The Total State
"How did the land of the free become a surveillance state terrified of COVID and ruled by unaccountable bureaucrats?"
President Trump’s nearly hour-long speech to the United Nations was shock therapy and you could see the stunned or incredulous faces of the various world leaders as Trump extended his 15-min speech by more than 30-min, to berate various world leaders, notably those of Europe. Below are a few excerpts from his speech - an abbreviated form of which I have included as a video link below:
“…what is the purpose of the United Nations? …. All they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words, and empty words don’t solve war.
“China and India are the primary funders of the ongoing war by continuing to purchase Russian oil, but inexcusably, even NATO countries have not cut off much Russian energy and Russian energy products, … Think of it. They’re funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one?”
“Just a few years ago, reckless experiments overseas gave us a devastating global pandemic. Yet despite that worldwide catastrophe, many countries are continuing extremely risky research into bioweapons and manmade pathogens.”
“Not only is the UN not solving the problems it should, too often, it’s actually creating new problems for us to solve. The best example is the number one political issue of our time: the crisis of uncontrolled migration……Your countries are being ruined.
The United Nations is funding an assault on Western countries and their borders. In 2024, the UN budgeted $372 million in cash assistance to support an estimated 624,000 migrants journeying into the United States. Think of that. The UN is supporting people that are illegally coming into the United States and then we have to get them out.”
“I encourage all countries to take their own stand in defense of their citizens as well. You have to do that because I see it. I’m not mentioning names. I see and I can call every single one of them out. You’re destroying your countries.”
“According to the Council of Europe in 2024, almost 50 percent of inmates in German prisons were foreign nationals or migrants. In Austria, the number was 53 percent of the people in prisons were from places that weren’t from where they are now. In Greece, the number was 54 percent and in Switzerland, beautiful Switzerland, 72 percent of the people in prisons are from outside of Switzerland.”
“Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before. We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great.”
“It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people…”
“At extreme cost and expense, Europe reduced its own carbon footprint by 37 percent. Think of that. Congratulations, Europe, great job. You cost yourself a lot of jobs, a lot of factories closed, but you reduced the carbon footprint by 37 percent. However, for all of that sacrifice and much more, it’s been totally wiped out, and then some, by a global increase of 54 percent, much of it coming from China..”
President Trump’s speech was inflammatory and provocative but may have given some leaders food for thought. More likely though, those countries that hate Trump (and one imagines that this is most of the U.N.) will double down on their policies, the most damaging of which is trying to promote a borderless world and net zero.
From the start of this newsletter in 2022, I have written about the globalists and the use of the climate as a tool to impose global control. This philosophy is backed up by the education system and then the permanent administrative state that controls various policy agendas, including health.
Dr Jacob Nordangård has written extensively about the global agenda and more recently has highlighted the role of AI in systems of control. His latest interview (see link below) with the Flashlights Podcast covers these issues and I recommend my readers listen to the interview.
The author of the Flashlights substack notes:
“A White Paper titled ‘The Agentic State’, published by the Global Government Technology Center Berlin (GGTC Berlin) in May of 2025, lays out a future in which AI agents take control of all functions of government.
Luukas Ilves is the lead author of the White Paper. He’s also advisor to Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister, son of Estonia’s former President, former Chief Information officer of Estonia and one of WEF’s Young Global Leaders.
In the White Paper, Ilves describes various features of Agentic AI Governance; he pictures a future where laws will become ‘living laws’ that AI agents can change at any time. Legislators won’t be needed anymore, humans will be monitored continuously, and compliance with regulation is enforced around the clock.”
Undoubtedly, we are walking into an AI future like lambs to the slaughter. ChatGPT seems very nice as it answers our questions but it is gradually being fed with data that we supply and will enable total control. At the heart of the whole world system at the moment, lies an important question: how much freedom and independence are you willing to sacrifice for convenience? The answer for most people, seems to be that they are willing to sacrifice almost everything, as the surveillance state tightens its grip.
Total State
This brings me to a new book that I have been reading over the past week titled, Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies. I heard the author interviewed recently and thought that the points he made were interesting and his book provides a look at a complete system of control that has developed without most of us realising.
Figure 1. Book cover of Total State by Auron Macintyre.
Total State describes Mr Macintyre’s personal journey as a reporter, starting with the COVID-19 pandemic and his understanding that not everything was as it seemed. His key question was: How did the land of the free become a surveillance state terrified of COVID and ruled by unaccountable bureaucrats? Here is an abbreviated description of the book:
“The modern United States is a nation full of censorship, lockdowns, riots, and political persecution. …As a journalist, Auron MacIntyre witnessed firsthand the manipulation of news events, the bias of the press, and the relentless assault on truth during the Donald Trump presidency. Yet, it wasn’t until the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 that his worldview was irrevocably shaken. The emergency measures and unchecked power wielded by authorities revealed a dark underbelly that defied the constitutional safeguards he had always believed in.”
I recommend readers buy the book, which is available in various formats, including audio. However, I have included a few of the most important quotes from the book below:
COVID-19 - So Does Freedom Really Exist?
“Those who cannot express the mildest opinion in public, who cannot raise their children in their own values (or, in many cases, afford to have children at all), see themselves as ambassadors of freedom to the world. Those who can be forced to wear a mask, have their businesses and churches shut down, and be functionally trapped in their homes while groups favored by the ruling class are allowed to burn and loot cities, still cling to the narrative of ever-increasing liberty. Even those who are gravely concerned by the actions of their government, and the passivity with which their fellow citizens seem to accept them, still see this as a subversion, not a consequence, of the system into which they were born.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 19). (Function). Kindle Edition.
The Nature of the Total State
In the beginning, all states were total. The earliest civilizations were small. A few families would band together to form an extended clan and establish a village…..Since everyone is key to the survival of the state, the state must take an interest in everyone. If someone refused to plant, hunt, harvest, cook, or fight outsiders, this had an immediate impact on the well-being of the whole group and the offender would find himself punished or ostracized…..
Modern man is born into a society that is much farther down this road. Our civilization has so much built-in efficiency, redundancy, and stability that a large segment of the populace no longer needs to work in roles essential to survival. This, in large part, helps to generate the feeling of freedom so many associate with the modern world….
If the will of the people is the key to legitimating the power of the ruling class, then the ruling class must take an interest in controlling the will of the people…..
The university serves as the modern church. No conspiracy is required to coordinate the actions of those who manufacture the narrative of our civilization because they all go to the same house of worship. They are all singing from the same hymn sheet…..
As odd as it sounds, we are governed by a decentralized atheistic theocracy. A religious system without an official holy book or central church, but a religious system of moral assumptions all the same…
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (pp. 21-32). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Circumventing the Constitution
The executive and judicial branches become bureaucracies in service to the legislative branch. When popular sovereignty is the only legitimating force in society, the most democratically elected branch is seen as the most valid. It makes all other branches subservient and they are eventually made subject to the exact same selection pressures. No other social force is considered legitimate, and so manipulation of public opinion becomes the key to ruling the entire state………
The Declaration of Independence states that “We find these truths to be self-evident.” But how can any moral truth be self-evident unless the people who are observing it share the same value system?
The modern obsession with progress, rationality, systems, and proceduralism has made us forget what a constitution is. Constitutions are a reflection of the spirit, nature, and culture of the people who live under them.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (pp. 53-58). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Foxes, Lions and the Total State
Mr Macintyre quotes Machiavelli who highlighted two types of rulers: lions (strong, capable, fight off enemies but able to be caught in a trap), and foxes (cunning and clever, able to avoid traps but cannot win in a direct fight).
We can think that there are no jackboots on the streets and prisons full of dissidents but this is not the only form of repression.
“Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World should remind us there is an entirely different form of power that can be used to control a society. In contrast to the brute force in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley’s dystopia relies more on scientific manipulation, indoctrination, and bureaucracy to control the population while being no less totalitarian.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 70). (Function). Kindle Edition.
COVID-19 provided evidence of a global “total state” approach to controlling populations, using fear and propaganda. Mr Macintyre points out that this more subtle “fox-like” approach has been more effective than direct confrontation. For example, in Australia, compliance of doctors was obtained after a few had their medical registrations threatened.
“The creeping total state in America looks different from the Soviet Union, for example, because of the character of its leadership class. The slower, more methodical approach of foxes proved to be more flexible and resilient than the aggressive application of centralized control by lions.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 81). (Function). Kindle Edition.
The Administrative State
There has been a constant increase in the number of government employees in most Western countries. as the regulatory environment has increased. The focus on cimate change has meant that not only red tape has to be overcome but now green tape, an almost impossible job. To deal with these issues, a new class of highly paid bureaucrats - the managerial class, has arisen.
“University-educated experts quickly became the only recognizable authority. The explosive growth of degree fields meant that academic language and managerial techniques could be brought to bear on every question. Corporations were obvious targets for this memeplex, but it quickly grew beyond the business world, revolutionizing every previously independent social sphere.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 91). (Function). Kindle Edition.
“The manager class simultaneously needs to drive popular opinion, collapse competing institutions, and justify the engineering of social tastes and behavior. Large-scale social engineering projects that increase compliance and generate efficiency by creating uniform consumption become increasingly important to the managers of the total state. To shore up its power, it must transform the populace into perfectly compliant subjects.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (pp. 94-95). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Producing Compliance with the Total State
Mr Macintyre points out that to maximise its control, the state seeks to exert control in every area of life. Notably, this is via the education system but also involves medicine and other fields.
“The state therefore adopts a therapeutic culture that enables the constant intrusion of managerial professionals to administer “scientifically” developed courses of treatment to reduce undesirable thoughts, attitudes, preferences, and behavior. The raising of a child, a task that for many thousands of years fell to his parents, extended family members, and the organic community in which they existed, now requires the intervention of experts at every moment. Medical doctors are, of course, a regular feature of the child’s life, but increasingly parents are encouraged to discard the timeless practices passed down through their family or religion and instead consult the opinions of credentialed experts when it comes to discipline, diet, socialization, and mental health. Child therapy replaces Sunday school and carefully curated playdates replace meeting the kids next door for a game of pickup football. The total state’s management of children is most effectively achieved through compulsory state-funded education. The student is managed at all times by credentialed experts, with every aspect of their day planned through the constant application of managerial techniques. All issues of discipline are settled through increasingly therapeutic models of resolution. At every stage, undesirable prejudices and moral particularities are stripped away through the application of therapeutic courses of behavioral modification.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (pp. 103-104). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Mr Macintyre quotes from C.S. Lewis and his book The Abolition of Man, written in the 1940s. With the rise in AI and push towards transhumanism, we may be at this point described by Lewis:
”….once a generation truly masters human nature, once they understand how to strip man of the sacred and reduce him to a material object, mere inputs and outputs that can be manipulated and engineered, then that generation will become the last that is truly human.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 107). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics
Robert Conquest was a British historian and diplomat best known for his pioneering research on Soviet history, particularly the period under Stalin. Mr Macintyre quotes Conquest’s three laws of politics, that he formulated, spoke about and were described by others in the 1970s to 1990s:
“Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
These laws can help us understand how individuals and institutions behave as civilizations expand and ultimately as the total state is formed.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (pp. 122-123). (Function). Kindle Edition.
“Once the core values of a social organization are up for debate, they are over. Once the foundational axioms of an organization have entered the realm of open discussion, it will always and inevitably move to the left.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 126). (Function). Kindle Edition.
“Western liberal democracies have now become little more than a network of impersonal bureaucratic organizations, while their governments now bear all the trademark signs of bureaucratic drift that Conquest warned about in his three laws. Modern states seek to expand their influence and increase their scale by implementing these vast bureaucracies, but in the process they completely separate the incentive structure of the managers from the populations they were originally designed to serve. The lack of skin in the game means the managerial elite are far removed from the consequences of their decisions and can instead focus entirely on their need to acquire power inside their organizations.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 131). (Function). Kindle Edition.
The highlighted section above caught my eye and precisely describes what I have seen first hand as a councillor in my local council area. Eventually, managers in organisations seek to gain power and control. Their main focus (even if they are unaware) is to protect the organisation and themselves rather than serving the group to whom they are meant to be accountable.
Is the Total State Doomed?
Mr Macintyre tries to be reassuring and the future of the total state and claims:
“The foundation of the total state is fundamentally unstable. The power of the managerial elite is based on a false vision of humanity that will collapse under sufficient strain. The total state is doomed to ruin,…
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 133). (Function). Kindle Edition.
I am unconvinced about the eventual failure of the total state, and even more so now that it is propped up with AI. I hope that Mr Macintyre is correct when he writes:
”Ultimately, the total state will fail because widely different peoples spread across vast distances cannot, and will not, be governed as one unified whole. The total state may have dissolved the social fabric, destroyed meaningful spiritual connection, and eliminated hard property in order to make its subjects easier to rule, but it has also made the nation’s human capital sadder, less healthy, and less competent in the process.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 144). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Mr Macintyre points to a repeating pattern of civilization across thousands of years:
“The Tower of Babel is not an engineering problem. It is a pattern repeating itself across human history: the hubris of a power centralizing in the hopes of reaching heaven only to collapse under its own weight and, perhaps, a nudge from the divine.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 146). (Function). Kindle Edition.
A Way Through?
The Total State can be overcome, in Mr Macintyre’s view. He doesn’t convince me and argues to some degree against its downfall as he writes:
“The total state has accelerated its advance by demolishing both civil liberties and social norms, and the speed at which those barriers have been breached has left many who once sat comfortably inside the friend/enemy distinction shocked at the hostility they now face for holding what were previously acceptable opinions. Anti-war leftists, free speech advocates, and gay marriage proponents now find themselves ejected from the Left if they are not supportive of new agendas like critical race theory, the mutilation of children under trans ideology, and the state persecution of dissidents.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 150). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Mr Macintyre believes that as societies decline, people will take action and move to areas where there is less control and countries where the are less controls.
“As the total state becomes more overtly authoritarian and less competent, individuals will flee to regions that are attempting to protect themselves from the fallout. In America, Florida has already seen a massive influx of new residents attempting to escape the insane pandemic regulations of their previous home states. Florida has developed a reputation for standing not just against the biomedical security apparatus but the ideological agenda of the regime.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 158). (Function). Kindle Edition.
My sense is that the noose is becoming tighter and controls greater. Undoubtedly, the surveillance state will have increasing influence and controls will be further proposed in the name of “safety”. AI will be widely utilised to overcome the safety of bureaucratic incompetence that has hitherto protected us.
However, Mr Macintyre writes:
”Eventually the total state will become so corrupt that submission to its authority will guarantee noticeable social degradation. It will become so inept that regions will find it easier to ignore its dictates than to follow them.”
Macintyre, Auron . The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (p. 159). (Function). Kindle Edition.
I hope he is right but a biblical world view tells us that there will be a rise in global control, with the end result being the empowerment of a deceiver unlike the world has even known, who will bring apparent peace to the world while enslaving humanity.
At just the right time, the Prince of Peace, will return. This time looks closer than it once was.