fox files

‘Woke’ Credit. We’re on the road to a social credit system, like the chinese, whether we like it or not.

Adoption of a Chinese-style social credit score across the West seems more like a matter of “when” rather than “if” at this point. The pandemic has accelerated this tendency, with people in many parts of the United States having become accustomed to presenting their vaccination papers in order to sit down in a restaurant or enter a movie theater. Other countries are further along the curve, with QR-coded cell phone passports required for travel, shopping, work, and public life in general. 

But the effort to aggregate personal data into a usable form of social control is taking place on multiple fronts. Credit cards—ubiquitous, trusted, and pre-linked to essential data sources— are an obvious platform upon which to build the new system. We see it happening all around us, but it’s all being rolled out slowly so as not to frighten the prey. 

Doconomy is a Swedish tech company that uses its proprietary “Åland Index” to allow consumers to track their individual environmental harm based on various lifestyle factors, including travel and consumption. The company partnered with MasterCard to produce the DO card, which “enables the cardholder to track and measure its carbon footprint for each purchase and to compensate for its impact day by day.” As opposed to standard green-branded credit cards, however, which use a few pennies per purchase to buy carbon offsets, or contribute to enviro-oriented non-profits, the DO Black card tallies the carbon footprint of one’s every purchase and cuts you off when you have hit your limit.  

“In other words,” boasts the company, “it’s the first credit card ever to stop you from overspending based on the level of CO2 emissions generated by your consumption.” The card sets a “carbon spending limit” based on Paris Climate Accord targets and issues a “Transaction Denied!” warning when you try to overspend. 

Much like the Paris Accord itself, of course, the limit is arbitrary and voluntary, and doubtlessly can be overridden. The type of well-heeled consumers who would carry the DO card—which is composed of biodegradable Poly Lactic Acid instead of plastic—surely aren’t counting on its credit limit to buy their staples; carbon frugality is a luxury only the rich can enjoy. The DO card doesn’t seem to have caught on in a big way yet, but a hard carbon spending limit tied to personal consumption certainly sounds like something that the Regime would be happy to impose. Look for it soon. 

Credit card companies track debt and payment levels to generate credit scores, which banks and other lenders use to determine how much to charge consumers to borrow money in the form of interest rates. FICO scores—the industry standard—can also be consulted by employers and landlords to determine, as a kind of shorthand, how reliable their potential workers or tenants are. These scores thus already serve as a kind of social credit index, except they are still largely voluntary. No one has to maintain lines of consumer debt in order to build up one’s score; it just makes it harder to finance large purchases if you don’t. 

In our age of racial obsession, the disparate impact of bad FICO scores has attracted the attention of the equity and diversity mob. Blacks and Latinos, it appears, tend to have worse credit, for a variety of reasons, some of which are said to be rooted in racism. In an effort to remedy this problem, advocates aren’t demanding that credit scores be less central to evaluating credit-worthiness; rather, they want an expansion of amount and kind of data that is fed into the algorithms to determine the scores.  

The Biden Administration backs the creation of a Public Credit Registry (PCR) under the aegis of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to replace the private credit reporting agencies that currently control the market. According to a report from Demos, the leftist policy group with ties to the Democratic Party, “the public credit registry will develop new algorithms for predicting creditworthiness with a goal of minimizing disparate racial impact.” The PCR will include rental history and utility payments, among other data sources, “when these data have been shown to be predictive and to minimize racial disparities.” 

Moving consumer credit reporting onto a federal-run platform sounds worrisome even if you aren’t a hard-core conspiracist, so couching it in the language of minimizing racial disparities is a good way to baffle surveillance concerns. But it’s hard to escape the nefarious implications to privacy that the Public Credit Registry represents. 

Society is so awash in personal data that it must drive planners and experts crazy that so much of it is going to waste. That’s why we discover from the New York Times that “a study analyzing medical records and consumer credit reports for more than 80,000 Medicare beneficiaries showed that seniors who eventually received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease were significantly more likely to have delinquent credit card payments than those who were demographically similar but never received such diagnoses. They also were more likely to have subprime credit scores.” Who’d have thought that credit scores would be such an important indicator of an unrelated health risk? Let’s start churning through all that data immediately, in the interests of public health, of course. 

None of this proves that we are heading toward a Chinese-style system in the next calendar year. But taken together it certainly indicates that we’re going that way sooner or later. 

In Defense of Parents and Parents’ Rights. The Uses and Limits of Relying On Liberal Mechanisms to Fight liberal Denouement.

Could the founders have imagined, in 1776, that two and a half centuries later, American parents would face the prospect of losing custody of their children for failing to make them eunuchs in the service of an ideological industry dictated by state-sponsored drag queens and drug cartels?

The question is ridiculous on its face. It is a long-held precept in the Western world, stretching back even before the dawn of the liberal state, that parents have a natural dominion over their children and that, in general, parents have the right to make personal, medical, educational, and religious decisions for their children without government interference unless there is proof of extreme abuse or neglect.

Parental rights were among the many implicit natural rights that Hamilton warned against enumerating in the American Constitution. In Federalist 84, he argues that the act of explicitly but vaguely defining certain rights would leave them subject to misinterpretation or violation. Hamilton additionally noted that if you accounted for some, you would have to account for all, because those left unaccounted for would fall in danger of being forgotten altogether.

Proving Hamilton’s point, the American Left has revealed in no uncertain terms this year that they indeed regard natural rights––especially those not explicitly listed in the Bill of Rights––as government-administered privileges to be granted or rescinded based on bureaucratic whim. What was taken for granted as common sense for so much of American history (that children are natural subjects of their parents, and that parents are the best guarantors of their children’s health and happiness) has been lost. Against nature, children are understood under the current regime to be, most fundamentally, wards of the state. By this logic, children as state subjects are optimized for society when all aspects of their care are entrusted to officially credentialed, state-sanctioned subject matter experts such as teachers, social workers, and public health bureaucrats. Cooperative parents are unpaid functionaries. Even mildly resistant parents are threats to the system.

The central tenet of the current default attitude is part of what Patrick Deneen identifies as the “false anthropology” of liberalism in Why Liberalism Failed. That is, the notion that human beings are divisible both on the internal personal level (viewing components of the self as discrete entities) and the familial level (viewing deep familial bonds between humans as essentially fungible). This is the core problem for Americans, both personally and politically. Parents have bought into the idea that they need to outsource the raising of children for the sake of perceived higher goods (financial security, career optimization, or so-called “socialization”). The government is attempting to enshrine this concession as law.

This conflagration of public and private atomization leads to deep identity-based disorder in private and in public. For example, children of the American public school system are failing. Individually, they lack a sense of purpose, which they would find through the unity of heart and mind that a true and better education would aim to provide. Collectively, they lack the sense of belonging that deep connection to family, history, and nationhood also tend to provide. Instead of examining their humanity in any meaningful sense, they bounce from subject to subject with no unifying principle of understanding except for the attitude that the old white men who came up with these various subjects are irredeemably evil. Illiteracy abounds. Mental illness abounds.

Children who study under the direction of their parents, even without any official teaching credential, fare much better by every metric.

Last week, Senator Josh Hawley’s office released “a Parents’ Bill of Rights, for every mom and dad in America.” His “proposal would guarantee them the seat at the table they deserve, one that no bureaucrat – or political party – can take away.” Hawley demands transparency, in classroom content and in how schools spend tax dollars, and that parents may speak at school board meetings without fear of reprisal.

A program to make explicit what the founders took for granted—that the Christian family is the moral core of civilization—is needed to fight back, but relying on liberal mechanisms to fight a liberal cause will be a tricky landscape to navigate. I hesitate to criticize Hawley’s approach too soon, primarily because it’s the most ambitious thing we’ve seen from a Republican since the Hays Code. But Hawley’s program, in focusing exclusively on public education, already treats parental rights too disjointedly. Of course, education is where the battle is being fought, and is thus a good and important place to to start. But the parental bill of rights, if we are to make one, cannot peddle exclusively in education because that is just one aspect of the culture’s sweeping attack on familial sovereignty. Parents’ dominion over their children is holistic, not discrete.

A parents’ bill of rights must be more expansive, and should attempt to encapsulate the whole picture of parenthood both in terms of dominion over children, responsibilities for children, and parents’ right and responsibility to defend the family against the worst excesses of the tyranny du jour: globo-homo-techno-consumer-capitalism. Parent’s rights should aim to reclaim parental authority in the public arena, not just over Department of Education apparatchiks, but also Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the entertainment industry, especially pornography. The promise to punish tyranny, actually, is the most promising aspect of Hawley’s bill. He writes: “In addition to writing them in law, Congress also needs to give these parental rights teeth. Where any of these rights are infringed, parents should be able to sue to enforce them. If schools or districts refuse to cooperate, their federal funding should be on the chopping block.” Imagine if similar suits were made possible for parents whose children accessed pornography due to lax authentication systems and targeted marketing campaigns.

Still, we have to wonder, as Hamilton did, whether enumerating parents’ rights in this way, even if we are to be as expansive and detailed as possible, ultimately plants the seeds of an even more dramatic violation of those rights in the future. One need not look further than the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to see just how those explications have since been used to discriminate on the basis of race, this time against whites.

Recalcitrant parents should keep Hamilton’s warning in their back pocket as they righteously proceed apace. Inaction in the face of this deep moral crisis is not an option, and as Alinsky wrote, using the language and habits of the enemy in order to twist their arm can be a very effective method of subversion. Make them live up to their own rules. Nevertheless, we cannot rest on the hope that even under duress, a regime dedicated to individual rights with an improper conception of the individual can re-embrace the family unit as the rightful anchor of society. We must be as vigilant as the activists who killed common sense in the first place. We must do what’s possible with what’s in front of us—while always preparing for what may come.

PROOF OF HYPOCRITE LEFT RIGHT THE HELL HERE. RIGHT THE HELL HERE DAMMIT!

It’s high school all over again. Remember those people who just had to be in the in crowd, no matter what? They would act and dress and speak however they needed to in order to be in that crowd. Well, that’s apparently how society itself is run. The elites push ideas that increase their power. And the huge number of people desperate for acceptance and respectability and social status simply accept them. No evidence or reason necessary. They will believe whatever they need to believe, whenever they need to believe it. And if you dissent? Then just the way they socially punished the unpopular kids, they’ll jump on the bandwagon to destroy a heretic like you. Ask one of these people: do you hold a single opinion that would surprise me? Is there any important question on which you disagree with Whoopi Goldberg? I would love to ask students applying to Ivy League universities: name one opinion you hold that could make you unpopular. I doubt they could name even one. I mention this because of the enormous number of people, famous and obscure alike, one can find on social media who a year ago were denouncing the “Trump vaccine,” and who now want to exclude from society anyone who declines it. Now you may say, “Well, they’ve since heard medical authorities approving the vaccines, so that’s the difference.” If that were indeed the difference, then I guess by their own logic they owe Trump an apology. I haven’t seen any. There’s a Twitter account that follows people like this and shows how readily they abandon one view for the opposite one, depending on what happens to be socially acceptable. A sample:

Siskind is a real treat. Even though the account that compiles items like the above does nothing but publish screenshots, she called on people to report it as a hub of “disinformation.” How screenshots could be disinformation, I can’t imagine. I guess ol’ Amy was embarrassed being singled out as a hypocrite. Here she is calling on people to report the account that noted her weird shift on vaccines:

Same goes for the travel bans under Trump and Biden. (The other day, Fauci could not explain why this travel ban had been implemented, given that there were zero Omicron cases in most of the African countries targeted.) I could reproduce hundreds of these, but here’s a sample:

Now that we’ve had our fun, a reminder: Didn’t I tell you the COVID Revealed docuseries was going to be amazing? I am not normally the “I told you so” type, but doggone it I did tell you so. If you’re not watching yet you’re missing some extremely worthwhile and absorbing material. I think you have about 36 hours left to register to watch for free before they take that option away, so do it now (and you haven’t missed my interview, which they haven’t released yet):

How The FBI Raid On Project Veritas Helped Protect The New York Times

The FBI’s raids on Project Veritas had the effect of protecting not just the Biden family but also The New York Times. It’s yet another episode in a long history of the FBI and New York Times wildly abusing their power.

Several observers have pointed out the terrible optics and even worse legal and cultural implications of the FBI’s raids earlier this month on three undercover journalists’ homes. Since the reporters’ organization, Project Veritas, is a political opponent of the American regime, the raids echo government behavior in unfree countries such as Russia, China, and Turkey.

Yet there’s another, less remarked, aspect to this story. It’s the raids’ effect of protecting a longtime, top-tier deep state information operations partner, The New York Times.

Project Veritas is a threat to The New York Times, not only in some of its undercover reporting about Times employees but also in its lawsuit against the Times for defamation. Curiously, then, The New York Times appeared to be aware of the raids about as soon as they commenced, as well as possibly obtaining private information about Project Veritas from the FBI operation.

Project Veritas founder O’Keefe noted: “Within an hour of one of our reporter’s homes being secretly raided by the FBI, The New York Times we are currently suing for defamation contacted the Project Veritas reporter to ask for comment. We do not know how The New York Times knew about the execution of a search warrant at our reporter’s home, or the subject matter of the search warrant, as the grand jury investigation is secret.”

Four business days after O’Keefe’s apartment was ransacked by the FBI, The New York Times on Nov. 11 published information from internal Project Veritas legal documents. It’s currently not public whether The Times obtained those documents from discovery in Project Veritas’s defamation suit or from an FBI leaker (or leakers). Project Veritas lawyers say they suspect a leaker.

“We have a disturbing situation of the U.S. attorney’s office or the FBI tipping off the New York Times to each of the raids on Project Veritas current and former employees,” O’Keefe lawyer Harmeet Dhillon told Tucker Carlson the evening of Nov. 11.

The FBI currently claims the raids stem from Project Veritas viewing what is alleged to be President Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary. Last week, a judge extended a ban on the Times publishing articles about Project Veritas until at least Dec. 1, reportedly due to its publication of those internal Project Veritas documents.

The FBI’s raids on Project Veritas, then, had the effect of protecting not just the Biden family but also The New York Times. It’s yet another episode in a long and troubled history of both the FBI and New York Times wildly abusing their power.

The FBI Has Been Politicized From Its Origins

From its very beginning, the FBI was racked with abuse of power. The FBI’s own history notes that “In the early twenties, the agency was no model of efficiency. It had a growing reputation for politicized investigations. In 1923, in the midst of the Teapot Dome scandal that rocked the Harding Administration, the nation learned that Department of Justice officials had sent Bureau agents to spy on members of Congress who had opposed its policies.” Spy on members of Congress — who are supposed to control the FBI.

The infamous J. Edgar Hoover who took the helm after that scandal kept secret police files on his political opponents and used them unlawfully, including to keep multiple presidents from firing him and to manipulate U.S. senators. That’s called “blackmail.”

Things haven’t changed. The long chronicle of FBI abuse of power has only lengthened, and persists to this day. Most recently, there’s the evidence still coming out about FBI incitement and provocations related to the Jan. 6 altercations and the trumped-up Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot.

A whistleblower recently claimed the FBI is surveiling moms and dads mad at public schools. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s denials about this don’t look too well against the backdrop of Democrat spy agency heads repeatedly lying to Congress under oath, as well as on TV, and facing zero consequences for doing so.

Those are only the most recent stories made public. One of the biggest stories of the past five years has been Spygate, the collusion between Democrat politicians and spy agencies including the FBI to frame and obstruct the man Americans elected president in 2016.

The FBI’s election interference also affected 2020. As Victor Davis Hanson noted recently, the FBI “did not disclose that it had possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop at a time when the media was erroneously declaring the computer inauthentic.” The FBI had possession of that laptop in 2019, in fact. As we now know, polling indicates that if the public had been informed of that story, Joe Biden likely would not have generated enough votes to declare himself president.

Hanson also resurfaces “the agency’s inability to follow up on clear information about the dangers posed by criminals as diverse as the Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.”

Without writing a book about the FBI’s endemic failures on every level — investigative, political, constitutional — suffice it to say that the past five Trump years may have intensified this politicized use of police power, but they are not in any way an anomaly. It almost appears as if comprising a secret police is what the agency exists to do, using the law enforcement part as its cover story.

The NYT Has Propagandized For Tyrants For a Century

As Ashley Rindberg writes in this year’s “The Grey Lady Winked,” The New York Times has a long history of pimping propaganda for totalitarians and tyrants. It’s about as old as the FBI’s institutional history of using police powers for politics instead of justice, dating back to at least the 1920s.

The New York Times published reams of positive and Pulitzer Prize-winning press for Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, and now Xi Jinping and Joe Biden. It is quite literally a propaganda mouthpiece for mass murderers and tyrants.

Rindberg’s book documents that, and I won’t reprise his work here. Suffice it to say, The New York Times chose to prioritize manipulating readers over reporting the truth long ago, while very successfully claiming to do the opposite.

In numerous instances, the FBI and New York Times have worked together to manipulate public affairs. In fact, The New York Times has been a routine location for FBI and other intelligence leakers to plant news stories that often turn out later to be false but still accomplish political goals. In other words, they help the deep state manufacture and spread propaganda.

Just consider a few recent stories we know about that demonstrate this. There are plenty more, many related to starting or perpetuating wars, which are lucrative for intelligence agencies and news organizations alike.

Without intelligence agency leaks, often of false information, to The New York Times and similar outlets, the Spygate attempt to subvert the 2016 election might not have come off at all. The FBI was deeply involved in these leaks and the whole collusion conspiracy, to the point that my colleague Mollie Hemingway described intelligence agencies and corporate media as “co-conspirators” in the operation.

The Times’s use to FBI leakers hasn’t been limited to Spygate, of course. As a recent example, The New York Times ran a false story about the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick after Jan. 6, 2021, which suppressed public discourse about election integrity by falsely linking those concerns to murder and providing political cover for ongoing show trials of Democrats’ political opponents. Another obvious example is governments’ indefinite suspension of citizens’ rights and normal lives in response to COVID, which was clearly enabled by media hysteria exemplified by The New York Times’ COVID “death map.”

Take a step back for a second and imagine the power of being able to blackmail any American, member of Congress, or the president. That’s the power to control government itself. Consider also that the power to determine what the public knows also confers massive political power in a democratic republic. Control public opinion, and you control the country.

This is what the FBI and New York Times have done in the past century, sometimes in concert. That’s why the FBI raiding an antagonist of its longtime information operations partner, and possibly leaking information obtained in that raid to that partner, is no surprise at all.

As long as such ops keep working, there will be more government-media joint information operations designed to keep control of the United States well out of voters’ hands.