By Mike Bastiat |

I had always thought the State might continue to get away with everything that it does by never making its intervention so direct and explicit, by working behind the scenes instead to ​indirectly extort people through taxes, regulations, fees, fines, licensure, roping them into courtrooms, etc., just as they always had. It would seem that this would be the best way to assure your continued existence while keeping down potential attacks on the State, ideological or physical.

As an agent of aggression against people who might be tempted to resist if they recognized this aggressive character, it has always seemed right to me that it would always be best for the State to keep its operations on the down-low, while nevertheless keeping them going. It would be best to appear as a peaceful organization that works to maintain society, keep people employed, make everyone richer, etc. If the State was seen as a benign institution that doesn’t really disrupt private life and probably even assures that it is possible to have whatever, its longevity would be assured, for no one would have much of a reason to call-out the harmful effects of its intervention.

The State, I thought, wished to do its criminal activity in a way that was apparent to anyone who wanted to think about it, but not so blatantly obvious that it hit most everyone in the face and forced them to really think about this institution for the first time, rather than it to exist in the back of their mind. If people were thinking about it too much, they might reject it, whereas before the State was largely and passively accepted by most. Few people, on any regular day, ever thought about the State, much less thought to criticize it. The State was there, it did bad things sometimes, but most people were able to go about their lives still and provide for themselves in spite of it. Sure, they stole some of your income, they caused unemployment in unseen ways, but they hadn’t really directly caused people to lose their jobs by ordering businesses to close. They messed up a lot before for anyone willing to see it, but never launched a series of orders that were directly aimed at controlling each and every person and preventing them from providing for themselves.

I thought that a normal operation of the State (which is to say, not-so-obvious criminal activity) would be prefered by them, since no State would want to expose itself for what it truly is: an agent of aggression that dictates to other people what they can and cannot do. It is better for the State to operate in euphemisms, so that people are always deluded about its violent nature. It is better to let people keep their jobs and just take a little bit of their money, than to be responsible for a direct destruction of people’s livelihoods (this is why the media propagandists repeatedly said it was a ​virus​, not the government, that is causing this — “the economic impact of the coronavirus” was repeated over and over).

It benefits the State, I thought, to have people believe that it’s democratic and peaceful, rather than to make ‘executive orders’ and other arbitrary dictates to be backed by the power of the police. They want people believing that their actions have gone through the proper processes which supposedly make them legitimate (e.g., voting, legislative approval). Wouldn’t this move away from such institutions, toward strong-man tactics, threaten the image the State holds up? Wouldn’t it make it hard to hide who they really were if the appearance of democracy were abandoned for technocracy? If people realized that ‘executive orders’ were simply single-man dictates occurring outside of the usual idea of a democratic system, wouldn’t they see this as lacking authority?

It seems that what the State has done is taken a new risk: to test out new powers and see how people respond to them, so that if the people respond how the State wants them to, it will be accepted as a sign that further invasions of property rights may occur, since they will have the sanction of the people — or, at least, there will not be enough resistance on the part of the people to stop the schemes from going through.

The problem for the State, as I always thought, was that it needed to mask its aggression while carrying it out anyway, since it must carry out ongoing aggression on the people in order to maintain its status as a State. They cannot avoid forcefully expropriating private production and controlling other people. There is no way around this for this institution.

But, in general, I thought, it would mostly wish to do this in a way that most people never noticed or didn’t care enough, so that they never did too much serious thinking on it and the schemes could go on. Or, at least, in a way that most people simply went along with it and never thought to form a theory of the State or even question its role in society, because the heavy-hand of authority was not that prominent, far-reaching, or personal. “Maybe they hurt other people, but they never hurt me, so who cares?” People would be willing to pay money to obtain a license to drive, but not put masks on their face​, the most characteristic and personal part of an individual’s body and identity, or quit their jobs or close their businesses and “stay at home.”

This, I thought, would be too direct of an assault, such that people may come to resist. They wouldn’t risk making such an order, because it might expose them for what they are: an agency that destroys everything it touches, causes mass unemployment, poverty, unrest, etc. The State could not have this kind of blame pinned on itself, since its existence depends on people believing the opposite. It would be best for them to not ramp-up their attack on all of society, or so I thought.

A direct attack

What I never really thought they could do then—​at least not without immediate resistance and a lack of obedience​—was to attack the very core human instinct of self-preservation: working for money, exchanging with others to get the things we need, exercising to stay healthy, going outside for sunlight, etc. At least, I thought that if they went this far that they could never get away with it, that people would say, “whoa, now that’s too much.” Could anyone imagine a primitive mankind, who had to constantly work to survive, being told to halt their production for months? For those living a hand-to-mouth existence, this would mean sure starvation. I thought that they could never tell people they weren’t allowed to work, operate their businesses, obtain goods, etc., and that they would go home and justify it in their minds. This would be too direct of an assault on the necessity for humans of working and producing to sustain their lives and bodies. I never thought they could tell people to “stay at home” (to “stop the spread”), and that people would say, “okay.” That they could come into the home, all the way into the business, etc., and people would accept it.

I thought that all this would risk sticking your neck out there too far, and having it chopped-off as a result. I thought that this would be a risk they wouldn’t take, because it’s better to stay in the background of life and stay beyond criticism. Is it that the authoritarians just can’t help from making progress in more authoritarianism? That they have sized-up the people to be obedient enough slaves to go along with whatever they wish of them?

In order to show conservatives that “breaking the law” is not akin to acting immorally, I have made what I thought were exaggerated examples before to drive home the point that people would have to resist insane and arbitrary orders if, for instance, the State declared that “drinking water is now prohibited.” Surely, most people wouldn’t care about “the law” anymore; they would do what is necessary to survive; they would drink the water regardless.

But I apparently didn’t go far enough, and now I cannot be so sure that millions of people would not comply with ​any insane and ridiculous order because it came from someone who was perceived to have authority and expertise. I could have made a better example, though, and the idea of prohibiting drinking water no longer sounds far-fetched. The empire has now come for a breath of fresh air with its mask mandates, and people have widely accepted it. They came directly for the face, still plan on coming directly for our bodies, and not too many people are alarmed by it. They have come for the things that are most essential about life—producing, giving birth, engaging in social and economic interactions, creating art, music, culture—and people are widely accepting these attacks too, which go quite far beyond withholding taxes from your income (which, to be sure, is theft).

Few people, bless their souls, recognize the sinister nature of all this. But whether or not the State and its actors created or seized the scheme is another question. We can be sure that they’re using it as an excuse to expand the power of the State and imagine that their authority over the people is limitless, unbound by any sort of consent, constitution, or public approval. The State is poking around at new ground and seeing how the people bite, and I imagine it is observing results which really tickle its lust for power and encourage it to continue on.

Getting “back to normal”

We then run into a problem of how to steer the narrative ourselves and how, through ideas, to achieve a greater amount of liberty from the State. Many average people continue to hope “it” passes, that things “go back to normal.” They treat these invasive government actions upon our private lives as temporary and tolerable, assuming things will return to “normal” one day. They act as if it is some unforeseen event, rather than something that is, as it appears to be, planned. They believe that the State is acting benevolently, rather than nefariously. They forget the State is in charge of this scheme and they see things as, “nature will run its course and things will be the same again.” They don’t know that States rarely cede any power they created for themselves, and that it’s better and easier to resist violations of liberty early on than to attempt to turn the tides on totalitarianism later down the road.

It’s worthy to mention a conversation I heard in the store the other day, because it must be a common one, and yet it is wrongheaded. It makes for a good example of the level of compliance in average people and the idea in people of what it will take to get the masks off and roll back authoritarianism. Two ladies (masked, of course) had bumped into each other. They were distressed about the situation (wearing masks), but complying nevertheless. “I can’t wait until things go back to normal,” one lady said to her friend. “Me, too,” the other lady said, both of them feeling that their lives were in someone else’s hands. Neither were too happy about the way the world was going, but nor were they refusing to be a part of it.

There is something significant in this conversation, because there is a real cause-effect at play here which would show the notion of complying-and-waiting to be a contradictory one. We might indeed assert a scientific-political law, as far as allowing the state’s authority to expand: that, ​to prevent an expansion of statism, it is necessary that people disobey​; and, ​compliance is a guarantee that the state will be able to do whatever it wants​. This doesn’t mean that people must violently revolt, only that a little civil disobedience (not wearing a mask, not closing your business) would go a long way to put a stop to their power, which, in large part, rests not on force alone but acquiescence and obedience.

Since these ladies, who were surely good-intentioned and just wanted their lives to move along, were wearing masks, though, they were doing the ​opposite of what it takes for things to return to ‘normal’ (ignoring that there was nothing normal prior to the direct attack). They gave the State the exact result it wanted to see, so that it could know if it could take one step further, so that it could affirm there would be no resistance going forward. They are helping to assure that things ​won’t go “back to normal.”

The only thing that would have halted the new abnormal was to ​never take part in it — to resist​. But here were are in a world where, dangerously, people choose to obey the State and allow it to take progressive steps toward greater tyranny. Aside from legislative law being illegitimate too, “orders” are now “akin” to laws in most people’s mind, and local governments and police forces have shown that they will enforce any dictate, despite calling themselves “law enforcers” and pretending to be behold to the “constitution” and not “the governor says so.”

By complying with the mask orders, people are showing the State that their orders are obeyed and that they, in fact, own the people and the economies that they claim under their jurisdiction. The compliance has emboldened the statists to cover more ground, violate more rights, and make itself more known as the unquestionable authority.

Where are we headed?

I believe we are at something of a turning point for the American State, not that it hasn’t been heading in this direction for a long time and not that it hasn’t destroyed a lot of peace and prosperity already. They are now working to see what sort of modern and extensive control systems they can impose on the people in the future, which leaves humanity closely watched and tightly locked down forever — not just for the supposed “two weeks to flatten the curve.” If they stamp out the voice of resistance, then we can’t be sure it could ever rise again.

None of this is new, of course. It’s just that it’s becoming way more obvious the types of things the State believes it has the right to control. While control over economic activity (business, etc) has already existed (taxes, licenses, regulations, last-call hours, etc), while the State has already long closed businesses who didn’t comply with their health departments, tax agents, zoning laws, demands to obtain a license before operating etc., the State now believes they possess the right to order businesses to close and change their practices because it has declared a “public health” emergency.

It isn’t, then, that they haven’t ​already come for the ability to produce, make a living, support yourself, and survive, but it was never so obvious. They ruined lives in ways that often require economic reasoning to figure out (monetary inflation, taxation of production, regulation in their favor, protectionism for their buddies, monopolies and cartels through licensure, patents, etc), but which weren’t so easy to uncover for the average person. Now, it is possible, more people will see through these schemes. More people will (we can hope) struggle to deny that the State is a socialist organization that controls every business, that they cause mass unemployment, that they destroy economies and communities, etc. This was a risk I thought might be too great for the State. Apparently they did not think so.

What’s different this time is that there’s no hiding the fact that they think they own people and their property, that they believe they have a right to control other people’s bodies and dictate the rules on their property, that they can use any excuse to lockdown people and shut down economies. This is the risk the State has taken by making its recent transformation into a technocratic, rule-by-the-experts State, where ‘public health’ and ‘science’ become excuses for doing absolutely anything to people.

The compliance granted under these new controls will inform the State on how much they can expand in the future, beyond points which were previously thought impossible or out of the question, such as lockdowns, forced vaccinations, arbitrary closure of businesses, etc. And it is on the people to show that they won’t tolerate something that is worse than the seemingly-benign masking of the public.

Even though we’re in the middle of the scheme and things could still theoretically go in either direction, more liberty or more statism, I believe that for now I can safely say that I overestimated the point of intolerance of the American people, the point at which people would accept no further incursions upon their lives and drop their respect for the State, because it simply made it too impossible to live and get along. The level of compliance they attained is, for them, surely a good sign that it’s safe to further the agenda. They have judged the American people at this point to becompliant enough to continue their plans of controlling everyone and everything, and the level of compliance with the initial parts of the program (masking-up, closing the doors, roping off the dining room) were the green-lights.

The level of compliance we have seen is thus great cause for concern, even though things have not gotten as bad as I predict they will be. By going forward with their schemes (namely, the scamdemic they hit us with, which came with a lockdown and a plan to vaccinate the planet), the State has presumably sized-up the people to be docile enough to be successful at controlling them. Contrary to my old thoughts that a more direct attack would risk exposure and hence potentially the existence of the state as a legitimate institution, they estimated, correctly, that if they grew the scope of the State, if they made its presence in society more known and prevalent, that people would come to support it even more, not less. So it isn’t even as if this has been seen as too great of an infringement upon liberties by everyone. Indeed, it seems that the more forcefully the State intervenes in society, they more people justify it as an indispensable institution that is doing things private actors would never be able to take care of on their own.

By accepting the size and scope of the State today, as people have done by wearing masks, making their employees wear masks, taking tests for ‘Covid-19,’ closing down their businesses, limiting their contact with others, etc., the precedent has been set for the State to go anywhere, to claim ​anything as its right to control.

We always knew the State would take our property, since any State, by definition, subsists on property that it expropriated from others (which it calls ‘taxes’). But now, the State is coming for our bodies, and this is even more bothersome than yielding up your physical goods to the State, since there is nothing more precious than one’s body. Most people are willing to give up their wallet to avoid physical assault by a criminal. But when the criminal (in this case, the government) insists on sticking your body with needles and injecting it with poisons which they call medicine, anything can be done to an individual at that point in the name of the collective (‘public health’). There are, at that point, no more rights or liberties whatever, and the dominance of the State over society is highly secured. The mythical “collective” or “society” or “the public” has taken precedence over liberty. In fact, liberty is mocked by those people who find the former more important.

A future of less statism is highly dependent on resistance and push-back by the people, of refusal to wear a mask, close their business, be vaccinated, etc. It will depend on people calling out their fakescience (excessive hand-washing, fear of germs, lying about transmission, telling people to stay inside rather than get sunlight, forgetting about the immune system and focusing on vaccines, etc, etc), refusing to put their kids back in government schools, and resisting any attempts by the government to track or directly invade their bodies.

It doesn’t seem though as if we’re seeing the levels of resistance necessary to undo their scheming. It doesn’t seem as if the awakening is big enough, as if my old theory is right: that if the state goes too far, people will give up on it and lose respect for it, such that it would lack legitimacy to ever control the people in the ways it wished it could. It seems the State is getting what they want: respect as the wise authorities who care so much about protecting others.

What happens then if people keep going along with it? Most likely, this means the scheme will continue, and the demands of the people by the government will worsen and become more impossible and impractical to comply with. What if the people expose the scamdemic? This could possibly mean two things: that their attack could be reversed, or something worse. I fear that if it is undone, if people call-out the fake-science and refuse to follow anymore orders, we would only be hit with something else, something even better to whip the people into line, like a war, another fake pandemic, fake protest, or fake revolution. Even an alien invasion isn’t off the table, as that would be another “invisible enemy” to most people (as they refer to a virus as being).

The State couldn’t possibly walk away from this great of an attack on society, for the fact that it is already in the middle of it and has goals that it wants to achieve. They can’t duck their tail and walk away looking like liars. They have to continue to justify their lockdown. They just don’t seem like the type of people to back down, even if the people resist, which could mean the State will ramp up their violence against people to get their way.

While many mask-wearers view the mask as a small price to pay to satisfy other people and comply, the mask is, no doubt, a stepping stone to greater control. It is something that represents a physical and ever-present sign of the scamdemic, so that people are ready to accept the next step the high-tech technocrats have for us, some parts which are ready to go and others that have yet to be dreamed-up. It is but one thing in a slew of future expectations the state will have of people, such as getting vaccines if they wish to go to work, to the store; downloading ‘contact tracing’ applications on their phone if they want to travel or proving their medical records to enter into various places; proving they have been vaccinated to have access to anything; etc.

Since the State has launched a sort of utilitarian cost-benefit analysis on society (lockdowns, “if it can save one life”), albeit an analysis which is to be determined by itself, this can also mean that private farms, etc., could be shut down in the name of protecting the environment. And you better believe the ‘global warming’ scheme is part-and-parcel of the scamdemic, since it is but another thing that appears to be a “collective good” requiring government intervention. In fact, I have already heard one of the cronies say that we need to “flatten the curve of environmental harm.” The collectivists are here and they’re not backing down now.

If the next steps are obtained, what’s left of liberty for Americans and the rest of the world may be finally done away with. If the regime that evidently controls the world is able to vaccinate millions of Americans, then it is my guess that all is lost here. That, going forward, the State will rule. If “jabbing” or “plunging” needles into people’s arms (as they refer to it) doesn’t cross the line, then nothing will. If that isn’t the hill people will die on, then there is no hill. The State’s ownership over the human-slaves it has always kept will be solidified, not only for that such a vaccination could potentially alter the character of the recipient or perhaps make them more susceptible to mind-control, but for that the property boundary of the human body is the origin and basis for all property rights. Self-ownership, which implies the right to reject physical invasions of your body, is where a theory of liberty begins and ends. If people don’t own their bodies, which implies a right to self-defense, there are no property rights whatever.

Not everyone who wears a mask will get a vaccination, agree to be traced, or even tolerate the mask and the restrictions indefinitely, but the level of compliance we have seen with masks is a frightening indicator for the possible compliance we will see when the health fascists soon come for our arms. I never thought you could see damn-near-everyone in a mask in the United States, but here we are, with Americans appearing less-rebellious than I thought them to be in the case of an excessive, society-wide intervention.

But the people behind this scheme are calculating and studying the response to their program, like the social engineers they are. You can bet your bottom dollar they are looking at the level of compliance they have attained with their initial orders and judging their next moves based on it. The State is, after all, highly dependent upon public opinion, which is why they must make the public think in a way that is conducive to state power. If people change their mind and decide it isn’t practical to comply with the State anymore, the State could lose its grip on the people, which again is why I always suspected they would keep their extortions and control over the people on the down-low.

The future

It will be the response to the direct attack—the direct expansion of the State into our lives as opposed to its usual lingering in the background—that determines how much power the State has in the future, which is already appearing to be an unchecked and unlimited one (so much for ‘checks and balances’ and ‘democracy’). The mask was the first step. God forbid Americans are vaccinated by the tens of millions, for that will probably be the last steps.

If people accept a vaccination, then it’s likely that we’re doomed; anything is on the table at that point in the future. If the people begin to resist, though, it’s possible their plans can be pushed back or even halted. It’s possible that many could come to regard the State as unfit to exist. The response of the people will dictate how successful the dictators are, and we’re fastly approaching the point where some level of resistance needs to arise or else we may assume it never will. What is too much for the people?

But this encroachment—quarantines, stay at home orders, closing businesses on the excuse of “public health,” causing unemployment for millions of people—is new ground for the State and they appear to be treading lightly at the moment, while maintaining the scheme nevertheless and planning on furthering them. They are feeling out the people and trying to keep the narratives rolling, while they work on the next steps of the program they wish to carry out: namely, obtaining a top-down, authoritarian society where the rights of individuals is no longer of concern and where the State is in full control of everyone and everything.

As devastating as it has been for many already, the direct attack can however offer us a sign of hope, ​if the efforts of the State blow up in their face and backfire on them and are called-out by the people​. The old theory I spoke of (that keeping the aggression unseen is best for the state) is not truly dead yet. That the State has put itself out there and shown the ​lengths it will go to in order to control people and property, ​which it must necessarily do as a state anyway​, can always, in my estimate, risk the State being exposed for what it truly is: a criminal gang that pretends to have ‘authority’ over people and property that they have no genuine ownership claim to. It is always possible that many people can wake up to the true nature of the State and oppose it as such, which is why, I had thought, the State would prefer to remain relatively unnoticed.

The theory that the State would wish to not expose its aggressive nature might already be in need of revision, though, in light of the compliance with the scamdemic so far: the State has estimated that if it flexes its authority, if it makes itself seen as the indispensable organization for combating supposed threats to “public health,” that people are likely to justify its authority even more. If the State ​didn’t think this, then I doubt they would make the uncalculated decision to intervene in private life at such extreme levels, since preserving their rule is the number one goal of the State. They are evil, but they are not that stupid. They are aggressive, but they like to conceal it.

We can bet that the State has poured millions of dollars into researching the psychology of the American people and their level of resistance. They have studies, hold meetings, and keep tabs on what they call ‘vaccine hesitancy,’ i.e., the rightful apprehension people have of getting stuck with a needle of who-knows-what-toxins. They fund propaganda to improve their numbers, to get more people comfortable with a vaccine that people had rightfully held skepticism toward. It’s so good, apparently, that people have to be fooled into wanting it!

How will people react to the direct attack, then? At this point, only time will tell. But it won’t take that much time. Soon enough we can be more sure of the direction society will be headed, perhaps for the rest of the century: toward standing up for liberty, or more or less total communism with all the people of the world under permanent rule and surveillance.

I fear—and this is my prognosis of the future— that since they’ve gone through with their scheme,and since the subsequent level of people who wore masks, left their jobs, or closed their businesses, has been so great, that they believe the ball is in their hands and that they will get what they want: a further technocratic state, where, through the help of technology and the advice of the so-called experts, all of society is controlled, all people are tracked and traced, all private activity is monitored or abolished, production is led by the planners, the last stage of the government’s destruction of money will be complete in a digital currency controlled by the central bank, and all sorts of normal human endeavors are ended.

If they didn’t think they would be successful (and I believe the reaction to the scamdemic they planned was, like resistance to vaccines, something that was considered), they would have called off go-time, they would have waited until the narrative could have been better crafted, until they thought that had people’s minds more in their hands. But they didn’t wait. They must’ve estimated that, despite the risks associated with being blatant dictators and abandoning the usual channels of legitimizing their actions, that they could clamp-down on all social order without it being much of a risk whatsoever. They must have downplayed the resistance to be so small and insignificant that the narrative wouldn’t be threatened and that the scheme could still commence.

Surely, they knew ​some people would resist it, but they assumed that they would be so small and insignificant that they could be branded as a minority of “conspiracy theorists,” “science-deniers,” “anti-vaxxers,” or otherwise non-experts on the issues, such that they wouldn’t affect the compliance of the general public with their schemes. My best guess is that their estimates have been right: the level of compliance we’ve seen so far is a tell-tale sign that more authoritarianism is to come.