DIY Topic 2: Federalism

Developments that will likely determine the shape of our future are certainly unfolding fast. Rudy Giuliani just joined the list of people like Roger Stone, general Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort who were visited at home by the feds basically for being a Trump ally. Though he wasn’t arrested and wont be put into solitary confinement like Manafort, the predicate for the visit was specious, and what the feds came to take was Trump attorney-client records. In the face of federal overreach, certain states are now beginning to take their own stands against it. Following the model of those blue ones that declared themselves sanctuary states against federal immigration and deportation laws, Montana, North Dakota, and Oklahoma have just declared themselves second amendment sanctuary states that will resist federal gun restriction measures. The NRA has also filed suit against a New York law that prohibits concealed carry. Because the SCOTUS has agreed to adjudicate it, it could be a precedent-setting case for gun rights.

In Texas and Florida not only are the citizens still free to go out to have dinner and socialize over drinks afterwards, they are now also being empowered with the right to utilize tech giant social media platforms without being censored, demonetized, and de-platformed. Government spending and the failure to take measures to restrain big tech’s capricious abuse of power were two areas where the Trump administration was derelict; They should have enacted restraints before the cancel/censor genie left the bottle. DeSantis has struck first here by getting Florida Senate Bill 7072 into-process to become law there. This provides a point of vulnerability for big tech cancel culture in that active Floridians can now carpet-bomb YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to setup online uncensored news services, forums, and organizations of any viewpoint. And provided that someone (anyone….??) is willing to lend them the financial backing to pursue litigation, they can legally go-after the tech oligarchs if they censor them, apply algos that push them-down in their search ratings, or deploy any of a number of the other suppressive actions that they have been taking. Tim Pool overviews some of the points of the bill here. Such a push for uncensored independent news and grassroots organizing seems timely given the degree to which people are turning away from establishment media sources.

Acting on such vulnerability points promptly is important, since central power obviously doesn’t like them existing and would like for them to be removed, which is immediately possible if we were ever to go under martial law. Other ongoing federal activities can quickly remove the effectiveness of things like online fund-raising. One prime example and something to really keep watch on now is the push among numerous governments to move all money from cash (and existing cryptos) to single CBDCs. Once the federal government gains the ability to transparently monitor every single transaction in the economy, and additionally gives itself the option to control or cancel any of them it wishes, then it instantly becomes much less effective to start up a social media-based news service or PAC in Florida that needs to raise funds.

The leader for CBDCs unfortunately is China and the PBOC has generated its own standard that it is now pushing with the other governments (viz., US, Canada, UK, EU) interested in switching to their own CBDCs. The latest standard in China ties their e-currency in with their social credit scoring system in an automated fashion. So it is now possible that citizens who haven’t been toeing the line adequately in the eyes of the CPC will awaken one day to find their money turned off (or at least several types of their transaction services denied). So in China there is much less need for the totalitarian government to even round up dissidents anymore, since it can now make them immediately destitute by essentially flipping a switch (or letting their social-monitoring AI do that for them). Governments like that turn their people from free-acting individuals into machines.

Even if a first-version ‘Digital Dollar’ is not implemented so perniciously, government and its big-tech allies who would carry-out the implementation of it would certainly use its perfect traceability to accumulate data on your spending and investing activities. You would no longer be able to make anonymous donations to web news services, groups, or causes that you support. Further, if you do and those donations are seen as going to organizations and causes that the government doesn’t like, it could launch reprisals even before it integrates-in AI to socially-grade you comprehensively (which likely would not take long).

So it’s good that some states are now acting to stand against Washington in favor of their citizens’ rights. The states doing so are so antithetical to the rich blues ones which have been removing their peoples’ rights that the red/blue rift is sharpening. This has increased the likelihood of the eventual fragmentation of the country that I previously mentioned is a possibility. Up until now, it has been the blue states that have been defiant (flouting federal laws in regards to immigration and constitutional freedoms), but only now are we beginning to see red states readying themselves to flout federal incursions against the 1st, 2nd, and 4th amendments. But these conservative states are still well-distant from holding conversations on forming any kind of confederation among themselves.