Intermezzo Guest Blog: Petr Svab; Experts’ Warning

This is a rather long piece compared to my usual blogs of ~1000 words, but well worth reading.  C.S. Lewis once wrote: “A tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  The robber baron’s cruelty may sometime be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment without end for they do so with the approval of their conscience[s].”  Read on and pray for the USA.  This article has minor formatting and grammatical edits from the original.

Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism

The US Flag at half-mast in front of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

Concerns about the nexus of big tech, big media, and big government.
By Petr Svab  January 20, 2021; Updated: January 21, 2021

The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.

While many have warned about the rise of fascism or socialism in “the land of the free,” the ideas have largely been vague or fragmented, focusing on individual events or actors.  Recent events, however, indicate that seemingly unconnected pieces of the oppression puzzle are fitting together to form a comprehensive system, according to Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University.

But many Americans, it appears, have been caught off guard or are not even aware of the newly forming regime, as the idea of elected officials, government bureaucrats, large corporations, the establishment academia, think tanks and nonprofits, the legacy media, and even seemingly grassroot movements all working in concert toward some evil purpose seems preposterous.  Is a large portion of the country in on a conspiracy?

The reality now emerges that no massive conspiracy was in fact needed — merely an ideological alignment and some informal coordination, Rectenwald argues.  “Despite the lack of formal overarching organization, the American socialist regime is indeed totalitarian, as the root of its ideology requires politically motivated coercion,” he told The Epoch Times.  The power of the regime is not yet absolute, but it is becoming increasingly effective as it erodes the values, checks, and balances against tyranny established by traditional beliefs and enshrined in the American founding.

The effects can be seen throughout society. Americans, regardless of their income, demographics, or social stature are being fired from jobs, getting stripped of access to basic services such as banking and social media, or having their businesses crippled for voicing political opinions and belonging to a designated political underclass.  Access to sources of information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult.  Some figures of power and influence are sketching the next step, labelling large segments of society as “extremists” and potential terrorists who need to be “deprogrammed.”

While the onset of the regime appears tied to events of recent years — the presidency of Donald Trump, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, the Capitol intrusion of January  6 — its roots go back decades.

Is It Really Totalitarian?
Totalitarian regimes are commonly understood as constituting a government headed by a dictator that regiments the economy, censors the media, and quells dissent by force.  That is not the case in America, but it is also a misunderstanding of how such regimes function, literature on totalitarianism indicates.

To claim power, the regimes do not initially need to control every aspect of society through government.  Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, used various means to control the economy, including gaining compliance of industry leaders voluntarily, or through intimidation, or through replacing the executives with party loyalists.

Similarly, the regime rearing its head in America relies on corporate executives to implement its agenda voluntarily but also through intimidation by online brigades of activists and journalists who take initiative to launch negative PR campaigns and boycotts to progress their preferred societal structure.

Also, Hitler initially did not control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the “brown shirts,” who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.  The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to “cancel” and “shut down” public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.  Dissenting media in America have not been silenced by the government directly as of yet. 

But they are stymied in other ways.  In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google.  Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.  Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems “authoritative.”  Search results indicate the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative.  Such media can then produce hit pieces on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the “authoritativeness” of the dissenters.  Facebook employs third-party fact checkers who have the discretion to label content as “false” and thus reduce the audience on its platform.  Virtually all the fact checkers focused on American content are ideologically aligned with Facebook.

Attempts to set up alternative social media have run into yet more fundamental obstacles, as demonstrated by Parler, whose mobile app was terminated by Google and Apple, while the company was kicked off Amazon’s servers.

To the degree that a totalitarian regime requires a police state, there is as yet no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly.  But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement.  Indicators go back to the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups or the difference in treatment received by former Trump adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn and former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe — both allegedly lying to investigators but only one getting prosecuted.  The situation may get still worse as the restrictions tied to the CCP virus see broad swaths of ordinary human behavior being considered “illegal,” opening the door to nearly universal political targeting.

“I think the means by which a police state is being set up is the demonization of Trump supporters and the likely use of medical passports to institute the effective equivalent of social credit scores,” Rectenwald said.  While loyalty to the government and to a specific political party plays a major role, it is the allegiance to the ideological root of totalitarianism that gives it its foot soldiers, literature on the subject indicates.

Totalitarian Ideology
The element “that holds totalitarianism together as a composite of intellectual elements” is the ambition of fundamentally reimagining society — “the intention to create a ‘New Man,’” explained author Richard Shorten in Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present.

Various ideologies have framed the ambition differently, based on what they posited as the key to the transformation.  Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, viewed the control of the economy as primary, describing socialism as “socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature,” in Das Kapital.

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, viewed race as primary.  People would become “socialized” — that is transformed and perfected — by removing Jews and other supposedly “lesser” races from society, he claimed.

The most dominant among the current ideologies stem from the so-called “critical theories,” where the perfected society is defined by “equity,” meaning elimination of differences in outcomes for people in demographic categories deemed historically marginalized.  The goal is to be achieved by eliminating the ever-present “white supremacy,” however the ideologues currently define it.

While such ideologies commonly prescribe collectivism, calling for national or even international unification behind their agenda, they are elitist and dictatorial in practice as they find mankind never “woke” enough to follow their agenda voluntarily.  In Marx’s prophecies, the revolution was supposed to occur spontaneously.  Yet it never did, leading Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, to conclude that the revolution will need leadership after all.

“The idea is that you have some enlightened party … who understand the problem of the proletariat better than the proletariat does and is going to shepherd them through the revolution that they need to have for the greater good,” explained James Lindsay, author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody.”

Elements of this intellectual foundation can be found in ideologies of many current political forces, from neo-nazis and anarcho-communists, through to progressives and to some extent even neoliberals and neoconservatives, Lindsay acknowledged.  “This is why you see so many people today saying that the only possible answers are a full return to classical liberalism or a complete rejection of liberalism entirely as fatally disposed to create progressivism, neoliberalism, etc.,” he said.

That is not to say these ideologies are openly advocating totalitarianism but rather that they inevitably lead to it.  The roadmap could be summarized as follows:

1. There is something fundamentally and intolerably wrong with current reality.
2. There is a plan to fix it requiring a whole society buy-in.
3. People opposing the plan need to be educated about the plan so they accept it.
4. People who resist the persuasion need to be reeducated, even against their will.
5. People who will not accept the plan no matter what need to be removed from society.

“I think that is the general thrust,” Lindsay said. “We can make the world the way we want it to be if we all just get on the same page and same project. It is a disaster, frankly.”

Points Four and Five Now Appear To Be In Progress.
Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos recently labeled the widespread questioning of the 2020 election results as “violent extremism,” which social media companies should eradicate the same way they countered online recruitment content from the ISIS terrorist group.  The “core issue,” he said, “is that we have given a lot of leeway, both in traditional media and on social media, to people to have a very broad range of political views” and this has led to the emergence of “more and more radical” alternative media like OAN and Newsmax.

Stamos then mused about how to reform Americans who have tuned into the dissenters.  “How do you bring those people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us all back into the same consensus reality?” he asked in a CNN interview.
“And can you? Is that possible?” CNN host Brian Stelter added.

The logic goes as follows: Trump claimed the election was stolen through fraud and other illegalities.  That has not been proven in court and is thus false.  People who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and managed to break inside and disrupt the electoral vote counting did so because they believed the election was stolen.  Therefore, anybody who questions the legitimacy of the election results is an extremist and potentially a terrorist.

With tens of thousands of troops assembled to guard the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) recently told CNN that all guard members who voted for Trump belong to a “suspect group” that “might want to do something,” alluding to past leaders of other countries who were “killed by their own people.”

Former FBI Director James Comey recently said the Republican party needs to be “burned down or changed.”

“They want a one party state,” commented conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in a recent podcast.  “That is not to say they do not want an opposition.  They want a token opposition.  They want Republicans where they get to say what kind of Republican is okay.”

Just as Marx blamed the ills of the world on capitalists and Hitler on Jews, the current regime tends to blame various permutations of “white supremacy.”

“Expel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in a recent tweet, garnering some 300,000 likes.  She was referring to the Republican lawmakers who raised objections on Jan. 6 to election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.  Their objections were voted down.

“Can U.S. Spy Agencies Stop White Terror?” Daily Beast’s Jeff Stein asked in a recent headline, concluding that a call for “secret police” to sniff out “extremist” Americans “may well get renewed attention.”  Under the regime, allegations of election fraud — de facto questioning the legitimacy of the leader — have become incitement of terrorism.  YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook, and Twitter have either banned content that claims the election was rigged or are furnishing it with warning labels.  Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey was recently recorded as saying that banning the president’s account was just the beginning.  This approach closely mirrors that of the Chinese communist regime, which commonly targets dissidents for “subverting” the state or “spreading rumors.”

What Is The Alternative?
If calls for radically reorganizing the world are inherently totalitarian, how is the world to avoid them?  The question appears to be its own answer.  If totalitarianism inherently requires allegiance to its ideology, it cannot exist in a society with a lack of such allegiance.

The United States were founded on the idea that individual rights are God-given and unalienable.  The idea, rooted in traditional beliefs that human morality is of divine origin, stands a bulwark against any attempt to assail people’s rights even for their own good.

“If you are not a believer in actual God, you can posit a God’s ideal on the matter … We have to posit some arbiter who is above and beyond our own prejudices and biases in order to ensure these kinds of rights. … Because otherwise you have this infinitely malleable situation in which people with power and coercive potential can eliminate and rationalize the elimination of rights willy-nilly,” Rectenwald said.

Intermezzo: Guest Blog by Jarrett Stepman

We Must Heed Lincoln’s Warning About Mob Rule

by Jarrett Stepman @JarrettStepman / January 06, 2021 /
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. Send an email to Jarrett. He is also the author of the new book, “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.”

Abraham Lincoln warned us: Mob rule begets mob rule.
On Wednesday, as Congress convened to certify an Electoral College vote of the 2020 presidential election, a mass of people broke into the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.  They climbed the building, smashed windows, entered offices, and even entered the House and Senate chambers.  It was a bizarre scene, to say the least.



Taking selfies and engaging in photo ops from the House speaker’s chair certainly puts a modern twist on this 21st-century reenactment of the Vandals’ sack of Rome in 455 A.D.  But it wasn’t just window-smashing and photo ops.  The intrusion also turned deadly.  A woman was shot and killed.

There will also be questions as to how a group of people, no matter how large, was able to push their way inside the Capitol and stay inside for several hours.  So, what’s to be made of all this?



The right to peacefully assemble and protest is an essential one guaranteed by the Constitution.  Breaking into and vandalizing federal property — for whatever cause — is not.  Regardless of the original message of the protests, those who orchestrated the break-in to federal property deserve condemnation.  It’s a violation of the rule of law, not to mention a federal crime.

Certainly, many on both the left and right came out quickly to condemn the violence.  It would, however, be a mistake to see what happened in isolation.






Let’s not forget that Washington, D.C. — as with many other cities across the country — had already been beset last year by mobs and waves of violent riots.  When rioters lit fires, smashed windows, toppled statues, and physically and verbally assaulted political opponents in the name of Black Lives Matter this summer, the result was that a street was named for the movement in front of the White House.



The violence wasn’t limited to just Washington.  Around the country, large swaths of cities were set ablaze as police departments became overwhelmed, and politicians did little to stop it.  A lawless “autonomous” zone was created in the middle of downtown Seattle, which led to widespread property damage and several deaths.  Many hopped aboard calls to defund the police, rather than defending the police while they were besieged.  And more than a few turned down federal aid when it was clear that things had spun out of control.



Portland, Oregon, had the highest spike of violent crime in the entire country — impressive given the nearly unprecedented national surge in violent crime.  That is the consequence of rampant lawlessness.

When Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., dared to suggest in an op-ed in the pages of The New York Times that overwhelmed police departments should have the ability to request aid from the military, the Times newsroom rebelled, and he was called an authoritarian.  Yet, Cotton aptly called the lawless riots what they were: mob rule.

Mob rule, whether conducted by members of Black Lives Matter or people wearing MAGA hats, is a threat to law and order.  Not only that, it’s a threat to liberty, too.  It violates the very essence of the Constitution, of the belief that the people ultimately rule.  And as Abraham Lincoln warned in his famed 1838 Lyceum Address, mob law when left unchecked begets more mob law.  When portions of the population think that violence is the path to victory, where the rules of the system don’t have to be followed, it is only natural for others to think that mob law is the law.  Under mobocracy, even those inclined to follow the law may eventually lose faith in the government.

Lincoln warned:
Good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose. Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed.

Even if we believe that our system has become corrupted, that injustice rather than justice has prevailed, it is still the wiser course to appeal to ballots, protest, and petition rather than violence.  The American Revolution, which ultimately ended in war and the overthrow of British rule, was for the most part an orderly affair.  Even within a system that did not provide representative government, the Founders appealed to law and negotiation first, second, and third before resorting to violence.  And once committed to revolution, they knew there was no going back.

We shouldn’t forget that the storming of the Bastille, as grave as the depredations of the French monarchy had sometimes been, led to mass violence and tyranny, not ordered liberty.

Most Americans understand this.  But make no mistake, unlike this summer’s riots — which countless media outlets distorted and misrepresented to excuse and minimize — there will absolutely be efforts to portray every Trump supporter as a violent insurrectionist.  And politicians will use that to justify curtailing the God-given rights of citizens who disagree with them.

Many have condemned the intrusion and vandalizing of the Capitol Building, as they should, but we should also not forget the fact that mob rule and lawlessness have destroyed the lives of countless Americans over the past year and has eroded our country’s attachment to the rule of law.  This should have always been unacceptable.

Lincoln’s warning in 1838 was ignored, and a generation of Americans paid a terrible price in blood for it. Let us learn from the past instead of tearing it down.  Regardless of the corruption of our institutions, the better path forward is to support the rule of law, reform old institutions or build new ones, and plan for the long term of sustaining this federal republic that we would surely like to keep.

Trump or Biden: 100 Days and Counting

After November 3, a few days less than 100 days from now, we will have elected the President of the USA . . . well, sorta.  To hear the two major candidates talk about it, questions surrounding mail-in ballots, voter disenfranchisement and current conjoined crises of Covid-19 and rampant racism on our roadways could cloud the conclusion well into December or even 2021!

Biden, himself, and his camp question whether Trump will accept the election results and leave office. ?Really?  That borders on the absurdity of rumors during Obama’s second term that he was going to figure out a way to stay in office.  But while those rumors started and stayed with a right-wing fringe, this is coming from the presumptive candidate.

Trump’s main problem is Joe’s safe and normal feel after four years of dumb impeachment attempts, and Trump’s less that intelligent reactions to everything from his first chief strategist (Remember Steve Bannon?) to firing officials via tweets.  He has sometimes been his own worst enemy.  When Pelosi tore up her copy of the State of the Union speech on national tv and looked like an idiot, instead of taking higher ground and ignoring it, he fed the frustration by inflating her infantile behavior to attacking Tuskagee Airmen and the little boy survivor who was in the stands (born at 21 weeks of gestation), something no thinking person would equate.

One wishes just once we would have to choose between the greater of two goods instead of the lesser of two evils.  But in a democracy of sinful people this will always be our choice.   Like C.S.Lewis, “I believe in democracy not because I believe every man is so noble and wise, he should have a say in his governance. I believe in democracy because no man can be trusted with absolute power.”

So as we go into the last 100 days before the election consider why you would choose to vote for either candidate.  These are just a handful of representative views espoused by the candidates as reported in various news outlets from CNN,Fox, Politico, Axios, Just Facts, and others.  There are a LOT of news sites reporting these ideas.

I encourage you to pray diligently for all our elected officials (1 Timothy 2:1-4), even the ones for whom you did not vote (See April 18, 2020)  And pray for our country that God will use America as He has in the past as a beacon to the world: a beacon of freedom of religion, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression, “one nation under God.”  Read what each of the candidates says, not necessarily listen just to the opposing camp’s quotes out of context or out of date, nor only what the candidate says about himself.  Kind of cynical, but I suspect they will all lie to get elected, and say whatever they think will pay off with votes.

Joe Biden —-

• Joe Biden, though nominally Roman Catholic, believes abortion should be available to a woman up to the moment of birth, that this is a medical procedure decision that should be left up to her.
• Expand Obamacare (ACA) coverage moving in small steps to reach “Medicare for All.”
• He believes that the LBGTQ agenda should be fully endorsed, even assigning a steering committee to his campaign staff to specifically address issues of importance to this group.
• He supports to a significant degree The Green New Deal, banning fossil fuels by 2050.
• End leases for off-shore gas and oil drilling and support nuclear tech as a means to reduce climate change.
• Pay farmers from our taxes to adopt climate-friendly practices.
• Tax carbon emissions in accord with recommendations by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
• He wants to abolish the death penalty completely regardless of the crime or victims.
• He wants to eliminate private prisons that relieve the state systems of some its overload.
• He will push for a national minimum wage of $15 per hour.
• He believes there is significant value in reparations to minorities for things like slave ownership by ancestors and oppression by cities and states.
• He is opposed to for-profit charter schools.
• He wants the taxpayer to provide two years of college education for any high school graduate.
• He wants to expand debt-relief programs for college-accumulated debt for students.
• He wants to boost pay for pre-college teachers across the board.
• Spending on political campaigns should be limited he says.
• He supports universal background checks for gun ownership of any kind and favors forming a national gun registry.
• He would leave criminal penalties for illegal entry into the US in place, but phase them out over his term.
• Tax corporations and the wealthy to pay for transportation to pay for “green” transportation such as electric vehicles, trans-continental high-speed rails, and focus on supplying these benefits to lower socioeconomic groups.
• Void past marijuana convictions and provide states with a bankroll to implement preventions of drug abuse rather than imprison users, allowing states to determine criminality in marijuana possession.
• He supports mail-in voting to protect citizen’s health.
• Israel should accept UN and international guidelines for establishing a two-state solution with a group that is calling for Israel’s annihilation.

Donald Trump —-

• Donald Trump opposes abortion except in the most extreme situations such as when a woman’s life is at risk.
• Though misogynistic and crass, he claims to support traditional marriage.
• He supports hate crimes against lesbians and homosexuals as we tolerate diversity, but opposes special “rights” for homosexuality such as marriage. Established by the Supreme Court, he accepts gay marriage but objects to equal benefits as traditional married couples.
• He supports Medicare and Social Security but opposes Obamacare (ACA) and expansion of government intrusion into the health care field. He wants to see Obamacare repealed.
• He wants to get bureaucracy out of innovators’ way and allow research into all areas of energy production.
• He believes the background checks for firearm ownership are currently adequate but a national age restriction should prevent anyone under 21 from owning a gun.
• Education should be determined at local and state levels moving up a bureaucratic chain instead of down.
• Infrastructure funding should be channeled to road, bridges, schools, etc, “legitimate government functions,” not special interests such as identity endorsements.
• He wants to see the tax code simplified and try to reduce taxes across all income groups.
• He wants defensible borders with deportation of anyone entering illegally.
• Maintain the death penalty to recognize damage to victims and families.
• He opposes legalization of marijuana but believes this is mainly a state issue.
• He wants to create Opportunity Scholarships to provide education for children trapped in failing schools. Education should be a right of every child.
• He reject ideology of globalism but embraces a doctrine of patriotism.
• He believes Iran cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
• He opposes mail-in voting as too risky for fraud.
• He fulfilled the Jerusalem Embassy Act enacted by Congress in 1995 and moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital. Every president from Bill Clinton on promised during his campaign to do so.  Trump did it.

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.” Psalm 122:6

Remember, too, that while the President does wield significant power, Congress and the Courts are co-equal branches of our government and they are chafing under the continual amassing of authority to the Executive Branch.  There may be significant push-back on any of these designs of the candidate once he is elected.

Jerusalem Temple Mount