in case you didn't know this writer lays out a portion of the reality here in the empire;

At the end of 1984, Slavery is Freedom, two plus two equals five, and Winston Smith loves Big Brother. The Party has destroyed Smith’s mind, he embraces whatever narratives it promulgates. The fictive Party has solved the conundrum that bedevils any individual or organization seeking to exercise power: coercion can exact physical compliance and the desired verbalizations, but how do you compel the subjugated to think and believe as you want them to think and believe?

Our Party, the confederation of powerful people who promulgate the narratives that always point the same direction—more government and power for the powerful, less freedom for the subjugated—has yet to reach the mind control of Orwell’s Party, but not for want of desire or effort. We know the Party’s narratives: globalism, climate change, surveillance, incarceration, political correctness, open borders, free migration, fiat debt, central economic planning, socialized education and medical care, and wars on terrorism, drugs, poverty, any regime that refuses to toe the Party line, hydrocarbons, private firearms, individual rights, privacy, precious metals and cash, and socialized education and medical care. We know the Party’s institutions: governments, central banks and their central banks, intelligence agencies, military forces, police, permanent bureaucracies, multinational corporations, multilateral economic, political, and financial institutions, foundations, universities, nonprofits, and NGOs. We know the Party’s overlapping mouthpieces: the mainstream media, think tanks, government and intelligence agency propaganda organs, crony executives and their companies, Hollywood, and academia. And we know the figureheads who stock governments and their allied institutions, and the Party puppeteers who pull their strings.............https://www.theburningplatform.com/2019/12/06/hows-that-alternative-reality-working-out-for-you/

its only a matter of how and when;

The frantic efforts of am exploitive elite to eliminate dissent only accelerates the regime's path to collapse.

Regimes that are losing public support always make the same mistake: rather than fix the source of the loss of public trust--the few enriching themselves at the expense of the many-- the regime reckons the problem is dissent: if we suppress all dissent, then everyone will accept their diminishing lot in life and the elites can continue on their merry way.

What the regimes don't understand is dissent is the immune system of society: suppressing dissent doesn't just get rid of pesky political protesters and conspiracy theorists; it also gets rid of the innovations and solutions society needs to adapt to changing conditions. Suppressing dissent dooms the society to sclerosis, decline and collapse.

Dissent is the relief valve: shut it down and the pressure builds to the point that the system explodes. Regimes that no longer tolerate anything but the party line fall in one of two ways: 1) the pressure builds and the masses revolt, tearing the elite from power or 2) the masses opt-out and stop working to support the regime, so the regime slowly starves and then implodes.

Here in the U.S., the suppression of dissent is the work of the corporate media and the Big Tech monopolies: Facebook, Twitter and Google. As Mark St.Cyr and I discuss in a new no-holds-barred podcast (1:08 hours, 4 segments), Big Tech is effectively suppressing dissent via shadow banning, de-platforming and de-monetization:

-- shadow banning: the audience who gets to see your content is throttled back to a fraction of your pre-shadow-banning audience. The mechanics are shrouded in secrecy, Stasi-style.

-- de-platforming: the Big Tech monopoly declares you persona non grata for a supposed violation of their Kafkaesque Terms of Service and bans your content from their platform, effectively silencing you.

-- de-monetization: your content is still officially on the platform in truncated form, but the flow of advertising revenue is turned off: you're welcome to post content but you will no longer be able to make any money from it. Enjoy!

When you crush dissent and spend a full year cracking the skulls of protesters, you end up with, well, France's general strikes. I covered the yellow vest protests in some depth a year ago: France in a Nutshell: "The Government Stopped Listening to the People 20 Years Ago" (December 12, 2018)..........https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec19/suppressing-dissent12-19.html

america is certainly 'fixed' and this writer provides some of the reasons why and how, but only some;

It continues to be very difficult for we US Americans to acknowledge that our political system and its capitalist economy is deeply corrupt and fixed, that we find it easier to always distract ourselves by demonizing others.

In some ways, it is irrelevant whether the Clinton and Podesta emails were leaked or hacked, as the Democrats created the hoax of Russiagate to avoid severe self-examination of their own corruption and deceptive practices.

The Democrats have ignored working people’s needs for at least 40 years as it became corporate. And the large amount of disenfranchisement among US voters due to Jim Crow revitalization, and excluding many felons for life, eliminate many citizens from voting.

Then to understand that our entire political system is one big financial scheme preserving an oligarchy of plutocrats, how can we even call ourselves a republic. We have never been a democracy. We are addicted to materialism. It is our stubborn belief in our validity as a nation, certainly as compared to others, that I believe preempts our capacity for the kind of popular revolt we need to be a nation with integrity and a true commitment to justice. This requires a nonviolent revolution that we have yet experienced, though the radical changes in the late 1960s threatened the system as never before with a break out of real democracy.

But how can we possibly ever believe what the US or its agencies say?

The basic principle is lying...........https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-america-needs-no-fixing/5696901

welcome to the land of the free, and don't forget the brave part, especially when it comes to chil'ren;

An 8-year-old girl was stripped naked and searched by Virginia Department of Corrections staff after she was led to believe refusal would result in not being allowed to see her father.

State policy allows for such searches at the Buckingham Correctional Center in Dillwyn, about 60 miles west of Richmond, and other state DOC prisons. The girl was accompanied by her father’s girlfriend, who is not her legal guardian. If they refused to be searched, they could have been banned from the prison.

“That’s outrageous," said Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. “It’s generally regarded in the criminal justice field that you do not strip search young children. ... I mean most adults, certainly most adults who work in the field of child welfare would know better, that this is an act of child abuse."

After being contacted Thursday by The Virginian-Pilot with questions about the incident, DOC Director of Communications Lisa Kinney said the department was just made aware of what happened and that the staff member who approved the search didn’t have that authority.

“It is deeply troubling and represents a breach in our protocol. We sincerely apologize to this child and her family and will be taking immediate disciplinary action against the person responsible,” Kinney wrote in an email...........https://www.pilotonline.com/government/virginia/vp-nw-strip-search-20191206-wd2ejtrtqfgbvkbj7xzh7btemu-story.html

americans constantly tell themselves how helpful and generous they are, and here is a minor display of that;

once again kunstler hits several nails squarely on their head especially with his description of what the dumocorp party has become, and where we may be heading. remember i have no use for either 'party' which i include as a disclaimer in case you might be confused and think i have a dog in this fight;

The last time the Democratic Party blew up in a presidential election year was 1860. It had evolved from Jefferson’s 1800 bloc of yeoman farmers to Andrew Jackson’s rowdy caucus of frontier populists in the 1830s, and settled into a slough of pro-slavery apologists by the 1850s, including two do-nothing Democratic presidents, Pierce and Buchanan. The party held a nominating convention in the spring of 1860 and couldn’t come up with a candidate when a claque of southern “fire-eaters” walked out. They tried again a few months later and cracked up into three separate parties with three nominees — and of course Mr. Lincoln won the election. The result was the bloodiest war in US history.

That’s one way to drain a swamp. Historical obfuscators might say the Civil War was a lofty, legalistic quarrel over “state’s rights,” but of course it was really about the intolerable depravity of slavery. A hundred years later, the mysterious inversions of history converted the old slaver’s party into the Civil Rights party. That had a good fifty-year run. It included a hearty side-dish of anti-war sentiment, and a general disposition against the Big Brother treatment of citizens, including especially the overreach of the CIA and the FBI.

What is the Democratic Party today? Well, it’s the cheerleading squad for “seventeen” government agencies that add up to the craftily-labeled “intel community,” a warm-and-fuzzy coalition of snoops, false witnesses, rogue lawfare cadres, seditionists, and bad-faith artists working sedulously to hide their previous misdeeds with ever-fresh ones. They’re the party against free speech, the party against due process of law, the party determined to provoke war with Russia. They’re the party of sexual confusion, sexual hysteria, and sexual conflict, the party of kangaroo courts, cancel culture, erasing boundaries (including national borders), and of making up rules for all that as they go along — like the Nazis and Soviets used to do. The ideas and policies they advocate are so comprehensively crazy that their old support of slavery looks quaintly straightforward in comparison.......https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-fraught-moment/

i see on the tv 'news' last night where 'our' schools are now teaching the kids how to spot 'fake news'. this is a most curious thing if you think it through: school is now in the business of teaching its charges not to think but to accept what the school and tv tell them as if there should be no question. what else would it take to show you its now 1984.