Across the pond, Poland and the European Union find themselves deadlocked over a question about judicial primacy. In early October, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal sparked controversy when it ruled that EU law does not supersede national legislation.

At stake in the EU-Poland legal dispute, was Poland’s decision in 2018 to rein in its judiciary and establish a disciplinary chamber to remove judges. Before these reforms were undertaken, the Polish judiciary was largely viewed as corrupt and inefficient, possessing vestigial features of the previous Communist order, when Poland was a member of the Warsaw Pact. What initially started out as a mundane domestic reform soon transformed into an international controversy.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) took exception to Poland’s reforms and ruled that EU law takes precedence over Polish law. The ECJ’s ruling did not deter Poland, though. Back in March, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki brought the case before the Polish Constitutional Tribunal, subsequently leading to the Polish tribunal’s controversial ruling in October. Following the October ruling, the EU commission had choice words for Poland’s superior court and reaffirmed its EU-law-über-alles stance.

Possessed by a universalist spirit, the EU ramped up the pressure on Poland by slapping it with a daily fine of €1 million euros (slightly over $1.1 million) until the Law and Justice (PiS, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) government modifies its judicial legislation to align with EU standards.

The Poles remain intransigent. They know what is at stake. Having gone through a series of partitions in the late eighteenth century in addition to being placed under the Soviet Union’s thumb via the Warsaw Pact in the twentieth century, Poles’ skepticism toward supranational entities and hostile external actors is justified. The former Soviet satellite will not compromise on its sovereignty both as a matter of principle and national identity.

The current tension between Poland and the European Union offers a glimpse of the new kinds of struggles nation-states are confronting in contemporary times. The erosion of national sovereignty is becoming the norm throughout the West as governments grow and political planners find every way possible to build superstates. The EU represents the most significant trial run of such a utopian project. Despite its failed attempts to create a United States of Europe so far, Eurocrats remain committed to their fantastical vision.

The biggest obstacles central planners in Brussels face are the former Soviet satellite states, which have grown skeptical of the EU’s pie-in-the-sky project for the Old Continent. As the largest member of the Visegrad Group, Poland has established itself as an opposing pole to Brussels-style globalism.

Poland’s judiciary reforms are part of a broader set of populist measures that span restricting the resettlement of Middle Eastern migrants within Europe to standing up for traditional cultural norms that have irked the bien-pensants all the way from DC to Brussels. For its defiance of conventional Western political norms, Poland has earned the illiberal democracy label, accompanying its fellow Visegrad Group member Hungary in receiving this dubious distinction.

The curious thing about Poland’s fracas with the EU is that Poland doesn’t want to leave the EU, at least not for now. According to various Polish polling firms’ findings, support for leaving the EU has never exceeded 20 percent. Since joining the EU in 2004, Poles have generally held the supranational union in high esteem. Further, Poland heavily relies on intra-EU trade for its exports. Trade with EU members accounts for 80 percent of Polish total exports. Even Prime Minister Morawiecki reiterated that a “Polexit” is not in the cards at the moment.

However, political intentions can change. Eurocrats fail to recognize that the EU’s initial popularity was predicated on reasonable benefits such as free trade between member states, liberalized travel within the EU, and greater diplomatic integration to prevent the kinds of fratricidal wars that devastated the Old Continent during the first half of the twentieth century. The 2016 Brexit vote showed the world that the EU’s power is not yet monolithic and that with the right amount of political will, EU member states can go their separate ways.

The more the EU micromanages Polish internal affairs and punishes Poland for the simple act of exercising sovereignty, the more likely it is to entertain the idea of exiting the EU altogether—a potentially devastating blow to the Eurocrats’ quixotic political project.

This article was originally featured at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is republished with permission.

The film Gaslight (1944), directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, relays the story of a con artist, Sergis Bauer, who under the assumed name of Gregory Anton seduces and marries a young woman, Paula Alquist. The smitten bride has no idea that her charming husband murdered her aunt, Alice Alquist, who left behind a home in London where a cache of priceless jewels is stashed somewhere in the attic. The newlyweds move into the home, which Paula has inherited, and the husband proceeds to dig through the contents of the attic in an impassioned effort to locate the jewels. In order to accomplish this aim, he must keep his wife inside the house while he goes out at night, ostensibly to work in his studio. Instead, he reenters the attic of the house from an alley entrance.

While rummaging around upstairs, directly above his wife’s head, Bauer makes noises, and his use of a lamp causes the gaslight downstairs to flicker, naturally raising questions in his wife’s mind. He quells her concerns about what is going on by persuading her to believe that her perceptions are mere figments of her imagination and indeed evidence that she is going mad. To bolster this claim, he takes down paintings and hides them, after which he insists that she was the one to have moved them, despite having no memory of having done so. The criminal comes very close to having his wife committed to an insane asylum, at which point he would be free to search the entire house without raising any suspicions whatsoever, because she will be out of the picture. Just in the nick of time, the scheme is thwarted by the arrival on the scene of a hero (played by Joseph Cotten) to save the day.

The term gaslighting has come to refer thus to the phenomenon by which people are systematically persuaded to question their own perceptions of reality. It is a tactic deployed by sociopaths and psychological abusers who persuade docile people to accept whatever they say, no matter how preposterous, and no matter how much it conflicts with the deliverances of their very own senses. Such psychological manipulators are greatly aided in this endeavor through their persuasion of other people to agree with their version of what is going on.

Governments which exert influence over the mainstream media are quite adept at this sort of manipulation, as is well-illustrated by the build up to every war. Those who oppose bombing campaigns are portrayed as cowards and traitors, if not miscreants, by war profiteers, who remarkably persuade much of the populace of the necessity of military intervention, despite the fact that it will kill innocent civilians who have nothing whatsoever to do with the behavior of the leaders said to necessitate recourse to war. Gross injustices are in this way portrayed as not only permissible and just, but also obligatory.

The gaslighting tactic was equally well illustrated by the U.S. government’s response to the revelation that illegal mass surveillance had been undertaken against the entire population. Rather than expressing compunction for the crimes committed, those responsible instead insisted that no one was really looking at any of the data anyway. This line was further bolstered by cries throughout the media that “Innocent people have nothing to hide!” The scandal was shortly thereafter forgotten by much of the populace whose right to privacy had been violated by their very own government.

Similarly, when Wikileaks published the Collateral Murder video depicting civilians, including Reuters journalists, executed point blank from an Apache helicopter by the U.S. military, people all over the world were naturally appalled. The powers that be responded to the public uproar by vowing to investigate. But they ultimately concluded that no crime had been committed, for the soldiers had acted in accordance with their rules of engagement. In other words, if you thought that you were witnessing with your very own eyes the unthinkable murder of civilians on film, you were wrong, according to the gaslighting government. Likewise, when the U.S. government defined dead suspects as dead terrorists, by labeling them Enemy Killed in Action (EKIA), even when located outside areas of active hostilities, they effectively decreed that they could use lethal drones to kill anyone anywhere for any reason. Having been told by the gaslighting government that everything done in their name was intended to keep them safe, the populace generally acquiesced to this usurpation even of citizens’ rights to a fair trial before being summarily executed at the caprice of bureaucrats.

Predictably enough, given the precedents already set by the U.S. government, when ten civilians were killed by a Reaper drone in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021, the Pentagon concluded their investigation of the case by claiming that they had committed no crimes in destroying those people, seven of whom were children. But that was only because they had not violated the laws of war rewritten by none other than themselves and, again, according to which anyone can be killed at any time for any reason, provided only that the government has determined that this should be done.

These examples underscore the fact that political power once captured is rarely ceded and progressively expands in the absence of resistance, a principle equally well illustrated by the handling of the COVID-19 crisis by governments the world over. Entire populations have been kept in a continuous state of uncertainty, never knowing what they will be forbidden from doing next. Vaccine passports, following the trajectory of circular stickers on floors, have swept through the First World, having been taken up in Israel, Canada, and throughout Europe, in addition to cities such as New York and Los Angeles, with millions of citizens now denied the right to socialize, use public transportation, go shopping, work, drive, or lead any semblance of a normal life without first presenting their health credentials. In Australia, healthy people in the Northern Territory who have been in contact with persons who tested positive for COVID-19 are being sent to quarantine camps.

Fear and uncertainty are powerful tools by which to gain, retain and augment government control because everything that officials do is claimed to benefit their constituents. Whether it is the war on terror or the current health crisis, all bureaucrats everywhere sincerely profess to be doing no more and no less than trying to protect their compatriots’ lives. That’s the standard refrain, rehearsed each time a new policy or intervention is imposed, or a civil liberty stripped away. There is no need to assess the consequences of well-intended initiatives, because the docile populace charitably permits government officials to plod along with their failed policies, no matter what they do—even when they kill citizens themselves. That was how the fiasco in Afghanistan dragged on for two decades, and that is why even when the Fool’s Errand was at last recognized for what it was by people in the position to effect change, a number of pundits and politicians protested in response, insisting that pulling out was a mistake.

As in the case of the many liberty-restricting measures adopted throughout the Global War on Terror, the attempt by governments to force their citizenry to subject to serial injections of novel substances into their bodies is said by supporters to be intended only to protect them. All across the globe, arbitrary punishments are being exacted against those who refuse to comply, this despite the ongoing protests by thousands of people for months on end in countries such as France and Australia, where the protesters obviously have not dropped dead from their failure to comply with public health measures, whether masking, vaccination or social distancing.

The government of Austria recently announced that all of its unvaccinated population would be locked down. Shortly thereafter, the lockdown was extended to cover vaccinated persons as well. It seems likely that this was a part of the gaslighting government’s general strategy to demonize the unvaccinated as the cause of the loss of the freedom of the vaccinated, under the assumption that the latter would increase pressure on the former to comply. Ratcheting up their campaign to vaccinate every citizen, the Austrian government has further announced a hefty 7,200 Euro fine to be extracted from those who persist in resisting.

The polarization of people into two antithetical groups, the vaccinated and the so-called antivaxxers, has been very effective in shutting down nearly all debate into serious questions regarding the efficacy of COVID-19 public health policies. When case numbers surge, this is immediately blamed upon the unvaccinated, as is the appearance of each new variant, even though a number of virologists maintain that the decision to vaccinate the entire population during a pandemic (rather than waiting some time) itself led to the creation of new variants, as the virus fought to survive in vaccinated hosts by wriggling its way around the spike protein antibodies created in response to the mRNA injections.

Because fully half of the population persists in a state of manifest terror at the prospect of death by virus, the major challenge today for free people has become to defend our shrinking liberties from governments which have clearly been captured by pro-Big Pharma forces. It is stunning that so many people have been persuaded to believe that they should do whatever Pfizer wants them to, despite the company’s well-documented history of malfeasance and fraud. Only the climate of fear and uncertainty continuously cultivated by media outlets (sponsored by Pfizer!) and government spokespersons can explain this group behavior phenomenon, which exhibits many characteristics of religious cults. It goes without saying that cult leaders are exemplary gaslighters, for their followers occupy a world of the cult leader’s creation. New Normal, anyone?

Cults are created and flourish in a climate of fear and/or uncertainty. A self-proclaimed special leader with unique access to The Truth arrives on the scene to magnanimously offer himself to a group of people as the solution to the dire situation. In the United States, gaslighter par excellence Dr. Anthony Fauci has become the go-to guru, despite having repeatedly issued contradictory guidance on everything from masks to lockdowns to travel bans to natural immunity to virus origin and the wisdom of mandatory vaccination. When confronted with his contradictions, Fauci has claimed that he lied for the good of the people. In fact, none of this behavior is surprising, because the way in which cult leaders maintain control of their groups is by continually rehydrating the very sense of uncertainty and fear which led people to join in the first place.

One of the most graphic uses of gaslighting by public health officials has been their utter refusal to acknowledge the reality of natural immunity through previous infection. There is no other case of a disease known to humankind and for which a vaccine exists, where previously infected and fully recovered people are exhorted to undergo vaccination. That’s because vaccines are specifically designed to provoke a response from the immune system. Vaccines incite the production of antibodies and T-cells which protect a person from the invasion of a virus. If the immune system did not protect infected people, then they would all be dead. Instead, 99% of people who contract COVID-19 survive, clearly demonstrating the efficacy of natural immunity. Most significantly, if the human immune system could not hold its own against a virus, then no vaccine designed to jolt the human immune system into fighting that same virus could possibly be effective. It is a case of gaslighting extraordinaire to claim that the immune system will only work if one is vaccinated with an elixir whose efficacy depends on the ability of the immune system to work.

A second, and equally remarkable, case of gaslighting occurred in the initial marketing campaign for the mRNA products, when representatives of the product companies exuberantly claimed that the vaccines offered up to 95% efficacy against severe illness and death, which was a protection already enjoyed naturally by the vast majority of the population pre-vaccine, because they were never vulnerable to serious illness from the virus in the first place. Having been persuaded to believe in the manifestly preposterous conjunction that natural immunity is worthless, and mRNA “vaccines” reliant for their efficacy on natural immunity are necessary, much of the populace stands ready to accept nearly any other contradiction which comes their way, even when it entails the surrender of their civil liberties.

Leaders continue to spout out absurdities such as: “We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers,” and the gaslighting government has been relentless in its quest to persuade skeptical citizens that their perceptions of what is going on are all wrong. Parents who worry that their children are being harmed by mask requirements which reduce oxygen flow to their brains, and prevent them from learning appropriate behavior through reacting to facial cues, have been told by the gaslighting government (Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary) that masks are just like “hair ribbons.” Those who wonder whether financial interests (such as stock holdings and patent ownership) might possibly influence bureaucrats’ policy recommendations are shutdown as “conspiracy theorists”. Obviously there is no merit to the idea that nonvaccine therapies were proscribed for the simple reason that Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the experimental vaccines required that there be no alternative therapies available. That’s just another conspiracy theory, according to the gaslighting government.

The list of ideas which fly in the face of commonsense but are fully embraced by true believers is amazing to behold. Clearly it makes perfect sense to require healthy people to undergo experimental medical interventions with unknown longterm side effects. There is nothing wrong with requiring healthy people to submit to medical treatments as a condition on their current and future employment, even though the treatment in question does not prevent transmission of or infection by the disease whose symptoms it is designed to moderate. It is perfectly logical to prevent people from traveling from one country to another where the rate of infection is even worse than the country of origin. The government is better situated to determine which medications a patient should ingest than is the patient’s own doctor. There is nothing at all alarming about the government sending out the vaccine police to ensure compliance with what public health officials believe should be the treatment of healthy people, despite knowing nothing about their medical history or circumstances. It is perfectly fine to mandate that healthy people undergo experimental injections while protecting the manufacturers from legal repercussions in the event of adverse effects up to and including death. Cloth masks have no prophylactic benefit against viruses whose size is smaller than the pores of the cloth, but people should be required to wear them anyway. Health passports do not prevent infection and transmission, because the “vaccines” which they document do not prevent infection and transmission, but people should nonetheless be required to have them in order to be able to participate in society. It is entirely normal for democratically elected leaders to upbraid their constituents and threaten them menacingly, proclaiming, “Our patience is wearing thin!” when they decline to take drugs for which they have no need.

The list goes on and on, and so long as the (for the most part) scientifically illiterate populace continues to bleat “Listen to The Science!” under the assumption that Fauci, a mere man, is the apotheosis of the enormous edifice of all scientific knowledge, then they will continue to accept new and arbitrary policies. The idea that lockdown, quarantine, masking and vaccination requirements will continue on until COVID-19 disappears from the face of the earth has been successfully insinuated into the minds of the Branch Covidians, even though “the virus” will continue to mutate, just as coronaviruses have always done.

Once lured into a gaslighter’s web, it becomes progressively more difficult for people to be debriefed as time goes on. They have invested, made sacrifices, and embraced a narrative which becomes more and more compelling, even in the face of conflicting evidence. Human nature is such that no one wants to admit that they were fooled. Accordingly, instead of blaming at least some of the millions of deaths of Americans throughout the pandemic on the poor policies with which they themselves complied, the followers of Fauci & Co. remain steadfast in their belief that the death toll would have been much worse had they not agreed to do whatever their local health authorities told them to.

For years, the companies in the mRNA therapy business were waiting to test their products on human beings and, with the sudden appearance of COVID-19, their opportunity at last arrived. Advocates of universal vaccination are by now so intransigent in their beliefs that they are not bothered in the least by evidence that males in the age cohort 12-17 years are at greater risk from myocarditis post-vaccination than from the virus itself while unvaccinated. The strident call to inoculate small children with next to no vulnerability to COVID-19 is equally perplexing. Before 2020, few people would have rallied to inject perfectly healthy children with experimental elixirs designed to protect other people from a virus to which the children themselves were not vulnerable. It is shocking that anyone would offer their children up as guinea pigs in what is manifestly an experimental trial for a product of which they have no need.

Impervious to statistical data which belies the story which they have been persuaded to believe, such as the relatively good outcomes in places such as Florida and Sweden, and the poor outcomes in California and New York, in addition to the “inexplicable” success story of largely unvaccinated Africa, where vaccine hesitancy is rife and many nonvaccine remedies have been widely used, the true believers continue to insist that Fauci’s decrees must be heeded. This despite the fact that the virus death toll of 2021 was greater than that of 2020, even after widespread uptake of the “vaccine” so vigorously promoted as the solution to the crisis.

Nonetheless, according to the gaslighting government, this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” reinforcing in the minds of half the population that every single COVID-19 death is caused directly by the evil “antivaxxers” who decline the treatment. In fact, it has become increasingly clear that the virus is untameable and endemic, as data from highly vaccinated Israel and Gibralter strongly suggests. Ignorant of or impervious to this data, the “good” vaccinated are being told by their gaslighting governments that if they do not present themselves for booster shots at regular intervals (Britain recently shortened the period of eligibility from six to three months), then they, too, will number among the irresponsible unvaccinated killers.

In the face of crisis, leaders are inclined to follow the simple precept: Do something. Do anything, the false assumption being that inaction is always worse than action. Having once implemented new policies, leaders are protected by the inaccessibility of counterfactual outcomes, and they always insist that things would have been much worse, had they not done what they did. Educated people, however, are now well aware that the government’s Global War on Terror itself led to a groundswell of support for the originally quite small group of extremists known as Al Qaeda, and the creation of factional franchises which spread throughout the Middle East and Africa. Similarly, we know that many of the excess deaths over the course of the past two years were caused not by the COVID-19 virus but by the political policies imposed in response to it.

In some parts of the world the average age of persons killed by COVID-19 has been greater than the actuary tables would have predicted, had the virus never emerged. In contrast, the rise in suicides and drug overdoses among young people, most of whom were not even vulnerable to COVID-19, is most plausibly explained by the draconian political policies preventing them from living what should have been their carefree lives. Not unrelated to the destruction of thousands of small businesses caused directly by government lockdowns, homelessness has increased dramatically, as any inhabitant of a major U.S. city can attest, with the sobering existence of vast tent encampments filling the sidewalks in front of shuttered stores for blocks on end.

Meanwhile, as was predicted by critics back in 2020, strict lockdown and medical triage policies have had as a further tragic effect that people terrified of contracting what they were propagandized to believe was the Black Death were prevented, not only by their own fear, but also by policies postponing routine screenings, from seeking even necessary medical interventions such as chemotherapy and surgery. In the U.K. alone, an estimated 50,000 early cancer diagnoses were missed. Yet government leaders and their appointees have doubled down on their failed policies, despite all of the evidence that they have been blinded by a monomaniacal obsession with one cause of death to the exclusion of any other of the many problems in society. Disturbingly, some medical facilities now refuse to treat the unvaccinated, even for serious illnesses which may culminate in their deaths.

Dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers have confirmed the rational grounds for skepticism harbored by “noncompliant” citizens, but the gaslighting government plunders ahead undeterred. For they know that their devotees, having lived since 2020 in a state of profound uncertainty, terrified by what was made to seem the looming specter of their imminent death, will agree to anything, up to and including the usurpation of their bodily autonomy.

If you, Skeptical Citizen, reject The New Normal, then there is evidently something wrong with you. The very last thing which anyone should care about is whether the government itself caused the pandemic by funding the gain-of-function research used to create the COVID-19 virus.

Parents across America were caught unprepared for the mass closure of government schools in 2020. Soon after, however, many decided they and their children had had enough of the status quo. Now at a crossroads, will they choose reform or repudiation?

The wave of ill-advised school shutdowns last year compelled tens of thousands of parents to rethink their children’s education. When the classroom was virtually forced into their homes via Zoom, parents realized just how abysmal the curricula and tutelage were.

Statistics on families fleeing to homeschooling must be worrying the education establishment.

From 2012 to 2019, the homeschooling rate hovered around 3.3 percent of K–12 US students. That figure rose to 5.4 percent in spring 2020. By the following fall, that figure had more than doubled to 11.1 percent.

Among black families, the increase was particularly noteworthy considering only 3.3 percent of black children were homeschooled in spring 2020 versus 16.1 percent in the fall.

While legacy media focused on cases of parents keeping their kids home out of fear of covid, longtime critics of the public school system argued that the pandemic actually helped to expose parents to the abuses and shortcomings that have long plagued public education.

Some chose homeschooling, but many other parents took to school board meetings, facing the beast head-on and ripping apart the deceptive social engineering with the public comment microphone. All the glory, glitz, and glam has so far gone to the latter group.

They grew a decentralized movement with immediate political consequences not only in Virginia’s gubernatorial election but also in school board races across the country earlier this month.

Axios, the popular DC-based news outlet run by former Politico journalists, recently reported on the growth of the 1776 Project, a new political action committee focused on reforming public school systems at the local level.

“My PAC is campaigning on behalf of everyday moms and dads who want to have better access to their children’s education,” the PAC’s founder Ryan Girdusky told Axios.

The 1776 Project won three-fourths of its fifty-eight races across seven states, proving the populist Right’s focus on the culture wars to be smart politicking.

Now Republicans in Congress are pushing a “parents bill of rights” ahead of their 2022 primary elections. Included are so-called rights to know what’s taught at school, the right to be heard, and the right to transparent school budgets and spending.

“This list of rights will make clear to parents what their rights are and clear to schools what their duties to parents are,” their flier states.

The reform position focuses on schools’ duty to parents and ipso facto their children. But what of the duties parents owe to their children?

What if, instead of pointing their collective finger at the school boards, parents looked in the mirror? What if they asked themselves how or why they feel entitled to have a place to drop their kids off for thirteen years of government brainwashing?

Any taxpayer has a perfect reason to object to school mask mandates or the teaching of racist and queer ideologies. Parents must start thinking more deeply about the situation, though.

Certainly for some, running for school board positions is their best shot at helping to provide their children and their neighbors’ children with better education. The problem is that in too many places, there’s an absolute crisis in education that can’t wait any longer for reform, no matter how severe.

Every family and community ultimately applies the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, the notion that the best way to organize society is for each action or decision to be taken at the smallest scale necessary, in assessing what must be done about things such as education.

By simply refusing to accept what federal or state authorities peddled throughout 2020, parents rightfully accepted more responsibility, clearly demonstrating that when things get personal, people will do what it takes to take back control.

Whatever step in that direction is taken, the child is better off. In his great essay “Education: Free and Compulsory,” Murray Rothbard argued that public school and compulsory schooling laws tend to victimize the child: “The effect of the State’s compulsory schooling laws is not only to repress the growth of specialized partly individualized private schools for the needs of various types of children. It also prevents the education of the child by the people who, in many respects, are best qualified—his parents.”

Unfortunately, far too few parents think of themselves as qualified, much less the best qualified educators of their children. They are easily led to believe simple reforms will “fix the system” they grew up dependent upon as children themselves.

“We always hear, Oh it’s broken. It’s not broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do,” Katie Phipps Hague told Mises Institute supporters at the latest summit in Florida last month.

Hague shared her experience homeschooling her seven kids and encouraged other parents to give it a try, essentially asking, What have you got to lose?

I know this sounds like I’m a crazy person, but if you pulled your children out of school … for a whole year, then include them in everything that you do in all of your trips and all of your conversations, put them around the intelligent, capable people that you all have in your circles and let them become comfortable around those people, you’d probably do better for them than maybe anything else you could ever do.

It’s wonderful that the populist movement on the right is targeting the educational bureaucracy, one of the great roots of societal decay. There is a lot of potential for good in populism, but not if it sets its sights on mere reforms. A much brighter future lies in a libertarian populism where parents free themselves from these decrepit statist systems altogether and grow alternative institutions.

Parents must be responsible for their children’s education precisely so that children learn to be autonomous. Autonomous people don’t support tyrannical policies, so the sooner parents embrace their own power, the sooner their children will be able to unleash their own.

This article was originally featured at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is republished with permission.

You can read Part I of this essay, published in September 2021, here.

Australia has had a history of complicated relationships between the governments that ruled over its vast sunburned lands and the individual citizens subject to such rule. The states and territories of Australia have had a degree of autonomy when it comes to how they may exercise control over the individual. The police have been an integral tool for these state governments to violate human rights and individual freedom. As is always the case a context of crisis is used and even when emergency powers are not directly cited, there is an implication that without such measures a calamity would befall the state and threaten each and every citizen.

For most human rights violations are those actions that occur overseas, away from the familiar. And should such violations occur closer to home, there must be a good reason. Those whose rights are violated perhaps in some way deserved it. Rights may be denied because of a greater need for security, safety and health, and violations committed for a collective good. Those resisting are radicals and extremists to be isolated or removed. The government is “us” after all; it serves us and it does what it needs in order to protect us from even ourselves. It is a parent, a benevolent and omnipotent entity that ensures society is secure and safe. It permits what freedoms it deems necessary and from within this entity exists righteous and moral human beings that take their jobs very seriously.

This is the deep belief that many feel within Australia. It is the religion that grows government and erodes liberty. It is the culture of dependence and servitude that not only allows such an expansion but marginalizes those who challenge it, or who wish to be left alone. It creates a class of public servants that live at the expense of the rest of Australia, who do not necessarily care or concern themselves with any greater social morality. Instead they go about their professional days in a self-serving manner because their job security, entitlements, perks and pensions are more important. It is an aristocracy of governance. To help retain and swell this government requires an active police and surveillance state that also threatens privacy and many forms of journalism.

Salisbury Affair

During the 1970s, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser requested that each states’ police Special Branches compile dossiers on anti-uranium protesters (among other dissident voices that were critical of government policy). Each of the state governments began to comply in various degrees or modified the spying and information collecting methods that they had already in place.

In 1972 Harold Hubert Salisbury had been a respected British policeman when he was recruited to become South Australia’s police commissioner. The SA premier at the time was a progressive Labour Party man, Don Dunstan, who was famous for policies that led to liberalization and social reforms. Whereas Salisbury was a man known for his tough on crime attitudes, his pro-capital and corporal punishment stance, and as an ardent drug warrior, so his appointment by Dunstan was a contrast.

During his tenure, Commissioner Salisbury oversaw surveillance on numerous South Australian residents. The special branch likely did what it would have done regardless of his appointment but it was in January of 1978 that premier Don Dunstan dismissed the police commissioner for “giving inaccurate information…to the Government” and “having so misled the Government that wrong information was given to Parliament and the public” (Advertiser, 18 January 1978).

A later inquiry found that a lot of the files on individuals and organizations were not specific to any security risk but instead focused on “political, trade union and other sensitive matters.”  And when Police Commissioner Salisbury was asked by Premier Dunstan, he refused to give details as to what the files contained. Commissioner Salisbury, in his defense, insisted that he was not subordinate to the state government on such matters but to the Queen and her representative in Australia.

A later enquiry found that over 41,000 files compiled by the South Australian police special branch existed. The files were considered to be both excessive and extensive but were often filled with biased and inaccurate information, large parts of which had been intentionally doctored. Who was considered a suspected individual was up to the discretion of police members and what information was entered or invented was also up to them. The files could then serve as records and be used against individuals either as means of leverage or to gain convictions.

The sacking of the police commissioner widened into a rallying point for those who were already critical of premier Dunstan’s policies. Harold Salisbury was depicted as a good and honest man who was unfairly sacked by a partisan premier. The individuals who had been harassed and spied upon were objects of fascination and predation by the police and government in such circumstances. The nature of what special branch had done became lost in the politicking of the moment and though it was for a time an important part of Australian history, it has become almost forgotten now.

The event did reveal however the power of both Australian state governments and their police in the surveillance and documenting of individual lives and interactions based solely on the suspicion of their political beliefs. Such special mandates, like the one directed by Prime Minister Fraser, allowed the police the power to compile library, telephone, and medical records regardless of the individual’s guilt or any charges. The individuals would be completely unaware of such evidence, and in some cases the information could be invented to suit the police. In the modern digital age such a controversy of surveillance seems token where it is now assumed that the authorities can and “should” do these things to protect society. In 1978, it was still considered a point of contention that may have even led to the resignation of a state premier a year later.

“Joh” Bjelke-Petersen

As a contrast to the South Australian Don Dunstan, Australia’s longest serving premier of Queensland, Johannes “Joh” Bjelke-Petersen was a hard nosed conservative that ran a police state with little regard for individual liberty. Ruling from 1968 to 1987, Joh oversaw a period of change in Australian culture that many conservatives such as himself resisted. Joh modelled himself as being a law and order leader. By the end his reign, his legacy was a regime of police brutality with two of his state ministers and a police commissioner jailed for corruption, while the premier himself avoided a second trial that likely would have convicted him if not for his age.

As a reaction to numerous street protests in the early 1970s, Premier Joh gave full support and powers to the police to come down heavy against anyone considered a “radical.” The bashing and bullying of protesters and organizers was not uncommon. Under his regime, restrictions on ‘rock ‘n’ roll bands and censorship of many forms of media through the use of the defamation laws “moral decency” laws were tightened. Joh was a proud rightwing conservative dictator.

In an incident when a raid was performed on a commune, the police burned down residents’ home and destroyed their property all on the suspicion that the individuals had been growing marijuana plants. The premier publicly backed and supported police conduct during such a raid. His tough on drugs stance was celebrated by many like-minded conservatives Australia wide. Premier Joh was a macho image for the anti-freedom conservatives that used the backdrop of the Cold War as an excuse to push their beliefs onto others.

By the end of the 1970s street protests had been banned in Queensland by Premier Joh. As was the case elsewhere in Australia, the Queensland special branch had been compiling extensive files on individuals and groups. This had in many cases led to harassment, extortion, and intrusive surveillance. Though unlike in South Australia, there was no controversial sacking of a police commissioner in regards to such files; instead the premier of Queensland granted the police as much power as possible to impose itself on the citizenry.

For a time Premier Joh had even tinkered with the idea of seceding from Australia and often expressed his support of the Apartheid regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa, praising how the minority white governments ruled over their populaces. The premier of Queensland was a famous man outside of Australia as well. His conservative and cold warrior views were heralded as being simply “anti-communist.” Men like Joh had certain beliefs and views of the world, a set of values that they held sacred. The pillars of government and its institutions allowed them to impose such upon millions of others.

The reign of premier Joh was a perfect example of fascism in Australia that eventually was checked when corruption and incompetence that stalled the authoritarianism of his rule. It was also a telling example of how the state police and premiers in Australia can exercise themselves with a special authority. The “law and order” promises that Premier Joh brought with him satisfied a mob of the population that had similar social views. With some irony the opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine mandates are now viewed as having a rightwing flavor to them, but it was men like Joh and his hard-right ideals that revealed how powerful a state government can be over its citizenry, especially in a “crisis.” And whether it was against marijuana or a virus, such premiers will ruin lives for “health.”

“The greatest thing that can happen to the state of Queensland and the nation of Australia would be if and when we get rid of the media. Then we would live in peace and tranquility—but no one would know anything!” Premier Joh said.

In many ways this period was a template for the coming police enforcement of current Australian states. The laws are arbitrary and inconsistent but the states government and their police powers can conduct themselves as they please, so long as it is claimed that it is for the greater good of the community. While Premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson claimed that God had chosen him to save Australia from communism, the present premiers believe that they need to save us all from a virus, poverty, bush fires, climate change (among other past and present health and safety “threats”). Whatever a state government or its premier deems an emergency can then allow them to use emergency powers, liberty be damned.

Journalism and Privacy

Australia was never a nation that ensured freedom of speech as a secured right. It was often assumed and implied that individuals and agencies had a certain degree of freedom to say or print as they please. Early on, even before federation censors were prolific, a state of laws existed that would protect the wealthy and powerful from slander. Late into the twentieth century more liberty was allowed by the various states and federal government but as is always the case, crisis and the neurotic impulse to see any and everything as a threat further stripped back any promise of real freedom of expression.

Instead of law that guarantees free speech, Australia relied upon anti-defamation laws that have traditionally protected the powerful and governed the right of expression. In times of war and during periods of crisis journalists were often threatened both officially and unofficially by the state. This does not make Australia exceptional but it does exhibit a tradition of aggression against a truly independent press. And it defies the popular notion of being “a free country.”

Outside of journalism and the realm of non-fiction Australia has a history of censoring books, magazines, art, film, computer games, etc. It is a nation that has a culture of paternalism and while not burning books per se, redacts, edits, and denies them entry onto the island continent. Whatever the cited context, the government always knows best and exercises an imperial benevolence often to protect its citizen-children from every dangerous infection. Unfortunately such violent paternalism is often supported by many Australians who truly believe that exposure to certain information, ideas, words, images, or depictions may mutate a human mind into such a deranged way that chaos and violence would befall society.

On a commonwealth-federal and state level the Australian governments had a very active censors office. In times past individuals have had their letters frequently read and edited. In the early days of nation these may have been those with Irish Fenian sympathies or anarchists and communists. Or any literature that defied the moral standards of a good white Christian nation that Australian governments desperately tried to maintain into the twentieth century.

The colonial history of Australia was a period where most of the published material was only made available to inform the residents of the colonies what the laws and local rules were. The crown made it compulsory that such things be read out during church services. It would take decades before the first “uncensored” newspaper would appear. The early roots of a government-dominated printing press helped to implant a modern day culture of mainstream media that does not enjoy true freedom of press.

According to a 2006 Reporters Without Borders survey, ranking countries in relative press freedoms Australia was listed at 35. The post-9/11 world has seen a decline in press freedoms in Australia thanks to new anti-terrorism legislation along with suppression orders on freedom of information requests. The war on terror has given greater muscle to laws that were first penned during World War I, the Sedition Act for example, making it hard for journalists to know what is allowable to write during “war time.”

And as many recent protesters posting on social media are learning, “incitement” is a very real crime in Australia where one can face prosecution based on the allegation that their words or sentiments may lead to sedition or promote the breaking of other laws.

On September 5, 2020, pregnant mother Zoe Buhler was arrested by Victorian police on the grounds that her Facebook post constituted incitement. You be the judge;

PEACEFUL PROTEST! All social distancing measures are to be followed so we don’t get arrested please. Please wear a mask unless you have a medical reason not to. September 5th is FREEDOM DAY! As some of you may have seen the government has gone to extreme measures to prevent the Melbourne protest. Here in Ballarat we can be a voice for those in stage 4 lockdowns. We can be seen and heard and hopefully make a difference! END LOCKDOWNS. STAND UP FOR HUMAN RIGHTS. WE LIVE IN A FREE COUNTRY.

The Foreign Interference Bill would make it illegal for anyone to “receive” and “handle” national security information. This would include the information that was revealed in the “Afghanistan war files,” where evidence came to light of Australian soldiers murdering innocent civilians. Regardless of the bloody content that these files revealed, the terrible war crimes, it is the exposure of such things that is viewed as more dangerous and criminal than the murder of innocent civilians itself.

The bill makes it dangerous and illegal for public servants to expose any government misdeeds to the media. The Australian Federal Police has been an eager implementer of such bills, as was seen when journalists were taken into custody in 2019. Since the 2001 attacks on the United States, those nations that consider themselves the champions of Western values have implemented laws that encroach on individual liberty and grow police powers. It has not won the war on terror, it has only terrorized individuals in the name of fighting it.

As an intimate example, when the Australian Federal Police raided journalist Annika Smethurst’s home they spent seven hours ruining her privacy and humiliating her, including going through her underwear with perverse intent. For those who have been through a police drug raid, especially one that can be conducted on the whiff of assumption, the police will confiscate any items that they deem prohibitive. Sports equipment like baseball bats and tennis racquets can be declared as weapons, for example. It is thanks to the war on drugs and the intrusive invasion of ones home and privacy that journalists or even individuals posting on social media may now find themselves at the mercy of police discretion as they suffer violence, property damage, theft, and even face kidnapping all in the name of implementing these laws.

Personal items that should remain intimate between couples can be pulled out and exhibited with no regard for privacy. Even if no charges have been pressed, the privacy of the individual is not sacred and humiliation is always ensured. Police officers often have gone through personal devices; whether they are “allowed” to or not does not change the fact that the individual has little control in each interaction.

“Police have an inherent bias when it comes to investigating their own…and that bias can skew investigations in all sorts of ways,” explains Melbourne lawyer Jeremy King. “It has been my experience with my clients that police are more sceptical of complainants when there is another police officer involved…then on top of that, there have been particular examples where, deliberately or otherwise, statements haven’t been taken, actions haven’t been taken where perhaps they would have been if a police officer wasn’t involved.”

Identify and Disrupt Bill of 2020

In August of 2020 the “hacking bill” was quickly passed through Australian Parliament that now allows government authorities the ability to spy on and impersonate individuals without their knowledge or consent. The bill allows the federal government the ability to access the social media and emails of an individual or group and permits them to delete, modify, and send messages, even impersonating those that are being “hacked.” The bill allows this conduct to occur so longas “suspicion” of criminal activity is raised.

The wider implications of such a bill are frightening and the full repercussions have not yet been realized. The government can now invent evidence, entrap individuals, and use information, real or fabricated, as a means of extortion to get individuals to stop doing things or to even give up information on others. In our social media age it can also allow the government an ability to create false public depictions of an individual or group through public posts and uploads.

Such a bill is the inevitable mutation of the special branch spying of the 1970s and invention of evidence and information in the past. Now with most of society’s reliance on the digital world, it can allow the government an absolute disregard to any privacy and to materialize whatever evidence it needs to take on any one that it deems “suspicious.”

In September, Adrian Lozancic of the Australian Democrats said, “Make no mistake, Orwell would be proud. This authoritarian legislation enables police to obtain, modify and delete your data without you knowing.”

While these bills are always pushed under the blanket of fighting child pornography, terrorism, organized crime or the illicit drug trade it is the inevitable reality that it will be used by the government to protect itself from whistleblowers or any revelations of misconduct. It is also likely that such information will profit certain individuals that are in positions of power, corruption being the greatest partner to any police state.

The bill has a very broad definition of what constitutes a “relevant offense” and it’s likely to be used against activists and human rights defenders as many of these individuals and groups, like journalists and whistleblowers, come under the definitions that relate to “serious Commonwealth offenses.” Such a law, with how easily it was passed, shows how little care the Australian media and public have expressed themselves and reveals a wider culture that embraces a state of limited liberty.

Encrypted email services and messaging apps have also come under attack with a push to ban their usage in Australia. The notion that individuals may wish to communicate in private with family, friends, colleagues, and customers is lost on some. Instead the spectre that only criminals and human monsters would use such means to communicate is the mantra that government advocates push time and time again. Such a bill may in time expand into the prohibition of such services for the Australian citizen.

“The Identify and Disrupt Bill will operate as part of a larger framework of surveillance laws, including the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 (TOLA), that amplifies the government’s powers without adequate limitations, undermines encryption, and endangers human rights,” reported Namrata Maheshwari and Raman Jit Singh Chima in Access Now in August.

It is unlikely that the introduction of such a bill will see a limit to government growth. It will be used as a gateway for state and federal governments to peer into every aspect of peoples’ lives. Such bills can then go after individuals relating to many other aspects that the government is fixated on, from the war on drugs, tax evasion, and even to those wary of vaccine mandates. It is a surface that no longer has been scratched but has been gouged deep to the bone, and it seems many in Australia are comfortable with it. At this time the greatest defense an individual has from such intrusions is to not stand out but to go unnoticed. It is a measure of scale for the government. In time technology and software will change this in the government’s favor.

Whistleblowers

It is no wonder that the Australian Julian Assange lingers in legal hell, given the government that rules his homeland. And it has been revealed recently that the Australian government has been aware of what misery he is experiencing while still supporting the British and American government actions that are punishing a man for publishing evidence of war crimes. Whistleblowing is often the enemy of government, in Australia especially.

Take for example “Witness K,” who exposed the corruption and bugging of an East Timor cabinet room, a bugging that lead to the screwing over of East Timor in favor of Australian national interests and the exploitation of the natural resources of a desperately poor nation. As a former Australian Secret Intelligence Service Officer, “Witness K” faces serious conviction. His trial is being held in secret and behind closed doors in front of a court with no transparency or public coverage. Because of the information leaked by “Witness K” the Australian government was forced to renegotiate its agreement with East Timor, after which the government took out its indignation on the spy that had revealed its dirty deeds to the world.

In August 2020 it was announced that the Australian government had spent nearly $3 million dollars in court waging its war on whistleblowers. It is a war that is waged to destroy individual lives by dragging them through the courts and ruining them financially. The victims include “Witness K,” David McBride who is a former defense force lawyer that helped to leak the Afghan war files, and Richard Boyle, who revealed the predatory actions of the Australian Tax Office.

Such aggressive actions against present-day whistleblowers are a reflection of a past that is smeared with a disdain for those who come out against the government and its nefarious actions. In the case of “Witness K” even his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, is being prosecuted and faces a hefty jail sentence. The Australian government has empowered its police to such a point that journalists are deterred from reporting objectively and whistleblowers risk everything should they expose injustices and misdeeds. It is a state of fear, the perfect instrument of a democratic authoritarian state. And for many Australians, so long as these actions are done with a degree of benevolence and in the name of a greater good, then the sacrifice to liberty and in some cases the murder of innocent civilians is a price that they are willing to pay. Because in the end, so long as people have welfare and jobs then human rights be damned. That seems to be “Aussie way.”