Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition from political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and completely controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society.
This is the authoritarian messaging we seem to be getting with the current American Administration.
We see it played out for example, as Harvard University and the Trump Administration go toe to toe in the latest move for power and influence. Harvard will not comply with the Trump Administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming, limit student protests, and submit to far-reaching federal audits in exchange for its federal funding, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced in a message to affiliates Monday afternoon. As a result, Trump has threatened to pull funding and remove Harvard’s tax exempt status.
Perhaps you’ve heard of this story. Or, maybe you haven’t. Personally, I think the real issue is that Harvard lost over $150 million in private donations last year and they are using this scuffle with Trump to cover this up. Although the media would have you believe the Tyrant in Charge wants to dismantle diversity programming and limit a student’s right to assemble, the real reason seems obvious: Harvard is getting nervous over these impending scrutinizing audits and are loudly shouting violation of rights in order to quell any questions about the audit and what these audits involve.
My opinion is these iconic institutions need to be brought down a peg, or two, but one doesn’t have to disrupt a student’s right to assemble or disrupt diversity programming to do so. The private sector has already pulled an enormous amount of funding from Harvard, which means they’re leaning on government (The State) funding to make up the difference. If The State wants to audit Harvard in order to make up that difference, then let them. But these auditors must be appropriately named agents of the Department of Education, not the fraudulently created unelected committee DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). If everything comes out fine in the audit, then I see no reason why The State can’t help out the institution until it can somehow woo the private sector into bankrolling them (again).
This is kind of a boring story in my opinion for the sheer fact that it has nothing to do with everyday Americans. It sounds like a bunch of privileged out-of-touch University heads throwing a giant tantrum now that their private funding has been pulled and they want the government to bail them out.
The part that makes it not boring is the reaction from The State. Although the response to the University to stop the diversity programming, or else, isn’t necessarily totalitarianism, telling the University its students cannot assemble or must limit their assembly absolutely is the very definition of totalitarianism. And this is where the story gets less boring for me, anyway.
The State’s response to Harvard is totalitarian in nature. The right to assemble isn’t open for debate. It’s baked in to our human nature and codified in our Constitution. And, you’d think the Trump Administration, the same Administration who interrupted American’s right to assemble for the first time in our nations history five years ago, wouldn’t stumble into this violation again. But here we are. Fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on me. I am unabashedly in support of the student’s right to assemble just as I was undeniably supportive of Americans protesting “lockdown” in 2020. I would be a hypocrite if I wasn’t supportive of the student’s right to assemble, And, I am no hypocrite.
I wondered what other stories out there were giving off such fucked up optics.
In March 2019, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was arrested outside a Hyattsville Home Depot in Maryland while seeking work as a day laborer. He was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being questioned by police about alleged gang membership. He was not charged with a crime, ultimately released and since his 2019 arrest, Garcia has never been convicted or charged with a crime. In fact, in 2019 a judge in Maryland granted him a “withholding of removal” status. So why, exactly six years later, practically to the day, was he arrested and deported to El Salvador?
Well, because totalitarianism.
Although we are told Garcia married an American citizen over ten years ago, was gainfully employed, a member of a union and fathered children with his wife, he was apparently not an American citizen. People forget, I think, that marrying a U.S. citizen does not automatically grant you U.S. citizenship. It simply allows you to apply for a green card (lawful permanent residence), and after a certain period as a permanent resident and meeting other requirements, you can apply for U.S. citizenship through naturalization. This process takes time.
Garcia has apparently been living and working in the USA for a decade but is still not an American citizen. It’s unclear if he even applied for his green card after he married his wife. So… he was just too busy to go through the necessary requirements to become a naturalized citizen? I’ll admit. It feels dodgy. But I’ll also admit. It’s not uncommon. You’d be surprised how many non American professionals are working in the American private sector, in America, who are allowed to stay here while they let their visas expire, for instance.
Despite all this, Garcia did not deserve to be shipped off to his home country, El Salvador, and thrown into one of the most brutal prisons on the planet as if he was some MS-13 hardened cartel leader. Besides, he was granted special “withholding of removal” status by that nice judge back in 2019. So why did The State defy the judge’s designation and deport Garcia anyway?
No matter which way you look at this, the optics on this particular brand of totalitarianism look bad. Of course I’m talking about the suspension of due process. The State, if it cared about its own laws and its own protocol, would bring Garcia back and put him through due process.
But The State is intransigent in their position on this. The Trump Administration isn’t budging. They’re doing nothing to even make it look like they’re attempting to follow any kind of due process and allow this man his right to a fair trial.
I suppose their reasoning is if they do it for him, they’d have to do it for all the detainees.
And, believe it or not, I’m fine with that.
Bring every single one of them back, because none of them had the benefit of due process or a fair trial. Bring them back. Put them in holding or put them under house arrest, create a system of rules that if violated means they forfeit their right to due process.
This feels more American to me than just rounding up a bunch of El Salvadorans who may, or may not, have ties to gangs and who may. or may not. be putting our country at risk.
But in totalitarianism, things get jumbled up and confusing and messy and lines about what is legal and not legal get blurred and the people, and the people’s human rights are caught in the cross hairs. The frustrating thing is there are laws in place to avoid this very thing.
Well, there were laws in place to protect anyone living in this country from being rounded up by ;government agents and disappeared, suspending all due process. Those laws were unfortunately weakened or outright undermined with the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act signed by the Obama Administration in 2012.
But, the show must go on in totalitarianism. Even if this story is just a composite, which means that Garcia himself is just a persona that doesn’t even exist and his wife, who has taken to the bully pulpit lately, is just some random actor or agent of The State, the message is loud and clear:
This is Totalitarianism. We can be suspected of terrorism, and just being suspected of it is now apparently enough to suspend our civil liberties, suspend due process and disappear us for an indefinite amount of time.
There is always a degree of salaciousness in totalitarianism. With the story of Elon Musk soliciting baby mama’s on New Twitter now trending in the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair, it deserves a little unpacking.
First, in totalitarianism one should assume everything is a lie. From murder plots, to stories of mass deportation to ivy league institutions throwing epic fits because they lost their funding, one really should take it all with a grain of salt because the truth about why we are hearing these stories is a real snooze fest.
However, the heavy false-flaggery behind the apparent legion of little Musks now bobbing about the planet needs some attention. Empires fall and as they come crashing down there’s always someone to throw out the lifeboat of sex and a lewd scandal to provide a titilating distraction while the entire thing burns to the ground.
The story is that Ashley St. Clair broke her agreement with Musk to keep quiet about her child’s origins. Musk immediately withdrew her allowance and she then fired back with even more stories and accusations. The Wall Street Journal then published every sordid detail.
What really happened, and what is happening, I assume, is that Musk has fathered maybe four or five kids, not 14. But The State’s field agents are busy at work planting ideas that he wants to populate the planet with his seed and that our world population is rapidly diminishing. So Musk is always on the hunt for new handmaidens to help him fill up the planet with little versions of himself.
This plays on the central theme in everyone’s mind, their greatest fear: if I don’t have someone to leave behind, my legacy will be forgotten and therefore I must not be all that important. What this story is doing is its mastering our deepest emotional turmoil and dredging up some dark notions that ultimately we are nothing without our lasting legacies.
It’s a trick in totalitarianism, to make the masses feel worthless. It’s dogged and comes at all angles in every shape and in a panopticon of ruthless stories, hashtags and algorithms that force us to become self-aware and admit how small we really are.
I’m going to assume the story of the Musk brood and his New Twitter Handmaids is a total fabrication and taken out of the playbook of Oswald Mosely, a British aristocrat and politician who rose to fame during the 1920s and 1930s when, having become disillusioned with mainstream politics, he turned to fascism. Like Musk, he wanted to disrupt government and root out wastefulness and like Musk, he too fathered a bunch of kids with at least two women.
By the way, I’ll clue you in on a little secret, in totalitarianism The State isn’t very creative. They can’t even come up with their own plot lines. They basically steal from other more famous, and interesting (if not controversial) people’s actual lives, modernize that life and present it to the media and the public as fact in the shape of an asset, even an oddly shaped asset like Musk.
The difference between Musk and Mosely is that Mosely was actually a brilliant, convincing, conniving, scandalous individual. Musk is just a hacked out version of a cross between Big Brother and Mosely fabricating an AI version of scandal that leaves all of us bored and utterly disinterested in his alleged conquests.
The real story, I imagine, isn’t all that exciting. He was married and in that marriage produced four kids. After that marriage he went through a makeover, got some hair plugs, started experimenting with drugs and met a Canadian artist named Claire Bucher whose stage name is Grimes. She’s legions more intelligent than him and is tall and elegant, so naturally he wanted to procreate with her, which he did.
That procreation is the little kid we saw Musk carrying around on his shoulders and parading like a pet at White House Press Conferences. Grimes quietly voiced her concern about her son’s health during this process through a few tweets and some time later, we no longer saw footage of the little boy anymore.
But the story about Musk and his New Twitter handmaids and his deep desire to command the country’s ship so his man parts can dive into it to spawn a legacy, is probably fake. But, like every thing that we see paraded out in front of us, we have to pay attention.
The message is that humans can be bought for a purpose and that purpose is slavery. Take away the sordid details, the steamy alleged text messages between Musk and St. Clair, and all the gasping details and it comes down to one theme:
In totalitarianism you are a slave. In totalitarianism you have one master and must love him. In totalitarianism if you don’t love the master then you are cast aside, thrown into a detention camp, made poor or irrelevant.
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