A Formula Playing Out

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | May 10, 2025

First, we have to tear things down, demonizing both people and institutions.

Human enemies are easy enough to define—we’ll call people here illegally rapists, murderers, released prisoners, and mental patients. We’ll describe Muslims, and most anybody from a Muslim-dominant country, as terrorists.

That way, people who look a little different, speak a different language, or believe a different religion become easy targets. The easily identified external enemies become targets for investigation, harassment, deportation, and worse. Defending them becomes difficult once we start to tear down institutions on which the public has traditionally relied.

We’ll start by denigrating the media over and over again. We’ll call them the “lame stream media,” spewing “fake news.” We’ll challenge every story, we’ll sue them if we don’t like the stories, we’ll create our own “alternate facts” to be repeated by media outlets, print and electronic, we do like. We’ll repeat the same lies so often with such intensity that at least some people will begin to believe them.

We’ll try to control the content and flow of information by claiming the media are hopelessly biased. We’ll then threaten and investigate even the most benign websites if they contain any information we don’t like because control is the goal. We’ll give special privileges to those willing to regurgitate anything and everything we say, like a special press briefing for supportive online “influencers.”

Once we’ve trained people to stop believing their traditional sources of information, we can start inserting our own. That will require discrediting the intellectuals and scientists who might contradict us, so we’ll use the same formula of attacks and lies that worked so well against the media.

We’ll claim the best colleges and universities are out of touch “elitists” (never mind all of us attended those schools) that are “indoctrinating” our children with radical ideologies that don’t represent real American values. When they don’t agree to change their ways, we’ll strip away their federal funding, making it impossible for them to conduct research that might contradict our new “facts.”

We’ll contradict science and censor real historians and create our own reality. We’ll change history itself by removing uncomfortable facts and replacing them with comforting fantasy. We’ll claim our K-12 education curricula is grooming and more indoctrination so we can replace it with our own actual grooming and indoctrination.

Science can be an extremely inconvenient impediment to our goal of creating and controlling information and facts, so we’ll eliminate as many government scientist jobs as possible and we’ll replace them with people who are not scientists at all but who agree with us. For example, we’ll hire someone to investigate the efficacy of vaccines who was once convicted of practicing medicine without a license. His boss calls him a “great healer.” Perfect. We’ll slash budgets for scientific endeavors, including grants to non-government organizations, and we’ll eliminate those positions we deem insufficiently loyal to our new causes.

Controlling Congress and local politicians was pretty easy. Already with a majority in both houses, threats, intimidation, and the promise of supporting someone else in a primary election were enough to fully remove the spinal columns of enough politicians that many others nervously fell in line.

We’ll take out potential military resistance by firing the star officers who have not kowtowed sufficiently.

We’ll have to lower expectations in order to maintain control because much of what we have planned benefits us and almost no one else. We’ll tout the notion of multiple generations working in factories and tell people their daughters don’t need all those dolls; two that might cost a little more will be sufficient, along with five pencils. Less for your children is enough, scarcity for all is good.

Now that we’ve gained some control of the media and education, debunked science, frightened politicians into complete acquiescence, reduced military impediments, and lowered expectations, we'll have to go after a remaining fly in our totalitarian ointment: the courts.

We’ll use the usual insults and denigration to try to bully them into obedience, call them radicals or rogue or extreme, and even use the threat of impeachment or jail when they make a decision we don’t like. Plus, they are always referencing that annoying Constitution that’s in the way of our goal of total control. Maybe we’ll just ignore court orders.

Presidents swear an oath of office: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Last week an NBC reporter asked our president: “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” His answer? “I don’t know.”

Autocrats and wannabe autocrats have a formula we’re watching play out right now. Our president doesn’t know if he has to uphold our Constitution—their goal is in sight.