The People vs. Flock (+ Redpill Real Talk)

Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

Does it get more quintessentially American than illegally knocking off Flock cameras that enable the government to conduct illegal mass surveillance of the “citizens” whom it doesn’t actually view as citizens at all but rather as cattle?

Via WUSA9:

“A growing number of Flock surveillance cameras are being intentionally vandalized across the country, including in Virginia, as critics raise concerns about privacy and how the data collected by the cameras could be shared among law enforcement agencies.
Arlington County police confirmed to WUSA9 that two Flock cameras were spray-painted on May 31. No suspect description has been released.
Flock cameras are automated license plate readers that use artificial intelligence to record when and where a vehicle is seen, along with its license plate, make and model. The cameras can also identify distinguishing characteristics, such as roof racks, bumper stickers and other visible features…
“I think the police need these tools,” said Sean Kennedy with Virginians for Safe Families*. “These tools aren’t new, and the hysteria around Flock cameras and some of these surveillance tools is overblown.”
Kennedy also noted that courts have consistently held that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on public roadways, making the recording of vehicles traveling on public streets constitutional.
“This vandalism or any type of vigilante action against these license plate readers is unwarranted,” Kennedy said. “You have every right to change the law and change the allowances, but you have no right to destroy public property.””

Rash of vigilante attacks on Flock cameras across American cities pic.twitter.com/Ap6Fhs0iju
— Ben Bartee (@BenBartee) July 13, 2026

* “Virginians for Safe Families”!

What kind of monster could be against “safe families”?

Obviously, domestic terrorists hate safe families.

(As we covered last month, the Department of Homeland Security recently manufactured a convenient new enemy at which to hurl its enormous resources and justify its ever-expanding budget: “anti-technology extremists.”)

Flock CEO Garrett Langley, whose X profile description reads “Safety is a fundamental right,” condemned, in an interview last year with Forbes, the Flock monitoring organization DeFlock as a “terrorist organization” akin to Antifa:

“You’ve got organizations like the ACLU… who take an above aboard [sic] approach to fight for their point of view. And thankfully we live in a beautifully democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight in court. And I have a lot of respect for those groups** because they have reasonable debates and we follow the law…
And then unfortunately, there’s terrorist organizations like DeFlock, whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else and that I think is unfortunate….
I like law and order. I like a society that is a bedrock of safety.”

Flock CEO Garrett Langley disparages opponents of his mass surveillance regime as "antifa" terrorists pic.twitter.com/XeXE3Wfce9
— Ben Bartee (@BenBartee) July 13, 2026

**Of course, Langley appreciates groups like the ACLU because they’re the feckless, milquetoast controlled opposition that is never going to win anything. In fact, as we’ve discussed here before, the ACLU barely even pretends to care about constitutional civil liberties anymore and is primarily focused on promoting transgenderism.

Look at those eyes; fathom the nothingness.

You could swear that they make these people — Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, this guy — in CIA factories somewhere.

They all have the same transparently bullshit origin story about being a go-gooder Boy Scout philanthropist tinkering in the garage to develop a product purely out of an altruistic desire to improve society with no help whatsoever from shadowy entities along the way.

In this case, Langley claims in another section of the above interview to have started making cameras by hand literally “at his kitchen table” because, by golly, goshdarnit, he just wanted to help with the crime rate!

(Langley does the “kitchen table” talking point in the same way politicians love invoking “kitchen table” issues to make themselves sound less totally disconnected from the reality of their constituents, whom they view not just as cattle but as totally asinine cattle whom they can simply bombard into submission with meaningless platitudes like “kitchen table” issues while recording campaign ads in front of a folksy pickup truck they’ve never driven once in their miserable lives.)

As for the “fighting crime” narrative that Flock employs, the reality is that crime is a social problem.

Rampant crime is the byproduct of a low-trust, atomized, nihilistic culture wherein the most sociopathic members of society rise to the top because they’re willing to do and say whatever they have to and the rabble, understanding intuitively that they live in a kleptocracy and bound together by nothing, simply adopt the same mentality as the corrupt leadership class, only on a pettier level, like looting Target in “mostly peaceful” protests against imaginary racism.

Yet, instead of fixing the culture, the offered solution, which isn’t a solution at all but only serves to further empower the corrupt ruling class, is simply mass surveillance and a police state, which many people will beg for when their cars keep getting broken into and white people keep getting stabbed on the subway by repeat violent offenders let out of jail by some George Soros DA.

This is anarcho-tyranny, which is no longer an abstract conspiracy theory as much as a description of reality in the modern West.

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Redpill real talk

Manually dismantling Flock cameras one by one, if cathartic, is an ineffective strategy for three main reasons:

· It’s a game of whac-a-mole; the company, armed with billions of dollars in government contracts in the aggregate, can repair them or build new ones faster than dissidents could realistically tear them down
· All the vandalism really does is give the government the excuse to crack the whip harder
· There already exist dozens of other means for the state authorities and/or the private entities they contract with to effectively track the peasants. Even if Flock went away tomorrow, the problem remains.

You can argue with these people until the cows come home.

You can plead.

You can moralize.

You can appeal to their better angels.

But they don’t care that no one wants their pantopican surveillance state; they’re going to build it anyway, and if you cause them any real problems other than feckless complaining on social media (which they might also turn into a criminal offense for good measure if they get tired of listening to it), they’re going to throw you into prison or, as Palantir CEO Alex Karp once fantasized, have a drone spray you with fentanyl-laced urine.

They just do whatever they want; your protestations mean nothing to them.

The only people with the legal means to stop them are a handful of imminently corruptible and/or totally clueless senators, congressman, governors, presidents, county commissioners or city councilors who will sell their flock, as it were, down the river in a heartbeat with some modest bribes and starry-eyed rhetoric about fighting crime.

They just do whatever they want, and they feel entitled because no one stops them.

There is no social contract; these people don’t believe in a social contract, insofar as it might constrain their behavior in any way.

They’ll pretend to believe in the social contract, of course, when they’re siccing the government on “domestic terrorists” who oppose their terrorism, but that’s purely tactical, not ideological.

Even if you somehow managed to get a politician elected to local, state, or national office who was serious about protecting civil liberties and dismantling the surveillance state, they’d dredge up some fruitcake who just remembered that he raped her five years ago, who will then be interviewed by a credulous and highly sympathetic Jake Tapper on CNN. Everyone else in elected office will then pretend to believe her and condemn the alleged rapist until he’s forced to quit politics, because if they don’t then another fruitcake will appear out of the ether with a “recovered memory” about them raping her too.

Everything is fake and gay.

The social contract is a lie.

Maybe it was always a lie, but in 2026 it’s definitely a lie — and a cynical one at that, designed to hamstring resistance to the limitless ambitions of sociopathic tech nerds.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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