Aristotle’s ancient guide to tyranny reads like a modern manual



In “Politics,” Aristotle explains that political rule comes in three basic forms: rule of one, rule of the few, and rule of the many. Each form has a healthy and a degenerate expression. Monarchy and tyranny describe rule by one. Aristocracy and oligarchy describe rule by the few. Polity and democracy describe rule by the many.

What separates the good from the bad in each category is not structure but motive. A king governs for the common good. A tyrant governs for himself.

Despite the millennia that separate us from Aristotle, the philosopher’s portrait of tyranny feels uncomfortably contemporary.

Aristotle does more than classify regimes. He explains, in cold and unsentimental terms, how tyrants preserve power once they seize it. His warnings, written more than 2,000 years ago, read less like ancient theory and more like a field manual.

The tyrant begins by eliminating rivals. He fears competition, especially from men of spirit and competence. Anyone admired for virtue, courage, or leadership poses a danger because excellence inspires imitation. Such men are removed through exile, execution, or disgrace.

Next the tyrant attacks institutions that allow citizens to form bonds. Aristotle lists common meals, clubs, educational gatherings, literary societies, and discussion groups. Any shared practice that fosters trust, loyalty, or independent thought threatens despotic rule. Organization creates solidarity, and solidarity creates resistance.

The tyrant also forces citizens to live publicly. Privacy breeds conspiracy. Public life enables surveillance. Aristotle describes rulers who compel their subjects to remain visible so that dissent never escapes notice. Long before Bentham’s panopticon, Aristotle understood that constant observation disciplines behavior.

Surveillance alone does not suffice. Tyrants cultivate networks of informers to uncover thoughts that cannot be seen. Citizens learn to treat one another as potential threats. Suspicion replaces trust. Speech becomes guarded. Silence becomes safety.

Aristotle could not have imagined digital surveillance, but he would have recognized its function. Technology merely perfects a strategy the ancients already understood.

Social bonds must then be weakened. The tyrant sows discord between neighbors, friends, and families. These relationships form the first line of resistance to centralized power. When trust dissolves at the most intimate level, organized opposition becomes nearly impossible.

Poverty also serves the tyrant. Aristotle observes that despots deliberately exhaust their populations with endless labor. The goal is not productivity but distraction. Citizens too busy to rest or reflect lack the energy to conspire.

He cites the construction of the Egyptian pyramids as an example of forced labor designed less to achieve a purpose than to consume a people’s strength. The task glorifies the ruler while leaving the population depleted.

War further strengthens despotism. Constant external threat convinces citizens that they need a strong ruler to survive. Crisis suspends normal limits. Emergency justifies control. Under perpetual conflict, organization becomes treason.

Aristotle claims that tyranny, the degenerated rule of one, borrows from the worst features of democracy. Despots empower groups unlikely to organize independently against them. He mentions women and slaves not as moral judgments but as political calculations within the ancient world.

The logic remains familiar. Tyrants elevate those dependent on the regime and hostile to existing social hierarchies. Dependence fosters loyalty. Resentment supplies enforcement.

Flattery plays a crucial role. Tyrants surround themselves with sycophants who inflate their ego and confirm their righteousness. Men willing to abase themselves rise quickly. Men of honor refuse to flatter and therefore remain dangerous.

Flattery becomes a sorting mechanism. Those who value dignity exclude themselves. Those who crave favor advance.

Aristotle adds that tyrants prefer foreigners to citizens. Citizens possess memory, tradition, and moral expectation. They know how things once were and how they ought to be. Foreigners lack these attachments, and they are happy to flatter the ruler who elevated them.

This arrangement benefits both sides. The tyrant gains enforcers without local allegiance. The foreigner gains status, wealth, and protection. Without the ruler, he has nothing.

RELATED: Do you want Caesar? Because this is how you get Caesar.

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Despite the millennia that separate us from Aristotle, his description of tyranny feels uncomfortably contemporary. Surveillance now operates through algorithms and cellphone cameras rather than forcing everyone to live at the city gates, but the purpose remains unchanged. Security replaces liberty. Total observation replaces trust.

Our institutions remove ambitious and virtuous individuals while elevating compliant managerial drones. Debt binds the population to endless labor. Work consumes life without building independence. Citizens remain busy, anxious, poor, and isolated.

Cultural and political authorities weaken family, denigrate religion, and discourage independent association. Community dissolves into administration. Loyalty transfers from neighbors to systems.

Ruling classes increasingly rely on populations with little connection to national history or tradition. These groups have no reason to defend inherited norms and every incentive to please those who grant them status.

Some details differ but the formula for tyranny does not. Aristotle understood tyranny because he understood human nature. His analysis endures because the same impulses govern power in every age.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Digital tyrants want your face, your ID … and your freedom



Thomas Sowell’s warning fits the digital age with brutal precision: There are no solutions, only trade-offs. When governments regulate technology, they seize your privacy first. Every “safety” mandate becomes an excuse to collect more personal data, and the result is always the same. Bureaucrats claim to protect you while making you more vulnerable.

Age-verification laws illustrate this perfectly. Discord’s recent breach — more than 70,000 stolen government ID photos taken from a third-party vendor — shows how quickly privacy collapses once platforms are forced to gather sensitive data.

Millions of citizens should not be forced to trade away privacy because policymakers refuse to acknowledge the risks.

To comply with the U.K.’s new Online Safety Act, Discord began collecting users’ documentation. That data became a target, and once breached, attackers reportedly demanded a multimillion-dollar ransom and threatened to publish the stolen IDs. Discord failed to monitor its vendor’s security practices, and thousands paid the price.

Age-verification mandates require digital platforms to confirm a user’s age before granting access to specific content or services. That means uploading government IDs or submitting to facial scans. The stated goal is child safety. The actual effect is compulsory data surrender. These laws normalize the idea that governments can force citizens to hand over sensitive information just to use the internet.

Centralized data collection creates a jackpot for cybercriminals. As the Discord breach proves, one compromise exposes thousands — or millions — of users. Criminals can sell this information, reuse it for identity theft, or weaponize it for blackmail. The problem isn’t a one-off failure. It is structural. Age verification mandates require platforms to create consolidated databases of personally identifying information, which become single points of catastrophic failure.

The libertarian Cato Institute captures the problem: “Requiring age verification creates a trove of attractive data for hackers that could put broader information about users, particularly young users, at risk.”

Governments may insist that the Discord breach was an outlier. It wasn’t. Breaches of sensitive information are predictable in systems designed to aggregate it. Even if the motives behind the U.K.’s age-verification regime were noble, undermining privacy to advance those aims is a trade-off free societies should reject. That is why the Online Safety Act triggered an outcry far beyond the U.K.

And, as usual, legislative mandates fail to achieve their stated goals. Days after the OSA took effect, VPN downloads surged as users — including children — bypassed verification systems. Laura Tyrylyte, Nord Security’s head of public relations, told Wired that “whenever a government announces an increase in surveillance, internet restrictions, or other types of constraints, people turn to privacy tools.” Predictably, age-verification laws encourage evasion instead of compliance.

RELATED: The UK wants to enforce its censorship laws in the US. The First Amendment begs to differ.

mikkelwilliam via iStock/Getty Images

The pattern is simple: Age-verification laws degrade privacy, heighten the risk of identity theft, and fail to keep minors off restricted platforms. They make the internet less safe for everyone.

Meanwhile, policymakers remain determined to spread these mandates in the name of protecting children. The U.K. pioneered the model. Many other governments followed. Twenty-five U.S. states have adopted similar laws. The list grows each month.

But governments cannot treat data breaches as acceptable collateral damage. Millions of citizens should not be forced to trade away privacy because policymakers refuse to acknowledge the risks. The result of this approach will be more surveillance, more breaches, more stolen personal data, and a steady erosion of civil liberties.

Privacy is the backbone of liberty in a digital world. Thomas Jefferson’s warning deserves repetition: “The natural progress of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield.”

Age-verification mandates accelerate that progress — and citizens pay the price.

Homeowners' associations weren’t supposed to replace civilization



Homeowners’ associations exploded across America beginning in the 1960s. No one describes HOAs as “popular,” and the horror stories of petty rules and bureaucratic neighbors are legion. Yet more Americans fight for the privilege of buying into them every year. The reason is simple: The HOA is the last legal mechanism Americans have to artificially recreate something the country once produced organically — a high-trust society.

People want neighborhoods where streets feel safe, houses stay maintained, and neighbors behave predictably. We call these places “high trust” because people do not expect those around them to violate basic standards. Doors remain unlocked, kids play outside, and property values rise. Americans once assumed this was the natural condition of ordinary life. It never was.

Everyone complains about HOAs, but they remain the only defense against the chaos modern culture produces.

High-trust societies are not accidental. They emerge only under specific cultural conditions. Trust forms when people can understand and predict the behavior of those around them. That requires a shared standard — how to act, how to maintain property, how to handle conflict. When those standards come from a common way of life, enforcement becomes minimal. People feel free not because they reject limits, but because the limits match their instincts and expectations.

Every social order requires maintenance, but the amount varies. When most residents share the same assumptions, small gestures keep the peace. A disapproving look from Mrs. Smith over an unkempt lawn prompts action. A loud party until 1 a.m. results in lost invitations until the offender corrects the behavior. Police rarely if ever enter the picture. The community polices itself through mutual judgment.

Several preconditions make this coordination possible. Residents must share standards so violations appear obvious. They must feel comfortable addressing those violations without fear of disproportionate or hostile reactions. And they must value the esteem of their neighbors enough to respond to correction. When those conditions collapse, norms collapse with them. As New York learned during the era of broken windows, one act of disorder invites the next.

American culture and government spent the last 60 years destroying those preconditions.

Academics and media stigmatized culturally cohesive neighborhoods, and government policies made them nearly impossible to maintain. Accusations of racism, sexism, or homophobia discourage the subtle social pressure that once corrected behavior. The informal network of mothers supervising neighborhood kids vanished as more women entered the corporate workforce. And as Robert Putnam documented, social trust deteriorates as diversity increases. Residents retreat into isolation, not engagement.

The HOA attempts to reconstruct a high-trust environment under conditions that no longer support it. Ownership, maintenance, and conduct move from cultural consensus to legal contract. Residents with widely different expectations sign binding agreements dictating noise levels, lawn care, parking, paint colors, and countless other micro-regulations. A formal board replaces Mrs. Smith’s frown. Fines replace gentle rebukes. Gates and walls replace the watchful eye of neighborhood moms.

What once came from community now comes from bureaucracy.

With home prices surging, families dedicate larger portions of their wealth to their houses. Few want to gamble on declining property values because their neighborhood slips into disorder. Everyone complains about HOAs, but they remain the only defense against the chaos modern culture produces. People enter hostile, artificial arrangements where neighbors behave like informants rather than partners — because the alternative threatens their largest investment.

RELATED: Do you want Caesar? Because this is how you get Caesar

Blaze Media Illustration

This analysis is not about suburban frustration. The HOA reveals a far broader truth: Modern America replaced a high-trust society with a trustless system enforced by administrative power.

As cultural diversity rises, the ability of a population to form democratic consensus declines. Without shared standards, people cannot coordinate behavior through social pressure. To replicate the order once produced organically by culture, society must formalize more and more interactions under the judgment of third parties — courts, bureaucracies, and regulatory bodies. The state becomes the referee for disputes communities once handled themselves.

Litigiousness rises, contracts proliferate, and coercion replaces custom. The virtue of the people declines as they lose the skills required to maintain trust with their neighbors. Instead of resolving conflict directly, they appeal to ever-expanding authorities. No one learns how to build trust; they only learn how to report violations.

The HOA problem is not really about homeowners or housing costs. It is a window into how America reorganized itself. A nation once shaped by shared norms and informal enforcement now relies on legalistic frameworks to manage daily life. Americans sense the artificiality, but they see no alternative. They know something fundamental has changed. They know the culture that sustained high-trust communities no longer exists.

The HOA simply makes the loss unavoidable.

If Arctic Frost Perpetrators Don’t Go To Jail, Conservatives Will

To conservatives, Arctic Frost is a scandal. To Democrats, it’s their new baseline. And the only way to stop it is to punish them.

This city bought 300 Chinese electric buses — then found out China can turn them off at will



A city had a rude awakening when it tested its electric buses for security flaws.

Some cities have gone all-in on their dedication to renewable energy and electric public transportation, but discovering that a jurisdiction does not actually control its own public property likely was not part of the idea.

'In theory, the bus could therefore be stopped or rendered unusable.'

This turned out to be exactly the case when Ruter — the public transportation authority for Oslo, Norway — decided to run tests on its new Chinese electric buses.

Approximately 300 e-buses from Chinese company Yutong made their way to Norway earlier this year, with outlet China Buses calling it a "core breakthrough" in Chinese brands' global reach.

Yutong offers at least 15 different types of electric buses ranging from 60- to 120-passenger capacity.

As reported by Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten on Tuesday, Ruter conducted secret testing on some of its electric buses over the summer. It decided to look into one bus from a European manufacturer, as well as another from Yutong, to address cybersecurity risks.

The test results were shocking.

RELATED: Cybernetics promised a merger of human and computer. Then why do we feel so out of the loop?

Photo by Li An/Xinhua via Getty Images

Investigators discovered that the Chinese-built buses could be controlled remotely from their homeland, unlike the European vehicles.

Ruter reported that the Chinese can access software updates, diagnostics, and battery systems remotely, and, "In theory, the bus could therefore be stopped or rendered unusable by the manufacturer."

The details were described by Arild Tjomsland, who helped conduct the tests. Tjomsland is a special adviser at the University of South-Eastern Norway, according to Turkish website AA.

"The Chinese bus can be stopped, turned off, or receive updates that can destroy the technology that the bus needs to operate normally," Tjomsland reportedly said. He additionally noted that while the buses could not be steered remotely, they could still be shut down and used as leverage by bad actors.

Pravda Norway described the situation as the Chinese government essentially being able to decommission the buses at any time.

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Photo by Lyu You/Xinhua via Getty Images

Norway's transport minister praised Ruter for completing the tests and said the government would initiate a risk assessment related to countries "with which Norway does not have security policy cooperation."

Ruter's CEO, Bernt Reitan Jenssen, said the company plans on working with authorities to strengthen the cybersecurity surrounding its public infrastructure.

"We need to involve all competent authorities that deal with cybersecurity, stand together, and draw on cutting-edge expertise," Jenssen said.

As a temporary fix, Ruter revealed the buses can be disconnected from the internet by removing their SIM cards to assume "local control should the need arise."

There was no word as to whether the SIM cards are upsized for buses.

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No, ICE isn’t terrorizing innocent families with social media surveillance



A bombshell report came out over the weekend accusing Immigration and Customs Enforcement of surveying millions of Americans’ social media accounts. In what left-wing groups call an “assault on democracy and free speech,” this looks to be a major violation of American rights and freedoms.

Or ... maybe their journalistic machine isn’t telling the whole truth.

The problem

In the report, the Verge alleges that ICE has partnered with an AI-powered social media monitoring group Zignal Labs to survey the social media posts of everyday Americans as part of an online surveillance system. The platform can scan posts in 100 different languages, analyze photos and videos to pinpoint the precise location they were taken, and even review weather data thanks to a new partnership with NOAA.

If you do something illegal and you post it online, you’ve just supplied the evidence to charge your crime.

With the power to process up to 8 billion posts per day, the Verge raises serious concerns over Americans’ privacy and free speech, as if the Constitution had suddenly become precious again. And for what? According to Will Owen, the communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, the goal is to “terrorize immigrant families” and “target activists fighting back against their abuses.”

That sounds terrible, if it were true. Unfortunately for Owen, he’s missing some details.

The details

For starters, ICE isn’t targeting “immigrant families.” Anyone who’s a legal citizen or in the country under an active visa isn’t under any pressure — or terror — at all. What ICE is looking for are illegal immigrants who have broken our nation’s laws and deserve a one-way ticket back home. Owen’s first claim is incorrect.

Second, the “targeted activists” he references are the ‘mostly peaceful’ protesters that have incited violence across the U.S. The most recent attack happened last week, when an anti-ICE protester in a U-Haul truck tried to ram into Coast Guardsmen at a base in Alameda, California. Or maybe you remember the deadly shooting at an ICE facility in Texas? Perhaps I could interest you in the rising tensions in Chicago, or the active calls for violence from former media pundits, or liberals’ outright disregard for law and order relating to ICE in general. These “activists” sound more like rioters, agitators, and criminals than law-abiding citizens who simply wish to exercise their First Amendment rights. Owen just isn’t being honest.

RELATED: House Democrats' ICE 'tracker' will 'put our lives in danger': DHS agent

Photo by Mathieu Lewis-Rolland

The Verge is right about one thing, though: Social media monitoring isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, social media has been used as a political weapon for years. The Biden administration loved it, in fact. Unlike ICE, which is (allegedly) leveraging social media to bring illegal aliens and criminals to justice, the previous White House and its party apparatus preferred to target regular American citizens. Here are just a few examples:

The truth

Believe it or not, social media isn’t a private space concealed under lock and key. It’s a public square brimming with comments, photos, videos, and data. When you post online, you willingly put your content in the public eye for all to see, and many groups regularly take advantage of it. Facebook can scan your posts to serve you ads. The large language models powering AI can gobble up your data for better responses. And yes, law enforcement can see illegal activity and charge offenders under the law. It all falls under fair use.

That means, if you do something illegal in the public square, there could be consequences. If you post about illegal things, legal repercussions will follow. The same goes for an illegal alien whose crime is simply residing in the country. All it takes is a photo, video, or some piece of information that confirms their location to pursue charges or, in this case, deportation.

A final word to the wise

Although illegal aliens don’t get to enjoy the same rights as American citizens (that requires citizenship), they do have to follow the same laws. No one — legal, illegal, or otherwise — has the right to commit a crime in a public space in the United States. If you do something illegal and you post it online, you’ve just supplied the evidence to charge your crime. Generally, it’s a good idea to refrain from posting about illegal things if you don’t want to get caught. In the case of an illegal immigrant living in the United States, it’s probably better not to post at all.

If it’s ‘worse than Watergate,’ then why the media blackout?



In a sense, this is old news. In December 2021, CNN reported that the House’s January 6 committee had subpoenaed phone records of more than 100 people.

But that was mostly Trump officials, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. No surprise there. After all, the January 6 Select Committee was empaneled for the specific purpose of turning President Donald Trump into a criminal for supposedly aiding and abetting the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol.

It is well past time for the Republican Congress to fulfill its promise to hold accountable those who weaponized the federal government against Trump and his allies.

But when this story resurfaced earlier this month, there was something new, too. For one thing, the scope of the investigation was almost unbelievable — it turns out those subpoenaed phone records consisted of a staggering 30 million lines of phone data.

And when the select committee’s investigation went nowhere, one of the members — GOP malcontent and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) — informed the FBI about the phone data in Dec. 2023 when it was becoming apparent that Trump was the favorite to win the Republican nomination in 2024.

Greater than Watergate

More revelatory than the numbers of the phone records hauled in by the J6 committee was the news that the FBI had gone after these same records — and possibly more — in an effort to target Trump and his conservative allies. Not only did the agency have its eyes on Trump, it also went after nine Republican members of Congress — eight senators and a stray congressman, in an obvious effort to sweep up accomplices in the coup that never was.

Whether the FBI obtained the same phone records as the J6 committee is unclear. Kinzinger’s tip may have been moot, because an FBI memo released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) shows that by September 2023, the agency had already “conducted preliminary … analysis” on the call data of several members of Congress, including Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

According to CNN, “The FBI, as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation, used court orders in 2023 to obtain the phone records of nine GOP lawmakers.” These were not actual phone calls or text messages, but rather information about who called or texted whom and when.

Grassley posted the memo to his X account, with the message:

This document shows the Biden FBI spied on 8 of my Republican Senate colleagues during its Arctic Frost investigation into "election conspiracy." Arctic Frost later became Jack Smith's elector case against Trump.

He concluded, in all caps: “BIDEN FBI WEAPONIZATION = WORSE THAN WATERGATE.”

Which raises the question: Why did the story turn out to be a one-day wonder? Here we have the discovery of a partisan investigation seeking to uncover dirt on fellow members of Congress (if the records did indeed start with the J6 committee), or at the very least a rogue element of the executive branch targeting political enemies in the legislative branch.

As Johnson said:

They’re casting this net, this fishing expedition against members of the Senate and the House. There is no predicate. There’s no reason for this other than a fishing expedition, which, again, should outrage and shock every American.

Once again, a member of Congress implied that we are witness to a political scandal (one of many in the Biden administration) that is among the worst in our history. Yet when you do a Google search for stories related to phone toll records being subpoenaed by either the J6 committee or the FBI, virtually nothing comes up beyond Oct. 7, the day after Grassley released the memo.

Crickets …

A few news outlets reported in the following days that FBI Director Kash Patel had fired agents involved in the Arctic Frost investigation. In addition, scattered reports surfaced on Hagerty questioning why Verizon released his phone records without informing him.

Verizon told Fox News Digital:

Federal law requires companies like Verizon to respond to grand jury subpoenas. We received a valid subpoena and a court order to keep it confidential. We weren't told why the information was requested or what the investigation was about.

Grassley and Johnson followed up with their own letter to Verizon and three other telecommunication companies demanding to be supplied with the same data that was provided to the FBI or special counsel Jack Smith. In addition, the senators expressed their belief that the records should have been privileged because they concerned the official constitutional duties of certifying the 2020 presidential election.

It seems like a real story — one that deserves the full attention of the press — but where are the special investigation teams at the New York Times and the Washington Post? What have you heard about this story on CBS, NBC, and ABC newscasts? Very little if anything. Certainly nothing in comparison to the coverage provided to Watergate.

Most recently, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Smith demanding a transcribed interview and documents along with communications related to his investigation of Trump. Well and good, but that interview will be conducted in secret, as were the interviews of Smith’s subordinates — one of whom, according to Jordan, “invoked the Fifth Amendment approximately 75 times.”

RELATED: Exclusive: House Republican seeks criminal investigation into Jack Smith's alleged surveillance scheme

Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

Time for Congress to step up

It is well past time for the Republican Congress to fulfill its promise to hold accountable those who weaponized the federal government against Trump and his allies. Press releases and secret interviews won’t do the job. We need public televised hearings, with witnesses ranging from members of the J6 committee, including Kinzinger, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), and now-Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), to former FBI Director Christopher Wray and Jack Smith.

Would the legacy media networks cover it? Probably not, because as we all know by now, those outfits are still after Trump’s scalp, and they will only seek to discredit Jordan and the other congressional investigators who want to know the truth. That doesn’t mean Republicans should give up.

Watergate started as a one-day story about a botched break-in. But even without Woodward and Bernstein, the famous team of reporters from the Washington Post, the story would never have been kept quiet unless Senate Democrats and congressmen didn’t do their job.

Now it’s time for Jordan, Grassley, and Patel to do theirs.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

GOP senator to sue Jack Smith after his lawyers try gaslighting on Biden FBI surveillance



One of the Republican lawmakers targeted by the FBI during the previous administration is preparing to take several Biden officials to court, including Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by former Attorney General Merrick Garland on dubious legal grounds.

"There is absolutely nothing 'proper' about spying on your political opponents to further your own radical agenda," Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn noted on X. "This is further proof Jack Smith must be fully investigated and held accountable as soon as possible."

'These guys just hated Donald Trump, and they hated us because we supported Donald Trump.'

Earlier this month, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) published damning documents from 2023 indicating that the FBI under the Biden administration obtained private cellphone records from Blackburn and eight other Republican lawmakers during its Arctic Frost operation — an investigation that ultimately morphed into Smith's federal case against President Donald Trump regarding the 2020 election.

After a briefing by FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino on the alleged surveillance scheme — which Grassley said was worse than Watergate — Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, one of the eight GOP senators targeted, said that "we were surveilled simply for being Republicans."

Bongino indicated that the FBI obtained call logs from the affected GOP lawmakers' phone carriers for the period of Jan. 4 to Jan. 7, 2021. Smith ultimately used and disclosed the records in his 2024 indictment of President Donald Trump.

There now appears to be a reckoning under way.

For starters, the FBI has canned several agents involved in Operation Arctic Frost and opened an internal investigation.

RELATED: Exclusive: House Republican seeks criminal investigation into Jack Smith's alleged surveillance scheme

Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Rep. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and other Republican lawmakers have called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to open a criminal probe into Smith.

"The Biden administration used Operation Arctic Frost to target its political opponents by authorizing covert surveillance on elected members of the Republican Party," Brecheen told Blaze News last week. "We cannot let the Biden administration and special counsel Jack Smith get away with this direct violation of the Constitution."

Meanwhile, Grassley has written to four telecommunications companies and five federal entities demanding answers about precisely which records were turned over to Smith as part of his elector case against Trump, noting that "there are serious constitutional questions that those communications are still subject to constitutional protections."

Lawyers for Jack Smith, Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski, tried their best in a Tuesday letter to Grassley to spin the apparent surveillance of elected officials as benign and "lawful" data collection.

'I can assure you this, we will be suing the Biden DOJ, Jack Smith, and his CR-15 team.'

"A number of people have falsely stated that Mr. Smith 'tapped' senators' phones, 'spied' on their communications, or 'surveilled' their conversations," the lawyers wrote, according to the New York Times. "Toll records are historical in nature, and do not include the content of calls. Wiretapping, by contrast, involves intercepting the telecommunications in real time, which the special counsel’s office did not do."

The lawyers further characterized the covert effort to find out who the Republican lawmakers were speaking to and when as "entirely proper, lawful, and consistent with established Department of Justice policy" and claimed that Smith was authorized to seek the records by the Biden Justice Department's Public Integrity Section.

Breuer and Koski apparently engaged in some mental gymnastics to play off the alleged surveillance scheme as business as usual, comparing it to two instances where the targets were themselves under criminal investigation, namely former President Joe Biden during the classified documents probe and former Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.), who was convicted on bribery charges.

"Mr. Smith’s use of the toll records as Special Counsel was lawful and in accordance with normal investigative procedure," wrote Smith's lawyers.

Upon receipt of the letter, Grassley wrote on X, "SMELLS LIKE POLITICS."

Blackburn told Just the News that she will be suing Biden DOJ and FBI officials who targeted her, Smith in particular.

The senator suggested that the 2023 grand jury subpoena of phone records violated her First and Fourth Amendment protections of free speech and privacy; her separation of powers protection as a senator; and potentially the Stored Communications Act because Verizon, her telecommunications carrier, allegedly turned over information pertaining to where she was when she made calls.

"We know that they pulled what is called the toll data, that is every call we either made or received, the duration of the call, the individual and the number that it was to and from, and then also the physical location where we were when that call was either made or received," said Blackburn.

"I can assure you this, we will be suing the Biden DOJ, Jack Smith, and his CR-15 team, which, of course, has already been fired by [FBI Director] Kash Patel, thank goodness," noted the senator. "These guys just hated Donald Trump, and they hated us because we supported Donald Trump and we were standing with Donald Trump."

In addition to wanting to take Smith to court, Blackburn has expressed an interest in seeing the former special counsel disbarred.

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Exclusive: House Republican seeks criminal investigation into Jack Smith's alleged surveillance scheme



Since former DOJ special counsel Jack Smith's alleged surveillance scheme surfaced earlier this month, House Republicans are leading the charge to bring justice.

Republican Rep. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, a member of the Republican Study Committee, urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to open a criminal investigation into Smith for his apparent involvement with Operation Arctic Frost, according to a letter obtained by Blaze News. During former President Joe Biden's administration, the FBI obtained private cellphone information from nine Republican lawmakers, an internal document indicated, in what appears to be an ideologically motivated instance of government weaponization.

'Weaponizing the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency to spy on political opponents is what we expect from authoritarian regimes.'

Brecheen's call for an investigation is also in accordance with President Donald Trump's executive order entitled "Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government," which Trump signed the same day he was inaugurated.

Since the scandal broke, the FBI has opened an internal investigation, firing several agents who were involved in the operation. As of this writing, the Department of Justice has not yet opened a criminal investigation, leading Brecheen and his co-signatories to be the first federal group to call for a criminal investigation into the operation.

RELATED: 'WORSE THAN WATERGATE': Republicans demand answers after documents reveal FBI spied on 9 GOP lawmakers

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Image

“The Biden administration used Operation Arctic Frost to target its political opponents by authorizing covert surveillance on elected members of the Republican Party," Brecheen told Blaze News. "We cannot let the Biden administration and special counsel Jack Smith get away with this direct violation of the Constitution.”

Many prominent lawmakers, including Brecheen, have characterized the scandal as a modern-day Watergate, according to the letter obtained exclusively by Blaze News. Brecheen also warned that if high-profile politicians can have their privacy violated for ideological purposes, ordinary Americans could too.

'The Bureau could easily be directed against individual citizens.'

"The revelation that the Biden Administration directed the FBI to surveil duly elected American lawmakers is indeed a scandal of magnitude our country has not seen since Watergate," the letter reads. "Let us be clear: weaponizing the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency to spy on political opponents is what we expect from authoritarian regimes such as North Korea or Iran, not the United States."

RELATED: Corrupt Stacey Abrams groups once led by Sen. Raphael Warnock go extinct after admission of guilt

Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

"The ramifications of this unprecedented scandal, however, stretch far beyond the lawmakers who were surveilled," the letter reads. "By empowering federal agents to secretly monitor the private phone calls of sitting United States Senators, Jack Smith set the sinister precedent that the same form of covert surveillance can and will be deployed against law-abiding American citizens."

"If the FBI could be so readily weaponized against powerful figures in our government, then it is not difficult to conclude that the Bureau could easily be directed against individual citizens."

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How Bill Gates and friends turned global health into a profit machine — at your expense



Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing network of nongovernmental organizations, politicians, and corporations have pushed for sweeping global health initiatives. They lobby for massive funding, insisting it will prevent the next international health crisis.

Groups such as the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, and the U.S. government have saturated the media with calls for “equity” and “preparedness.” Together, they established the Pandemic Fund — a financial pool designed to channel money into their shared vision of global health management.

It takes little imagination to see how a fund directed by Gates-linked institutions could steer money — intentionally or not — toward companies in which he holds a stake.

According to its website, the Pandemic Fund “finances critical investments to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response capacities at national, regional, and global levels, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.” In practice, it serves as a central clearinghouse for governments, NGOs, and business coalitions to move money under the banner of “health security.”

The funds flow to “implementing entities” such as the World Bank; the WHO; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and UNICEF. These organizations, in turn, decide how the investments are distributed — and to whom. Each claims to act on behalf of public health, but their reach and influence often extend far beyond medicine into politics, surveillance, and control.

Convenient ambiguity

Who actually gets paid to implement these objectives? What do “surveillance” and “prevention” mean in practice? How is “preparedness” measured? Which corporations manage the process, and whose services are contracted for the lab upgrades? None of these questions has a straight answer. The fund’s language reads like a bureaucratic fog — dense, opaque, and unaccountable.

What the Pandemic Fund does provide is a clear list of donors: the United States, the Gates Foundation, and several European governments. It also highlights 47 active projects spanning 75 countries.

What it doesn’t provide is equally telling. The site omits the names of officials who manage the money in each country, the ownership of the laboratories, and the companies installing the surveillance systems. Even the identities of those delivering “medical support” remain concealed behind the veil of “global cooperation.”

Conflicts of interest

Beyond its opacity, the Pandemic Fund is riddled with conflicts of interest. The Gates Foundation ranks among its largest institutional donors, while Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, acts as an “implementing entity” responsible for distributing those same funds.

Gavi’s own website acknowledges that the Gates Foundation was both a founding partner and a seed donor, contributing $750 million at its launch in 2000. That relationship alone should raise questions. Gavi now helps allocate the Pandemic Fund’s grants, meaning one of its original funders plays a direct role in deciding where new money goes.

The potential conflicts run deeper. Bill Gates has invested heavily in Moderna and BioNTech, two of the world’s leading mRNA vaccine manufacturers. The Gates Foundation funded Moderna’s early mRNA work, and public records show that Gates himself owns more than 1 million shares of BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to produce the COVID-19 vaccine.

It takes little imagination to see how a fund directed by Gates-linked institutions could steer money — intentionally or not — toward companies in which he holds a stake.

The web of influence extends into policy enforcement. The World Health Organization’s director-general oversees the International Health Regulations, a global framework that allows governments to impose quarantine, testing, or vaccination requirements during declared health emergencies. The United States accepted the IHR in 2005 but rejected the most recent amendments adopted in 2024, formally withdrawing from those obligations in July of this year.

Even so, the structure remains in place. If Washington — or any other government — adopted tighter compliance measures, it could channel money from the Pandemic Fund to purchase vaccines and “countermeasures.” Pharmaceutical companies would profit handsomely from policies that treat mass vaccination as the first and only line of defense. The more the world relies on vaccines as a universal solution, the more secure the profits for investors like Gates.

The Gates Foundation’s influence doesn’t stop at funding or investment. It appears on the WHO’s list of official “non-state actors,” a category that allows direct collaboration on projects and participation in committee meetings. In other words, the foundation helps set global health standards and then funds the programs that enforce them.

RELATED: Researchers tied to Fauci’s COVID cover-up still scoring big NIH grants

Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

American taxpayers foot the bill

At the end of the chain, American taxpayers pay for it all. Washington’s seemingly benevolent $700 million “donation” to the Pandemic Fund comes straight from the U.S. Treasury. Every dollar funneled into this global health consortium began as someone’s paycheck.

In practice, the fund operates less like a charity and more like a taxpayer-financed slush fund for international health bureaucrats and private interests. The U.S. government collects money from citizens, passes it through the fund, and watches as the Gates Foundation, the WHO, and their network of NGOs redirect it to vaccine manufacturers, foreign governments, and organizations with which they maintain deep financial and institutional ties.

This system of influence moves wealth in one direction — up and out. Money leaves the hands of American workers and flows to a global health elite that hides behind the language of “pandemic prevention.” The slogans of safety and preparedness disguise a network that rewards insiders and deepens the dependence it claims to end.

Congress and federal auditors need to dig into where this money actually goes and who profits from it. Americans deserve to know whether their taxes support genuine public health or line the pockets of the same institutions that cashed in during the last pandemic.