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ProudlyConservative 3 points ago +3 / -0

The plan is in the Bible. Read His words. He never said it would be easy. Have faith and in all things, praise God. Your reward is in Heaven. Earth is not our home.

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ProudlyConservative 2 points ago +2 / -0

Just a quick question... they can't still go through with this impeachment thing they started??

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ProudlyConservative 2 points ago +2 / -0

If you type in thedonald.xyz it automatically goes to this site since thedonald.win is no longer redirecting to patriots.win

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ProudlyConservative 1 point ago +1 / -0

The Epoch Times

The American flag blows in the wind outside the Supreme Court on Sept. 18, 2020. (Alex Brandon/AP Photo)

Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism, Experts Warn Concerns over the nexus of big tech, big media, and big government BY PETR SVAB January 20, 2021 Updated: January 21, 2021

News Analysis

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 aren’t 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’s becoming increasingly effective as it erodes the values, checks, and balances against tyranny established by traditional beliefs and enshrined in the American founding.

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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.”

MOST READ Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism, Experts Warn Eric Trump: ‘The Best Is Yet to Come’ 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 Jan. 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’s also a misunderstanding of how such regimes function, literature on totalitarianism indicates.

To claim power, the regimes don’t initially need to control every aspect of society through government.

RELATED How China’s Totalitarian Regime Has Worsened the Coronavirus Spread How China’s Totalitarian Regime Has Worsened the Coronavirus Spread 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, 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 didn’t 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 haven’t 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’s no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly. But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement. Signs 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’s 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 his 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’s not to say these ideologies are openly advocating totalitarianism but rather that they inevitably lead to it.

The roadmap could be summarized as follows:

There’s something fundamentally and intolerably wrong with current reality There’s a plan to fix it requiring a whole society buy-in People opposing the plan need to be educated about the plan so they accept it People who resist the persuasion need to be reeducated, even against their will People who won’t accept the plan no matter what need to be removed from society. “I think that’s 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’s 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’ve tuned in to 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 Jan. 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 inaugur

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ProudlyConservative 1 point ago +1 / -0

Doggos, another Moderator told me I can find News under my user name. I don't see where that is. Thank you.

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ProudlyConservative 2 points ago +2 / -0

He has his 6,000 National Guard for 30 days, so it's our problem, not his. What a JOKE.

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ProudlyConservative 1 point ago +1 / -0

I love that video except when they show pence. I still can't believe this has happened to our country. Is there any recourse??

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ProudlyConservative 1 point ago +1 / -0

So with all the fallout, does he get everything reversed!!?? He was basically Cancelled Everywhere!!! It makes no sense!! Why can't people wait to actually find proof of what they're alleging before they ruin every body's lives!! The Damage is DONE & no body gives a CRAP. All the while, there is massive amounts of proof of all the corruption on the dems side and they keep getting away with it all. The only thing that gives me any comfort is that those Evil f**kers will ultimately be judged for their evil doings when they are no longer here.

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ProudlyConservative 5 points ago +5 / -0

Four years wasn't enough. We were all robbed. Imagine what would've been if we'd have eight years. God Bless you our dear President.

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ProudlyConservative 1 point ago +1 / -0

I pray that God will comfort you and give you peace that only He can give. I pray that the wonderful memories you have will sustain you while you grieve. It is hard to put into words, but your Mom will always be with you, just now in a different way. God's grace is beyond description. He will be your Strength. God bless you.

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ProudlyConservative 9 points ago +10 / -1

They are both EVIL and both lead to DEATH.

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ProudlyConservative 9 points ago +9 / -0

Alcohol is nothing but trouble. Please be careful. It may seem fine while you're young but just be careful. A very special person in my life was an alcoholic and passed away. It is deadly.

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ProudlyConservative 6 points ago +6 / -0

This is DEVASTATING. You know someone else is in charge making the decisions and he's just signing these EO's. It's really SICK. "These people are sick", said President Trump. Four years of this and we are only on day one. We are royally fucked.

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ProudlyConservative 1 point ago +1 / -0

It's going to be a L- O- N- G four years...

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ProudlyConservative 57 points ago +57 / -0

You have a right to your opinion. People that didn't like President Trump didn't let down. Biden is a CCP puppet and soon Harris will be in office. She is a Socialist. They both support abortion. For that fact ALONE you are RIGHT.

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