Is This the Start of an American Stasi?

[mountaineer]

Is This the Start of an American Stasi?
    By Mollie Hemingway
    May 15, 2024
Tom Klingenstein's site

In January, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards argued at length on this site that America was rapidly becoming a “soft totalitarian” state. Their essay was a response to former Mitt Romney advisor Gabriel Schoenfeld and others who have spent the last several years asserting that the right is simply paranoid about the “deep state,” and that concerns about abuses of power are overblown.

If you were wondering where I come down on this debate, well, let’s start here: Last fall, a congressional report revealed that I was on a secret list of public figures compiled by agencies within the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, in conjunction with Stanford University, that was used to pressure social media companies into suppressing and censoring my public statements.

This was all part of an “Election Integrity Project” that was created in the summer of 2020. Ostensibly, the goal was to prevent the spread of so-called “disinformation,” which the Washington establishment considers a threat to “democracy”—words that in recent years have become political weapons divorced from any meaning. In reality, this project was nothing more than unelected bureaucrats engaging in extreme violations of the First Amendment in order to meddle in an election and oust an incumbent president.

On a personal level, the idea that I was being surveilled and my public statements suppressed is disturbing. But what should be disturbing to all of us is that there are still so many people—even self-professed conservatives—heavily invested in denying that this is happening. This is the core of Schoenfeld’s argument: the laughable assertion that none of the major characteristics social scientists have traditionally used to define a totalitarian regime can be plausibly identified in contemporary America.  ...

If covert actors in our government are spying on and suppressing public figures, you can only imagine how emboldened they are when it comes to targeting ordinary citizens. Of course, we don’t really have to imagine much. In recent years, we’ve seen attempts by the FBI to hound citizens for private beliefs that the current regime finds politically threatening.  ...

Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

One of the most recognizable characteristics of a totalitarian regime is the harassment of dissidents by secret police. Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of The Federalist and a target of a Homeland Security suppression initiative, identifies our own “secret police” in the constellation of federal agencies that have relentlessly targeted regime opponents from the president of the United States all the way down to your local school board. This is the fifth in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

[mountaineer]

Before posting this essay, I searched "American Stasi" to make sure no one already had posted it. To my surprise, there have been several threads here at TBR on the topic. Looks like a trend, sad to say. Yes, we very much are becoming East Germany (or USSR, take your pick).