If the federal government responds this poorly to a hurricane, what is going to happen when we are facing a major long-term emergency that affects the entire nation?  As I have been consistently warning for years, you should not be counting on the government to come riding in on a white horse to rescue you when global events hit the fan.  Unfortunately, global events may hit the fan a lot sooner than most people think.

Politico spoke to a man named Mike Toomey in North Carolina that desperately needs help after floodwaters destroyed his home.  When Toomey called FEMA last week, nobody answered his call.  Instead, he got a recording that informed him that he was 675th in line to be helped…

Mike Toomey called a federal helpline last week to get disaster aid after Hurricane Helene flooded his home in western North Carolina.

He got a recording instead.

“They said I was 675th in line,” Toomey, a painter in a spattered shirt, recalled as he waited outside a federal recovery center in Hendersonville.

Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina over a month ago. And people like Toomey still can’t get help from FEMA even though they are reaching out.

In fact, Politico says that “hundreds of thousands of people” have not been able to get the assistance from the government that they are hoping for…

Hundreds of thousands of people who are trying to recover from disasters nationwide have been unable to get through to federal call centers or have stayed on hold for excessive periods of time in the weeks since Helene barreled into southern Appalachia last month.

Overwhelmed by Helene and Hurricane Milton, the centers failed to answer nearly half of the incoming phone calls over the course of one week recently. For the calls that were answered, it took more than an hour for federal workers to pick up, on average.

This is the worst federal response to a major natural disaster that I have ever seen.

I honestly don’t know how to explain it.

At one time, most federal agencies exhibited at least a minimal level of competence, but those days appear to be long gone.

In addition to not getting hundreds of thousands of people the help that they desperately need, it is also being reported that hundreds of roads are still closed in North Carolina…

Hundreds of roads in North Carolina remain closed or damaged as Americans try to recover in the aftermath of flooding from Hurricane Helene, according to the New York Times.

Many of the roads have been washed away or severely damaged by the floodwaters that stranded people in remote areas of the state, the newspaper reported on Saturday.

Some of the roadways and portions of major highways have been reopened, the Times reported. “But as of early Saturday, there were just over 700 incident reports noting a portion of road still listed as closed, impassable or otherwise affected by the storm.”

What in the world is taking them so long?

You would think that opening up the roads would be one of the top priorities.

But at this point we are being told that it could take “months” to even get Interstate 40 back to full operation…

Bringing Interstate 40, as well as many other highways and roads, back to full capacity is likely to take months, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars, though officials cautioned it was too early to make formal estimates.

We used to be a country that worked harder than anyone else.

Now we are being run by a bunch of bureaucrats that like to stand around and talk instead of taking action.

After everything that we have witnessed in North Carolina, there should be no doubt about what will happen when a truly apocalyptic national emergency comes along. And that may occur a lot sooner than most people think, because war is here.

In the Middle East, the Iranians are preparing for a major attack against Israel…

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has instructed his forces to prepare a direct attack against Israel after deeming the Jewish nation’s retaliatory strike last week too big to ignore, according to a new report.

While Khamenei attempted to downplay to the public the extent of Israel’s attack on Tehran’s military facilities, privately, he greenlit plans for a counterattack in a meeting with his Supreme National Security Council, three Iranian officials told The New York Times.

The ayatollah allegedly made his decision on Monday after reviewing the damage report from his military officials, which detailed the strikes across Tehran’s missile production plants and defense systems.

Israel has publicly warned that it will hit back even harder than last time if Iran attacks, and the Biden administration has informed Iran that it will not be able to restrain Israel…

“We told the Iranians: We won’t be able to hold Israel back, and we won’t be able to make sure that the next attack will be calibrated and targeted as the previous one,” a U.S. official said.

It appears that this war in the Middle East could soon take an apocalyptic turn, and that would have major implications for the entire planet.

Meanwhile, those living in the EU have been instructed to “stockpile emergency supplies” in case a direct conflict with Russia breaks out…

People living in the European Union should stockpile emergency supplies in the event of war breaking out or another major emergency, a new report has advised.

The report on Europe’s civilian and military preparedness, published on Wednesday, was written by former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö in his capacity as Special Adviser to the President of the European Commission.

The report notes that the EU was not prepared for either the COVID-19 pandemic or Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and that it needs to move “from reaction to proactive preparedness.”

As I warned my core supporters on Friday, we are closer to a nuclear war with Russia than we have ever been before.

If missiles start falling on U.S. soil, there will be absolutely no help from the federal government.

You will be on your own.

Speaking of nuclear conflict, North Korea just tested a new ICBM that has enough range to easily reach the continental United States…

Pyongyang officials have since identified the massive rocket, which they dub “the world’s strongest strategic missile,” as a new Hwasong-19 ICBM. Given that nuclear warhead-capable ICBMs can reach several thousands of miles away, such a missile would have the capability of hitting the continental United States. And the timing has not been lost on anyone, as it was a mere days before the US presidential election.

“It can be stored and moved anywhere, allowing for excellent mobility, stealth and survivability,” said Kim of the rocket. State media has subsequently released carefully edited, high quality footage of the ‘perfected’ missile launch, which has been widely circulating on Friday:

2024 has been a year of war, but in 2025 we are going to see things go to an entirely new level.

If you are blindly trusting that our government officials have everything under control, you are not being wise because they don’t.

When war comes to U.S. soil, what are you going to do?

Are you going to be counting on the federal government to bring you food and supplies and everything else that you need?

When things go sideways, the federal government is not going to be there for you. At this point, they can’t even take care of the areas of the country there were devastated by Hurricane Helene.

There are many that are trying to sound the alarm about what is coming, but most of the population is simply not listening.

Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

Socialism rejects human action and economic calculation and sells a false image of a government that can create wealth at will by issuing more units of fiat currency. Obviously, when inflation arrives, the socialist government will use its two favorite tools: propaganda and repression. Propaganda, which accuses stores and businesses of driving up prices, and repression, which occurs when social unrest intensifies and citizens legitimately hold governments accountable for scarcity and high prices, are the two main strategies.

If you want lower prices, you need to give less economic power to the government, not more. Only free markets, competition, and open economies help decrease consumer prices. Many readers might think that we currently have a free market with competitive and open economies, but the reality is that we live in increasingly intervened and overregulated nations where central banks and governments work to perpetuate unsustainable public deficits and debt. Therefore, they continue to print more money, leading many to question why it is getting harder for families to make ends meet, buy a home, or for small businesses to prosper. The government is slowly eating away the currency it issues. They call it “social use of money.”

What is “social use of money”? In essence, it means abandoning one of the main characteristics of money, the reserve of value, to give the government preferential access to credit to finance its commitments. Therefore, the state can announce larger entitlement programs and increase the size of the public sector relative to the economy, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The state issues more currency, which makes people’s money less valuable. Citizens become more dependent on the state, and they will demand more subsidies paid in the currency the state issues. It is, in essence, a process of control through debt and currency depreciation.

When governments and central banks talk about price stability, it means a two percent annual depreciation of the currency. Aggregate prices rising an average of two percent is hardly price stability because it is measured by the consumer price index, which is a carefully crafted basket of goods and services weighted by the same people who print the money. That is why governments love CPI as a measure of inflation. It fails to fully reflect the erosion of the currency’s purchasing power. This is why the CPI’s basket calculation fluctuates so frequently. Even if it accurately measures, it will underestimate the rise in prices of non-replaceable goods and services by adding them to a basket of things we consume maybe once or twice a year at best. When you put together shelter, food, health, and energy with technology and entertainment, there will always be distortions.

Thus, governments and central banks are never going to defend price stability. If aggregate prices fell, competition soared, and citizens saw their real wages rise and their deposit savings increase in real value, their jobs would disappear.

When a central bank like the Fed cuts rates and increases the money supply after an accumulated 20.4% inflation in four years, it is not defending price stability; it is defending price increases. This strategy serves to conceal the government’s financial insolvency. A currency with a declining value.

Governments are the ones that create inflation by spending a currency that is constantly losing purchasing power because the state issues more than what the private sector demands. No corporation or allegedly evil oil producer can make aggregate prices rise and continue increasing annually at a lower pace. Only the one that prints the money, and central banks don’t print money because they want to; they increase the money supply to absorb rising public deficit spending.

Inflation is a hidden tax, a slow process of nationalization of the economy, and the perfect way to increase taxes without angering voters and blaming private businesses in the meantime. The consumer will likely blame the store or business for higher prices, not the issuer of a currency that loses purchasing power.

Why would governments want higher prices? Because it gives them more power. Destroying the currency they issue is a perfect form of control. That is why they need more debt and higher taxes. High taxes are not a tool to reduce debt, but rather to justify rising public indebtedness.

You may have read numerous times that the government has unlimited borrowing power and can manage inflation to allow you to live comfortably. It is false. The government cannot issue all the debt it wants. It has an inflationary, economic, and fiscal limit.

Inflation is a warning sign of declining currency confidence and a loss of purchasing power. The economic limit is evidenced by lower growth, lower employment, weaker real wages, secular stagnation, and declining foreign demand for public debt.

The fiscal limit is evidenced by soaring interest expenses even with low rates, weaker receipts every time they hike taxes, and citizens and businesses leaving the country to more friendly tax systems, all of which add to the poor or negative multiplier effect of government spending.

If you want lower prices, you should give less economic power to governments, not more.

A government that tells you it will borrow $2 trillion per annum in a growth and record receipt economy and will continue to increase debt and borrow well into 2033 with the most optimistic assumptions of GDP and receipt is telling you it will make you poorer.

When a politician promises that he or she will cut prices, they are always lying. A weaker currency is a tool to increase government power in the economy. By the time you find out, it may be too late.

Money is credit, and government debt is fiat currency. Currency depreciation is inflation, and inflation is equivalent to an implicit default. No interventionist government or central bank wants lower prices because inflation allows the government to increase its power while slowly breaching its monetary commitments.

Other prominent federal agencies involved in natural resources management include the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps).

The federal government owns 47% of the land in the western United States. The percentage of federally owned land varies by state, with Nevada having the highest percentage at 80.1% and Connecticut and Iowa having the lowest at 0.3%.

As of 2018, half of the West belongs to the federal government, including 48% of California, 69.1% of Alaska, 53.1% of Oregon, 48.1% of Arizona, 42.3% of Wyoming, 41.8% New Mexico, 36.6% of Colorado, 62% of Idaho, 66.5% of Utah, 28.5% Washington state, and 81% of Nevada. Look up your state here.

By all accounts, they are not good stewards of the land.

Some believe the Great Reset will be built in the American West.

Sen. Mike Lee discussed it with Tucker last night.

It’s enough to make an observer wonder whether an awkward kumbaya truce could spontaneously break out, in which antagonistic foes raise a curious eyebrow and timidly ask, “You mean, you’re against fascism and racism, too?” before taking off their masks, throwing down their cardboard signs, and apprehensively shaking hands.  Of course, that never happens, so very angry Americans continue to denounce one another in nearly identical terms.

The whole thing would be funny if it were not so serious.  And it’s serious because the resulting confusion leaves Americans who might otherwise agree about an awful lot instead reaching for one another’s throats.  The more time they waste fighting, the easier it is for their real enemies to get away with all kinds of mischief without anyone noticing.

Who are their “real enemies”?  Well, regardless of any American’s particular ideological beliefs, those who most affect their lives (outside their families and friends) are almost certainly people with wealth and power — and not the vast majority of their working-class neighbors just trying to earn a living.  Because wealth and power remain in the hands of a small collection of political and financial “elites,” they benefit when citizens with neither wealth nor power choose to attack one another.

Another way to think of this is to ask a simple question: what is the greatest threat to any political system?  Is it the threat of foreign invasion?  Economic depression?  Disease?  Of course not.  It is the possibility that those controlled by the system will overthrow those doing the controlling.  Every government in the world — communist dictatorship, theocratic regime, or so-called constitutional republic — claims to be working for the people.  But when the “elites” of those governments speak behind closed doors, their efforts are directed toward subduing the people.  Governments invest in the illusion that their power is limitless and that the people have no other choice but to obey.  Whenever common people recognize that they are the ones with inherent power, the government’s illusion of control is shattered, the system is upended, and a new era with novel organizing principles arrives.

Seen through this lens, it is easy to understand why governments have a vested interest in stirring up domestic conflict.  A peaceful and well mannered society might engage in respectful debate and start asking serious questions, such as: why should private central banks be allowed to print money and devalue personal savings?  Why should America be financially squeezed by a bunch of multinational corporations that use cheap labor overseas and bully small businesses into bankruptcy here at home?  Why should foreign investment houses own so much land and property in America when fewer Americans than ever before can afford to own a home?  When government authorities use outside companies to censor Americans’ speech and spy on their private activities, do such workarounds really trump the Bill of Rights?  When corporations work hand in glove with government bureaucrats to track and police citizens, hasn’t our system of government transformed into something we would have once recognized as classically fascist?

These important questions and others might lead common citizens to think more clearly about their government’s priorities before arriving at another uncomfortable question: does the government really represent the people’s interests, or does it represent the interests of its corporate partners?  Such discussions threaten to shatter any government’s well-guarded illusion of control.

The political system can’t have that, so the corporate news media blast out daily reminders that “racism” and “extremism” are the real threats to peace and prosperity.  On television and on social media sites, the message is clear: trust the government but distrust your neighbors.  If everybody is more worried about Donald Trump’s personality or Taylor Swift’s political endorsements, nobody has time to wonder how we’ve reached the point when the federal government’s fiscal burden consumes 93% of America’s total accumulated wealth since its founding or how global debt now exceeds $315 trillion.  The wealthiest and most powerful people in the West take from everyone else and then set society on fire with engineered division and hate.  They are civil arsonists committed to destroying the evidence of all the damage they’ve wrought.

You can tell that financial and political “elites” are becoming desperate in their attempts to maintain power because they resort to little more than childish name-calling these days.  The great bugbear this decade is the “far right.”  Nobody explains why the “far right” should be feared more than the “far left,” when the theft and mass murder perpetrated by communist regimes over the last century dwarf the atrocities committed by all other ideologies in human history.

Nobody explains how the “far right” socialists of Hitler’s Germany can be distinguished from Venezuela’s “far left” socialists today.  Rather inexplicably, corporate news organs and academic institutions lump everyone who believes in limited government, national borders, self-determination, and personal liberty into the same category of WWII fascists who promoted totalitarianism, empire, dictatorship, and subjugation to the State.  Most citizens who are mislabeled “far right” distrust government and despise the notion of corporate control over society.  How that makes them “fascist” is a linguistic mystery.

What makes more sense is that Western governments fear the emergence of liberty movements not because they will one day be marching under the Arc de Triomphe, but rather because they represent a renewed public rejection of centralized power.  The more centralized the governing authority (e.g., the U.S. federal government, the E.U., and the U.N.), the more worried it has become that common people will reclaim sovereignty over their personal lives.  Consequently, the mouthpieces for the axis of corporate and government power in Western capitals — which is socialist in spirit and fascist in principle — slander citizens who are opposed to Big Government as somehow being the ideological descendants of Hitler’s Nazi Party.  It’s horse pucky.

Those who are nonsensically labeled as “far right” do have all too frequent encounters with fascism.  It’s just that those experiences come in the form of corporate-government beatings from the same people and institutions claiming to “protect democracy.”  During the Reign of COVID Terror, social media companies threatened and censored citizens who questioned the government’s monopoly on scientific debate, the need for school closures and economic lockdowns, or the efficacy of the pharmaceutical industry’s experimental “vaccines.”  Fascist tyrants such as Justin Trudeau used his partnership with banking institutions to seize citizens’ savings and mortgaged properties when they protested against his COVID authoritarianism.  Cellular companies kept track of citizens’ movements and reported those violating house arrest to the police.

This kind of corporate-government fascism has become commonplace.  European governments dedicate enormous resources to monitoring citizens’ online speech and punishing those who express unapproved opinions, and tech companies are quick to assist these bureaucratic bullies in their hunt for “offensive speech.”  A UK man was recently arrested for engaging in “anti-Establishment rhetoric” in a social media post.  Google openly admits to manipulating search results in ways that promote the talking points of their government partners while hiding dissenting voices.  Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big Pharma don’t operate independently of Big Government.  They are one and the same.

It turns out that everyone hates fascism except for Western governments and their corporate friends.  That’s why they demonize citizens who cherish liberty.

Living with an eye toward moderation is about more than restraining from vice.  Experience teaches that thoughtless excess undermines otherwise healthy activities.  Reading books without taking the time to consider the meaning of their words can make a person educated but unwise.  Almost everything in life is done best when done with earnest reflection and restraint.

You do not need to read through the correspondence of America’s Founding Fathers to appreciate their preference for moderate government.  Philosophically, of course, they were the radicals of their age.  They rejected the notion that an elite aristocracy should exercise power by divine right and fought a war for the revolutionary principle that “all men are created equal.”  They defended liberty, property rights, and speech as essential elements of what it means to live.  When it came time for them to design a government best equipped to protect these freedoms, however, moderation was the key!

The English Civil War of the previous century weighed heavily upon their minds.  The fall of the Roman Republic two millennia earlier guided their thoughts, too.  They understood the corrupting influences of power, but they also appreciated the carnage that corrupt governments wreak.  Mercurial monarchs and political repression guarantee war and forestall peace.

The Founding Fathers’ spirit drove them to fight for freedom, but their temperance restrained their actions after achieving victory.  It has been said that General George Washington could easily have made himself king, but he was a man of humility who sought to follow in the footsteps of Cincinnatus — the virtuous Roman statesman who relinquished power and returned to his farm.  Similarly, had the Founding Fathers suffered from the same unchecked passions that seized Robespierre and the Jacobins during the French Revolution, America might have quickly ended in a Reign of Terror of its own.  Instead, the Founders’ commitment to moderate forms of government nurtured civic peace.

Their first attempt at a national charter — the Articles of Confederation — was so moderate, in fact, that it did not last even ten years.  So wary were the Founding Fathers of a strong central government and so concerned were they for the preservation of the states’ sovereign powers and Americans’ inherent rights that they required a second bite at the apple to get the U.S. Constitution right.

Even then, the whole document is an exercise in slicing and dicing government power into discrete parts.  The Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches are coequal entities meant to keep one another in check.  The Constitution restricts Congress’s authority to a short list of enumerated responsibilities, curtails the president’s unilateral decision-making power, and grants the Supreme Court limited jurisdiction over particularized controversies.  The whole document screams, “These are the only things that the federal government is allowed to do.  All other rights and powers belong to the individual states and their citizens.”

Then, just to make sure that future ethically challenged politicians didn’t get any immoderate thoughts of their own, the Founders stamped a Bill of Rights at the end that screams even more loudly, “Future federal government functionaries, you may never, ever do any of these things!  Really, these rights are off-limits and cannot be infringed!”  If only later government stewards had listened.

Just as moderation in life keeps us balanced, moderation in government keeps passions in check.  Constitutional republics with robust democratic norms do not require a Deep State.  If a citizen is not happy with something the government is doing, there are peaceful avenues for change.  Contacting representatives, voting for new representatives, or running for office are simple ways to alter public policy without having to alter the form of government.

When government agents operate beyond the reach of citizens, however, they damage the essential mechanisms for self-government.  When the only thing that matters is who is in charge, the contest for who controls the reins of government becomes a zero-sum game.  Excessive power leads to immoderate behavior, and immoderate behavior threatens long-term civic peace.  Government instability is the inevitable result.

If the American Republic one day falls, its cause of death could be rightly pinned on a lack of civic moderation.  Corporations posing as political parties divide Americans against each other while doing what’s most lucrative for a small cabal of financial elites.  A detached and unelected government bureaucracy furthers its own insular interests while disregarding the wishes of the public it pretends to serve.

A private central bank manipulates markets, causes unnecessary inflation, and steals from everyone with meager savings.  The Pentagon stations troops all over the country, as if it is more concerned with safeguarding the federal government from citizens than with protecting the country from foreign enemies.  The Department of Homeland Security aids and abets foreign nationals in the commission of immigration crimes that cause widespread harm to American communities.  Dozens of covert agencies spy on the American people without warrants or even the pretense of probable cause.

The Department of Justice and its sister agencies censor, intimidate, and incarcerate any American who objects to the government’s excessively unconstitutional behavior.  This thing we call the federal government is the walking, talking embodiment of immodesty.

We all got a good look at its immodesty when the Supreme Court broke rank last month and ruled that President Trump has broad immunity from criminal prosecution.  This small expression of dissent from an otherwise ideologically homogenous government blob produced paroxysms of Deep State rage.  Justice Department praetorians quickly condemned the Court for recognizing the president as the person constitutionally vested with executive power.

Senator Chuck Schumer and other legislative flamethrowers immediately set to work on a strategy for neutering both presidential immunity and the Court’s recognition of it.  So much for coequal branches of government, right?  Corporate news media erupted in such fits of schizophrenic paranoia that top-dollar “journalists” claimed presidents could now murder citizens without paying any price.  Strangely enough, none of these hyperventilating nitwits seemed to mind when Barack Obama was using drones to execute Americans without any concern for due process or civil rights.  But that was King Barack, and different standards apply!

Although the headlines were all about Donald Trump, the Deep State’s fury was about something else.  For over a century, administrative departments and agencies have enjoyed relatively unchecked power.  Although they are either legislative creations or quasi-constitutional outgrowths of the Executive Branch, they operate remarkably independently.  This arrangement makes a mockery of the Constitution’s checks and balances.

The DOJ’s power exists only to the extent that the president lends constitutionally vested authority to institutions under his control, but the DOJ’s argument to the Court has been that it alone decides what the president can and cannot legally do.  In this way, the DOJ and similarly powerful departments have placed themselves above the Constitution’s three branches of government in a kind of bureaucratic coup d’état.

By holding that executive power resides in the president alone, the Court directly threatens the illegitimate powers of all those government officials who operate beyond the Constitution’s constraints.  Combined with the Court’s complementary decision to strike down Chevron deference, which gave administrative agencies broad discretion over the implementation of bureaucratic rules and regulations these last four decades, it seems as if a majority of justices are weary of the federal government’s growing intemperance.

To no one’s surprise, the worst “extremists” all work near D.C.  For any chance at future peace, Americans must force the government back into its constitutional cage.  Without a little moderation, this Union cannot last.

“The privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen—a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man’s life at will.”—Justice William O. Douglas

(Rutherford)—The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion.

Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that fortress—and the Fourth Amendment alongside it—to a crumbling pile of rubble.

We are no longer safe in our homes, not from the menace of a government and its army of Peeping Toms who are waging war on the last stronghold of privacy left to us as a free people.

The weapons of this particular war on the privacy and sanctity of our homes are being wielded by the government and its army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized mercenaries.

Government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting virtual home invasions using surveillance technology—with or without the blessing of the courts—to invade one’s home with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, aerial drones, and other monitoring devices.

Just recently, in fact, the Michigan Supreme Court gave the government the green light to use warrantless aerial drone surveillance to snoop on citizens at home and spy on their private property.

While the courts have given police significant leeway at times when it comes to physical intrusions into the privacy of one’s home (the toehold entry, the battering ram, the SWAT raid, the knock-and-talk conversation, etc.), the menace of such virtual intrusions on our Fourth Amendment rights has barely begun to be litigated, legislated and debated.

Consequently, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

Indeed, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this surveillance age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

Without our realizing it, the American Police State passed the baton off to a fully-fledged Surveillance State that gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like an electronic prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have—and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in—will be connected and talking to each other.”

By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”

As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.

It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices become government informants, reporting independently on anything you might do that runs afoul of the Nanny State.

Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

It is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:

Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.

Once technology is able to access and act on your thoughts, not even your innermost thoughts will be safe from the Thought Police.

Thus far, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug. Yet when the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

To our detriment, we are fast approaching a world without the Fourth Amendment, where the lines between private and public property are so blurred that private property is reduced to little more than something the government can use to control, manipulate and harass you to suit its own purposes, and you the homeowner and citizen have been reduced to little more than a tenant or serf in bondage to an inflexible landlord.

When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic—the hallmark of a healthy and free society—has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, none of this will change, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House, because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, we’ll still be prisoners of the electronic concentration camp.

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact [email protected] to obtain reprint permission.

(Zero Hedge)—It’s likely that your level of confidence probably depends on a wide range of factors, such as perceived competency, historical context, economic performance, accountability, social cohesion, and transparency.

And for these same reasons, trust levels in government institutions also change all the time, even in the world’s most developed countries: the G7.

Confidence in Government by G7 Countries (2006-2023)

This chart, via Visual Capitaist’s Nick Routley, looks at the changes in trust in government institutions between the years 2006 and 2023, based on data from a multi-country Gallup poll.

Specifically, this dataset aggregates confidence in multiple national institutions, including the military, the judicial system, the national government, and the integrity of the electoral system.

What’s interesting here is that in the G7, a group of the world’s most developed economies, there is only one country bucking the general trend: the United States.

Across most G7 countries, confidence in institutions has either improved or stayed the same between 2006 and 2023. The largest percentage point (p.p.) increases occur in Italy and Japan, which saw +13 p.p. and +11 p.p. increases in trust over the time period.

In the U.S., however, confidence in government institutions has fallen by 13 p.p. over the years. What happened?

Key Figures on U.S. Trust in Institutions

In 2006, the U.S. was tied with the UK as having the highest confidence in government institutions, at 63%.

But here’s where the scores stand in 2023, across various institutions:

Based on this data, it’s clear that the U.S. lags behind in three key indicators: confidence in the national government, confidence in the justice system, and confidence in fair elections. It ranked in last place for each indicator in the G7.

One other data point that stands out: despite leading the world in military spending, the U.S. is only the third most confident in its military in the G7. It lags behind France (86%) and the United Kingdom (83%).

First, Banfield (who died in 1999) was a pioneering political scientist and longtime Harvard faculty member who was, according to Charles Kesler, the editor of Claremont Review of Books, “one of the greatest social scientists of the twentieth century.” Banfield’s best-known book, the 1970 bestseller The Unheavenly City, was an influential — and contrarian — examination of America’s “urban crisis.” His blunt indictment of lower-class culture as the root of most urban ills was controversial and led to campus protests and undeserved pariah status in academia.

Second, Government Project, based on Banfield’s PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago, is an equally insightful analysis of the Casa Grande Valley Farms cooperative, which was created by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1938 at the height of the Great Depression to provide economic security to distressed tenant farmers and migrant farm workers — many of them “Okies” displaced by the Dust Bowl. Banfield’s careful case study of the Casa Grande project, based on his review of the detailed government records (including extensive interviews with the participants) and his own experience as a “public information officer” for the FSA, is a sobering critique of government planning and social engineering.

Third, the original Foreword by Rexford Tugwell (nicknamed “Rex the Red” by his detractors due to his utopian infatuation with Soviet-style schemes), a member of FDR’s “Brain Trust” and the architect of FSA’s predecessor agency, the Resettlement Administration, is alone worth the modest cost of the book as an exercise in bureaucratic hubris. Tugwell lauds Government Project as “the full case history” of Casa Grande, and acknowledges that “We can see in it many lessons if we will” — while conveniently shifting the blame for the fiasco to others.

Finally, Banfield had a long association with AEI, dating back to 1963 (when Milton Friedman served on AEI’s advisory board), and one of Banfield’s students at Harvard, Christopher DeMuth, was AEI’s president from 1986 to 2008. For all these reasons, Banfield, now largely forgotten, deserves to be remembered, as do the lessons of Casa Grande.

What was Casa Grande and why did it fail? The FSA was a New Deal relief program that sought to provide employment and housing — and, ultimately, economic self-sufficiency — to destitute farm laborers such as sharecroppers and itinerant cotton-pickers then living in squalid shacks. Sixty families were selected to live in newly constructed brick homes featuring modern amenities such as electricity, indoor plumbing, flush toilets, water heaters, refrigerators, gas ranges, and washing machines. At great expense (more than $1 million in 1938 dollars), the federal government (via the WPA) built the homes, acquired 3,600 acres of farmland, and provided the necessary agricultural infrastructure (wells, irrigation ditches, roads, fences, outbuildings, and the like).

Unlike the earlier — but equally disastrous — Matanuska Colony Project in what is now Palmer, Alaska, Casa Grande did not rely on a model of individual homesteads of 40 acres for the participants to clear and farm; it was to be a “collective” farm on an industrial scale, permitting efficient mechanization and more scientific agricultural techniques, such as crop rotation. Small farms in the Arizona desert were deemed to be economically untenable. Accordingly, the 60 settlers chosen to participate would own the farm on a communal basis, responsible for cooperatively operating the farm profitably and reimbursing the federal government for its substantial up-front investment. Eventually, the Casa Grande settlers would repay their debt to the FSA, share the profits, and build equity as owners. Casa Grande — an untested experiment in quasi-socialist agriculture — was to be the largest cooperative farm ever established in the United States.

The problems with this model were — or should have been — obvious. The Casa Grande farm was a complex enterprise, dependent on irrigation, with multiple crops (cotton, alfalfa, grain), livestock (cattle, hogs, sheep), dairy, and poultry, and a complement of horses, mules, tractors, hay balers, and other equipment. The settlers, some of whom had limited (or no) farming experience, were ill-equipped to manage such a complicated operation on their own. To protect its investment, the federal government appointed an experienced farm manager to oversee operations. The farm would not immediately turn a profit, so the settlers were initially paid a nominal monthly stipend. From the beginning, this arrangement generated conflict.

The settlers, who viewed themselves as “owners” (albeit communally) resented the FSA’s management despite their own lack of experience as independent farmers. The settlers’ duties were strictly structured by the FSA foreman. Because of the FSA’s operational supervision and their modest monthly remuneration, the settlers behaved as hired hands, often threatening to strike — against their own cooperative! — if they didn’t get their way. “Sharing” the workload led to disputes over perceptions regarding the settlers’ differing roles and levels of effort. Needless to say, the operational arrangement was contrary to the ostensible goal of cooperative self-governance, which frustrated and confused the poorly educated and inexperienced settlers.

The Casa Grande participants, few of whom were native Arizonans, were haphazardly chosen from widely disparate backgrounds, in terms of age, education, family composition, religious beliefs, life experience, and other characteristics. The only trait they shared was destitution. Any random assortment of humans will include moochers, loafers, troublemakers, and complainers, and the quarrelsome Casa Grande settlers were no exception. With time on their hands (thanks to the mechanized farm operations), the settlers quickly divided into competing cliques and factions. Internal governance amidst these differences degenerated into petty feuds, incessant bickering, jealousy, resentment, and recrimination. The “cooperative” was wracked with discord.

Naïve FSA managers were dismayed that the independent-minded settlers did not adapt to communal life; “economic democracy” was, after all, the ultimate goal of establishing a cooperative farm. To the New Deal architects of Casa Grande, enlightened communal living was a moral imperative. Alas, no amount of tinkering and prodding by the FSA’s social engineers was able to turn Casa Grande into a kibbutz. Adding to the tension, neighboring communities viewed the WPA-built collective farm with distrust and suspicion, nicknaming the project “Little Russia.”

Despite the cajolery of FSA social workers, in 1943 the fractious (and short-sighted) settlers insisted by a two-thirds vote on liquidating Casa Grande — after it became profitable! — squandering their equity on legal fees, and walking away with next to nothing. Most returned to destitution and squalor as migrant farm workers, leaving the federal government $100,000 in the hole (in 1946 dollars).

The lessons? Americans do not readily embrace government-imposed collectivization. “Community,” in the Tocquevillian sense — voluntary associations which comprise the fabric of civil society — cannot be manufactured or externally imposed; civic cooperation must be organic. Good intentions are not enough. In a free society, dealings among citizens are based on “private ordering”: consensual free-market transactions based on perceived individual self-interest. Property rights demarcate separate economic interests. The potential for personal financial success provides incentives for hard work and self-discipline. All these elements were absent in a government-planned “cooperative” with federal supervision and competing factions among the randomly-chosen participants — all of whom were strangers before being thrust into an unfamiliar communal society.

Original foreword author Tugwell was an FDR confidante who helped create, and then led, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration that was declared unconstitutional in 1936, when he’d moved on to be Administrator of the Resettlement Administration. A champion of central planning in industry, housing, and agriculture, Tugwell believed that government bureaucrats could “fix” social problems by moving poor people into utopian planned communities. Despite the manifest failures of the numerous New Deal programs that he designed and oversaw, he steadfastly refused to accept any blame. In his 1951 Foreword, Tugwell conceded that Casa Grande was a “noble failure,” not because “the conception was bad,” but because “the people there could not rise to the challenge.”

Tugwell disingenuously condemned the “character” of the “unfortunate” settlers, who succumbed to “a general sickness which was at work,”including “deplorable exhibitions of selfishness” and “maleficent” opposition to cooperation by “very powerful forces” opposed to FDR. Despite the best efforts of the federal planners, he lamented, “We are far from being fundamentally accustomed to the projections necessary to finding our duty and doing it in modern society” (emphasis added). In other words, Americans were to blame for refusing to adapt to Soviet-style communal farming!

Casa Grande was one of four cooperative farm projects sponsored by the FSA. Believe it or not, it was the most successful. The others, also torn by factionalism, fared far worse. Government Project is a powerful lesson — in economics and human nature: Socialism doesn’t work.

Postscript: The difference between then and now is that Congress recognized the failure of resettlement projects and cooperatives, and in 1943 cut off their funding. Today, such self-restraint is entirely absent.

When Democrats with “daddy” issues find their way into power, they force their own psychological deficiencies upon the broader populace.  Why?  Because they try to play “father” to their constituents but have no idea how a good father is supposed to behave.  They scream and shout because they confuse insults and tantrums with masculinity.  They reimagine the ideal male leader as someone who would enjoy wearing make-up and behaving like a teenage girl.  They demand that male “allies” relinquish any say over the healthy delivery of their unborn children.  Instead of taking personal responsibility for missteps in life, they blame their problems on the nebulous “patriarchy” — or rather, the failed fathers of the past!

After punishing all the good men as stand-ins for all the weak men who never properly parented them, Democrats are left with the wimpiest, least wise leftovers of the sorry lot.  Then some angry, man-hating leftist with zero self-awareness uploads a video onto social media demanding to know where all the good men have gone.  Well, you chased them away, you trans-obsessed, insult-spewing, sniveling punk!

Greg Gutfeld made this point on a recent episode of The Five when discussing the exodus of black and Hispanic voters from the Democrat party: “They’ve alienated men in order to please miserable activists, and men are like, ‘Hey, we know when we are not wanted.  We will see ourselves out.  We know what a woman is, right?  We know what is best for our kids.  We know what it takes to protect our cities and our families, and we are tired of apologizing for laughing at funny jokes and having natural testosterone.’”

Because the Democrat party is filled with fake men and phony fathers, it continues to shove real men and fathers away.  Then, when Democrat voters find that their trusted “authority figures” have squishy backbones, too, their “daddy” issues spiral out of control.  They need more laws, more mask mandates, more punishments; they become desperate for some governmental “daddy” to tell them what they can and cannot do.

This hits at a major distinction separating Democrats from the liberty-loving conservatives whom leftists naturally resent.  Liberty-lovers do not confuse the government for their own parents.  Government is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a thuggish bully.  It does not exist to keep you safe at night, to put food on the kitchen table, to teach you right from wrong, or to furnish you with love.  Government is a bureaucratic machine that specializes in using the threat of force and the application of actual violence to coerce strangers into doing exactly what the State wishes them to do.

Depending on the government to behave like a loving parent is like depending on one of James Cameron’s cybernetic Terminators for a soothing hug.  Both have the kind of uncaring programming that makes most embraces fatal.  Still, for Democrats with “daddy” issues, those bureaucratic Terminators are the closest things to family that they’ve got.  They’d gladly put their trust in a brutal and dogmatic State that occasionally pats them on the head and promises to take care of them.  It’s psychological abuse disguised as “caring government.”

This fraudulent parent-child construct produces nothing but servile citizenry.  In a healthy family, parents nurture their children until they become competent, self-sufficient adults.  Good parents supervise what their children learn, keep them from harm, and guide them along their journey to adulthood.  The love and respect between a parent and child never go away, but the relationship is not meant to produce lifelong juveniles stuck in a permanent state of dependency.  Children grow to become capable adults; those adults have children of their own; and the cycle promotes a strong, healthy society.

When governments act as false parents, however, they are not interested in transforming juveniles into adults.  They do not seek to create competent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves.  They do not want to produce a population strong enough to think for itself.  Because a citizen’s self-sufficiency eliminates his dependency on government, bureaucrats must infantilize grown adults for the rest of their lives.  The State is not equipped to be a parent, but it is an ideal machine for mass-producing slaves.

I suspect that part of President Trump’s popular appeal comes from his refusal to treat adults as if they were still children.

Parents sometimes have to “pretend” around their young children.  To keep them safe from the terrors of an often dark world, they “bend the truth” here and there.  When a family seeks shelter during a tornado, or a parent is laid off from work, or a relative is diagnosed with a scary illness, parents will look into their children’s eyes and say, “Everything will be all right.”  That’s what good parents do when the best that they can do for their children is to soothe their worries with fearless love and steady support.

Adults, on the other hand, should be able to speak bluntly to each other without concern that an unvarnished truth will “trigger” another adult to melt into a trembling, catatonic puddle of tears.  Trump told NATO countries that they should pay their full financial commitments to the alliance if they really fear for their own security, and the fainting class screeched, “How dare he tell the truth so publicly?”  Trump (allegedly!) pinpointed Haiti and other unstable nations as “S-hole countries,” and celebrities came out of their mansions to pretend Haiti is just as luxurious as Hollywood.  Trump told Americans there is a dangerous invasion of foreign nationals crossing our open borders, and the corporate news propagandists denounced his accurate assessment as intolerably “racist.”

Time and again, the pundit class has insisted on treating American adults as if they were children too young to understand harsh realities.  President Trump is the first national leader in most Americans’ lives to show them respect by plainly speaking the truth.

A lot of people did not quite understand how long their government had been treating them like toddlers until Donald Trump’s frank speech jolted them awake.  He questioned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, excoriated globalism’s destruction of America’s middle class, and refused to search for the constantly shifting line denoting what is “politically correct” to say out loud.  He called out “journalists” for spreading fake news, criticized monetary policies that have transferred Americans’ wealth to foreign adversaries, and rebuked “allies” that facilitate illegal immigration into the United States.

When threatened by foreign regimes, he threatened them back in direct and unequivocal terms.  When speaking of rising crime in the United States, he did not worry about the criminals’ feelings.  When his enemies used the Intelligence Community, Department of Justice, and politically partisan judges to threaten his freedom, he never hesitated to call out the abuse and corruption taking place.  At first, a lot of Americans thought, “He can’t say that!”  Over time, however, a lot of those same Americans wondered, “Why shouldn’t he be able to say that?”

Why must we censor our own speech and pretend that untrue things are true simply to avoid the possibility of feeling uncomfortable?  Are we not all adults?  Are we not capable of speaking to one another candidly?

One of the most important things President Trump has done for our country is to stop pretending that things are fine when they clearly are not.  Pretending is for young children.  Facing hard truths head-on is for adults.  Childish Americans must grow up because the government can never be their “daddy.”

What do you think? Leave your thoughts at The Liberty Daily Substack.

The latest version of the government takeover of food is happening in Pennsylvania where Amos Miller is being attacked for supplying his friends and neighbors with fresh food. According to famed attorney Robert Barnes:

Let me explain what the #AmosMiller case is about after a court conference. The @PAAgriculture claims ALL food is “illegal” — as illegal as illegal drugs — unless it was made by a government-approved facility, and they can destroy it at will.

Let me explain what the #AmosMiller case is about after a court conference. The @PAAgriculture claims ALL food is "illegal" — as illegal as illegal drugs — unless it was made by a government-approved facility, and they can destroy it at will. See brief:https://t.co/FXvjc1yJmP

— Robert Barnes (@barnes_law) February 26, 2024

Miller is the Amish farmer who sells products like raw milk. This is a threat to the monopoly on what we digest that government and their cronies are trying to establish, so they’ve gone full-blown police state on him.

According to left-leaning Newsweek:

Representative Thomas Massie, who called the raid “shameful” last month, told Newsweek in a Wednesday statement, “It’s a shame that small farmers have been pushed into these situations by overbearing government regulatory agencies and lawmakers captured by corporations and monopolies.”

The Kentucky Republican continued: “I support all small farmers and consumers who wish to engage in voluntary transactions. It’s imperative that Congress take up my PRIME Act to ameliorate the plight of small farmers like Amos.” Massie’s bill seeks to exempt meat products from federal inspection after slaughter and preparation at a custom facility.

Donald Trump Jr. also weighed in on last month’s raid, writing in a post on X (formerly Twitter), “Imagine what law enforcement could accomplish if they went after oh I don’t know, say, members of elite pedophile rings rather than farmers selling to their neighbors??? Can I be the only person sick of this s***?”

He is scheduled to appear in court on February 29th. A GiveSendGo has raised over $240,000 so far.

Editor’s Note: It has never been more important for Americans to take control of their food security. It isn’t just the attacks by governments and multinational corporations. It’s all of that plus a multitude of attacks against farmers, ranchers, and anyone who believes in the food God has provided us.

Grow your own food if you can. Stock up on long-term storage food. We encourage working with companies like Prepper All-Naturals to stock up on as much as possible. They are an America First company that helps people secure premium beef that is shelf-stable for up to 25 years. Take advantage of promo code “veterans25” to get 25% off at checkout.

Sound off about this story on The Liberty Daily Substack.