The Ruling Elite, the National Archives, and the 1984 Blueprint for Tyranny
Orwell was right about building an authoritarian state...and the people in power were listening.
“Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?”
“No.”
“Then where does the past exist, if at all?”
“In records. It is written down.”
“In records. And-?”
“In the mind. In human memories.”
“In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?”
To their credit, our ruling elite have long been studious followers of George Orwell. They understood, as Orwell did, that any authoritarian regime requires just two things to gain and maintain power: a system to control the minds of the people and a means to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
Sometime in 2007, soon after powerful leftist politicians and members of the intelligence community decided that Barack Obama would be the Democratic Presidential nominee - and eventual winner - the ruling elite launched their plan for an authoritarian takeover of this country based on Orwell’s ‘1984’ blueprint.
Their first task was easy. They already had a system in place to control the minds of the American people: A compliant mainstream media that would obediently promote any narrative their tyrannical masters fed to them.
What the ruling elite didn’t have was a means to destroy the American public’s understanding of its past.
As students of Orwell, they knew 1984’s protagonist, Winston Smith, was a records manager at Oceania’s ironically named Ministry of Truth, where he routinely destroyed government records (via the ‘memory hole’), and replaced them with new, revised records that fit the Party’s latest version of Oceania’s past.
America’s ruling elite were drooling at the thought of having this ability, too.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” - George Orwell
So, continuing to follow the 1984 Blueprint, they began to plan their corruption of our own version of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth, the National Archives and Records Administration.
The first thing the ruling elite did was reach out to one of their own, a powerful leftist billionaire named David Rubenstein, who, coincidentally, had already begun a personal crusade to change the stated purpose of the National Archives from preserving our country’s (imperfect) history to functioning as a repository of records documenting what Rubenstein considered America’s many past injustices.
They explained to Rubenstein their intention to corrupt the National Archives and Records Administration and tasked him with finding a likeminded person they could rely on who future-President Obama could nominate as Archivist of the United States as soon as he was inaugurated.
Rubenstein knew just the right man, a lifelong Marxist librarian named David Ferriero, who had been vice provost for library affairs at Duke University from 1996 to 2004, when Rubenstein was chair of the Duke Board of Trustees.
Soon after contacting Rubenstein, the ruling elite reached out to yet another one of their own, Microsoft founder and longtime member of the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and made Gates an offer.
They promised Gates that if he used his power and influence to support Obama’s candidacy and his agenda during his time in the White House, they would ensure that his company would eventually have total control over all the digitally recorded information created and preserved by the United States government - the largest, most valuable corpus of information ever assembled.
Naturally, Gates accepted their offer.
On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. The very next day, Obama signed Executive Order 13489 - Presidential Records, which established executive privilege by incumbent and former Presidents in connection with the release of Presidential records by the National Archives and Records Administration. It would be the first of many executive orders and new laws affecting Federal records management and the National Archives that the Obama administration would create during his two terms in office.
On July 28, 2009, President Obama nominated David Ferriero to be the 10th Archivist of the United States and lead the National Archives and Records Administration. Ferriero had a quick confirmation and was sworn in on November 13, 2009.
Once installed as Archivist of the United States, Ferriero systematically destroyed any progress the Federal government had made in transitioning government records from information recorded on paper to information that was born digitally and maintained throughout its lifecycle in an electronic format. This effectively ended any authentic records management practices anywhere across the Executive Branch of the Federal government.
From an historical perspective alone, this was an unimaginable tragedy for our country. There is a fourteen-year-old hole in American history that will never be filled. And it continues to grow unchecked every day.
But equally as tragic, Ferriero’s destruction of the governmentwide system of records management resulted in ending any possibility of the American public preserving its Constitutional right to hold the government accountable for anything it says or does.
Since Ferriero’s first days as Archivist of the United States, any scandal, any crime, any illegal intelligence operation the Federal government or the White House has committed has had its roots - in part or in whole - in Ferriero’s dismantling of the Federal records management system. This also continues unabated today.
At the same time Ferriero was putting an end to Federal records management, he was also working to fulfill the obligation the ruling elite had to Bill Gates by putting the full force of National Archives into promoting Microsoft’s products and services for exclusive use across every agency in the Federal government. (Often this was done in ways that were clearly illegal yet completely ignored by Congress, the President, and the media.)
In short order, Microsoft, once an equal competitor with several other information management and cloud services companies in the Federal market, began its meteoric rise to dominance at every level of the Federal government.
Today, Microsoft is on the verge of controlling every piece of recorded information the government creates. They are poised to crawl and analyze, not just the billions of electronic records at the National Archives, but the hundreds of billions of records maintained by the nearly 200 agencies across the entire Executive Branch of the Federal government.
The priceless information scraped from these records will be fed into AI systems that will allow Microsoft to build algorithms of unimaginable power, giving Bill Gates, former members of the Obama regime, and members of the ruling elite total control over more than just the activities of the Federal government, but the daily lives of every American citizen.
Just as Winston Smith’s entire life was controlled and surveilled by his government, citizens of our country are months - not years - from the same fate.
Ever the cynic, George Orwell, who wrote ‘1984’ as a warning, would probably enjoy the irony knowing that the American government is poised to be in the same position as his fictious Oceania - and our ruling elite have done it by following his own 1984 Blueprint.
I always wonder why republicans didn't make any attempt to stop this.
Librarians just might be the most important people in the world.