By John & Nisha Whitehead
The votes are in.
No matter who runs for office, no matter who controls the White House, Senate, or the House of Representatives now or in the future, “we the people” already have lost.
We have lost because the future of this Nation is being forged beyond the reach of our laws, elections, and borders by techno-authoritarian powers with no regard for individuality, privacy, or freedom. The fate of the United States is being made in China, our role model for all things dystopian.
An economic and political powerhouse that owns more of the U.S. debt than any other country and is buying up American businesses across the spectrum, China is a vicious totalitarian regime that routinely employs censorship, surveillance, and brutal police state tactics to intimidate its populace, maintain its power, and expand the largesse of its corporate elite.
Where China goes, the United States eventually follows. That way lies outright tyranny.
• Censorship. China’s censorship machine is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984 book with government agencies and corporations working together to limit the populace’s freedom of expression. Government agencies routinely harass and intimidate anyone seen as non-compliant. Activists are frequently penalized for gathering in public places and charged criminally with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” China has gone to great lengths to muzzle journalists reporting on corruption or human rights abuses.
• Surveillance. COVID-19 brought China’s Orwellian surveillance out of the shadows and gave China the perfect excuse for unleashing the full force of its expansive and sophisticated surveillance and data collection powers on its citizenry and the rest of the world. Facial recognition cameras and cell phone carriers track people’s movements constantly, reporting in real time to data centers that can be accessed by government agents and employers alike. And coded color alerts (red, yellow, and green) sort people into health categories that correspond to the amount of freedom of movement they’re allowed: “Green code, travel freely. Red or yellow, report immediately.”
• Social media credit scores. Equipped with facial recognition technology, some 200 million security cameras installed nationwide allow authorities to track so-called criminal acts, such as jaywalking, which factor into a person’s social credit score. Social media credit scores assigned to Chinese individuals and businesses categorize them on whether or not they are good citizens. A citizen score determines one’s place in society based on one’s loyalty to the government. A real-name system, which requires people to use government-issued ID cards to buy mobile sims, obtain social media accounts, take a train, board a plane, or even buy groceries, coupled with social media credit scores ensures that those blacklisted as unworthy are banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.
• Safe, smart cities. Having pioneered the development of so-called safe, smart, cities, China is exporting worldwide the high-tech communities in which residents are monitored round the clock, their every action under constant surveillance, and every device is connected to a central brain operated by artificial intelligence. Privacy expert Vincent Mosco concludes, “The benefit from smart cities clearly goes to the authorities who are able to use the promise of the modern, high-tech city to extend and deepen surveillance. It goes to the big tech companies who profit first from building the smart city infrastructure and secondly by commodifying the entire smart city space. Citizens gain some operational efficiency but at great cost to their liberty.”
• Digital currency. China all ready has adopted a government-issued digital currency, which not only allows it to surveil and seize people’s financial transactions, but can work in tandem with its social-credit score system to punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior).
• AI surveillance. In much the same way that Chinese products have infiltrated almost every market worldwide and altered consumer dynamics, China is now exporting its authoritarian tech to governments worldwide ostensibly in an effort to spread its brand of totalitarianism worldwide. Although countries with authoritarian regimes have been eager to adopt AI surveillance, liberal democracies are aggressively using AI tools to police borders, apprehend potential criminals, monitor citizens for bad behavior, and pull out suspected terrorists from crowds.
• Secret police. According to recent reports, China has planted more than 54 secret police forces in 25 cities around the world, including the United States, as part of their efforts to track and threaten dissidents and deport them back to China for prosecution.
• Police brutality. Not much has changed about China’s brutal crackdown on protesters in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese policing remains brutal, excessive, and inflexible, now with the added power of the surveillance state behind it.
• Intimidation tactics. China has mastered the art of intimidation tactics, threatening activists, their families and their livelihood should they fail to comply with the government’s dictates.
• Disappearance, brainwashing, and torture. Those who fail to fall in line with China’s dictates are often made to disappear, arrested in the dead of night, and imprisoned in Orwellian re-education camps. China has built more than 400 of these internment camps in recent years.
China’s global influence, its technological reach, its quest for world domination, and its rigid demand for compliance are pushing us towards a world in chains.
What too many fail to recognize, however, is that China and the American Deep State have joined forces. As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart, The Erik Blair Diaries, this is fascism hiding behind a thin veneer of open government and populist elections.
For all intents and purposes, we have become the embodiment of what Philip K. Dick feared when he wrote The Man in the High Castle, a vision of an alternate universe in which the Axis powers defeat the Allies in World War II, and “fascism has not simply conquered America. It has insinuated itself, with disturbing ease, into America’s DNA.”
Yet, while Dick’s vision of a world in which totalitarianism has been normalized is chilling, our growing reality of a world in which the Deep State is not merely entrenched but has gone global is downright terrifying.
Our national flag may not boast the red and white stripes with a swastika on a field of blue as depicted in The Man in the High Castle, but be warned: we are no less occupied.
—The Rutherford Institute