This should horrify everyone! It's hard not to come off as some conspiracy theorist when explaining to people how government forced lockdowns, government sanctioned "essential business" status assignments, and mask and vaccine mandates are steps towards authoritarianism. The excuse is, “we are following the experts who want to protect people from this virus. Believing they are power-hungry authoritarians seems a little too conspiratorial to me.”

I often say, “there are very few real Bond villains in serious positions of power.” Truly evil, malevolent people are harder to come by than you think, and those people don’t tend to rise up the ranks of social or political power often (but they rise up quickly when they do). But what people seem to not understand is it doesn’t take a Bond villain to turn a liberal society into a totalitarian state. Hitler didn’t just appear before things went wrong in Germany. First there were fertile conditions for drastic change. Then there was a small but loud public push for change. Then the experts came in and became hyper-focused on making changes by promising security and safety while ignoring freedom and liberty. And, finally, bad actors saw the opportunity to seize power and control (some well-intentioned “good” actors become corrupted by power, and any people in power who maintain their moral compass and passion for liberty are shot in the back of the head).

The American soil, and western grounds more generally, have been fertile for drastic change for a while now, but the radical minority needed something to allow the seeds of authoritarianism to grow and bloom more quickly. Narratives like climate change, systemic racism, and orange man bad were effective, to a certain point, but those types of Miracle Grow didn’t have the urgency necessary to create radical change while the passions were high. The authoritarian crops were not yet ready to bear fruit and the growing season seemed like it was coming to an end. But then the perfect growing conditions appeared.

It took the incompetence of a massive world power to spread panic and disease around the world like a crop duster dropping fertilizer across the fields. Now the crops are growing and are almost ready for harvest. COVID-19 became a catalyzing event for authoritarian control.

China has advanced substantially as a world power over the last few decades, but there is no sector where they advanced more than in the practice of human oppression. They have concentration camps. They have indentured servitude. They have no free speech. They have no real rights protected against the coercion of the state to allow their people to make their own choices. They seem to be using Orwell novels as a roadmap instead of a cautionary tale. And, speaking of Orwell, they’ve even implemented a way to control behavior using something called the social credit system. If you’re reading this and heard a loud clap in the distance, that was George face-palming in his grave.

Kristin Tate, opinion contributor for The Hill, wrote an article titled Coming Soon: America’s own social credit system. In this article, she briefly explains China’s social credit system:

“China’s social credit system is a combination of government and business surveillance that gives citizens a “score” that can restrict the ability of individuals to take actions — such as purchasing plane tickets, acquiring property or taking loans — because of behaviors.”

She then ends the paragraph with this ominous message:

“Given the position of several major American companies, a similar system may be coming here sooner than you think.”

Tate runs through a good breakdown of how big tech companies are already implementing this social credit system in the U.S. (read the article for more), but she doesn’t connect how we are already in a much larger BETA test for adherence to this system. Big government calls for more control, especially during a pandemic, is unsurprising, but the open acceptance and even calls for more coercive government control is unbelievable. The days of, as Benjamin Boyce put it in my conversation with him and @ReturnToReason, the “screw you daddy” mentality we naturally had as Americans towards authority has long passed. The lesson Benjamin Franklin taught us when he said, “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” has been forgotten. We’ve been broken for a while, but COVID paranoia split us in half.

I believe Tate is missing this key element in her article, but she ends her piece perfectly:

“As it grows in breadth and power, what may be most surprising about our new social credit system won’t be collective fear of it, but rather how quickly most people will fall in line.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/565860-coming-soon-americas-own-social-credit-system?rl=1