I remember when this was a conspiracy theory.
The thing they never would have predicted was that nobody had to round everyone up into camps or abduct them in the night. People would willingly rush to instrument themselves and give away all their privacy for convenience and cute emojis, and when a story like this came out they’d shrug.
A while back a friend and I had just read something about all those nuclear tests in the 50s and 60s. He asked what “the fuck were they thinking?” thing we are doing today. I immediately answered: total surveillance with no regulation or oversight.
As I’ve said before: we just (in my opinion) had an attempted fascist coup. The next one won’t be so incompetent and will have a far smarter and slicker demagogue behind it.
What on earth are you talking about? What relevance does this political commentary have to the topic at hand?
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"
"Corporatism became one of the main tenets of fascism in Benito Mussolini's fascist regime"
Imagine if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, rallied the extreme left with dog whistles and charged divisive rhetoric, and then had lost to a fairly moderate Republican in 2020.
Before the election can be certified she gives a speech to a mob of angry protestors telling them to march to the capitol. Embedded among them are actual paramilitary and militia groups with strong extreme-left ideologies.
The protestors go full riot, start fights, bludgeon a police officer to death with the American flag, march into the capitol, and start ransacking the place. Many of them are wearing shirts with hammers and sickles on them, "Lenin was right," "Camp gulag," etc. A number of them are dressed in all black and are seen climbing around with zip ties calling the names of various congress members and senators. They erect a gallows out front and are chanting things like "hang Mitch McConnel!"
Clinton is reported by numerous witnesses to be watching the events on TV while she calls and threatens officials in states where her opponent won by a narrow margin, pushing them to overturn the results. She also has a team of attorneys working on tactics to overturn the election. She refuses to give a speech to call off the riot for hours and hours until the national guard shows up to clear the building. Even after that she refuses to concede the election.
I'd call that a coup attempt. You might call it an insurrection. I think that's quibbling over semantics.
I brought it up to argue for the risk posed by complete loss of privacy. We are creating a system of total surveillance that will be available to whatever much worse regime might take power in the future. If the thought of right-wing populist authoritarians is fine with you, imagine instead that it's an American Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. That is not out of the question either if the same people backing right wing populism become disillusioned with it and flip to left wing populism instead. Stranger things have happened. For the record that could be every bit as awful as a right wing authoritarian, especially with the kind of surveillance powers they will be able to seize and mobilize.
People who think there's nothing wrong with this panopticon we're building should convert to Islam and move to Xinjiang province.
You might also ask if the figure head president is as half as important as some project meaning onto the office?
There are many hypotheticals you could take. None of it feels relevant to the discussion about compulsory DNA collection.
This seems like a good opportunity: since this scenario/though experiment is a product of your mind, you should have access to knowledge of whether it actually was a coup attempt (the people in question genuinely had the intent to overthrow the government, and a legitimate plan of sorts) - so, did they?
(Credentials: my wife is really into conspiracy theories)