Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, lawmakers and officials are rushing to try and answer a host of questions: “Who has the disease?” “Where are they?” “Where have they been?” Accurate answers to these and other questions would help tackle the pandemic.
Across the world, a range of surveillance technologies are being deployed in an effort to find out more about who is sick. Although a crisis may make increased surveillance more palpable to the billions under some kind of lockdown civil libertarians shouldn’t be shy about highlighting the ineffective nature of many emergency measures and insisting that even those that are effective be strictly time‐limited.
Tragedies, panics, and crises have a tendency to result in bad policy. The 9/11 terrorist attacks prompted a wave of unnecessary and ineffective laws and policies. The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Transportation Security Agency (TSA), the passage of the PATRIOT Act, and the rollout of a wide range of new surveillance programs are among the most notable domestic examples. The effectiveness of these measures should embarrass government officials. Post‑9/11 mass surveillance did not thwart large terrorist attacks, with a White House panel finding that one of the most famous mass surveillance programs — the snooping on telephony metadata — was “not essential in preventing attacks.” Meanwhile, the TSA has demonstrated that it’s more efficient at fondling law‐abiding citizens and residents than it is at passing its own security tests. Predator drones, often associated with US foreign policy, fly along the northern and southern borders adorned with the Customs and Border Protection logo.
Even when emergency measures are effective they can sometimes stick around longer than necessary. At the beginning of the Second World War the British government passed a range of policies that infringed on civil liberties, including the introduction of ID cards. In September, 1939 First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill gave a speech in which he emphasized that infringements on freedom would be temporary: Full Story - Matthew Feeney - CATO Institute
Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory
Cultural Marxism is a term that originated in the early 1970s by a scholar, Trent Schroyer in 'Critique of Domination The Origins and Development of Critical Theory' Schroyer used the term in an accusatory thesis correctly stating that many 'critical' theorists were failed Marxists, or cultural "Marxists" who had been absorbed into middle class capitalist society.
In political philosophy, critical theory is a neo-Marxist philosophy developed by a nefarious group known as the Frankfurt School. It was initiated in Germany in the 1930s based on the philosophy of Marx and science of Freud. It is a melding of Marixst Fascist Socialism and Psychology.
