There’s a wonderful scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where Frodo tells Gandalf that he wishes the Ring had never come to him. Gandalf replies, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” After reading Auron MacIntyre’s recent release, The Total State, I found myself feeling a bit like Frodo.

MacIntyre, who is a BlazeTV host and entertaining tweeter, makes an extended case that our liberal democracies — which we are constantly told are the freest societies in human history — are in fact forms of soft totalitarianism, a “total state.” Like so many, Covid was MacIntyre’s “red pill” moment. He watched as constitutional protections were swept aside under the pretext of “public safety.” This “state of emergency” lasted three years, notwithstanding mounting evidence that Covid was not nearly as dangerous as it initially seemed. After all the lies and excesses, there were no apologies, fines, or charges. Just a desperate attempt by elites to memory-hole it all.

A Different Political Lineage

The Total State makes some familiar, almost indisputable arguments. Our administrative state has become bloated, unaccountable, and self-interested. The revolving door between public and private service can lead to moral hazards and corruption. Tastemakers at elite institutions — Hollywood, Harvard, Yale, The Washington Post, The New York Times — do not engage in Darwinian competition where only the best art and

A recently published inspector general report, paired with newly released transcripts of one FBI official’s 2023 interview with the House Judiciary Committee, shows that the FBI’s strategy for retaliating against whistleblowers involved suspending their security clearances without explanation or warning.

Jennifer Leigh Moore, who served as executive assistant director for the FBI’s human resources branch until her retirement in June 2023, told congressional investigators that she is “adamant for every employee to be treated fairly and accurately” and that her “whole management principle is around ‘be kind.’”

“No matter what we’re doing, if we’re suspending a clearance, if we’re bringing on board an employee, or if we’re at a retirement, we are always kind,” she told the House Judiciary Committee in April 2023.

Moore and her agency’s actions regarding retaliation against whistleblowers, however, suggest otherwise.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan expressed strong concerns that the FBI initiated a targeted “purge” of employees with dissenting views last year. Moore first testified to the committee about the issue in April 2023 but refused to comment any time she was asked about several agents who suffered suspensions.

She claimed she was “not allowed to discuss ongoing security investigations,” prompting the House Judiciary Committee to subpoena her for refusing “to answer questions during her transcribed interview about the FBI’s retaliation against brave whistleblowers who have come forward.”

Special Agent Garret O’Boyle, Special Agent Stephen Friend, Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill, and Staff Operations Specialist Marcus Allen all testified to Congress in

As a Nevada law allowing mail ballots received up to four days after Election Day to be counted faces a legal challenge, a fresh look at Nevada’s 2022 vote count reveals the potentially election-flipping number of mail ballots that were counted despite arriving after Election Day. In just Clark County, nearly 40,000 mail ballots were counted that arrived in the days after voting supposedly ended, roughly 5 percent of the county’s total ballot count.

In that same election, Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt led Democrat incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto on election night but eventually lost by less than 8,000 votes statewide. For comparison, two years prior, Joe Biden narrowly beat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election in Nevada by 33,596 votes.

In the closing days of battleground Nevada’s crucial 2022 U.S. Senate race, Laxalt pulled ahead of incumbent Cortez Masto. On Oct. 21, leftist organ Politico fretted over news that Laxalt had “inched ahead” of Cortez Masto as a “bad sign” for Dems, considering the former Nevada attorney general was down by 3 points a month earlier.

“Cortez Masto was long seen as the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the Senate, the most likely to fall should a ‘red wave’ sweep the country and punish Democrats this midterm season,” wrote Vox senior politics reporter Christian Paz shortly after the election.  

But the wave never materialized for Republicans in a midterm election that was supposed to be a referendum on an extremely unpopular president. While the