Kerby Anderson
John Whitehead has been warning us about the growing surveillance state in America for decades. The increase in surveillance has taken place under both Republican and Democratic presidents. But he is seeing another element that concerns him even more.
To illustrate it, he reminds us of the Steven Spielberg movie, Minority Report. This dystopian film is set in the future “where police agencies harvest intelligence from widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, [and] precognitive technology.” The goal is to stop a crime before it takes place.
He reports that we have more than 123 real-time crime centers in the country. This is where local police agencies can upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data along with other data and intelligence gathered from state and federal agencies. This comes not only from surveillance cameras but includes facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, and social media monitoring.
The natural reaction from some people is that we shouldn’t be concerned about all this surveillance if we have nothing to hide. In fact, I heard that very comment last week in a meeting I attended.
Yes, you should be concerned because even saying the wrong word or attending the wrong meeting can turn you into a suspect. He mentions a few harmless words that can be trigger words for certain algorithms. Attend a political rally and you might be listed as a potential threat. Leaked materials have shown these centers tracking people at rallies for racial justice, environmental issues, conservative issues, and third-party candidates.
Authors like George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Phillip K. Dick warned about a future police state. This election you need to ask candidates what they plan to do about this growing surveillance state in America.

Kerby Anderson
Victor Davis Hanson argues that the “end of affirmative action was inevitable.” He provided ten reasons why it died. Here are five of them.
First, “supporters of racial preferences always pushed back the goalposts for the program’s success.” How long was this reverse bias supposed to last? We never heard a clear answer.
Second, “the true barometer of privilege was rendered meaningless.” He talks about “truly privileged” people (like Barack and Michelle Obama) lecturing the country about its unfairness, “as if they had it far rougher than the impoverished deplorable of East Palestine, Ohio.”
Third, affirmative action supporters were never able to explain why the racial sins of prior generations fell on individuals today. And why should “those who had never experienced institutionalized racism, much less Jim Crow,” be collectively compensated today?
He also argues that there was never a “rainbow” coalition of shared non-white victimhood. For example, Asians have been subjected to “coerced internment, immigration restrictions, and zoning exclusions.” Yet they as a racial group do better economically and have longer life expectancies than any other racial group.
Finally, intermarriage and mass migration made it more and more difficult to adjudicate affirmative action standards. Tiger Woods is half Asian-American, a quarter Anglo-American, an eighth African-American and an eighth Native-American. Then you have Senator Elizabeth Warren claiming to be Harvard’s first Native-American law professor.
These are just a few reasons why the end of affirmative action was inevitable. Although the media failed to report it, most Americans agreed with the Supreme Court’s decision and were ready for affirmative action to end.