Yeah that is kind of a given, I just wish more people would wake up to that fact.

I use proton VPN, but no I always just get my phones from Amazon bc it’s cheap. Never was a real problem in the past, but now that the U.S. is (officially) a giant Oligopoly, probably not a wise idea.

I don’t really know any tech friends that are super in the know about that kind of thing. I have a paid Norton 360 subscription that does frequent scans for malware and says it never finds anything, but honestly wouldn’t even be surprised to learn I’m paying for a useless subscription.

I’m also in a state that was involved in a huge government data breach a few years back. They didn’t really go into it too much when it happened, but apparently just about everyone over the age of 18 had their private data compromised.

The only reason I even bring that up is bc our current Governor who has always been a power hungry authoritarian boot licker renewed the Executive Order for a state of emergency for a cyber incident that our previous governor first created when the data breach happened several years ago.

When he “renewed” the order, he also slipped in a new section that granted authority to the director of one of his cabinet’s agencies, Governor’s office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP), to handle the emergency as he sees fit.

What’s even more concerning is that on the same day he renewed this order, he restructured GOHSEP so that it is now under the control of the state’s National Guard, gave the former director of GOHSEP a new title, and then named a member of the Guard “acting director.”

He’s been very vague about what the renewal was about, but it allegedly had something to do with updating the OMV/DMV data base for the state. Since then he has also created a hiring freeze for the state, which would seem to indicate that whoever was acting director is now indefinitely the director named in the executive order until the governor decides to lift the hiring freeze.

Even for someone not already paranoid, and without everything happening at a national level, that would all be a bit concerning right? I’m not a journalist, but I’ve been trying to get people to pay attention to it.

For some reason, no actual local journalists seem to be willing to point this out, but it’s all publicly available information.

I know I’m usually on the more paranoid side, but I’ve always assumed everything I do on a smartphone is potentially being monitored via camera or mics.

If the apps are just taking screenshots, or recording a few seconds of data via mic, it would be almost guaranteed that certain corrupt (and also paranoid) governments that are dismissive of privacy rights could force or bribe those apps to allow them to also access screens, mics, and cameras anyway, right?

I’m in the U.S., and especially with how glitchy my phone has suddenly become over the last few months, I’m just at the point where I just assume that’s what’s going on.

I had the same android for like 4 years without many issues, then suddenly around February it just became almost impossible to use. Weird glitchy things with the size of the tool bar at the bottom of my screen and the popup keyboard. Redirect notifications all the time for certain websites, and my VPN connection is just constantly interrupted and having to be reset.

I finally was like fuck it, this is an old phone so maybe that’s it. Brand new phone, but most of the same issues.

I use signal instead of text most of the time, and switched a lot of things to proton mail, but if someone is potentially recording your screen, does it really matter if what you’re doing is encrypted?

No it’s not clickbait, he really is a fucking moron.

I had the same visceral reaction reading the title of this post

Oh fuck me! The standard of living has already taken such a giant nose dive during my lifetime. First it was corporations and now this shit? You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Idk I have to disagree with that. Aside from bigger cities that always vote blue like New Orleans, Atlanta, Asheville, Memphis, and several others there are still states that definitely lean conservative, and vote red but have actually swung blue at least for governor. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist even in those cities, but it also exists to lesser extents (more confined to neighborhoods) in cities like Boston and Philly.

Louisiana is actually a perfect example of this, when corruption is so blatant it can’t be ignored and things like Medicaid expansion actually benefit people, they will vote Democrat.

Looking at Clinton’s first run, you would be surprised at how many states went blue when they thought it might benefit them. It kind of falls back to in-grouping I guess, but looking at the election map from the 2024 election it would seem it’s definitely not confined to the south. That’s kind of how the heritage foundation has been as successful as it has been. They actually began the official U.S. movement against multiculturalism, which then shifted to “political correctness” in the 90s, and then “wokeness,” and now “DEI.”

A national political focus on welfare as a handout, push towards Christian nationalism disguised as Christian values, and racial division to distract and divide can be traced back to one group

If you remember Jerry Fawell and fairly blatant attempts to use Christianity to somehow advertise segregation, you can thank the Heritage Foundation for that.

I feel like the Heritage Foundation has already declared a civil war, but like most wars, the rich and powerful people that instigate it will not be the ones doing the actually fighting.

That’s why they exploit in-group behavior to exert mass psychological control while keeping a broken system broken. It benefits them to keep people angry, divided, and distracted.

If/when we actually begin physically fighting a civil war on their behalf (which they are desperately trying to instigate), we are achieving their goals for them. It also benefits them financially given their ownership in weapon manufacturing and defense companies.

It’s no surprise that despite all the cuts we hear about in just about every government department, somehow spending for defense has remained fairly stable and actually increased slightly since 2024.

I agree we should be vigilant and angry, but instead of fighting the people they are exploiting, a better strategy is to steal from their playbook mid game, take advantage of a situation where everyone is already angry, and keep people informed rather than distracted. It is actually still a matter of relying on in-group vs out-group, but by drawing attention to the things they are trying to keep hidden, it actually turns the people that created the war into the out-group.

Trump’s GOP approval ratings are already tanking,, which is a good start, but I think most people are aware Trump is just a pawn in the bigger scheme. To actually end this shit once and for all, we have to make people understand this was in the making for decades, and really going off of Heather Cox Richardson’s point, nearly two centuries.

My ADHD brain makes it difficult for me to focus on a full length book, and I’m not one of those people that can scan and retain information, so I have to confess I’ve never read her book, but I very much want to read Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

By the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt called the South the nation’s No. 1 economic problem, resistant to unionization and social policies. Even today it leads indices for poverty and weak educational systems. The Jim Crow South was upended by the civil rights revolution. Yet even in defeat, its language of oligarchy and its opposition to progressive political and economic policies through an appeal to racism has been adopted by the modern Republican Party.

Sometimes people tell me I need to chill tf out and stop getting so worked up over this stuff, but I grew up in this world. I escaped and saw that it wasn’t like that in other parts of the country, or even all of the south.

Now I see this shit happening in 2025, and so much has been destroyed in 3 months (just realized today actually marks 3 very long months). It feels like they’re trying to make an entire country like the world I grew up in. I know there is no escape if they succeed, and I know it doesn’t stop with the United States. I just can’t accept that, and go on with life knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way.

This is decades in the making. It is a sort of “civil war” but the thing is, it’s a small group of wealthy people who are hoping to manipulate enough Americans into believing they have some kind of common in-group interest that will motivate them to fight against any Americans resistant to their takeover. Which, after actually typing that out, and reading it, I’m realizing that is also exactly what the American civil war was, there was just no way for people to be informed about who was actually pulling the country’s strings at the time.

That’s why they exploit political, racial, and religious divisions. They don’t actually care about any ideology. It’s a tool to manipulate and control in order to further exploit groups to do their fighting for them.

The Heritage Foundation first infiltrated the government by providing Reagan with a copy of their Mandate for leadership, and getting him on board back in the early 80s.

Over 40 years later, they are back in the White House ready to implement Project 2025.

Since Reagan opened the door for them, America has gradually accepted that social benefits are handouts, but corporate welfare actually benefits all of America, because somehow corporations ARE people.

Citizens United was a huge victory for this wealthy group of individuals, because they now have to jump through fewer hoops/hide the source of money used to buy elections.

The Heritage Foundation has also created a network of nonprofit think tanks in all 50 states that pays to promote state level policy benefitting wealthy individuals and corporate donors while disguising it as “small government” representative of state residents.

The creator of this network was Thomas Roe, an early member of the Heritage Foundation. As Roe himself explained to another Heritage Foundation trustee, Robert Krieble, “You capture the Soviet Union – I’m going to capture the states.”

You know normally I think the argument that people are less imaginative/creative than they used to be in the past is BS.

After reading the sentence “He made his way to the roof by threatening guards with a fake pistol and nectarines painted as grenades.” I think maybe that’s true

He’s Trump’s science advisor, Peter Theil’s protege, and son in law of Brexit Secretary Sir David Davis. The best of the best.

Yeah it was a dumb thing to say, that’s the point

Have you never seen a dystopian scifi movie? If this administration somehow attempted to time travel, you don’t think the world would look exactly like it does now?

I mean, if we are to go by Kratsios’ speech, it would appear they are just the first brave and innovative enough to take advantage of technology already existing but intentionally weighed down by regulations. This timeline being a result of their brave innovation makes a lot of sense.

Maybe in your house, but in the White House, I’m not so sure. Mr. Kratsios holds a political science degree (with a focus on Hellenic studies) and appears to have no hard science qualifications.

No joke, he was actually Trump’s acting director of OSTP during his first administration. During that time, people were critical of him because he lacked any qualifying experience in science.

Democratic members of the House actually wrote a letter begging Trump to pick a real science advisor to avoid a potential disaster. Trump eventually picked a meteorologist as his official science advisor several months later. If not for Anthony Fauci’s meddling, those two would have been solely responsible for handling the COVID pandemic under Trump.

Just to be clear, the point is that Kratsios seemed to be making a sciencebro sales pitch about U.S. innovation under Trump, but given how delusional and unethical this administration has already been when it comes to making a name for U.S. tech supremacy, people took it seriously.

Wasn’t expecting such a weirdly strong reaction to pointing this out, but yikes.

You just gave me a mental image of the dumbest BTFII reboot

Nope. But given our elite technologist leaders often have some dangerous ideas about innovation and “improvements to society,” that don’t quite align with reality, I can’t say I blame people for worrying they might actually try.