If You Stand Up and Fight for One Thing Let it be This
Imagine living in a totalitarian world where every thought, action and step were monitored by the state. Picture a society where the government could choose your friends and harshly punish you if they decide your behavior is impure or unpatriotic.
Well, you don’t have to imagine this dystopian universe because, to some degree, it is already happening in China. Under Xi Jinping’s oppressive leadership, the country expanded use of the WeChat smart phone app. Users can text, make voice or video calls, read news, play games, pay bills, book taxis and doctors’ appointments, transfer money, and even access government services.
The app works by collecting extraordinary amounts of personal data on users’, including whereabouts, financial activity, social connections, and habits—which are all closely monitored by the Chinese Communist Party.
A Monmouth University article, The Dark Side of WeChat, concluded, “leaving WeChat means leaving [social] life in China.”
Initially, the app had a system that gave people a financial credit score. In 2014, the State Council expanded it to include a “social credit score”. If the government disapproves of your behavior, it deducts points. If you lose enough points you end up on a blacklist.
The program’s slogan is downright chilling: “Allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” In other words, the state can destroy you at any moment of its choosing and you have no recourse.
One aspect of the system explores your social network. If the government doesn’t like your friends or associates, points could be deducted. The publication Wired reported that this year China plans to make participation in the program mandatory.
Obviously, WeChat is a dictator’s dream, so it’s no surprise that Russia announced it is creating, MAX, its own version.
“The goal here is absolute control,” Anastasiia Kruope, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times. Philipp Dietrich, an analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations, added, “You need to bring it into the daily life of people to the extent that you cannot avoid this app anymore. The whole point of doing this is the same reason China is doing WeChat: the more information you can gather against your citizens, the better.”
The Russian model is aided by the country’s “patriotic” education, where Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised “that our children love their motherland with all their hearts.”
The question begs, could the United States be next? Andra Watkins, a New York Times best-selling author and survivor of Christian Nationalism, says it’s a distinct possibility. In an interview with Susan Demas at Lincoln Square Media, Watkins said:
The goal of this [DOGE] appeared to be plugging in something to create a WeChat type of structure for our U.S. federal government.
This is the system that Musk would like to convert X into via Palantir. So, that is what is now being put into the federal government by DOGE in different departments. And we don’t know exactly what is being done.
Later in the interview, Demas asked Watkins, “How close are we to having this state-sanctioned moral value system like it operates in China.” Watkins, replied:
We know that they’re using the system now to track immigrants. That’s going to be their test pilot on what they need to do, what kinds of data they need to combine, how they need to track it so they can then bring this out to a wider market of people.
They [Christian Nationalists] restrict our freedoms with religious laws. So, absolutely a tracking app like this could be used to track whether you visit a gay bar or search for a date on Grindr or go to an appointment for your hormone therapy as a transgender person.
It’s not an option in WeChat to turn off the location tracking. So, those kinds of behaviors get you dinged on your social credit score, and you lose privileges if you do that too many times…you won’t be able to do that [opt out of tracking] in something like this Palantir-driven model. So, they’re always going to know where you are if you’re going to these kinds of things that are deemed not state-sanctioned moral values.
The idea that the Project 2025 fanatics in the Trump administration could control the most intimate aspects of our lives is terrifying. What’s most frightening is that in the United States the surveillance infrastructure is already in place. All that’s missing is connecting the existing collected data to a ubiquitous app that assigns a social score.
If you think I’m paranoid or engaging in hyperbole, please read a sobering article in The New York Times that outlines the extent NYPD monitors New York City. From the first moment we enter the Big Apple, by bridge or tunnel we are being tracked and our data stored. According to the story:
The city’s police force has spent more than $3 billion amassing information that reveals where you have been, whom you have interacted with and what you have said, thought and believed. Unlike previous surveillance methods, new digital tools allow law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance persistently, universally, at an unimaginable scale. They can do so with no special permission, no oversight and no advance planning. The results amount to a digital time machine that not only makes our past constantly available to law enforcement officers but also can provide them with predictions about our futures.
Wherever you go in New York City, there’s a good chance the police are tracking you. Enter the subway system, for instance, and your identity, banking information and location trickle into city databases.
Walk down the street and you’re likely to be recorded by one of thousands of security cameras, some belonging to the New York Police Department, others just connected or available to the department’s databases.
Drive into the city and traffic cameras will automatically photograph your car, capturing your vehicle’s license plate, make, model, color, distinctive markings and even passengers.
Post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok and the N.Y.P.D. can scrape and store your messages, capturing your thoughts, plans, political statements and friend group.
The first question we must ask is whether officials in the Trump administration possess the moral character, acquired wisdom, and ethical restraint to eschew technology that provides total social control? The past two weeks should disabuse us of any illusion that this miserable crop of vindictive trolls won’t weaponize data to destroy us.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) director Brendan Carr, at the direction of Trump, used government coercion to crush freedom of speech and temporarily cancel comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show on ABC. A few days later, Trump turned the Department of Justice into a personal police force to target enemies. He harangued Attorney General Pam Bondi, on Truth Social, demanding that she take action to prosecute Trump’s perceived enemies:
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
At a packed Phoenix stadium memorial honoring Charlie Kirk, his wife, Erika, struck the right note, saying she forgave her husband’s murderer. Her Christ-like response perturbed President Trump, who rebuked her from the stage.
“I am sorry, Erika. He [Charlie Kirk] did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.” This echoed Trump’s message following Kirk’s death: “We have radical-left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”
Presidential advisor Stephen Miller, pulling off his best Joseph Goebbels impersonation, reflected Trump’s fury in a raging speech promising vengeance:
“You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy! You are envy! You are hatred!…You have no idea the dragon you have awakened.”
The administration wasn’t kidding and followed through by threatening liberal nonprofit organizations. Trump signed an executive order that labeled ANTIFA a domestic terror organization. The New Republic reports that transgender people may be mislabeled next as “nihilistic violent extremists.”
Meanwhile, Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied through their teeth, falsely linking Tylenol to autism. On Tuesday, Trump gave an insane dictator-length speech at the United Nations, bashing the organization and trashing climate change. If this weren’t enough evidence of Trump’s kingly intentions, the aspiring despot draped huge banners of his face over three federal buildings in Washington, DC.
“When I saw the banners hanging from federal office buildings last week, it reminded me of [the] Communist Party in China—just totally inappropriate and a step towards authoritarianism,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) told CNN.
The point of this column is three-fold. The first is to make you aware that invasive technology exists, and is already being implemented, in autocratic countries, to exert total dominance over the private lives of civilian populations.
The second is to remind you that America is about to cross over the line into outright authoritarianism. We can no longer live in denial about where we are on the road to dictatorship.
The third, and most vital point, is to draw a big bright red line in the sand. If the Trump administration tries to install a WeChat-type of app in the United States, do not oblige their wishes by installing it. If this occurs, it is time for a general strike and mass civil disobedience, if not outright rebellion. If necessary, blue states should weigh secession.
Do not voluntarily surrender your free will. If you do so, your most intimate desires and private moments will forever be restrained on a digital leash. In essence, you will have become a slave–with the psychotic Stephen Millers of the world serving as your master.
We are living in a chaotic time with fast-moving news cycles. In such an unstable environment, it is easy to become numb when each day brings new outrages and fresh horrors. But if we encounter an attempt by the Trump administration to WeChat America—listen to the blaring alarm, drop what you are doing, and prepare to fight as if your life depends on it.
