State of Emergency

..  it is a blunt fact that someone in prison cannot terrorize the community.

Despite their pledges and tough talk, our leaders only fudge numbers, redefine what counts as “serious crime,” or they just ignore the issue. Perhaps that’s because a certain level of crime is politically useful in the maintenance of the current system, and useful in upholding the status quo...

To see this in action, I can think of no better book to read than the memoirs of General Pyotr Wrangel, Always with Honour. Wrangel, a general in the White Army during the Russian Civil War, describes how the Bolsheviks emptied the jails and asylums in order to swell their ranks with bloodthirsty fanatics who would happily dig the graves of the old regime and its supporters.

Sam Francis noticed this phenomenon a little over thirty years ago and called it “anarcho-tyranny,” a descent into a kind of managed chaos. The state allows particular forms of lawlessness to flourish, largely unimpeded, to ensure effective regime control, mainly of the tax-producing middle classes who are scared straight and unable to offer effective resistance...

If we want a truly spectacular specific example of anarcho-tyranny at work in America today, we need only look back a couple of years, to the “mostly peaceful” protests of 2020, following the death of George Floyd. These massive riots, which were allowed to take place during a time of widespread social restrictions due to COVID-19, were the most expensive bout of unrest in U.S. history...

To extend Sam Francis’s central insight about anarcho-tyranny, we can easily imagine a system in which crime is precisely managed so as never to exceed certain boundaries beyond which ordinary people would revolt. Events of the last three years have provided governments around the world with immense amounts of data about exactly how far citizens today can be pushed, in which directions, and for how long before they begin to push back, if indeed they do at all....