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 “When I’m wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?”--John Maynard Keynes

A 2020 Cato Institute survey found that 62% of Americans say the political climate prevents them from sharing their political beliefs because others might find them offensive. Majorities of democrats (52%), independents (59%), and Republicans (77%) all agree they have political opinions they are afraid to share. History has shown us that governments can be terrible to citizens and that's how that totalitarianism can take root—not through jackbooted thugs, but through a million small acts of self-censorship, like confessing to a thought crime, with dissenting views said privately but never made publicly. That’s when speaking obvious truths becomes an act of courage rather than basic citizenship.

George Orwell understood that. In his novel 1984, the party’s greatest achievement wasn’t forcing people to say things they didn’t believe—it was making them afraid to believe things they weren’t supposed to say.  But the real genius was making citizens complicit in their own oppression, turning into both prisoner and guard.

The secret police (stasi) in communist East Germany didn’t just rely on secret police—they turned ordinary citizens into informants. 1 in 7 East Germans was reporting on their neighbors, friends, even family members. The state didn’t need to watch everyone; they got people to watch each other. But the stasi had limitations: they could recruit informants, but they couldn’t monitor everyone simultaneously, and they couldn’t instantly broadcast transgressions to entire communities for real-time judgment. Social media has solved both problems. Now we have total surveillance capability—every comment, photo, like, and share automatically recorded and searchable. We have instant mass distribution—1 screenshot reaching thousands in minutes. We have volunteer enforcement—people eagerly participating in calling out “wrongthink” because it makes them feel righteous. And we have permanent records—unlike stasi files locked in archives, digital mistakes follow you forever. The psychological impact is exponentially worse because stasi informants at least had to make a conscious choice to report someone. Now the reporting happens automatically—the infrastructure is always listening, always recording, always ready to be weaponized by anyone with a grudge or a cause.

We saw this machinery in full operation during Covid. Remember how quickly “2  weeks to flatten the curve” became orthodoxy? Questioning lockdowns, mask mandates, or vaccine efficacy wasn’t just wrong—we were told it was dangerous.  By saying “maybe we should consider the trade-offs of closing schools” could get you labeled a grandma-killer. The speed at which dissent became heresy was breathtaking. Some of your neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family members became the enforcement mechanism. People didn’t just comply; they competed—virtue-signaling their way into a collective delusion where asking basic questions about cost-benefit analysis became for them evidence of moral deficiency. Neighbors called police on neighbors for having too many people over. People photographed “violations” and posted them online for mass judgment. And the most insidious part? The people doing the policing genuinely believed they were the good guys and not the gestapo! They thought they were protecting society from dangerous misinformation, not realizing they had become the misinformation—that they were actively suppressing the kind of open inquiry that’s supposed to be the foundation of both science and democracy. The ministry of truth didn’t need to rewrite history in real time, facebook and Twitter did it for them, memory-holing inconvenient posts and banning users who dared to share pre-approved scientific studies that happened to reach unapproved (by the deep state) conclusions. The party didn’t need to control the past—they just needed to control what you were allowed to remember about it.

This wasn’t an accident or an overreaction. This was a stress test of how quickly a free society could be transformed into something unrecognizable, and we failed spectacularly. Anyone who actually followed the science understood that the only pandemic was 1 of cowardice. Worse, most people didn’t even notice we were being tested. They thought they were just “following the science”—never mind that the data kept changing to match the politics, or that questioning anything had somehow become heretical. The beautiful thing about this system is that it’s self-sustaining. Once you’ve participated in the mob mentality, once you’ve policed your neighbors and canceled your friends and family and stayed silent when you should have spoken up, you become invested in maintaining the ego-massaging fiction that you were right all along. Admitting you were wrong isn’t just embarrassing—it’s an admission that you participated in something monstrous. So instead, you double down and ignore or demonize when confronted with inconvenient facts.

And this brings us back to the children. They’re watching all of this. But more than that—they’re growing up inside this surveillance infrastructure from birth. The stasi’s victims at least had some years of normal psychological development before the surveillance state kicked in. These kids never get that. They’re born into a world where every thought might be public, every mistake permanent, every unpopular opinion potentially life-destroying.

The psychological impact is devastating. Research shows that children who grow up under constant surveillance—even well-meaning parental surveillance—show higher rates of anxiety, depression, and what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” They never develop internal locus of control because they never get to make real choices with real consequences. But this goes far deeper because the ability to hold unpopular opinions, to think through problems independently, to risk being wrong—these aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re core to psychological maturity. When you eliminate those possibilities, you don’t just get more compliant people; you get people who literally can’t think for themselves anymore. They outsource their judgment to the mob because they never developed their own.

Yep, we’re creating a generation of psychological cripples—people who are practiced at reading social cues and adjusting their thoughts accordingly, but who have never learned to form independent judgments. People who mistake political consensus for truth and group popularity for virtue. People who have been so thoroughly trained to avoid “wrongthink” that they’ve either lost—or never developed—the capacity for original, critical thought entirely.

But here’s what’s most disturbing: the kids are learning this behavior from us adults. They’re watching adults who whisper their real thoughts, who agree privately but stay silent publicly, who confuse strategic silence with wisdom. They’re learning that authenticity is dangerous, that having real convictions is a luxury they don’t deserve. They’re learning that truth is negotiable, that principles are disposable, and that the most important skill in life is reading the room and adjusting your thoughts accordingly. The feedback loop is complete: adults model cowardice, children learn that genuine expression is risky, and everyone becomes practiced at self-censorship rather than self-examination. We’ve created a society where the Overton Window isn’t just narrow—it’s actively policed by people who are terrified of stepping outside it, even when they privately disagree with its boundaries.

As stated earlier, this is the architecture of soft totalitarianism. Just the constant, gnawing fear that saying the wrong thing—or even thinking it too loudly—will result in (at least) social death. The beauty of this system is that it makes everyone complicit. Everyone has something to lose, so everyone stays quiet. Everyone remembers what happened to the last person who spoke up, so nobody wants to be next. Technology doesn’t just enable this tyranny; it makes it psychologically inevitable. When the infrastructure punishes independent thinking before it can fully form, you get psychological arrested development on a mass scale. It’s already baked into education and employment through dei and esg. Wait till it’s baked into the monetary system. Maybe they’re just connecting us to the Borg anyway?

We’re passing this pathology down to our children like a genetic disorder. Except this disorder isn’t inherited—it’s enforced. And unlike genetic disorders, this one serves a purpose: it creates a population that’s easy to control, easy to manipulate, easy to lead around by the nose as long as you control the social rewards and punishments. When adults who lived through the China virus saw what happens when “groupthink” becomes gospel—how quickly independent thought gets labeled dangerous, how thoroughly dissent gets suppressed—many responded not by becoming more committed to free expression, but by becoming more careful about what they express. That’s when they’ve learned the wrong lesson.

What we’re creating is a society where authenticity has become a radical act, where courage is so rare it looks like privilege. We’re raising children who learn that being yourself is dangerous, that having real, informed opinions carries unlimited downside risk. They’re not just careful about what they say—they’re careful about what they think. This doesn’t create better people. It creates more fearful people. People who mistake surveillance for safety, conformity for virtue, and silence for wisdom. People who’ve forgotten that the point of having thoughts is sometimes to share them, that the point of having convictions is sometimes to defend them. This is the real threat to democracy.

The solution isn’t to abandon technology or retreat into digital monasteries. Instead we need to create spaces—legal, social, psychological—where both kids and adults can fail safely. Where mistakes don’t become permanent tattoos. Where changing your mind, especially when presented with a better view, is seen as growth rather than hypocrisy. Where having convictions is valued over having “political correct” records. Most importantly, we need adults who are willing to model courage instead of strategic silence—who understand that the price of speaking up is usually less than the price of staying quiet. In a world where everyone’s afraid to say what they think, the honest voice doesn’t just stand out—it stands up. Because right now, we’re not just living in fear—we’re teaching our children that fear is the price of participation in society. And a society built on fear isn’t a society at all. It’s just a more comfortable prison (at first), one where the guards are ourselves and the keys are our own convictions, which we’ve learned to keep safely locked away.

It’s PSYOP season—it’s never been more important that people find their conviction, use their voice, and become a force for good. If you’re still scared to push back against propaganda, still getting swept up in manufactured outrage cycles, still choosing your principles based on which team is in power—then you may have learned absolutely nothing from the last few years. Your years late to the story. But you’ll know you’ve caught up when you realize the world is run by a bunch of satanic pedophiles. And yeah, that use to sound crazy too.

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”—John Stuart Mill

Supplemental Info:
https://thefederalist.com/2025/06/30/leftist-supreme-court-justices-want-to-parent-your-kids-in-the-worst-way/ 

--------------- On Judges -----------

"We have activist judges in this country who are members of organizations that judges ought not be members of. The statue of justice is blind. It's not supposed to see what skin color you are, or if you're black, Hispanic, transgendered or whatever." -Mark Steyn

Judges must interpret the Constitution of the US as written and not attempt to modify it, either by inventing new rights or by ignoring or diluting rights already there.  The Constitution already provides an amendment process that gives that power to the people and their elected officials.

Judges must not use their positions to replace the text of the law and Constitution of the US with their own personal feelings or agenda or "life experiences."  Nor should they allow empathy, political favor, or political identification to affect their legal decisions.  To do so is to engage in judicial activism.

Judges must understand that the Federal government has no power if the Constitution does not explicitly provide it.  The Founders did this to maximize personal and economic liberty.  The Constitution reserves all other rights to the states and to the people.

Judges must respect the delicate checks and balances and the separation of powers among the branches of government, refusing to become a tool of either the Legislative or Executive branches, and they must be prepared to invalidate efforts of either branch to overstep its constitutionally delegated powers.

The Constitution is an American document, and declares that it shall be "the supreme Law of the Land."  Foreign law has no place as precedent or authority in the interpretation of the Constitution.

"As the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, his job was 'to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not.' If the public doesn't like the rules, or the consequences to which the rules lead, then the public can change the rules via the ballot box. But that is very different from judges changing the rules by verbal sleight of hand, or by talking about 'weighing of the constitutional right against other considerations, as Justice Breyer puts it. That's not his job. Not if 'we the people' are to govern ourselves, as the Constitution says... The media, like Justice Breyer, might do well to reflect on what is their job and what is the voting public's job." ---Thomas Sowell

 

Supplemental Info:

https://www.theblaze.com/news/justice-amy-coney-barrett-humiliates-justice-jackson-over-her-apparent-ignorance-of-american-law

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2025/06/27/now-that-is-a-brutal-footnote-in-the-supreme-courts-ruling-on-birthright-citizenship-n2659553 

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/06/27/supreme-court-ends-abuse-of-injunctions-no-more-judicial-supremacy/

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/california-judge-who-blocked-trump-national-guard-order-hit-impeachment-resolution

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