“1984” Warned Us—We Ignored It: The Government Plot To Make Us Prole Drift

“They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.” —George Orwell, 1984, Part Two, Chapter IX

“They want more for themselves and less for everybody. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking.”

That was the late, great George Carlin from his 2005 HBO comedy special “A Life Worth Losing.”

Great comedians, like Carlin, deliver uncomfortable truths in a way that doesn’t make you feel preached at, but still manages to get a laugh out of you. That is, until you realize how accurate some of the “jokes” are that they’re making.

In that passage, Carlin is talking about how the wealthy and powerful maintain their power by shaping what people learn, what they believe, and what choices they think they have. They want people educated enough to work within the system, but not so educated that they’ll begin to question the system and who interests it actually serves.

And as long as people believe they’re in control, they’ll continue participating in the very arrangement that keeps them powerless.

Carlin was diagnosing the exact same societal rot that George Orwell mapped out decades prior.

Carlin used stand-up comedy, while Orwell used the written word in his novel 1984, but both describe what happens when the ruling class successfully engineers—and profits from—the systematic erosion of critical thinking and the measures they’ll take to maintain their power.

At that point, stand-up stops being comedy and literature stops being fiction.

Instead, they simultaneously become prophetic and diagnostic. And when you dig deeper, you see that a strong case can be made that the government is intentionally keeping us dumb, distracted, and divided, all to line their own pockets.

Watch/listen here

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” —George Orwell, 1984, Part One, Chapter VII

1984 was supposed to be a warning. Not a how-to manual.

This sentiment, and others like it, has been proclaimed with increasing frequency when it comes to the state of the “free world” and our decreasing ability to express ourselves freely.

I, like anyone with a brain, have noticed the shift in what’s allowed to be said, who you can say it to, and—perhaps most worrying—the consequences of stepping outside of the boundaries of the first two.

And I live in the United States, where it’s gotten progressively worse—especially since Covid, but it’s still not as bad as it is in places where posting mean things on social media can get you arrested or where not saying what people want you to say can get you fired.

Of course, there are much more repressive places to live than the United States, Great Britain, or Canada. Places where criticizing the government can get you imprisoned, disappeared, or mysteriously diagnosed with polonium-210 poisoning.

But “at least we’re not living in a dictatorship” is a pretty low standard for countries that pride themselves on their citizens’ freedom.

Whenever people talk about George Orwell’s 1984, it’s usually about Big Brother and the expanding state of surveillance, government overreach through tech companies, the suppression of dissent, and the normalization of doublespeak.

Those are important themes and warnings from 1984, but I rarely see people discuss the Proles and why they are the real warning from the book.

Don’t get me wrong—the arrival of Flock Cameras, facial recognition, and forced pronouns was predicted by the book, but there is something more significant at play in the story.

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” —George Orwell, 1984, Part One, Chapter VII

In 1984, Oceania—which is ruled by The Party—controls information, rewrites history, and suppresses dissent. Its ideology is INGSOC and its authority is embodied by Big Brother, the leader whose image is everywhere.

Most of the book takes place in a version of London which is part of Oceania.

15% of Oceania’s population belongs to the Party at one level or another. You can think of The Party as Oceania’s ruling government elites.

The other 85% are the non-elite, non-government members of the population, who are referred to as the Proles.

The Party claims to have liberated the Proles while keeping them permanently subordinate. Its promise of equality becomes the justification for a society built on rigid hierarchy.

But this hierarchy raises an interesting question that I had to reread the book twice to get an answer to:

If the Proles make up 85% of the population, why don’t they ever rise up and overthrow the 15%?

Winston, the book’s protagonist and an Outer Party member—sort of a lesser elite—believes that if there is any hope of overthrowing the Party, it lies in the proles.

But the Proles don’t seem to be particularly interested in overthrowing anything. Their lives aren’t the greatest—they start working in the mines at 12, age prematurely from a tough life of scarcity, and often die around sixty—but they have more freedom in their private lives than Party members, even while remaining politically subordinate. At least—and we’ll get to this more in a bit—they aren’t repressed in a way that makes them all want to revolt.

And The Party isn’t worried that they’ll revolt either.

In a book Winston reads titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, it’s explained that “Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared.”

Winston is part of the machine. He knows how the sausage is made, so to speak, and he hopes that if the Proles understood the system as he does, they’d be ready to take up arms and fight.

But the Proles already know that their lives are hard. What they lack is an understanding of how their individual hardships connect to The Party and the organizational capabilities to do anything about it.

This ignorance isn’t an inherent feature of the Proles; that is, there’s nothing about them that makes them less intelligent or less motivated.

The proles’ ignorance is engineered. They are given so many distractions—like poverty, pornography, gambling, petty arguments amongst one another—that they never get a chance to recognize the larger system. And, even if they did, they would never unite against it.

In Orwell’s world, the Party deliberately organizes society to keep the Proles powerless.

Our world doesn’t require that level of coordination. Businesses want customers, politicians want power, and government agencies want more authority.

Those interests can reinforce one another, producing a population that is constantly occupied but increasingly easy to govern.

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” —George Orwell, 1984, Part One, Chapter II

The way technology has intertwined itself with daily living is astounding, and it’s all sold to you under the guise of convenience and efficiency. And to be fair, all of the apps on your smartphone do deliver on that promise.

You can hold your phone up to your face to unlock it; you can get anywhere by just pressing a button and letting the GPS guide you; your music transfers seamlessly from your phone to your speaker; and your devices sync without a single friction point.

Hell, you don’t even need to carry your wallet or keys anymore.

While this technology feels freeing, much of its convenience depends on making the old ways obsolete, leaving anyone who hasn’t adapted at a serious disadvantage.

I have a friend who swore he’d never get a smartphone, but the world has changed to the point that he was eventually forced to. As a millennial who lived through cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, and then streaming, I was shocked a few years ago to realize there were no CD-ROM drives in my house.

People my age grew up in a world where buying concessions at a sporting event was cash-only, and now everything is cashless, with data passed between apps and your phone.

With everyone being forced to use devices that track their location, every move makes them easier to find, categorize, sell products to, and keep distracted. Before discussing how these devices distract us, I have to acknowledge how tracking can help solve crimes.

I’ve watched more than a few episodes of 48 Hours where a crime was solved or the missing person—dead or alive—was found because of data showing which cell towers a phone connected to.

It turns out that any car built after, like, 2009 has a tracker inside that effectively functions as a black box and has also been used to solve crimes, but there is a far more nefarious purpose to this constant surveillance.

Edward Snowden will come up again later in this essay for a different reason, but right now we have to talk about what he discovered about these sinister uses of tracking.

What Snowden found inside the National Security Agency—the NSA—shattered the comforting lie that our digital tracking is just passive metadata or isolated law-enforcement work.

Before he went public with the revelations in 2013, top intelligence officials swore under oath in front of Congress that the government was not collecting data on millions of Americans.

Snowden leaked thousands of documents proving that they were doing exactly that—building a global dragnet that intercepted the digital lives of everyday citizens. And because so much of our lives now takes place online, surveillance can reveal an extraordinary amount about us.

Snowden revealed that the NSA was issuing secret court orders to major telecom providers to hand over the phone records of tens of millions of ordinary Americans on an ongoing, daily basis.

They scooped up what the government calls “metadata”—who you called, when you called, how long you talked, and your location via cellular towers. The NSA claimed that it wasn’t technically spying because it wasn’t listening to the audio. But metadata linked to you can reveal a great deal about your life.

For example, if the NSA sees that you called a suicide hotline at 2:00 AM, a divorce lawyer at 9:00 AM, and your bank at 10:00 AM, they don’t need to hear a single word of the conversation to figure out what’s taking place.

As if that wasn’t enough, Snowden exposed other programs that went beyond phone records into the content of people’s communications.

One was PRISM, through which the government compelled American tech companies to provide communications associated with selected foreign intelligence targets. That could include emails, messages, photos, and other stored information.

If you typed it into a screen, the government intelligence apparatus had a mechanism to ingest it into a permanent database. And the potential for abuse wasn’t just theoretical. Snowden later described analysts pulling up text threads and intimate photos in intercepted communications and passing them around among colleagues.

You don’t have to believe that every person is being watched every second to recognize how much power that access creates—or how little the people being watched might know about it.

One of my favorite scenes in The Dark Knight is when Batman hacks into the infrastructure of Gotham City in a desperate bid to locate the Joker, and turns every citizen’s cell phone into a high-frequency receiver.

By blanketing the city in a high-tech grid of hijacked devices, he’s able to construct a real-time, three-dimensional sonar map of everyone in Gotham.

When his technical director, Lucius Fox—played brilliantly by Morgan Freeman—discovers the machine, he stands before the monolithic wall of civilian feeds and says, “Beautiful. Unethical. Dangerous,”

Lucius gives Batman an ultimatum, threatening to resign his position because, as he bluntly notes, “This is too much power for one person.”

Of course, that’s Hollywood and Batman is supposed to have a moral conscience. After all, this is the superhero who has a rule against killing, so it’s no surprise the film raises ethical questions about the device.

In real life, that power isn’t used ethically; the government seeks to have as much power over its citizens as possible and, as we’ll see, they will use it as they deem fit.

The NSA doesn’t need a threat like the Joker to justify building its surveillance machine, nor does it have someone like Lucius Fox insisting on a self-destruct mechanism.

However, the government will exploit a genuine crisis to expand its surveillance powers in its desire to track and monitor every aspect of its citizens’ lives.

“Private life came to an end.” —George Orwell, 1984, Part Two, Chapter IX

We don’t have to wonder how the government would behave during a crisis because they already gave us the blueprint following the tragedy of September 11, 2001.

Just 45 days after the attacks, while the nation was gripped by collective grief and panic, Congress hastily passed the USA PATRIOT Act.

President George W. Bush signed the act into law.

Its lengthy acronym—Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism—was wrapped tightly in patriotism; it granted the government sweeping powers to spy on its own citizens.

But beneath the patriotic branding lay a massive, permanent expansion of state power over ordinary citizens.

The Patriot Act dissolved the historic legal “wall” that kept domestic law enforcement separate from foreign intelligence agencies, allowed the FBI to issue “National Security Letters” to search library and financial records without a judge’s approval, and sanctioned “Sneak and Peek” warrants that let agents secretly break into a citizen’s home without notifying them for months.

Most infamously, it was Section 215—the “business records” provision—that served as the legal justification for the very NSA dragnet Edward Snowden later exposed. For over a decade, the government secretly interpreted a single clause about obtaining “tangible things” relevant to terrorism to mean they had the legal right to scoop up the private phone metadata of tens of millions of innocent Americans every single day.

This technological hijacking of our daily lives is the literal realization of the warning Orwell left us in Goldstein’s manifesto:

“With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.”

The Patriot Act set a dangerous precedent: it proved that the government can use fear to manipulate the population into trading away their fundamental right to privacy. And once the prison walls of tracking are built under the guise of an emergency, they are simply retrofitted to become a permanent fixture of our daily, high-tech lives.

“The object of power is power.” —George Orwell, 1984, Part Three, Chapter III

Whenever you discuss the Patriot Act, there is inevitably pushback about how much safer it made Americans. Well, yes. There hasn’t been another attack like 9/11 since, thank goodness.

And to be fair, I’m a big fan of the Patriot Act’s less efficient twin brother born out of the same tragedy, the TSA. I personally like knowing that there’s no one on the plane who is strapped.

But for day-to-day living, has any of this surveillance made a difference in our safety?

That’s kind of a loaded question, but the purpose of this surveillance was never to make the community safer. We see the proliferation of Flock safety cameras, automated license plate readers, facial recognition software, and digital dragnets taking over every intersection, but the numbers we would expect to move aren’t moving. At least not in the right direction.

Despite the widespread adoption of CCTV, automated license plate readers, and digital forensics, national clearance rates—that is, the percentage of reported crimes cleared by arrest or exceptional means—for major crimes have stagnated or declined over the past 15 years. In 2010, the clearance rate for violent crime was 47%. In 2025, it was 47%.

The widespread private adoption of Ring cameras has actually correlated with a LOWER clearance rate for property crime. In 2010, the clearance rate for property crime was 18.3%. In 2025, it was 17.4%.

Tim Tebow presented the “Red Dot Map” during a congressional hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, displaying approximately 338,000 distinct red dots representing verified U.S. IP addresses that downloaded or shared CSAM over a six-month period. He wanted to know why something hadn’t been done.

The explanation was a lack of funding, resources, and manpower, along with special rules and limitations about how to deal with these types of crimes. But let’s be real here for a second.

While it’s certainly possible that there are manpower issues and legal hurdles, we watched this country create the RICO laws to combat the Mafia and put incredibly tough laws on the books, notably the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, to combat the crack epidemic.

And with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, billions of dollars in federal funding poured into state and federal law enforcement agencies. So we know it’s possible to attack problems once they’re endemic.

Surveillance can help solve crimes. It also gives the state the ability to monitor people who haven’t committed any. The promise of the first makes us more willing to accept the second.

Benjamin Franklin warned us about this long before Orwell when he said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

That’s where Orwell’s warning becomes relevant: the infrastructure sold to us as protection can also become an instrument of control.

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” —George Orwell, 1984, Part Three, Chapter III

The telescreens all over Oceania were never about improving public safety; they were about keeping track of its people.

As Orwell wrote, “There was no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

When high-tech digital dragnets capture mountains of data yet fail to streamline the prosecution of the most heinous, universally condemned criminals, you can’t believe that you’re being watched for your safety. That’s not just the conspiracy theorist in me talking. The results are there!

At the very least, let’s assume that it’s not an attempt to create a surveillance state. It still just doesn’t work, and we have given up our privacy for it. But we don’t care because we are entertained and our lives are easier.

An ineffective system doesn’t necessarily lose its power. Sometimes, its failures become the argument for giving it more money, more access, and more authority.

And these concerns don’t stop at the American border. The documentary Broken Country, examines what’s happening in Canada—and asks how a country with so much going for it can leave so many citizens wondering what happened.

We don’t have to assume every crisis was manufactured to recognize the danger. A genuine problem can still become the justification for powers that extend far beyond it.

The government either outright manufactures a problem and then presents its solution as proof that we need its intervention, or allows an existing problem to get worse.

Sometimes, the state needs you to step out of line. And if you don’t, then it will push you itself and punish you for it.

“To keep them in control was not difficult.” —George Orwell, 1984, Part One, Chapter VII.

In 1984, the Party systematically engineered and permitted specific vices among the lower classes—the proles—to keep them spiritually and intellectually hollowed out.

The book describes the life of the Proles this way:

“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”

We’ve seen such tactics used in our society, with similar outcomes.

In the 1980s, the CIA began flooding cocaine into this country to raise money to support the Nicaraguan Contras. But cocaine was an expensive party drug for the rich and famous.

But then the street chemists—or chemists with street connections—figured out how to make a cheap, smokeable form of coke, and thus crack was born. And the hood fell in love with it. The addiction, violence, and incarceration that followed devastated many already struggling communities.

Then, beginning in the 1990s and accelerating into the 2000s, another drug epidemic took hold. Only this time, the drugs also reached into middle-class homes and suburbia through a medically legal route: prescriptions from trusted doctors.

One of the biggest differences was how the drugs got through the front door.

Crack came from a dealer on the street. But a doctor could prescribe opioids, a pharmacy could fill the prescription, and the pills could sit in your medicine cabinet

The crack epidemic brought tougher laws and prison sentences. Drugs like Percocet and OxyContin had a legal channel for distribution and possession, provided you had a valid prescription.

And yes, Gen-Z is leading the trend of not drinking.

Some of it is driven by health, but a lot of it is because they just found another state-approved way to alter or numb their minds: marijuana and nicotine vaping.

Nicotine and THC are responsible for far fewer deaths than alcohol. There is no debate about that at all.

But when something is given the legal blessing of the government, not only does use increase as taboos lose their power, but capitalism also gets involved, and more potent versions with better delivery systems can be created.

The weakest version of the stuff that’s being sold in the dispensary is stronger than the strongest stuff you could get on the street.

And vaping—which started as a way to help people stop smoking and break their addiction to nicotine—has become one of the main ways people consume nicotine, alongside pouches and gum

And the revenue the government generates from taxing these activities is incredible. Over the past 3 years, it’s estimated that marijuana has generated $13 billion in tax revenue. To put that into perspective, the revenue generated during the 2025 NFL season by all 32 teams combined was $14 billion.

Orwell gives us a Party that deliberately supplies distractions to keep the population subdued. Modern society can arrive at a similar arrangement through ordinary incentives.

A company wants to sell something people will keep buying. Politicians see jobs and tax revenue. The customer gets immediate pleasure, while the long-term costs are either outright ignored or used as further justification for more heavy-handed laws and authoritarian overreach.

Nobody has to pitch “keep the population distracted” in a board meeting. Distraction can be the profitable outcome of everyone pursuing their own interests.

I don’t think our government comes up with these ideas. The government just bends to the will of whoever lobbies the loudest; regulations change, and we drift proleward, becoming easier to manipulate as we grow more comfortable.

George Carlin, again, makes a poignant observation in that same segment from his comedy special:

“It’s never going to get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners. The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t.”

“The one public event to which the proles paid serious attention.” —George Orwell, 1984.

And this doesn’t just happen with drugs.

In the world of Oceania, Winston explains the Proles’ relationship with gambling:

“The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive.”

It’s impossible to miss the proliferation of gambling, aggressive legalization, and corporatization of mobile sports gambling across the modern landscape. And this is all quite recent.

In 2018, the Supreme Court opened the door for states to legalize sports betting. Since then, what used to require a trip to Vegas, a casino, or a shady bookie who’d take it out of your ass if you got behind has been reduced to the ease of downloading an app.

By 2025, Americans were legally wagering nearly $167 billion a year on sports. Sportsbooks generated almost $17 billion in revenue, and state-regulated sportsbooks produced $3.7 billion in taxes.

Even if we take sports gambling out of the mix and just look at the traditional lottery, there have been rather interesting changes over the past few years, the most notable of them being that many states now allow you to play online or use your debit card to purchase lottery tickets in person.

A few states—like California, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, and Indiana—allow you to purchase state lottery tickets using credit cards.

This removes a barrier to action, allowing more people to play than otherwise would.

And the ability to buy lottery tickets on credit is basically a giant finger in the face of those token “gambling problem” warnings that appear in lottery and sports-betting ads

The government doesn’t have to legalize gambling with the intention of keeping people distracted. Once it collects revenue from the business, it has a financial stake in people continuing to play.

That creates an obvious conflict of interest: the institution responsible for addressing gambling’s social costs also benefits from the very activity that produces them.

The companies get customers. The state gets revenue. The player gets another reason to keep looking at his phone. As more of the population becomes trapped in addiction and distraction, those in power have less reason to fear a revolt

In 1984, Winston says this clearly about the Proles:

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

Distracted by poverty, trivial concerns, and state-sanctioned diversions, the modern-day proles will never unite.

But let’s pretend, for a moment, that someone exposes the game for what it really is and tries to wake people up.

The government has tools for that as well.

“Eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous.” —George Orwell, 1984.

If a Prole happens to be born with exceptional talent, ambition, or a brilliant mind, the system doesn’t promote them.

As Orwell explicitly noted in the text: “A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them… marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous.”

The exceptionally talented underclass are systematically liquidated before their brilliance can threaten the hierarchy’s stability.

The more I look at class, the more I realize that the average person has the idea of class all wrong. Most people think there are generally 3-5 classes, depending on how granular you get.

There are the lower, middle, and upper classes. This is typically an income distinction, though there are also associated behaviors and expectations.

Drilling down a little further, the lower class can be divided into the poor and the working poor. And then, above the upper class, there is some idea of the elite and various degrees of extreme wealth

But the more you look at our system, the more you realize there are really only two classes: those who pay taxes and live under the rules, and those who collect taxes and operate above the rules. Regardless of how much money you make, you’re either following the rules or making them.

George Carlin said it best: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”

That club comprises technocrats, government officials, and the major media organizations.

And as I’ve shown, they deploy several measures that are designed to simultaneously keep track of what you do, leave you inert, unable to act, or uninterested in addressing the problems you notice, and extract as much money from you as possible while doing it.

However, when someone outside the club—the real-life version of a prole—notices the devious machinations of the ruling elite and tries to alert the masses or galvanize them into action, there is always a reaction. And that reaction is designed to send a message to anyone who might have wanted to stand up to the system.

I told you earlier that Edward Snowden would come up again. Snowden got a look at the government’s surveillance machine. He saw how the sausage was made, so to speak, and he decided to let people know exactly what was happening.

The state didn’t pat him on the back for having a conscience. Instead, they weaponized the full weight of the Espionage Act to strip him of the life he had built, turning him into a permanent political exile who had to seek political asylum in Russia.

John Kiriakou, a decorated 14-year CIA counterterrorism veteran who led the high-stakes raid that captured top al-Qaeda logistics leader Abu Zubaydah in 2002, blew the whistle on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation”—aka torture—program.

Mind you, torture is “illegal,” but again, there was no reward for him for having a conscience. Instead, his life was ruined, and he was put in prison for two and a half years because he was also accused of violating the Espionage Act—while the actual torturers and architects of the black sites never did a day.

A parallel fate befell Reality Winner: a brilliant young military linguist who spoke Pashto, Farsi, and Dari fluently. She used her elite cognitive talents to serve as an NSA contractor.

When that pesky old conscience of hers compelled her to leak a classified report on foreign election interference, the government sprang into action, and she was handed the longest federal prison sentence ever imposed for a media leak—a chilling reminder of what happens when a highly capable asset steps out of line.

Then there is Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

Assange wasn’t even an American citizen or an intelligence insider; he was a foreign journalist and publisher operating in another country. Yet when WikiLeaks published a massive trove of leaked classified documents in 2010—including the infamous “Collateral Murder” video showing a U.S. military helicopter firing on journalists and civilians in Iraq—the global elite went after him.

He spent seven years confined to a single room after being granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, followed by more than five years inside Belmarsh Prison fighting extradition to the United States.

The federal government leveled a staggering 18 criminal counts against him, primarily under the Espionage Act—marking a terrifying escalation in which the state actively sought to criminalize the baseline journalistic act of publishing leaked truths.

And sometimes, you don’t have to prosecute the person who exposes the system. You can help turn him into someone nobody wants to believe.

Remember earlier, when I mentioned the CIA orchestrated flow of cocaine into America that fueled the crack epidemic?

In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb published “Dark Alliance,” a series in the San Jose Mercury News tracing connections between cocaine traffickers supplying Los Angeles dealers and the Nicaraguan Contras, the rebel movement backed by the CIA.

Webb followed part of that supply chain and reported that the men involved had helped finance a war supported by our government.

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times challenged his reporting. Even his own newspaper eventually caved to the pressure. Webb resigned, and his prospects in daily newspaper journalism collapsed.

Meanwhile, the CIA wasn’t just sitting around hoping the controversy would pass. They were actively involved in getting these newspapers to challenge his findings.

An internal agency account, later made public, described its response under the title “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story.” It credited the agency’s existing relationships with journalists and described helping a reporter working on a story that would undermine Webb’s allegations.

Then Webb decided to end his own life by somehow shooting himself in the head twice. Make what you will of that and the CIA’s involvement, but season 4 of the series Snowfall seems to agree that this work of the CIA—only the journalist in Snowfall was an Asian woman and the method of assassination was poison and asphyxiation.

In all of these cases, the state is sending a chilling, crystal-clear warning to the press and the public alike: if you tell the public what’s really going on by pulling back the curtain and exposing the raw, unfiltered actions of the ruling class, they will cross oceans, bend international laws, and expend infinite resources to break you.

“Nuclei of discontent” —George Orwell, 1984, Part Two, Chapter IX

And the government elites do not reserve this treatment for just the high-level insiders or digital publishers who expose the machine’s architecture from the top down.

If the government reacts with the law to take down one of their own who develops a conscience, it reacts with outright violence when someone tries to organize the people at the very bottom.

While the whistleblowers are trapped in legal battles or forced into exile to prevent the truth from getting out, those who mobilize the street are targeted because they possess the dangerous ability to turn that truth into organized action.

At just 21 years old, Fred Hampton accomplished something that absolutely terrified the political establishment: he created the original Rainbow Coalition. He sat down with rival street gangs like the Blackstone Rangers, working-class whites, and Puerto Rican activists, and negotiated a street truce live on local television.

He realized that if you stop the infighting, you can actually clean up your community, and perhaps you’ll realize who is making a mess of it in the first place, by funneling drugs into the city streets.

The FBI’s COINTELPRO didn’t offer him a seat at the table; they orchestrated a pre-dawn tactical raid on his apartment, drugging him and shooting him twice in the head while he lay asleep. By the way, the movie Judas And The Black Messiah is an incredible film about these very events.

Malcolm X started as a street hustler, but in a prison cell he underwent a transformation. When he got out, he used his newfound knowledge to deconstruct systemic white supremacy and advocate for absolute self-determination.

When his vision expanded globally—when he went to Mecca, discarded rigid sectarian constraints, and began organizing an international framework for human rights—he became a problem for the elites.

His house was firebombed, his movements were tracked, and he was gunned down before that global vision could take root.

And who could forget the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.? The popular narrative sanitizes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a peaceful dreamer, but the system knew exactly how dangerous his talent was. As long as he was strictly marching for civil rights in the South, the state negotiated.

But the moment King turned his sights toward the economic architecture of the entire nation—the moment he opposed the Vietnam War, denounced capitalism, and began organizing the Poor People’s Campaign to occupy Washington, D.C. until the government addressed systemic poverty—the dynamic flipped.

The FBI labeled him “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.” And from there, he was executed on a motel balcony just as he was preparing to unite poor people across all racial lines.

“Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.” —George Orwell, 1984, Part Two, Chapter IX

Whether it’s a tech whistleblower being forced into permanent exile, a decorated case officer being locked in a prison cell for exposing state crimes, a legendary organizer being targeted on the street, or a Nobel Prize winner getting assassinated—the architecture operates on a single, unchanging rule.

The system will gladly provide just enough assistance or digital entertainment to keep the population subdued inside the prison walls.

But the exact moment a Prole proves they have the genius, the discipline, or the collective power to scale the wall, the system moves with absolute, calculated precision to take care of them.

The disturbing parallel is how much freedom people can enjoy while remaining politically powerless. Distraction can keep them occupied. Convenience can make them dependent. Surveillance can make them visible.

And when someone challenges a powerful institution, that institution has resources to defend itself that an ordinary person rarely possesses.

These forces don’t need a single architect to reinforce one another. That is what makes the arrangement so difficult to recognize—and so difficult to change.

The rest is up to you.