The Surveillance State Safety Pimps and Their Fundamental Contempt For Human Liberty

Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and [nanny-state techno-twinks].”
-Thomas Jefferson

I reported recently on the ongoing drama surrounding the erection of 100,000+ Flock cameras across America and the valiant, if ultimately futile, Whac-A-Mole efforts by patriot vigilantes to fell them one by one like rotten, dying trees.

What often goes unremarked upon, which I noted in passing in the last report, is that Flock’s full company name is actually “Flock Safety,” and that the provision of “public safety” is the primary elevator pitch the purveyors of this product have used to pimp their wares — to the extent they’ve felt compelled at all to convince the public of their merit. (Their preferred method is simply to game the approval process in local government and skip the whole pesky “public debate” farce. Like defense contractors, their client, after all, is the state and not the general public — a niche market that only necessitates passive buy-in from the populace.)

In the same motif, Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley’s X bio leads with the nebulous and audacious motto: “Safety is a fundamental right.”

“Safety,” as defined by tech entrepreneurs, isn’t just a right; it’s a fundamental right.

As far as I’ve seen, Langley has never exposited how he determined safety to be a “fundamental right”; it’s apparently just meant to be taken axiomatically as self-evidently true.

But whatever could “safety is a fundamental right” — assuming it is meant to mean anything beyond “give me public money to spy on the public for profit because I’m a literal fascist” — actually mean?

The implication of safety as a “fundamental right,” as rights are things the government is obliged by the social contract to ensure, is that any instance in which the government is not guaranteeing safety is a failure to fulfill its duty.

If it is obliged to ensure safety at all times, safety being a “fundamental right,” there is virtually no human activity the government could not regulate or outright ban, as risk is inherent in almost everything:

· Consensual sex would be banned because there is some unavoidable risk of STD transmission
· Guns? Wave goodbye to those, obviously
· Nicotine is off the table
· All-American alcohol-fueled fireworks fun is clearly a non-starter
· Everyone, not just the developmentally challenged, might just need to wear a helmet at all times in public because head injuries can unexpectedly strike at any moment
· Peanuts will be forever banned from any public space because some kid with a vaccine-induced allergy downwind might catch a whiff and die (the “vaccine-induced” part would go unmentioned by the authorities, obviously)
· Since words can be violence, according to the progressive left and, increasingly, elements of the censorious right — some nonsense called “stochastic terrorism” — and as violence is inherently unsafe, we can just go ahead and trash the First Amendment along with the Second and Fourth. Just to be safe, let’s nuke the whole Bill of Rights.

Imagine literally any human behavior at random, and it’s guaranteed the state could come up with a rationale to outlaw in on the basis of its intrinsic unsafety.

And what can we surmise is going to happen when the time comes for the Pandemic 2.0 lockdown regime in the name of “safety” now that the government, more and more with time, has the ability to track the peasants’ movements in real time?

Perhaps the difference between a suggestion and an enforceable order is merely the ability to monitor compliance.

“Imagine the compliance!”

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla salivates over "the compliance" achieved by nanochips in drugs that emit signals to confirm when the patient takes the pill pic.twitter.com/EeDDbXpfBa
— Ben Bartee (@BenBartee) July 10, 2026

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Safetyism, then, exists fundamentally and permanently at odds with libertarianism (“libertarianism” not in the sense of the holistic political ideology but in the narrow sense of the primacy of liberty to political doctrine).

You can have a free society, or you can turn society into a giant rubber-room full of adult children; these are mutually exclusive scenarios. Hence the Benjamin Franklin quote we all know and love about giving up essential liberty for a little temporary (and illusory) safety.

The Savage declares his counter-right to safetyism

“’All right then,” said the savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’
There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.’”
-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Parenthetically, “safety is a fundamental right” reflects a glaringly female-coded prioritization of safety over other values/concepts with which it is in unavoidable competition, such as liberty, courage, risk-taking, and heroism. Without the feminist revolution, the constant appeal to “safety” would probably not have the same purchase within the public psyche as it does in 2026. Living in the Third World largely untouched by Western feminism (not for lack of trying by Western social engineers), you don’t see nearly as much invocation of “safety” in policy sales pitches.

The impetus for this article was not to promote my avant-garde expat book, but I did devote a large portion of it to the relevant exploration of the decidedly Western concept of “human rights” and how well they are received, or not, in the Third World.

Via Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile:

“To question human rights makes you something akin to a Nazi sympathizer; a deplorable, as Hillary Clinton might say; an unthinkable monster.
Rights add up by the day. No one ever subtracts rights from the apparitional list some authority keeps somewhere — rights are only added. More and more rights, all the time, until the full utopia is birthed.
They catch on like fashion trends — designed by influential hipster professors and decorated attorneys with lawsuits to file on behalf of their new class of fresh-pressed clients.
Their fresh-pressed clients, the decorated civil rights attorneys will say in court, have been brutalized for centuries, even millennia, by state-of-the-art 2017-edition bigot oppressors violating their client-victims’ newly-issued inalienable rights.
Whenever a new right hits the market, trendy sociology professors and established academics parrot each other telethon-echo-chamber-schizophrenia-style until the chic new right is firmly enshrined in Western values — inalienable, unquestionable, and irrefutable…
Universal rights this and human rights that — it never ends. It goes on and on. By the day more and more rights are manufactured assembly-line-style by shiftless, empty-eyed wormy sons of b****es at the UN or Amnesty International or wherever.
Then, after they pump them out, the same bureaucrats who focus-grouped them hocus pocus-style into the public psychology go on to pretend like the new “rights” for “protected classes” weren’t just whispered into existence five minutes before… like they aren’t twisted figments of depraved Western imagination with an unfixable fixation on liberalism as a lifestyle — or, more than that, a religion… The Church of Neoliberalism™.
“These rights always existed,” they’ll insist; it’s just that, they’ll explain, those inalienable rights remained undiscovered, like some archaeological treasure lost to time under layers of sediment, until some enterprising publicly-subsidized social scientist dug them up out of the ground like a long-forgotten artifact.
They’ll continue, with condescending-PhD-taxpayer-subsidized undeserved certainty, that there’s some rational scientific method to uncovering rights — some logical process of hypothesis and duplication and peer-review.”

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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The Savage declares his counter-right to safetyism

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