One of the most powerful movies that I've ever seen was The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), about a Stasi (secret police) agent in East Berlin, in 1984, surveilling a writer and his lover.  In many ways, it's an uplifting story about how humanity can survive even in the most oppressive environments, but it's also a deeply depressing story showing how an unchecked government has complete power over people, especially through the government's access to electronic surveillance.

In 2021 America, rather than 1984 East Germany, it's become painfully clear that the Democrat party that controls our federal government revels in the power it now possesses.  We see that with the January 6 protesters, who did no more than what Democrat protesters have done for at least 20 years, but who now find themselves indefinitely imprisoned, deprived of the ability to obtain material necessary for their defense, and bullied in Maoist struggle sessions to confess their sins in exchange for shadowy liberty.

We also see that with the FBI's latest initiative, which is to try to get family members to turn in their "extremist" relatives:

This is the kind of thing that was common currency in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and East Germany.  It's still done in North Korea and other totalitarian countries.  Totalitarian spy agencies know that their best weapon is a teenager who is angry at a parent or a spouse in an ugly divorce or custody battle.  Others have recognized the pattern:

https://t.co/ogCn0vIX1i pic.twitter.com/HXBtYjD6QD

— Dr. Interracial рџ‡єрџ‡ё (@sandyleevincent) July 11, 2021

There are limits, though, to what an American government can do, and even the Democrat party recognizes that.  Fortunately, it's got corporate America — especially the technology sector of corporate America — to step in and do what it cannot.

The latest alliance of the federal government and Democrat-run technology companies comes in the form of a Democrat National Committee request to SMS companies (i.e., text message companies) to police texts for "misinformation" about vaccines.  In other words, the Biden government, acting through the DNC, has concluded it's not enough for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to censor people's non-government-approved content or for Google to delete non-approved material from its search engine.

Politico broke the story as part of a longer article about the Biden administration's push to force Americans to get vaccinated:

Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

Here's how it will work: when you try to send your college-aged daughter a text message telling her that the vaccine might impair her future fertility, the SMS company will either refuse to send that message or will send it along with the company's assurance to your daughter that you don't know what you're talking about.

What's striking about all this is that we're not talking about the Black Death, which killed a third to a half of people in varying parts of Asia and Europe during the 14th century.  Nor are we talking about smallpox and other familiar European diseases that, once they entered the New World, killed up to 90% of the indigenous people because their immune systems were completely unprepared for scourges that had long been endemic in Europe.

Instead, we are talking about a virus that has a mortality rate that's lower than 2%, with the bulk of the people in that 2% being the extremely elderly — almost all of whom have gotten their vaccinations.  Other Americans, when they're able to get information past the censors, have made their own decisions about the risk of the vaccine versus the risk of COVID.  In this regard, it's worthwhile to remember that life is never without risk.  Every time we get behind the wheel of a car, we're making a risk-benefit analysis.

What we have here is the coming together of technology companies that occupy every area of our lives and a government that is working through non-government agencies.  Their alliance has one purpose: to force you to take a vaccine of dubious efficacy and relatively high risk (for some) in order to protect you from a disease that has an infinitesimally small chance of killing most of us.

As anyone who knows history should be, I'm a very pro-vaccine person.  What's happening now, though, strikes me as both suspicious and terrifying.  And thinking back to that movie about East Germany's secret police, when I look at our government and see that we're being run by the Demo-stasi party, I feel very nervous.

Image: Textoter by DaraDaraDara.  CC BY-SA 4.0.

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