Moving Toward Total Control

Climate, Cash, Cameras, Credentials, Control

I was struck down with a terrible virus about one month ago (I don’t think it was the China virus), which put me out of action, but finally, I am back on my feet and have had the opportunity to survey the various parts of the cunning global scheme to usher us into serfdom. It’s not looking good, but it may be that I am still suffering from the impact of the virus, and I am feeling unduly pessimistic.

My head has been spinning with the Iran “deal” and so I thought I would start my overdue newsletter with some perspective from the ancient viewpoint of the prophet Daniel, a Jewish noble, who was taken to Babylon around 2,500 years ago following the conquest and destruction of Jerusalem.

The other parts of this newsletter outline other areas of control that I have been considering as I try to put together the big picture of where the West is heading, as we consider the signs of the times.

The Iran Deal and the U.S. Mid-Terms

Daniel, who lived at the peak of the Persian Empire in what is modern Iraq and Iran, issued a series of warnings about the future rise of a world leader who would eventually demand worship in his own name in Jerusalem. You don’t need much imagination to see such a figure appearing at some future stage on the international horizon.

From both biblical and geopolitical perspectives, Persia (modern Iran) is likely to remain a source of international tension as the “Twelvers” in control seek to usher in a global conflagration to hasten the return of the “enlightened one” - the Mah’di, who will provide a simple option: convert to Islam or die (it’s good to have a choice)!

There are different views about whether the “Mah’di” and the antichrist are the same person, but you wouldn’t rule it out. One thing is certain: the Iranian regime is unlikely to change its views and seek friendship with the U.S. and Israel, after chanting “Death to the Great Satan” and “Death to the Little Satan” for more than 40 years. Don’t expect a great outcome in the ongoing negotiations.

Like my readers, I have been wondering what President Trump’s plan is regarding Iran. I think that the answer is that no one knows – perhaps not even Trump himself! The “deal” is like a yo-yo, but you can see that Trump may have handed some of the trump cards to the apocalyptic Iranians. There appears to be little appetite in the U.S. for extending the war and forcing Iran into “TOTAL SURRENDER”, as Trump wrote in the early days of the war. President Trump also wrote in 2020: “Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation!” These Iranians seem to have their own “art of the deal”.

There are many twists and turns to come as the U.S. mid-term elections approach, and President Trump’s unpredictability may still give him the upper hand. He even seems to have a new strategy - putting his own Republicans offside in a recent meeting with Republican senators. He seems to be ignoring his staff’s advice and instead going with his “gut”. However, President Trump is very attuned to public sentiment, and if the polls continue to decline, he may simply choose to withdraw U.S. troops. In any case, the Nobel Peace Prize looks a long way from Trump’s grasp now.

President Trump’s support among voters has declined for several months, and he will have to pull a rabbit out of a hat to achieve good midterm election results. Fortunately, as opponents, he has the Democratic Socialists (=communists), who are in the ascendancy of the Democratic Party, and this group wants to introduce socialism and confiscate private property. I don’t think that this philosophy is going to take the U.S. by storm, even though they are winning a range of important Democratic primaries.

So in the big picture, Iran is a very significant signpost on the biblical path towards the “man of lawlessness” and his future domination of international affairs. Israel will remain a key focal point for world attention, and this tiny piece of Middle East real estate clearly has a spiritual value far beyond its size, as forces on the Right and Left join with Islam to turn against it. What explanation is there for the extraordinary rise in antisemitism, if it is not part of a wider spiritual battle?

In the big-picture context, wars always create a new “crisis” that requires intervention and more power for governments. This is the well-known Hegelian dialectic that was outlined in the substack post below by Colin Dixon (below) published in December 2023. It is important to make a mental note: when you see a crisis - more control is coming.

The Problem-Reaction-Solution Paradigm: Unraveling Hidden Agendas in Modern Crises

Bureaucratic Incompetence - The Saving Grace?

However, despite the challenges we face, I have not been especially alarmed about government attempts to control us. My reasoning was simple: all of these grand schemes depend on government bureaucracies to actually implement them, and government bureaucracies are structurally incompetent. The same people who can’t fix a pothole are hardly going to pull off a seamless global takeover. I slept well.

What I failed to account for was the rise and efficiency of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Claude and their successors don’t need a lunch break, don’t lose the file, and don’t go home at 4:30pm. The one reliable buffer between humanity and total control was always human incompetence. That buffer is now being engineered out of the system.

Now we have to deal with AI bureaucrats that will be much more efficient and will have clever tools to hem us in and take effective action. I think we are staring down the barrel of bureaucratic systems that will become increasingly intrusive as our electronic transactions are monitored and, as in China, CCTV cameras and phones capture our every move.

The Broad Context Facing the West - Globalism and Monitoring

The West faces many serious issues: international conflict, trade wars, nuclear threats, “the climate crisis”, and the rise of artificial intelligence in the move toward global control. However, if you stand back from the detail of the day-to-day issues that we all face, there does seem to be a slow but progressive noose that is tightening - and in such a clever way that most of us are unaware.

The most obvious issues are the shift from a cash economy to people waving their phones across scanners, the constant surveillance by ever-intrusive cameras in almost every location and the clever but inexorable move toward digital identity that will be needed for us to do anything. Unwittingly, we may even have agreed to our own demise, courtesy of the labyrinthine, obscure terms and conditions in various 100-page documents that we failed to read. Readers will have recently received such a document from Google. Few will have read it.

When I first started writing this newsletter, courtesy of Patrick Wood and his clear outline of technocratic control, I could see that all the globalist tools and programs were lining up to enslave us —the U.N.’s Agenda 21, quietly rebranded as Agenda 2030 when the original deadlines slipped by unnoticed, the World Economic Forum with its now-famous promise that we will “own nothing and be happy,” and the seemingly endless parade of COP (conference of parties) climate summits.

Which U.N. genius even thought up the COP acronym? I think it was coined because the globalists decided we were all going to cop it! And now, these annual shindigs are up to COP31 (this year in Turkey). The vast array of international organisations and foundations has the population trapped in a complex pincer movement, necessitating global enforcement mechanisms.

Climate As A Global Tool

Climate, of course, is a tool that has been used to gain international control and was planned by Rockefellers and others since the 1950s. The use of the climate as a tool for global control has gradually gained pace since the U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992.

Now, with all the educational institutions under the control of myriad left-wing groups, climate propaganda has been irresistible, and so the end result is millions of children with “eco-anxiety” and a tightening of the net-zero legislative noose in all Western countries.

Australia, like the U.K., readily embraced the climate agenda even though our country is just a blip on the carbon emissions screen. The United Kingdom legislated their own economic destruction, which is being ruthlessly pursued by the hapless Ed Miliband, the U.K.’s climate czar, who seems to have a stranglehold on U.K. energy policy, with or without Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. Now, he may even become the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, under the new socialist saviour in the U.K. - the “king of the north”, Andy Burnham. Burnham’s failure is assured before he is ever anointed as the new Prime Minister, even though he has excited U.K communists (ie the Labour Party). He seems to be just a better-communicating socialist who is facing the key problem that Thatcher understood: the U.K. has run out of other people’s money and now can’t even defend itself, such is the spending on social welfare programs, which is about 25% of government expenditure. A day of reckoning is coming, but it may be too late by the time the U.K population wakes up.

Looking ahead, the climate bandwagon has so many supporters with their snouts in the trough that once President Trump has departed the scene, the “drill baby drill” philosophy of the U.S. will be forgotten as the Democrats once again embrace the climate crisis when they are back in power. Unfortunately, it seems that the “climate crisis” is here to stay, such is the relentless narrative of the U.N. and various ancillary bodies. As Western governments subsidise “green energy” for net zero, energy costs will rise exponentially, energy in the West will become more regulated, and we will all become poorer.

It looks like bad news on all fronts - and it is. However, the good news is that we are not yet slaves to our AI overlords, and there is time for us to demonstrate wisdom rather than just step into the snares set for us. Then there is the pandemic (most people have already forgotten)!

Control by Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, provided the ultimate reason for more government control, as experts with spreadsheets forecast death and disaster unless everything shut down. Forced isolation followed by forced vaccination was widely accepted by the Australian population, who didn’t heed President Reagan’s warning about the nine most dangerous words in the English language: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”.

Drew Holden has just published a six-part series titled: “A COVID Autopsy” which I recommend to my readers. This series is important for everyone to read because it is easy to forget the overreach and dictatorship applauded by the COVID public health bureaucrats and their media acolytes.

A COVID Autopsy, Part 1: 'The Virus Can Be Stopped, but Only With Harsh Steps, Experts Say'

The COVID plan was so successful, in terms of government control, that there are undoubtedly plans afoot to reproduce it. Fears are now being raised about rat hantavirus, Ebola, and in Australia, “bird flu”. Remarkably enough, “experts” are urging flu vaccinations for the Australian population to beat the “bird flu”, even though such vaccinations would have no efficacy.

The solutions proposed for infectious diseases and reiterated since COVID-19 are always the same: more power to government agencies and the World Health Organization.

Most people seem to have been seized with collective amnesia about government overreach during COVID, and the majority may even have been affected by a form of Stockholm Syndrome. In the state of Victoria, Australia, where the harshest lockdowns and overreach occurred, voters re-elected the COVID dictator, Dan Andrews, as State Premier despite him being responsible for locking down the state for more than one year. Now that Victoria is in a terminal economic death spiral, a bronze statue of Andrews is being erected! It looks as though you may be able to fool most of the people most of the time (at least in Victoria).

I recommend that Sons of Issachar subscribers take the time to read Drew Holden’s six-part series on COVID-19, which is the best retrospective analysis I have seen. Mr Holden includes headlines and links to many of the articles published during COVID-19, and, as would be expected, the editors of these august publications have made no apology for the misinformation and propaganda that was promoted at the time. Mr Holden’s series is a serious warning about simply following the crowd and mainstream views.

1. Part 1 – outlines the flimsy evidence that had us all donning masks without any evidence of effectiveness. Evidence can still be seen of the effectiveness of the mask propaganda, with a few people in shopping centres masked up, like the Japanese soldiers holding out in the jungles of the Philippines years after the end of WW2.

2. Part 2 - outlines the deception of “15 days to stop the spread” and the illusion that public health officials knew what they were doing. The media with the backing of “experts” condemned those who sought to end restrictions, particularly the Republican states such as Georgia, Tennessee and Florida;

3. Part 3 – highlights the cover-up related to the likely leak of the modified coronavirus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the attempt by Dr Anthony Fauci and his colleagues to promote the Wuhan wet market theory of cross-species transmission. Mr Holden writes: “It’s impossible to overstate how comprehensively the legacy press fought to bury the lab leak hypothesis. Every mention of the lab leak theory was shouted down. Every proponent of the possibility was ridiculed as a crazy person, regardless of their standing in their respective scientific field. The media “fact checks” were endless.”
   The role of the legacy media in preventing a logical assessment may even have been associated with President Trump called it “the China virus. Mr Holden notes: “Rather than try to get to the bottom of that, the legacy press worked tirelessly to foreclose all conversation around the lab leak by writing off anyone who thought the idea worth exploring as a conspiracy theorist or a nut.”;

4. Part 4 – deals with the fabrication around social distancing rules, the evidence of which is still available as you wait in line at some shops with feet drawn on the ground, 6 feet apart. Some “experts” even said that social distancing from pets was necessary. As Mr Holden notes: “Invented though it was, social distancing, paired with the public doctrine of masking from the Left and among legacy media outlets, motivated a wave of hard-hearted and mean-spirited public cruelty for anyone who questioned The Science.” He concludes this part of his article with an important insight: “Setting aside all the other problems, all the other deceptions, all the other untruths, this element of combative, insistent, anger toward and hatred of our fellow citizens – across the country or across the street – defined this era of American life, and I can’t begin to quantify how much damage that must have done to our social fabric. I don’t think we’ve even begun to reckon with it.”

5. Part 5 deals with vaccine hypocrisy. When it was President Trump touting “Operation Warp Speed”, all the media became vaccine deniers. Mr Holden writes: “I think we’re already starting to forget just how viscerally anti-Trump voices attacked Trump’s vaccine efforts. Many major media voices and elected Democrats led the claim that any medical breakthrough during the Trump admin was actually dangerous, and not to be trusted; the kind of vaccine denial that today gets critics booted from social media and polite company.” Despite no or very limited safety data, the vaccines were all touted as being “safe and effective” when the opposite was true.

6. Part 6 – covers the impact of the lockdowns, particularly on children, as test school scores were reduced and various indices of mental health declined. Mr Holden concludes toward the end of his series: “But perhaps the most harmful outcome from efforts to mitigate COVID – and likely the most difficult to measure – was the damage done to our body politic and social fabric. We may never know the damage wrought by legacy-media inspired efforts to demonize those who objected to heavy handed lockdown measures, or the interpersonal cost of the rending of our social fabric that such battles delivered. But what we have learned (again, noting we likely have much more to learn) is depressing.”

The COVID lockdown was such a successful tool of control that undoubtedly, the playbook will be used again and my research indicates that incredibly, most people in our country are still grateful to the government and doctors for the lockdown and vaccines.

The Socialists Are In the Ascendancy With Dependency and Control

In Australia, few people are alert to the next step toward government control as the socialist agenda advances, with handouts to the non-productive and taxation to eliminate incentives for anyone still willing to take a business risk. The image of a bronzed, independent Australia has been replaced by that of people with their hands out, as our national disability insurance scheme has grown out of control (see Figure 1). It looks as though everyone in Australia has a disability and needs financial support!

Figure 1. Increase in spending for Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme from 2016. The funding equates to ~$2,000 for every man, woman and child.

Eventually (and probably sooner than later), this has to come to an end. As Margaret Thatcher said:

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”.

The Surveillance Architecture

The lure of convenience is of great note in our modern society, and many of Generation Z and Alpha have never even seen cash. I was struck by the information from a CFO of a major organisation who said that a person had requested payment by cheque. Many in the office had never seen a cheque, so they gathered around to see this marvel!

The cashless society will soon be achieved because the baby boomers, the last of those who use cash, are dying out. With AI tools, it will be possible to investigate and even stop electronic transactions, as the Trudeau government did with the Canadian truckers during the COVID lockdowns.

The next step is clearly the requirement for digital identity, followed by Digital Currency, which is programmable money that can be switched off, restricted or tied to a social credit score, a tool already in wide use in China.

Not only can our expenditure be monitored but with the expansion of digital cameras together with improvements in facial recognition tools, everyone can be monitored as they move around the major cities. Facial recognition is being increasingly employed by governments in the West, notably in the United Kingdom.

As far as I know, no vote has been taken on the decision to employ the surveillance state and expand it at every opportunity. Somehow, it has been legitimised, probably in the terms and conditions sheets that no one reads, and may even be a condition for us to drive on the major highways or walk around the city streets. The once fanciful ideas in Brave New World now look increasingly plausible.

Should We Be Worried and What Can We Do?

We definitely should be worried, and while it may be almost impossible to stop the progress toward total control, we can opt out of some of the most obvious control systems.

Here are six practical steps worth considering. None of them requires great sacrifice, and together they reduce your exposure to the most obvious monitoring and control systems now being built around us.

1. Treat your phone as a surveillance device — because it is.

Your smartphone knows where you have been, who you called, what you searched for, and what you said near it. A Faraday bag — a simple, inexpensive pouch that blocks all radio signals — will prevent your phone from being tracked or remotely accessed when you do not want it to be. Use it when you are not expecting important calls. Beyond that: review your app permissions regularly, disable location services for apps that have no business knowing where you are, and consider whether a basic phone might suit you just as well for most purposes. The convenience of the smartphone is precisely what makes it such an effective tool of surveillance — it was designed to be indispensable. Remember, the phone is called the smartphone because it is the smart one, not you!

2. Use cash — while you still can.

Every electronic transaction is a data point. The Trudeau government’s freezing of the Canadian truckers’ bank accounts was not a warning — it was a demonstration. Using cash for routine purchases slows the construction of a detailed profile of your habits, preferences, and movements. It also keeps the option alive for the next person who asks to be paid by cheque and finds a roomful of blank faces staring back at them. Normalising cash use, even modestly, is a small act of structural resistance.

3. Think before you post (or don’t post) — social media is a permanent record.

What you post on social media will be there long after you have forgotten you said it, and the standards by which it may one day be judged may be very different from those that apply today. AI tools are already capable of trawling years of a person’s posts and assembling a political and ideological profile. Opinions that are mainstream today may be categorised as dangerous tomorrow. The simplest rule: if you would be uncomfortable with a future government official reading it, do not post it. Better still, reduce your social media footprint to the minimum necessary, and consider whether platforms operated by large corporations aligned with globalist agendas deserve your daily attention and data at all. Remember that if the app is free, then you are the product.

4. Switch to private, encrypted communications.

Gmail, Outlook, and most mainstream email services are surveillance platforms that happen to carry your mail. ProtonMail (Swiss-based, end-to-end encrypted) is a straightforward replacement that requires no technical expertise to set up. For messaging, Signal is the gold standard — it is end-to-end encrypted, retains no metadata, and is used by journalists and lawyers worldwide for exactly that reason. These are not difficult steps. They are the digital equivalent of closing your curtains.

5. Build modest food and supply reserves.

COVID demonstrated how quickly governments will restrict movement and access to goods. A household with four to six weeks of essential food supplies is simply more resilient than one that depends on a supermarket visit every few days. This is not paranoia — it is the same prudence that previous generations practised as a matter of course, before just-in-time supply chains and 24-hour supermarkets persuaded us that resilience was unnecessary. Add to this a modest first-aid kit, a supply of any essential medications, and enough cash on hand to function for several weeks if electronic systems become unavailable. The goal is not survivalism; it is not being entirely dependent on systems that may one day be used to apply pressure.

6. Know what you believe, and why — and do not outsource your thinking.

The most powerful tool the ancient Sons of Issachar had was discernment — understanding the times and knowing what to do. The machinery of control described in this newsletter depends heavily on passive compliance: people who have not thought carefully about what they value and are therefore easily swept along by whatever narrative is dominant. Read widely, including sources that challenge the mainstream consensus. Discuss what you read with people you trust. The COVID period demonstrated that the majority will follow instructions even when those instructions make no logical sense — and that a small minority who retained critical thinking and refused to be shamed into silence were, in most cases, right.

Critical thinking is not a luxury; in the environment we are entering, it is a necessity. As Jesus observed two thousand years ago:

“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

It was true then. The last five years suggest it is no less true now.

A Final Word — and a Return to Daniel

Daniel lived through one of history’s most sophisticated systems of total control. Babylon was not a ramshackle empire — it was a global bureaucratic and military machine of considerable efficiency, with the resources to enforce compliance on a continental scale. Daniel and his companions were immersed in it from youth, educated in its language and literature, and subjected to sustained pressure to abandon their beliefs and conform. They did not. They served faithfully within the system while refusing to cross the lines that mattered. They were not naive about the power of the empire, but they were not intimidated by it either, because their frame of reference extended well beyond their day-to-day experiences.

What is most striking about Daniel’s account is that Babylon fell. The empire that seemed invincible was gone within a generation. The writing, quite literally, appeared on the wall. Daniel, meanwhile, continued into the reign of the Persian kings that followed — proof, if any were needed, that faithfulness to one’s convictions is a more durable strategy than accommodation to power.

The surveillance cameras will multiply. The digital identity systems will be rolled out. The AI bureaucrats will arrive, efficient and tireless, with none of the helpful incompetence that once gave us breathing room. All of that is likely coming. But so, according to the same book of Daniel that mapped the rise of these empires, is their end.

The trajectory of history as Daniel saw it was not toward the permanent triumph of any human system of control — however sophisticated — but toward its ultimate failure and replacement by something of an entirely different order: an eternal kingdom.

That is the ground on which hope stands. Not optimism about institutions or politicians or the pendulum of public opinion, though all of those may have their moment. But the deeper confidence that the story is not over, that those who understand the times are not helpless, and that faithfulness in small things is important.