A Warning to the West

Sometimes you look around and think, "Wow, this is going to end badly."

And since I'm a writer, I get to turn those thoughts into stories.

That's what happened with Jupiter Skye.

Originally,  Jupiter's story was supposed to be popcorn Space Opera, a series of fun, mostly lighthearted adventures about a daring smuggler operating on the edges of society.

Then 2020 happened. The Covid lockdowns. Calls for those who refused to take the shot to be incarcerated in concentration camps. Surveillance state abuses. People being arrested and harassed for going to church or protesting state action, while violent mobs were given a pass on looting, rape, murder, and destroying whole neighborhoods.

I thought then that we'd already entered an ochlocracy, mob rule, and in certain cities (we all know which ones), this has certainly proven true. The rule of law has been abandoned in those places--along with a respect for others, the sanctity of property rights, and the responsibility that goes hand in hand with freedom--and been replaced by statism and a parody of decency.

And I look at all this and think, "This is how the West is lost." Not through war or natural disaster or population collapse, but through ordinary citizens willfully turning their backs on the foundations of their own culture.

We can debate the causes all day long: post-modern nihilism; abandoning classical education; embracing intolerant, anti-diversity "wokeness" and DEI measures; the enduring legacy of KGB anti-West, and especially anti-American, propaganda.

In the end, it doesn't matter. We're still living in a world where at least one-quarter of the US population believes Western civilization is evil, while socialism and communism are forwarded as good and just and humane despite ample evidence to the contrary. No amount of reasoning, facts, or historical truth can change these children's minds--for they are children--because they're convinced of their own moral superiority and cannot tolerate disagreement.

So as I watched the world fall apart around me, in ways both small and large, Jupiter morphed from popcorn Space Opera into a warning about the evils of all-powerful, all-encompassing centralized governments. If we don't change the path we're on now, if we don't return to our roots, we're going to end up living in an authoritarian dystopia like the one in which Jupiter exists, where all the freedoms and independence Westerners fought so long and so hard to develop have eroded away, to be replaced by a pervasive surveillance state and a large welfare class mired in a self-perpetuating state-sponsored poverty.

Some say Western civilization has already fallen. I hope there's still time to save it, and that's why I wrote the Jupiter Skye Series: to serve as a warning to the West about where we're going to end up if we don't do something to halt the erosion of our core values.

***

There's another side to this that I only touched on briefly above: the rise of a pervasive surveillance state.

There are so many aspects of this that could be discussed here, but they all boil down to one thing: Big Brother is watching.

Over the past decade and a half or so, it's become increasingly difficult for individuals to protect their privacy against intrusive government oversight.

Things really came to a head with the introduction of the smart phone, with its ability to access the internet and, especially, GPS, which turned essentially every mobile phone into a tracking device. During the height of the (overblown) pandemic panic, government agents used cellphone tracking data to monitor curfews and travel among select groups of people and enforce compliance with lockdowns.

Flock cameras became popular around the same time, more or less, and now there's a government monitoring device seemingly at every corner. Abuses by law enforcement are increasing as the technology improves, including enabling stalker behavior.

And now, wifi signals can be used to identify people in their own homes.

In the US, where I live, residents are guaranteed the right to privacy from government intrusiveness by the 4th Amendment, which prohibits warrantless searches, among other things. Many of the other amendments to the Constitution assume that individuals have a basic right to privacy, with the understanding that the Constitution served as a limit to government power and not a limit to individual freedoms and responsibilities.

Yet the unholy (and unhealthy) convergence of state and corporate interests--i.e. surveillance corporatism, often incorrectly labeled "surveillance capitalism"--has given rise to mass surveillance that, in and of itself, and aside from personal abuses, threatens to crumble the very protections from government upon which our country was founded.

The worst part of this is the people who justify the use of mass surveillance, in alignment with their own moral and political views: Flock cameras allow criminals to be caught quickly; people voluntarily own cellphones and therefore tracking data is "public"--it's not--and not subject to a warrant; people who've done nothing wrong have nothing to hide, a naive sentiment based on a heroized view of law enforcement agents specifically trained to treat everyone as a criminal [affiliate link]; and so on.

Meanwhile the ultimate check on government power--the People--is being distracted by a culture war between the political left and the political right.

The truth is that the fight isn't between left and right; it's between liberal and illiberal or, if we're going to use the correct terms here--which we should--between libertarianism (individual freedom) on the one hand and authoritarianism (state control) on the other.

We must make this distinction.

Otherwise, we risk allowing bad actors into manipulating us to support policies that greatly reduce individual liberty, to the point that we're on the verge of living in the dystopian nightmares envisioned by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, G.K. Chesterton, and Yevgeny Zamyatin, if we aren't already.

***

Of course, mob rule and pervasive surveillance corporatism are only part of Jupiter's story, the foundations on which the story world rests.

Renegat itself is about a job Jupiter takes that just may put her in the black while simultaneously striking a blow at her enemies.

It's a fast-paced, action-forward adventure featuring our daring smuggler, a gruff assassin, a rogue intelligence operative, and a chase across the galaxy while trying to avoid capture.

You can preorder that story now at Amazon.

The official release date is August 13th, so you don't have long to wait for either the ebook or the paperback. An audiobook is already in progress, to be narrated by the talented Rebecca Winder, who also narrated No Stress Space Express by Jack Bodett, among others.

Here's a little more about Renegat to whet your appetite: