Prerequisites to Tyranny
According to one definition:
A conspiracy is simply two or more people or organizations working in tandem to perpetrate a nefarious crime or fraud…or conceal or cover up activities that, if exposed, would harm certain people and organizations.
One of the tools of conspirators is to label the people – often not many – who are onto them as, yes, conspiracy theorists. To silence them. And, in the case of pretend journalists like Peter Hoysted (Jack the Insider), to humiliate them over and over. His salary is paid by Rupert Murdoch, by the way. Another tool is to propagandise the punters. As Josh Stylman has argued, quoting Theodore Dalrymple:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
This principle of forced participation hasn’t disappeared—it has evolved. Today’s system doesn’t merely demand silence but active complicity in its narratives ...
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-second-matrix-break-the-controlled-awakening/
There is another tool used by propagandising conspirators, aka the tyrannical state. This one takes some work. In a typically excellent article at The Brownstone Institute, titled “In Defense of Conspiracy Theorists”, Bill Rice argues:
As a bonafide conspiracy theorist, I’ve come to believe the world’s most important conspiracies would be impossible to pull off absent a prior conspiracy to staff these organizations with clone thinkers who will never question or challenge the official narrative.
https://brownstone.org/articles/in-defense-of-conspiracy-theorists/
His logic is simple. And it supports the view that conspiracies are real and routine. Because if the institutions conspiring to dud customers or electors or whomever have thought far enough ahead to people their institutions with signed-up automatons, then it all was deliberate! A virtuous logical circle.
Having worked in both corporate universities and government agencies, I can attest to Rice’s conclusions. If you step outside the corporate narratives, you are going to be shown the door, in short shrift. Or denied promotion. Or denied interesting projects. Or kept out of research grant application teams. Or hauled into the CEO’s office for correction or counselling. James Cook University, just down the road from my current abode, did the first of these things to an outstanding scholar called Peter Ridd.
My recent experience with (God help us all) the Australian public health system suggests organisations full of butt protectors, yes men and women, narrative protectors and “good” corporate citizens. Anyone who has worked for a large institution knows this. Cover-ups of a minor or major nature occur every hour of the day, for example. Risk management 101. A whole army of consultants get rich by advising on how to do it. Every corporate and government agency now has a media unit. To feed the chooks, as Sir Joh used to say. Really?
Populating key institutions with the compliant explains the success of the whole Covid scam. See under Jack the Insider, again. Of course. The climate scam. See under school teachers. And all the other state scams, too. It is the way the world works. Generations of incoming employees are ideologically onboarded. See under unconscious bias training.
And as Bill Rice would recognise, the devil’s second greatest trick was to get the CIA to convince the world that truth-tellers were “conspiracy theorists”. Just like Satan’s greatest trick – convincing the world that he doesn’t exist – it has worked! The modern midwit left has signed up, lock, stock and whole freaking barrel. Ironically, doing the dirty work of the supposed corporate enemy. The class enemy. I still haven’t figured that one out. And not just what we still call “the left”, of course. The establishment right, personified by the likes of Toby Young, are on board with the dissing of conspiracy theorists.
Locking up the corporate loyalty system is critical to the control agenda.
I have written before of the theory of positive deviants. Those rare beasts within corporates who are actually there to help solve problems, to challenge orthodoxies in doing so, to serve the public (or customer) interest, in spite of their assigned roles of corporate self-protection, to admit corporate error and to break through enforced narratives. Sometimes they whisper things to you. Like what hospital nurses say about doctors. They definitely whisper.
One in four corporate employees is suggested by the consultant Mark Strom to be a positive deviant.
https://www.acumenintl.com.au/team/thought-leaders/dr-mark-strom/
You might get lucky. The rest are what Bill Rice might think of as enlisted soldiers of the narrative. Obey or be sacked. Most employees want to pay the bills and put food on the family table. We have all been there.
There are several sub-classes of corporate hacks. There are those who actually believe the ideology. They have been prepped at school and university, with green, woke religion. Sadly, there are more of these than we might expect. Then there are those who know it is all bullshit but who want to “get ahead”. Or stay out of trouble. They are the chancer class. Then there are the scaredy cats. Too frightened to go against the bosses’ agenda. Institutions are full of these types.
Managing up is a corporate religion. And the powers-that-be know this. They engineered the whole managerial revolution to achieve it. See under HR and MBAs.
Of course, most conspiracy theories turn out to be simply Pol Sci 101. Modern adaptations of public choice theory, for example. Of bureaucratic capture, as one (very important) example. This theory exposes the private interests of public officials and their motives in building coalitions with private actors. It is essentially a theory of public corruption.
The establishment’s best tactic has been to place a yawning gap between “conspiracy theory” and “political science”. My mission has always been to collapse the distance between the two.
Which brings us to Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s leading political science and history scholars.
Her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was an historical examination of the rise of Hitler, in particular. It was also about preconditions. About the easing of populations into readiness for tyranny. The subtle moving of people into acceptance of it. It worked so well because the prepping was so well constructed and planned. Wikipedia summarises the thesis:
In this book, Arendt argues that totalitarianism was a "novel form of government," that "differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship" in that it applied terror to subjugate mass populations rather than just political adversaries.
Novel. Oppression. Terror. Whole populations. Ringing any bells? Hannah hadn’t even heard of Covid. Of the World Economic Forum. Of Tony Fauci. Of bioweapons. Of the Department of Homeland Security. Of Wuhan labs. Of Davos. Of the new world order.
Let us assume that Bill Rice’s account of the new tyranny was planned. The success of the strategy proves the conspiracy. It means it was planned. It could only have worked that way. Quod erat demonstrandum. That is the burden of Rice’s argument.
Bill Rice’s (brief) examination of the nature of narratives, propaganda and the rolling out of a system of control is more a political science approach than Arendt’s historical analysis. Regulatory capture is critical to his framework of tyrannical conspiracy and to the building of corporatism as a system of government.
The public choice theory works because everyone in the establishment is a winner. Bureaucrats advance their careers and prestige. Industries get goodies from government. Rigging the rules easily beats the harder task of winning in the marketplace. As Adam Smith long ago recognised. Ministers get to cut ribbons and make announcables. They are all busy with the exciting, day-to-day process of governance. While the puppeteers simply grin at all the colour and movement, and continue to hold all the cards. Quietly and (mostly) invisibly. They even meet once a year (in Davos) and tell us openly what they are up to. They know that everyone will ignore them.
Bill Rice’s theory of tyranny prepping is also redolent of the theory of the long march through the institutions. Crafted the Italian Marxist Gramsci and refined by the German radical Rudi Dutschke. Get the team in place. This was the master class of the Marxist pivot in the 1960s from relying on the (useless) working class to the pursuing the capture of cultural and political institutions. This is how you prepare institutions for their historic role of cultural transformation. You populate them with willing cadres of dumbo, willing, embedded social revolutionaries. You create career pathways for goon-undergraduates to advance and to become performative puppets. You “educate” them for their tasks.
Hey presto. Now, all of our institutions – media, bureaucracy, political advisers, NGOs, university academics – are all singing from the same song sheet. Crawling with willing sign-ups. They have been prepped to believe in climate catastrophe, net zero, DEI, woke ideology, globalism, mass immigration, feminism, the rainbow coalition. Every last corner of the media has been captured. Even lifestyle channels are crawling with lesbian couples looking for “an escape to the country”. Normalised. We have been conditioned to say, all good.
The long march. The prepping. The origins of totalitarianism. The CIA. The Covid gaslighting and fear campaigns. The fact checker class. The silencing and ridiculing of dissidents. The rigid enforcement of narratives. The sophisticated propaganda. The censorship industrial complex. It all happened. It is not our imagination.
Ducks in a row? If it wasn’t all a conspiracy … prove it.
Josh Stylman alerts us to one final tool of the conspirators. Creating controlled opposition, dividing the awake and causing them to dissolve into squabbling over minor matters.
This pattern of building trust before redirection reflects a deeper system of control, operating on the ancient alchemical principle of Solve et Coagula—first dissolve (break apart), then coagulate (reform under control). The process is precise: When people begin recognizing institutional deception, natural coalitions form across traditional divides. Workers unite against central bank policies. Parents organize against pharmaceutical mandates. Communities resist corporate land grabs.
But watch what happens next—these unified movements get systematically dissolved. Consider how quickly unified resistance fractured after October 7th, how the trucker protests dissolved into partisan narratives. Each fragment splinters further—from questioning authority to competing theories, from united action to tribal infighting.
Watch how the confidence game operates in truth movements: First comes legitimate revelation—real documents, genuine whistleblowers, undeniable evidence. Trust builds through authentic insight. Then subtle redirection begins. Just as they slice society into ever-smaller fragments along political, racial, and cultural lines, they splinter truth movements into competing camps. Unity becomes division. Action becomes debate. Resistance becomes content.
Just look at the post-Covid micro “freedom” parties in Australia. Monica Smit’s call for a coalition of the willing will inevitably fall on deaf ears, as the UAP, One Nation, the Libertarians, Family First, the Family Party and People First (Gerard Rennick) go their separate ways at the coming Commonwealth election. And the winners are – the legacy parties, the Greens and the Teals.
A million souls descended upon Canberra in early 2022 – the convoy to Canberra – then promptly went home and did nothing much more. Like the gay marriage no voters. ScoMo knew he could ignore the convoy brigade. Literally ignore them. As did the other institutions of Covid oppression.
The Liberal Party’s continued flipping of the bird at the freedom movement, seen, for example, in its joining of Labor’s clever hate speech legislation and the absence of a Covid apology, shows that the latest iteration of official Liberalism continues to ignore a third of the electorate. Channeling Stylman and Bill Rice, it is a perfect example of building the institutions of control and the architecture of tyranny.
What of the Convoy? No MAGA spirit and follow-up there. No focus. No leadership. No strategy for revolution. Just looking at the Trump 47 campaign’s utter brilliance, exemplified in the manner of the creation of DoGE, the contrast could not be greater.
Source: Ed Dowd’s Telegram channel, 15 February 2025, and SCREW.GOV.
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=9534301519937467&id=100000731426534&_rdr
Meanwhile, a third of the Australian electorate remains endlessly unrepresented. While the micro parties endlessly blather about the deep state. And remain micro. The establishment is laughing.
Whether all of the tools described here pre-date the tyranny, or are developed over time alongside the tyranny as the level of tyrannical sophistication improves, hardly matters. What we are seeing is an architecture of totalitarian conspiracy. And a mighty fine piece of global skullduggery it is.
Footnote
FROM THE PAGE OF SCREW.GOV ON FB
I came across a lawyer, Tom Renz, who actually read Trump's DOGE Executive Order and, expecting some illegal power grab, found it to be airtight. Turns out Trump and Musk didn't create anything. Obama did.
Obama created United States Digital Service (USDS) in 2014. It was meant as a bureaucratic patch job to fix the Obamacare website meltdown.
Fast forward to 2025. Trump rebrands it DOGE (United States DOGE Service). Keeps the acronym, keeps the funding, but gives it a whole new mission: Find the Receipts
Legally untouchable because it was already fully funded and operational. Trump invokes 5 USC 3161, which allows him to create temporary hiring authorities. DOGE teams get embedded inside every single federal agency. Each team consists of a lawyer, HR rep, a zoomer nerd, and an investigator. They report to DOGE, not the agency they're embedded in.
But wait, there's more! Trump invokes 44 USC Chapter 35, which governs federal IT and cybersecurity oversight. Since USDS was originally an IT oversight body, DOGE now has full access to all federal data systems. Yes, that’s right. All of them.
His executive order is written to block legal challenges. Includes language that overrides conflicting executive orders. Orders every agency to comply. Refusal means they violate presidential authority.
Congress can't defund it because it's not a new program, just a repurposed one. DOJ can't sue for overreach because Trump used existing laws exactly as written. Democrats trying to file legal challenges run into standing issues because DOGE operates within existing frameworks.
Obama literally built the perfect Administrative (Deep) State IT backdoor. Trump and Musk just hacked the system and took the admin controls. Musk now has legal oversight of every major agency's internal systems. The Administrative State can't stop it without rewriting multiple federal laws.
They legally outplayed the system and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Obama created DOGE.
Paul Collits
15 February 2025
Thanks, another great article. Am now about to hit the links.