Crisis Update: Any 'Emergency’ Would Be Step Closer To Dictatorship

Hate laws will censor all dissent

• This is not about politics - one day the boot will be on the other foot

• NBC says Biden under pressure to declare climate emergency

• Unlocking special powers without need for Congress

• UK ‘Online Safety’ law recreates Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

• Parliament imediately demands social media demonetise Russell Brand

• Neither convicted nor charged - he is guilty of pre-crime and Thoughtcrime

• UK lawmakers insist racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism requires censorship

• Despite research suggesting Britain is much more liberal than 40 years ago

• Ironically censorship is pretty low-ranking compared with what’s happening

• Carl Schmitt, legal theorist of Third Reich, drafted the State of Exception

• Reichstag Fire ended habeas corpus, expression, press, association and assembly

• Recent problem, reaction, solution suggests policians toying with a Fourth Reich

(2,600 words or about 12 moments of your company. Apologies for typos - both Substack and me are buggy today.)

Britain’s wartime Ministry of Information, model for Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

Sep 21, 2023

NBC News claims that president Joe Biden is being urged to declare Climate Change a national emergency. This would allow him to “unlock special powers for a president in a crisis without needing approval from Congress.”

This would be similar, it says, to the emergency powers grabbed after September 11^th, 2001, and in response to the claimed Covid pandemic.

A state of emergency in response to a hurricane is one thing. For purposes of power and control it is quite another.

That is why the German philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt called it a State of Exception (German: Ausnahmezustand).

He developed his theory in the 1920s, though it reaches back before the dictatorships of classical Rome. In today’s environment, we have to look not only at the why — 9/11, Covid and now Climate Change — but the what.

To visualise what is happening, we have to grasp how different measures connect. And then we need to extrapolate.

Floyd and the Wall

For example the death of George Floyd and the riots that followed, organised in part by Black Lives Matters, led to a political campaign to “Defund the Police.” Big cities now are losing staff and cannot attract new recruits in numbers to replace them.

This in turn led to a decision not to prosecute retail theft worth less than $1,000 in some Democratic-run districts to reduce the pressure on police and the courts.

At the same time politicised district attorneys (DA) have been financed by George Soros with the effect of making the legal systems “soft on crime” while prosecuting political opponents. The United States has 70 prosecutors whose campaigns were funded by Soros, after 12 left office last year. ¹

The consequence is that city streets become unsafe and residents begin to leave. Many corporations have recently shut down stores in the most crime-ridden areas.

Extrapolating this, the gap left by a denuded police service opens several opportunities: for a privatised police force; for the imposition of military; or for non-local police from another district, region or country.

In all cases this would mean that local-born police, who have ties to the community, are replaced by outsiders who are far more likely to follow repressive orders. This is a long-standing technique used by authoritarian regimes.

The outcome would be the exact reverse of what Black Lives Matter supporters desire.

Under the new hate speech laws one might be penalised for that reference to Soros. The Guardian promotes claims that the term “globalist” is an “age-old antisemitic conspiracism.”

See Opposing Ideologies Serve The Same Masters (Moneycircus, Aug 4, 2022)

Even more frequently the same newspaper carries opinion pieces suggesting that “Climate Change deniers” should be denied a voice in public — clearly failing to understand the full meaning of the word, Opinion, printed at the top of each article. Such political prejudice may now have in Britain the force of law.

Guardian guile

The Guardian, which styles itself as the media industry’s newspaper, failed to report on the passage of the Online Safety Bill, which sailed through the upper chamber of Britain’s parliament this week.

The push for Online Safety legislation is moving to the U.S. where the The “Kids Online Safety Act” (KOSA) was introduced in Feb 2022, and reintroduced in May 2023. Canada, Australia and New Zealand, already have such legislation, as does the European Union.

This means that in Western countries, in the event that a State of Exception is declared, the laws are already in place to penalise any criticism.

Readers will recall that Elon Musk and his CEO at Twitter/X Linda Yaccarino have instituted “freedom of speech; not freedom of reach” which means you can talk or post all day, but no-one will hear you.

Fiat Constitution

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” wrote the legal theorist of the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt (Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet).

His views on the exception evolved, however, from emergency measures intended to preserve a constitutional order — to which the nation would eventually return — to the permanent transformation of the State by a charismatic leader.

In other words, from a temporary dictatorship in the style of classical Rome, to a messianic deliverance from the constraints on a leader’s action of a constitutional republic portrayed as flawed and outdated.

It is the latter that the powers, that should not be, are considering in the United States.

Charismatics of the political variety are claiming they have the gift of knowing what the future holds, and what is best for the people in the present (from the Greek word charisma, or gift). They also speak in tongues.

The governor of New Mexico last week issued a “public health emergency order” that purports to suspend the right to bear arms guaranteed in the Second Amendment.

Gov Michelle Lujan Grisham issued the order to one particular county, but her words and actions were a clear challenge to the U.S. Constitution.

It was an attempt, albeit within one state, to pursue Schmitt’s injunction in his work, “Political Theology” (1922, but only translated into English in 1985, and only published widely in English in 2006) for a sovereign to overturn mechanical procedures and technical constraints.

The effort to overturn constitutions is gaining urgency. King Charles last week launched his 2030 clock, and on the same day the heads of the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and the World Health Organisation said that Agenda 2030 was advancing too slowly.

Digital nirvana

Another example, outside of the West, is Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has banned his political opposition, amounting to 11 political parties, ² on the pretext that they have ties to Russia and has shut down much of the media. ³

Ukraine and South Africa were the first countries outside of China to launch digital ID and social credit.

See Beware The Trifecta Of Tyranny (Moneycircus, Nov 24, 2022)

Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone says Zelenskiy and his handlers plan to turn Ukraine into an “ethno-nationalist, Spartan, hyper-militarized bastion, armed to the teeth by NATO, existing for years in a state of permanent war against Russia, and we, the taxpayer, nothing we can do about it.” Zelenskiy in April 2023 said:

“We cannot talk about being a Switzerland of the future but we will definitely become a big Israel, with its own face. We will not be surprised to have representatives of the armed forces and the national guard in all institutions, supermarkets and cinemas. There will be people with weapons. I am sure that our security will be the number one issue in the next 10 years.”

Such a State clearly would brook no opposition or dissent.

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has blocked any attempt at peace talks, except for those which follow the complete capitulation of Russia.

Democrat Richard Blumenthal (no relation) and Republican Lindsey Graham are promoting a draft resolution in the US Senate that any use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia, or their agents or the destruction of a nuclear facility, sending radiation onto the territory of NATO, should be considered an attack on NATO.

This policy of supporting Ukraine in the war with Russia would be etched into law, making it difficult for future presidents to reverse, isolating the policy from public scrutiny or protest.

As Max Blumenthal says, in order to defend democracy in Ukraine, it must first be curtailed in the United States. ⁴

In case you wonder who Zelenskiy answers to, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are helping the Ukrainian government set up a reconstruction bank to steer public seed capital into rebuilding projects — and it’s not for charity.

Brand Orwell

While the West focuses on the did-he, didn’t-he of Russell Brand, here is what his downfall is disguising: A shift to 1984-style permanent war. George Orwell will have his day.

In a taste of things to come, the UK Parliament sent a letter to social media, including Rumble, demanding they “demonentise” all of Brand’s videos. Whatever you think of him he is an individual who has not been found guilty, and not even charged.

The Guardian writes: “What is Rumble, the video-sharing platform ‘immune to cancel culture’? The $2bn platform where Russell Brand has 1.4 million followers is popular among conservative commentators and conspiracy theorists.”

The UK Online Safety Bill imposes strict requirements on large social platforms to remove illegal content. It will be enforced by UK telecom regulatory agency OFCOM.
About 300 pages long, the new rules took more than five years to develop. It forces companies to proactively screen for objectionable material and to judge whether it is illegal.

It is part of a wave of rules in Europe aimed at ending an era of self-regulation in which tech companies set their own policies about what content could stay up or be taken down. The Digital Services Act, a European Union law, recently began taking effect and requires companies to more aggressively police their platforms for illicit material.

OFCOM, dominated by BBC alumni, will be the new information police. Britain’s Ministry of Information, the basis for Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, once had a similar role.

See BBC Flirts With ‘Deeper Authority’ - The corporation takes an ominous turn (Moneycircus, Aug 18, 2021)

The bill will require age verification for pornography sites, which opens the door to digital ID in order to access the Internet. It also requires “safety filters,” presumably switched on by default, to protect people from seeing “harmful content, such as eating disorders, self-harm, racism, misogyny or antisemitism,” in the words of the NYT. ⁵

The Guardian failed to even mention the passage of the UK Online Safety legislation through both houses of Parliament. With no irony, The G wrote the next day:

“Britain is much more liberal-minded than it was 40 years ago, study finds. From views on gay sex to women’s role in the home, British social attitudes survey reveals a ‘near revolution’. Examples of the ascendancy of liberal views include attitudes towards same-sex relationships – 50% of respondents said they were ‘always wrong’ in 1983, compared with 9% in 2022 – and a woman’s right to choose an abortion, supported by 76% now, against 37% when the question was first asked 40 years ago.”

This hardly seems consistent with British lawmakers’ insistence that the threat of racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism is so great that we need more censorship.⁶

State of Peril

A State of Exception justifies the jailing of political opponents and the suppression of their supporters. Freedom of speech is in greater peril than most people think.

In the words of Adam Liptak, writing in The New York Times more than a decade ago, the Patriot Act “gave rise to civil liberties tremors, not earthquakes.” Its impact was greatest abroad — people were held in decades-long detention in Guantánamo Bay without charge, suffering brutal interrogation techniques. ⁷

At home what changed mostly was how law enforcement saw its mission. Attorney General John Ashcroft said preventing terrorist acts had become more important than punishing crimes after the event.

Philip K. Dick yet again showed his prescience with the 1956 novel “Minority Report.” Ashcroft’s definition of pre-crime extended to “spitting on the sidewalk.”