Due to the recent exit of Lt. Gov. Brent Sanford, Gov. Doug Burgum has yet another vacancy to fill to round out his administration before the local tech titan sets his sights on a third run in 2024. The governor had previously announced an aggressive agenda for the Legislature’s next session, which is bound to do nothing to change the testy dynamic between the two.

On the whole, Gov. Burgum has proven to be a popular and capable leader for the state. He’s managed statewide disasters and cultivated new industries to broaden the state’s economy, namely in the realms of crypto and Big Data. The frozen north became a viable landing place for the data centers of Big Crypto and Big Data, figuratively ripe for the picking precisely because we have surplus of space and unused energy.

Given recent events, maybe selling off our limited resources to this industry should be given some reconsideration. Despite this, Gov. Burgum has apparently soaked up the crypto Flavor Aid, assuring North Dakotans growing uneasy with the Soviet cavalcade of red flags that there is no cause for concern.

This refrain, for us to “trust,” and take on faith rather than verification, is a common one from frauds promising impossible things in a lame attempt to dance around the fact that they are producing nothing. At least we can count on freeloaders like Elon Musk to at least produce a car or get a rocket in the air every one and a while, whereas the Bankman-Frieds of the world produce nothing but air.

What remains inexplicable is how time and time again people like Bit Zero and FTX investor Kevin O’Leary were duped into banging the drum in support of “the next big thing,” only for those most affected being the rank-and-file citizen or end user influenced to buy into what was often an obvious black box Ponzi scheme the entire time.

While that intersection between the seats of power and industry has been quite troubling, it’s just one example of what can go wrong when these behind-the-scenes, back scratching and palm greasing operations metastasize into something even more terminal. But who is really the “mark” being played here?

It would seem as though our leaders in business and politics are as oblivious to the succession of ruses cooked up by these characters as a gullible 12-year-old who has gotten ahold of their parent’s credit card to buy a Bored Ape NFT. That said, what they definitely understand is how these systems can be leveraged in the name of power and control.

What Gov. Burgum and these companies setting up shop in our state are anticipating is a future where the Federal Government and the Federal Reserve finally pull the trigger on codifying a so-called “digital dollar.”

This new digital currency would be modeled after anonymous decentralized blockchain currencies like Bitcoin, that is without the anonymity or decentralization. What is troubling is that such a transition would usher in an era where every purchase, payment, paycheck or donation will be logged, tracked and stored forever in the Selfish Ledger.

The only example we need to illustrate the evil made possible by such a system is China’s Social Credit System, which invariably elicits assurances that such an atrocity could not happen here. Given recent events, I think we all know that it definitely would. In some ways it’s already here, and we know this because of how many people have been proven to be gaslighting liars in recent weeks.

The one thing we can credit Elon Musk for accomplishing with his takeover of Twitter was ripping back the curtain to air out all of the chicanery going on behind the scenes. What has been lost for the most part in the partisan muddle obfuscating and spotlighting the various threads of the Twitter Files has suddenly been brought center stage.

The fact that the FBI was not simply recommending and directing the censorship efforts of the site was verified by the FBI itself. While calling their critics “conspiracy theorists” out of one corner of their mouth they also confirmed that Twitter was just one of many companies they’ve deputized into service censoring anything the agency doesn’t want the plebs saying, thinking or reading. But don’t you dare take issue with them doing it.

What has also been driven home by the journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and now Michael Schellenberger is that it was not simply a revolving door between the law enforcement and intelligence arms of the Federal bureaucracy; it was a coordinated capture. The FBI effectively funneled former agents into roles within Twitter, maintaining their own internal slack channels where they could coordinate amongst themselves. What about? We don’t know, but we can guess pretty easily at this point.

Further the FBI provided temporary clearance for senior employees to view classified documentation to gaslight them into buying the idea that a certain report from a newspaper whose name rhymes with Few Spork Most was about to drop was bogus Russian propaganda, when they knew very well that it wasn’t. And that was while they weren’t spending most of their time policing random low-follow users for jokes and memes they didn’t like. And we thought J. Edgar Hoover was petty.

They had to abandon ethics, truth and morals in order to “save Democracy,” a theme also present in the progressive “save the world” rhetoric disingenuously spouted by characters like Bankman-Fried. Everyone wants to view themselves as the hero, and it really is amazing how easily some of these people were able to delude themselves that was true while they did what they did.

Given the Federal government’s efforts to control the flow of information and police discourse, how can we trust them to be in charge of a system that allows them to know literally everything about us and have absolute control over our ability to exercise inalienable rights?