is lost in this madness, is the fact that we all have to live together, regardless if we agree or not about every ‘issue.’ But the bottom line remains the same; right and wrong matter, whether or not one chooses to concentrate on single or multiple feigned, and likely contentious, problems or opinions. We are all different, so expecting every other to agree with your position, no matter how passionate it may be for you, is ridiculous. In fact, it is downright ludicrous.
What is lost here, is the most starkly obvious aspect of this entire situation; and that is that all these conflicts are purposely manufactured by the State players who desire to distract you, so that the extreme tyranny they are practicing will go unnoticed. How better to rule over and control the masses, than to use propaganda and psychological maneuvering to pit all against all to such an extent, as to mask the real terror facing the hate-blinded proletariat? The right versus wrong argument becomes moot, because in this type of cultural battle, there can be no right or wrong. Once that level of insanity is set in place, total immorality, crime, violence, hostile attitudes, loss of compassion for all others, and gross indifference consumes all else. This will always lead to a win for the heinous State apparatus, and a loss for all the rest of us.
Everyone who accepts and participates in this circus of isolation and hate; the republicans and democrats, the bogus and farcical transgender crowd, the masters and the collective plebs, the so-called ‘woke’ among you, the race-baiters, the media whores, the sexes versus each other, the BLM and Antifa scum, all governments of course, and any and all who expect to gain respect by force or censorship, are completely responsible for this devastating declination of humanity. There are many to blame, but so long as any group can use politics in order to decide who wins and who loses, who gets favors, who gets funded at his neighbor’s expense, who gets legislative protection, and who gets to impose his will and desires on others, chaos and loss of liberty will be the prevailing outcome.
Transgenderism and homosexuality are not normal. Rioting is not normal. Censorship cannot be normal in any free society. Mutilation, perversion, and degeneracy are not normal. Killing babies and exploiting children are not normal. Theft, looting, and property destruction are not normal. Mass homelessness is not normal. Abandoning and destroying family is not normal. It is impossible to blend all these things with all the good in life, and expect to retain any semblance of normalcy. Competing cultures of this magnitude have to completely separate in order to survive. In any case where unlimited ‘tolerance ‘and ‘diversity’ are demanded, and right and wrong have no meaning, no moral or compassionate ‘civilization’ can exist.
Therefore, it is my belief that the human species continually reinforces the insanity of man, using ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ as excuses to alter the paradigms of good and evil so as to favor both equally.
So what is the solution to our culture war ills? As always, there is only one real solution, and that is to rid the country of the major antagonist driving this wedge between us. The State and its governing corporate partners, the ruling class in other words, must be abolished in order for harmony to return. This could be done by mass secession, and preferably at every level of ‘governance.’ Then, competing cultures dependent on force , could go their way, while those of us seeking harmonious co-existence could go another.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ~ Isaac Asimov
https://www.garydbarnett.com/the-culture...ed-insane/
https://cdn.getmidnight.com/6908ab1f9a9e...920109.jpg
Mental Health Round-Ups + Involuntary Detentions • The Next Phase of the Government’s War on Thought Crimes
John Whitehead
“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity.”—Hannah Arendt
Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.
Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.
If we don’t nip this in the bud, and soon, this will become yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the First and Fourth Amendments at will.
This is how it begins.
In communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believemight be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.
In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”
While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”
As the AP reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.
Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.
The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.
The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”
Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union also declared dissidents mentally ill and consigned political prisoners to prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, where they could be isolated from the rest of society, their ideas discredited, and subjected to electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures to break them physically and mentally.
In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:
The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.
Warrantless seizures, surveillance, indefinite detention, isolation, exile… sound familiar?
It should.
The age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.
Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.
That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) its critics is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these individuals are declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.
These developments are merely the realization of various U.S. government initiatives dating back to 2009, including one dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”
Coupled with the report on “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” issued by the Department of Homeland Security (curiously enough, a Soviet term), which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.
Thus, what began as a blueprint under the Bush administration has since become an operation manual for exiling those who challenge the government’s authority.
An important point to consider, however, is that the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is locking up individuals trained in military warfare who are voicing feelings of discontent.
Under the guise of mental health treatment and with the complicity of government psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, these veterans are increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs in need of intervention.
For instance, the Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.
One tactic being used to deal with so-called “mentally ill suspects who also happen to be trained in modern warfare” is through the use of civil commitment laws, found in all states and employed throughout American history to not only silence but cause dissidents to disappear.
For example, NSA officials attempted to label former employee Russ Tice, who was willing to testify in Congress about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, as “mentally unbalanced” based upon two psychiatric evaluations ordered by his superiors.
NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had his home raided, and he was handcuffed to a gurney and taken into emergency custody for an alleged psychiatric episode. It was later discovered by way of an internal investigation that his superiors were retaliating against him for reporting police misconduct. Schoolcraft spent six days in the mental facility, and as a further indignity, was presented with a bill for $7,185 upon his release.
Marine Brandon Raub—a 9/11 truther—was arrested and detained in a psychiatric ward under Virginia’s civil commitment law based on posts he had made on his Facebook page that were critical of the government.
Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.
The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.
The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.
In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.
Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.
Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others), are a perfect example of this mindset at work and the ramifications of where this could lead.
As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”
With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.
While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.
This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.
Let that sink in a moment.
Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority in order to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, and you’ll understand why some might view these mental health round-ups with trepidation.
No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.
Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
We stand at a crossroads.
As author Erich Fromm warned, “At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.”
https://www.truth11.com/untitled-1172/
The Culture War Against Thinking Individuals by the Vast Ideologically-Motivated Insane
Gary D. Barnett
“Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else’s views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others.” ~ J.P. Moreland
It is natural human proclivity to run and hide from critical thinking, in what has become a society consumed by spurious headlines, ignorance of fact, and extreme propaganda, but fear not the truth. Understanding the culture war that seems to be perpetually ongoing, is not as daunting as it may appear. All that is required in order to capture the importance of this line of thinking, is a modicum of logic and reason, a desire to know reality over fiction, and to accept certainty above all else. It is imperative to expose the constant lies fed to the collective herd, and to isolate them so as to discover the legitimate truth, so that the State’s false narratives can be abandoned once and for all. Once this awakening occurs, if in fact that is even possible today, and a psychological escape from the insanity of this supposed ‘civilization’ materializes, one’s mind will be free of fear, anxiety, confusion, and hate. It is a wonderful state of being in which to dwell.
We are in a culture war, and the antagonist in this nefarious plot, and evil enemy of all sane thinkers, is the State, its controlling ruling class, and all those who would support, recognize, and enforce, its mandates and illegitimate laws. This includes those who would expect all others to live and act as they do, to blindly accept what they accept, and to bow to authority instead of depending on self. The term “culture” from its Latin root could have come from different source terms, and over time, multiple meanings have been applied, but generally in the context here, it means: institutions, behaviour, traditions, ‘norms,’ and way of life. This takes in a lot of territory, but does include the societal whole. This in essence leads to the assumption of a collective society, or collectivism, which in turn, means for the ‘good’ of the group at the expense of the individual. As should be presumed, this would always be a closed society, based on totalitarianism, obedience, and rule, and completely detrimental to freedom. As one should know, but few seem to, this is never the way forward.
Consider just our recent history, and you will come away with a better understanding of our revolutionary departure from independence and responsibility, into the hell hole of collective madness. Just considering the near term, beginning with the ‘covid pandemic’ fraud, the hatred toward one another in this country has escalated exponentially. All so-called ‘cultures’ have collided at once, just as planned by the puppet masters, and caused dissension at such levels among every societal entity, that mass hate has been the result. This has been the ultimate in the strategy of divide and conquer, and due to premeditated and purposeful State agitation, most of the people are at each other’s throats, while the overriding collective mindset is to censor, shun, and condemn the truthtellers; thereby making them out to be non-conforming dangerous terrorists. Those who can help others the most by exposing the global takeover plot, those thinkers who dare to challenge the State, those speaking out against the criminality of the ruling class and its enforcers, have now become the shunned minority.
The entirety of the ‘Great Reset’ plot is based on fear. The ‘covid’ scam bears this out, and all State actions since, have continued to lead to separation from community, family, and friends, elimination of the individual, universal loss of empathy, concentration only on self and self-fulfillment, mass hatred, and total chaos. State allowed rioting, thievery, violence, looting, and the resulting phenomenon of isolation from community in favor of ‘cultural groups,’ have led to a mob indifference never before seen in this country. Diversity and ‘tolerance’ now mean accepting any and all behavior, regardless of the completely immoral nature of it, or the great harm it causes, especially against the targeted children. So many heinous things are now considered the ‘norm,’ and due to astounding apathy, fear of rejection, and ostracism, most just pretend to see no evil and hear no evil, and do not speak out about the atrocities they are confronted with every day, which means that they are certainly condoning by silence, evil intent and actions.
The dominating aspects of any culture war create an aggressive and antagonistic atmosphere so steeped in anger, censorship, and hatred, that little actual civil conversation and debate can take place. What is lost in this madness, is the fact that we all have to live together, regardless if we agree or not about every ‘issue.’ But the bottom line remains the same; right and wrong matter, whether or not one chooses to concentrate on single or multiple feigned, and likely contentious, problems or opinions. We are all different, so expecting every other to agree with your position, no matter how passionate it may be for you, is ridiculous. In fact, it is downright ludicrous.
What is lost here, is the most starkly obvious aspect of this entire situation; and that is that all these conflicts are purposely manufactured by the State players who desire to distract you, so that the extreme tyranny they are practicing will go unnoticed. How better to rule over and control the masses, than to use propaganda and psychological maneuvering to pit all against all to such an extent, as to mask the real terror facing the hate-blinded proletariat? The right versus wrong argument becomes moot, because in this type of cultural battle, there can be no right or wrong. Once that level of insanity is set in place, total immorality, crime, violence, hostile attitudes, loss of compassion for all others, and gross indifference consumes all else. This will always lead to a win for the heinous State apparatus, and a loss for all the rest of us.
Everyone who accepts and participates in this circus of isolation and hate; the republicans and democrats, the bogus and farcical transgender crowd, the masters and the collective plebs, the so-called ‘woke’ among you, the race-baiters, the media whores, the sexes versus each other, the BLM and Antifa scum, all governments of course, and any and all who expect to gain respect by force or censorship, are completely responsible for this devastating declination of humanity. There are many to blame, but so long as any group can use politics in order to decide who wins and who loses, who gets favors, who gets funded at his neighbor’s expense, who gets legislative protection, and who gets to impose his will and desires on others, chaos and loss of liberty will be the prevailing outcome.
Transgenderism and homosexuality are not normal. Rioting is not normal. Censorship cannot be normal in any free society. Mutilation, perversion, and degeneracy are not normal. Killing babies and exploiting children are not normal. Theft, looting, and property destruction are not normal. Mass homelessness is not normal. Abandoning and destroying family is not normal. It is impossible to blend all these things with all the good in life, and expect to retain any semblance of normalcy. Competing cultures of this magnitude have to completely separate in order to survive. In any case where unlimited ‘tolerance ‘and ‘diversity’ are demanded, and right and wrong have no meaning, no moral or compassionate ‘civilization’ can exist.
Therefore, it is my belief that the human species continually reinforces the insanity of man, using ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ as excuses to alter the paradigms of good and evil so as to favor both equally.
So what is the solution to our culture war ills? As always, there is only one real solution, and that is to rid the country of the major antagonist driving this wedge between us. The State and its governing corporate partners, the ruling class in other words, must be abolished in order for harmony to return. This could be done by mass secession, and preferably at every level of ‘governance.’ Then, competing cultures dependent on force , could go their way, while those of us seeking harmonious co-existence could go another.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ~ Isaac Asimov
https://www.garydbarnett.com/the-culture...ed-insane/
https://cdn.getmidnight.com/6908ab1f9a9e...920109.jpg
Mental Health Round-Ups + Involuntary Detentions • The Next Phase of the Government’s War on Thought Crimes
John Whitehead
“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity.”—Hannah Arendt
Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.
Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.
If we don’t nip this in the bud, and soon, this will become yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the First and Fourth Amendments at will.
This is how it begins.
In communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believemight be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.
In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”
While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”
As the AP reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.
Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.
The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.
The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”
Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union also declared dissidents mentally ill and consigned political prisoners to prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, where they could be isolated from the rest of society, their ideas discredited, and subjected to electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures to break them physically and mentally.
In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:
The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.
Warrantless seizures, surveillance, indefinite detention, isolation, exile… sound familiar?
It should.
The age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.
Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.
That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) its critics is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these individuals are declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.
These developments are merely the realization of various U.S. government initiatives dating back to 2009, including one dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”
Coupled with the report on “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” issued by the Department of Homeland Security (curiously enough, a Soviet term), which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.
Thus, what began as a blueprint under the Bush administration has since become an operation manual for exiling those who challenge the government’s authority.
An important point to consider, however, is that the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is locking up individuals trained in military warfare who are voicing feelings of discontent.
Under the guise of mental health treatment and with the complicity of government psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, these veterans are increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs in need of intervention.
For instance, the Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.
One tactic being used to deal with so-called “mentally ill suspects who also happen to be trained in modern warfare” is through the use of civil commitment laws, found in all states and employed throughout American history to not only silence but cause dissidents to disappear.
For example, NSA officials attempted to label former employee Russ Tice, who was willing to testify in Congress about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, as “mentally unbalanced” based upon two psychiatric evaluations ordered by his superiors.
NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had his home raided, and he was handcuffed to a gurney and taken into emergency custody for an alleged psychiatric episode. It was later discovered by way of an internal investigation that his superiors were retaliating against him for reporting police misconduct. Schoolcraft spent six days in the mental facility, and as a further indignity, was presented with a bill for $7,185 upon his release.
Marine Brandon Raub—a 9/11 truther—was arrested and detained in a psychiatric ward under Virginia’s civil commitment law based on posts he had made on his Facebook page that were critical of the government.
Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.
The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.
The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.
In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.
Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.
Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others), are a perfect example of this mindset at work and the ramifications of where this could lead.
As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”
With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.
While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.
This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.
Let that sink in a moment.
Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority in order to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, and you’ll understand why some might view these mental health round-ups with trepidation.
No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.
Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
We stand at a crossroads.
As author Erich Fromm warned, “At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.”
https://www.truth11.com/untitled-1172/