COVID-19 was a test to see how little resistance the citizenry would offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security. “We the people” failed that test spectacularly. Four years later, we're still failing.

Any presidential candidate who promises to be a dictator on day one, if elected, will be a dictator-in-chief for life. Then again, the president is already a dictator with permanent powers: imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional.

Forty years past the time that George Orwell envisioned the stomping boot of Big Brother, the police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state. 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

SWAT team raids have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned means of giving heavily armed police the green light to crash through doors in the middle of the night.

The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong. Don’t believe it.

According to the FBI, you may be an anti-government extremist if you’ve purchased a Bible or other religious materials; used terms like “MAGA” and “Trump”; shopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, or Bass Pro Shops; or purchased tickets to travel by bus, cars, or plane.

Communications kill switches have become tyrannical tools of domination and oppression to stifle political dissent, shut down resistance, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, and keep the populace isolated, disconnected and in the dark, literally and figuratively.

There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians. Political psychopaths eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it? All the signs seem to point in this direction.

Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists … and the U.S. government.