We’re Already a lot Closer to Totalitarianism Than you Probably Realize

Heather Snow
Sep 7, 2018 · 5 min read

And no, that’s not fearmongering or histrionics. It’s reality, and it’s far past time that people start taking this seriously. Especially with a man like Brett Kavanaugh on the verge of claiming a life-long spot in the nation’s highest court.

Did you ever see that Calvin and Hobbes strip with the farmer who’s about to detonate his gas-filled house just as a runaway train, a crashing 747, and a rending scar in the Earth’s very crust converge on his position? Because that’s where we are right now:

We live in a country where the law no longer matters for those in the ruling class (to the extent that it ever did in the first place). Our elected officials can take bribes, accept payouts, play favorites, commit war crimes, and lie right to our faces about it without a care in the world. And before you write me off entirely, let me just say that this isn’t a partisan thing. The vast bulk of the democratic party would be, ideologically speaking, completely indistinguishable from the republicans if not for the issues of LGBT rights, gun control, and healthcare. The rules don’t apply to any of them, the constitution means nothing, and the moment Kavanaugh’s butt hits that bench, it’ll matter even less. That guy is a special kind of terrifying.

Did you know that, thanks to GPS technology in our phones, the government has the ability to track our positions anywhere on the surface of the Earth to within three-meters? They can listen in on your calls, read your emails and text messages, remotely activate your webcam, phone cameras, and microphones, log into your accounts, and target you with malware payloads to install keyloggers and other spy software on your devices.

Did you notice that our police are murdering people with near-impunity? Philando Castile was shot four times in the chest and gut during a traffic stop. His killer was acquitted on all charges. Freddie Gray was beaten to death (or “rough rided”) in a paddy wagon, his killers walked. John Crawford III was shot to death in a Walmart for carrying a BB gun he’d picked up off a shelf in that same store. Grand jury declined to indict. Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old boy playing with a toy gun in a park, had police called on him. They gunned him down within seconds of arriving on the scene. Grand jury declined to indict. Eric Garner, choked to death by an officer. Grand jury declined to indict. There’s Michael Brown, Dillon Taylor, Jamar Clark, and believe me when I say that these are just the barest tip of the iceberg: police have killed nearly 700 people in the US so far this year.

At Standing Rock we saw police and security forces pelt protestors with every type of non-lethal weapon imaginable, from pepper spray to LRADs. They sicced attack dogs on people. Turned water cannons on them in below-zero weather. Mutilated a woman’s arm with a concussion grenade after deliberately tossing it at her. They instituted a media blackout and even attempted to scare away journalists by filing trumped-up rioting and trespassing charges against Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. They illegally shot down drones, used IMSI-catchers and malware attacks to compromise protestor’s phones, and reportedly even used electromagnetic devices to destroy laptops, phones, and other devices. In Portland, a police officer deliberately and purposefully shot a protestor in the back of the head with a 40mm grenade launcher, severely injuring them. If not for the fact that the victim had been wearing a helmet at the time, they almost certainly would have been killed. No charges of any consequence were filed against the officer in that case, incidentally.

Murder and wanton brutality not scary enough for you? How about some honest-to-goodness gestapo style kidnappings? In Chicago, police disappeared more than 7000 people, confining them in a secret facility where they were beaten, held without charges, tormented, and denied communication with family or attorneys. If you had the optimism of a golden retriever, you could make the argument that we at least haven’t heard of any other sites like this, but if you honestly don’t think that they exist, I’m afraid you’re hopelessly naive.

Let’s talk about our correctional system: A largely-privatized, profit-seeking venture that scoops up as many warm bodies as it can with frivolous arrests and utilizes a loophole in the thirteenth amendment to compel them to work for pennies a day on lucrative labor contracts. Sometimes they even have the gall to charge inmates for the privilege.

How about the malicious prosecution of whistleblowers? Recent, high-profile cases include Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner, incarcerated, exiled, and incarcerated, respectively, all for disclosing information to the public that happened to be in the public’s interest to know. In Manning’s case, she was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for exposing an incident in Iraq during which security forces murdered multiple civilians and two Reuters journalists. Snowden one day finally mustered the decency to tell the American people that they were being watched, and Winner leaked a report confirming that Russian intelligence officials did, in fact, interfere in the 2016 election.

I could go on like this for pages. I didn’t even mention ICE or the fact that our government is kidnapping children and selling them into adoption, temporarily enslaving the parents before deporting them and, in many cases, separating them from their children forever. I didn’t mention the media’s gleeful participation in all this crap or go into any detail about their role as a propaganda arm of the state. If I were a better researcher and more organized, and if I was trying to be comprehensive, this entire piece would be little more than a mile-long line-item audit detailing precisely how screwed we are. But I think I’ve made my point by now.

Facism. Nazism. These aren’t just buzzwords. They’re real words with real meanings, and they really are applicable in our time. If you want my opinion, the only thing that’s saved our bacon from falling under an honest-to-god dictatorship thus far is the fact that our president is a babbling, incoherent moron.

But what if he wasn’t? What if our next president isn’t? What if we get someone who, like Trump, is eager to misuse domestic surveillance and a militarized police force but who, unlike Trump, is actually competent and reasonably intelligent?

That right there is, aside from his religious zealotry and shocking misogyny, the reason why Kavanaugh is so terrifying. He’s the gas leak in farmer Brown’s house. One hazard among many, to be sure, but still dangerous in his own right. He represents a further erosion of accountability for the ruling class. A further distancing of our constitution and laws from relevancy. He’s an ace in the sleeve of the powerful: another whimsical leap toward a crumbling precipice that we’ve been walking entirely too close to since September 12, 2001.

And if we keep going in this direction, pretty soon that ledge is going to collapse away beneath our feet.

Heather Snow

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Hanlon’s Razor is a lie.

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