Hallmarks of Tyranny in an Evolving Social Democracy by Dr. Miguel A. Faria

Editor’s Note: This article has been revised and updated after Donald Trump’s magnificent victory and the resurgence of the GOP in the election of November 5, 2024. It explains what was happening in America and bolsters the fact that the evolving police state, which America was fast becoming under the authoritarian, socialist Democrat regimes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, must be dismantled and liberty fully reasserted. —MAF

To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.—George Orwell (1903–1950)

Georg Hegel (1770–1831), the father of dialectical idealism, the philosophy Karl Marx transmogrified into Marxist dialectical materialism, once lamented that what we do learn from history is that man does not learn its lessons. As any student of history knows, the loss of individual freedom concomitant with government repression features prominently in the inception and development of totalitarian states. These features reoccur: First is the centralization and empowerment of a national police force with a vast network of surveillance and informants to spy on the suspected population. Second is the issuing of national identification cards to keep tabs on the whereabouts of all citizens. Third is control of education, which is necessary for the indoctrination of the young and the neutralization of moral instruction, which is normally inculcated by the family and churches. Fourth is control of the mass media and the press or at least making it pliable to the dissemination of state propaganda, while silencing the opposition. Fifth is civilian disarmament via gun registration and restrictive licensing, followed by the banning and confiscation of firearms.

Thus, gun control along with loss of liberty and increasing repression necessarily and prominently features in the unfolding, authoritarian designs of a burgeoning police state. For the total empowerment of national police forces—which the American Founders called “standing armies,” operating with vast surveillance capabilities and networks of informants to spy on the population (not foreign enemies)—draconian gun control measures become a necessity.

In Cuba and in the Soviet Union, as we have seen, the informants that the agencies rely on are usually the dregs of society. These stool pigeons are often unreliable ruffians or underworld elements willing to be snitches, so they can remain at liberty to commit common, non-political crimes. In the Soviet police state and the Gulag, the valuable criminal informants were referred to as “socially-friendly” elements by the guards of the labor camps and the secret police (KGB).

In America, we already have myriad agencies of law enforcement from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). We should pause and be reminded of the misadventures of the ATF, essentially a standing army and frequently an army of rogue agents. When serving friendly Democrat and RINO (“Republican in name only”) administrations, the ATF launched open war against certain elements of American society that were considered politically incorrect and vulnerable and thus liable and subject to intimidation. Once targeted by the ATF, the nonconformist and politically incorrect elements became subject to harassment and to the violation of the law that a man’s home is his castle. It was this type of entrapment and harassment that was responsible to a significant degree for both the tragedies at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 during the George H.W. Bush administration, and in Waco, Texas, in 1993 during the Clinton administration.

The ATF, empowered to control illegal firearms in the United States, has been found on more than one occasion to be deeply steeped in corruption. During the Obama administration, the ATF was responsible for the infamous “Fast and Furious” Operation, selling illegal assault weapons to Mexican drug lords as well as attempting to register legal guns and compiling lists of lawful gun owners in illegal databases.Learning from the lesson of history, President Donald Trump needs to purge the politicized and corrupt segments of the American intelligence services, both in the FBI and the CIA, and not forget to declaw the roguish law enforcement agency, the ATF.

Education and the Media in Collusion with the Deep State

The next three points are relevant to what is happening in today’s educational environment and the propaganda power of the media; the fifth point, gun control, is discussed at length in my book, America, Guns, and Freedom (2019).

Regarding control of the media, we have also seen that even in free countries the press, of its own volition and purely by sharing political ideology with a political faction, can become a willing tool and a propaganda organ, either of the opposition to the legal government in power or vice versa. This is what is happening in the United States. No president in American history has had to suffer the sustained open media attacks that the print and electronic media have launched against President Donald Trump—the legally elected president of the United States in 2016. Some media personalities, such as comedian Kathy Griffin, who stood with a mock-severed head of President Trump, have even called for his assassination. We can expect an unrelenting frontal attack against him after the historic 2024 election. The entire deep state, supported by the progressive (socialist) media, the popular culture (including Hollywood) and Marxist academia, that supposedly and disingenuously “want to save democracy,” will eagerly resume the attack.

During Trump’s first presidency (2017–2021), a coup d’état against his administration was launched, and all the resources available to the press and the mainstream liberal media for sustaining a constant barrage of negative propaganda were utilized to sabotage his presidency. Incredibly, this included a fifth column within the intelligence community, who detested his presidency on political and ideological grounds.

Again, consider the animosity and open hostility that the entrenched ruling political and cultural establishment, the deep state, has shown for President Donald Trump, and compare that to the obsequiousness the mainstream liberal media has observed for Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden as well as for the Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris during her 2024 campaign. The “objective” journalists, particularly the talking heads in broadcast journalism, are now openly lamenting her defeat.

The fourth point is that the media and their power of disseminating propaganda and exerting mass indoctrination of the population can help in either propping up a leftist dictatorship or dooming an elected leader not to their liking. These events took place in Cuba as witnessed by the author: The invaluable assistance rendered to Fidel Castro by the media both in Cuba and in the United States in the overthrow of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista, and subsequently the assistance rendered by the government-run media today in the sustenance of the communist dictatorship, continues. To ensure control of the press, one of the first things Fidel Castro did after his takeover was to silence potential media opposition and take over all media organs—the press, radio, and television. But in the U.S., it is not necessary to take over the media. They will help prop up a leftist leader and doom a freedom fighter of their own volition.

Not surprisingly and emphasizing the importance of the third major point in the establishment of tyranny, private education also ended in Cuba immediately after the communist takeover. The government-controlled public education system that followed became a vast and necessary organ for the mass indoctrination of Cuban youth. This is happening in America in the Department of Education with the politicized, junk science of critical race theory, wokeness, and the propaganda of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) protocols. The moguls of the mega-corporations, including the health care industry, are also busy indoctrinating their employees in DEI, an issue that is specifically addressed in Controversies in Medicine and Neuroscience: Through the Prism of History, Neurobiology, and Bioethics (2023, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK).

Thus, how education and the press were taken over by the communist state in Cuba, has been described in Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise and more recently in Cuba’s Eternal Revolution through the Prism of Insurgency, Socialism, and Espionage (2023, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK). Moreover, the mechanics of how all five major points of tyranny were implemented on the island, that suffocated a way of life and ended freedom, are also described.

Although what happened in Cuba took place by revolution, similar steps are taking place in the United States by evolution. And it can happen here, despite the interludes of elected Republican administrations, because the media, academia, and the established elites have joined forces against the working and middle classes in this country.

Lump Them Together So They All Smell

Since 2016, the mainstream liberal media openly joined the progressive leftist camp and even use old Soviet tactics to defame their conservative opponents. Take for instance, Vladimir I. Lenin’s (1870–1924) advice to his communist party followers, later the Soviet government:

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law breaking, withholding and concealing truth. We can and must write in the language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us.

The Communist Party of the USSR further elaborated upon Lenin’s directive in 1943:

When certain obstructionists become too irritating, label them, after suitable build ups, as Fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic… In the public mind constantly associate those who oppose us with those whose names already have a bad smell. The association will, after enough repetition, become ‘fact’ in the public mind.

That is exactly what the mainstream liberal media has been trying to do with Trump and the Republican Party—lump mainstream conservatism with smelly racists and anti-Semites, then charge mainstream conservatism with racism and anti-Semitism and refer to it as the far right. They did so with the 2017 confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia, categorizing Unite the Right marchers as conservatives and lumping them with the “smell” of the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis, neither of which are conservative groups but more akin to the left in the political spectrum. The media used the event not only to attempt to discredit all conservatives, following the old advice of Lenin and the Communist Party Directive of the Soviet Union, but also to help incite the disturbance in the first place.

The comparison between media coverage of events in Charlottesville to those that followed on August 14, 2017, when radical protesters in Durham, North Carolina tore down a Confederate monument, is informative. In Durham, members of the Workers World Party (WWP), an extremist communist group and offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), led the protesters. But the media downplayed the nature of the participants. The WWP is a far-left group that has sponsored violent demonstrations in the United States and stands by such violent actions as were carried out by the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, and openly still supports the communist government of North Korea, a rogue nation that frequently threatens nuclear war against the United States and her far east allies, South Korea and Japan. You can be certain the members of WWP were not lumped in with the respectable left and the progressive movements to which the mainstream liberal media or academicians belong.

As for civilian disarmament, another goal of the Democratic Party in the United States, we must remember that governments have a penchant to accrue power at the expense of the liberties of individual citizens. Civilian disarmament is not only dangerous to personal liberty but also counterproductive in achieving collective safety.

Governments that trust their citizens with guns are governments that sustain and affirm individual freedom because as Thomas Jefferson affirmed, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and for government to gain ground.” Indeed, governments that do not trust their citizens with firearms tend to be despotic and tyrannical. And, as our history of Prohibition in the 1920s demonstrated, Americans obey just and moral laws but disobey or flout capricious and tyrannical laws.

Finally, let us heed the admonition of the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), who was greatly admired by the American Founding Fathers and who opined, “I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty would not when he had me in his Power take away everything else.”

This article is excerpted and updated from Dr. Miguel A. Faria’s book, America, Guns, and Freedom: A Journey Into Politics and the Public Health & Gun Control Movements (2019).

Miguel A. Faria, M.D., is Associate Editor in Chief in neuropsychiatry; and socioeconomics, politics, and world affairs of Surgical Neurology International (SNI). He is the author of numerous books, the most recent—America, Guns, and Freedom (2019); Controversies in Medicine and Neuroscience: Through the Prism of History, Neurobiology, and Bioethics (2023); Cuba’s Eternal Revolution through the Prism of Insurgency, Socialism, and espionage (2023); Stalin, Mao, Communism, and the 21st Century Aftermath in Russia and China (2024); and Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions (in press)— the last four books by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.