Eighty Years Later, Another American Mass Incarceration?
Keywords Have Consequences; Malwords Have Catastrophic Consequences
Eighty years ago this month, 120,000 American citizens were rounded up and indefinitely incarcerated without due process. The whole operation was completed in sixty days. It was government sponsored, popularly supported, and media-driven. Meaning it was observed, recorded, and measurable.
By many of the metrics now pushing America toward yet another government-sponsored, popularly-supported, media-hyped atrocity.
Japanese-Americans evacuated from California, 1942. Image credit: National Archives
Deja Vu All Over Again
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, under which 96% of Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to concentration camps for the duration of World War II.
The narrative and its vehicle are familiar. Mainstream media, in collusion with government and powerful interest groups, whipped people into a panic following Japan's devastating attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
With America's Pacific fleet demolished, our western flank was dangerously exposed. Enemy agents were everywhere, and hiding in plain sight among the Japanese minority who dominated the West Coast's agriculture and fishing industries.
Despite reassurances from the Japanese-American community, a massive public outcry fingered anyone of Japanese ancestry as the "enemy among us," "dangerous," "unassimilable," and "a threat to our democracy." Every person of Japanese descent--men, women, children, aged, infirm-- needed to be locked away "for our safety—and theirs."
We look back on the elites who hyped this atrocity as acting to solidify power, and stimulate an economy floundering under New Deal socialist diktats-- and not on evidence they willfully suppressed.
Eight decades later, the US media now amplifies the talking points of a government intent on provoking a war to replenish lost political capital, while suppressing evidence exposing the incompetence running it aground-- vaccine mandates, economic lockdowns, Green New Deal, open borders.
And with Vladimir Putin opposed to vaccine mandates, will that make American vaccine skeptics the new "enemy within"? Will it make vaccines the new loyalty oath, concentration camps the new enforcement vehicle, and wartime powers the new justification for persecuting those who dare to question authority?
Keywords Drive Behavior
Keywords are not a new concept. On the internet they are used to draw attention, signal intent, amplify message. Placement and frequency of keywords on a webpage determine search engine ranking. And this how quickly people find you, hear your message, and take action.
Keywords play a similar role in our daily interactions. Keywords are part of any escalation: from nations going to war, to people coming to blows; from companies agreeing to merge, to people falling in love.
People draw attention, signal intent, and amplify the message of what they are about to do. So to masses of people. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Words always precede deeds.
Telegraphing Atrocity
The archives of over 2,300 American newspapers in publication during World War II form a corpus---or linguistic database-- of approximately 300 million published words per month. Within this corpus, we see immediate spikes in the frequency of certain keywords in the days following the Pearl Harbor attack.
Some of the spikes are predictable. The frequency of the term WAR + JAPAN jumps 21% to 566 words per million (WPM) published artifacts. And then steadily increases to a median of 700 WPM.
Some spikes are sad: racial epithet JAP jumps 315% to 166 WPM, and medians out at 185 WPM.
And some are tragic: a raft of sub-10 WPM keywords--ENEMY ALIENS, JAPANESE PROBLEM, JAP MENACE, JAP INVASION, JAPANESE FIFTH COLUMN, JAP REMOVAL, JAP OUSTER, and JAP RELOCATION tell you what people were thinking and what was about to happen.
Why do frequencies matter? If, as psychologists believe, the average adult processes between 20,000-30,000 words daily, the odds of encountering a keyword with a frequency of 50 WPM stands at once a day. At 500 WPM, it's ten times a day. A news-literate person in 1942 was likely encountering terms signaling hostility toward Japan and Japanese between 16-18 times daily.
The unquestionable intent of these terms was to report on the war effort. But the unquestioned outcome was national and local mass atrocity,
Nationally, EO 9066 drove the evacuation of "designated persons" (i.e. Japanese-Americans) into concentration camps in remote areas of the American West. Families were allowed just one suitcase per person, denied legal relief on grounds of "military necessity," and then had their fighting age males sent to war to defend that military necessity.
Locally, a blizzard of firings, evictions, expulsions, curfews, lockdowns, de-bankings, cancellations (leases, licenses, permits, etc.) made it all but impossible for Japanese-Americans to stay in their communities. This "legalization of racism" as one Supreme Court Justice observed, was driven by a public fixated on punishing anything Japanese in America.
This fixation would culminate in the legal attempt in Regan v King to strip Japanese-Americans of US citizenship. Litigated by California's longtime attorney general, plaintiffs were turned back at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on February 19, 1943, exactly a year to the day EO 9066 was signed.
The decision was appealed, but the Supreme Court declined to take the case. The "no thanks" note arrived a few days after testimony on Capitol Hill by Lt. General John DeWitt, commanding officer over the concentration camps. during which he had stated it was impossible to determine the loyalty of Japanese Americans, because "a Jap is a Jap."
That made headlines, shocking the nation, and the Court, which took up Ex parte Mitsuye Endo instead, delivering a unanimous decision declaring mass incarceration of citizens unconstitutional, ending the American gulag, and the largest systematic incarceration of US citizens without trial or due process in our history.
Keywords Have Consequences
And keywords with catastrophic consequences have a special name--malwords.
Malwords are malware for the mind--keywords weaponized and released into society as verbal viruses for isolating, silencing and destroying a targeted population.
Understanding how malwords work helps us diagnose, predict, call out, and prevent government-sponsored atrocity, often by the same people who vowed never to forget the last one.
Because under COVID, we hear the same outcry in mainstream and social media for swift and decisive action against the unvaccinated, who present an existential threat to America and its democracy. Calls for actions range from mass quarantine, incarceration, and firings to loss of benefits, loss of custody, forced vaccination, and torture.
This fixation with punishing enemies of the state presents symptoms similar to the hysteria that landed 120,000 American citizens in prison for the crime of having the wrong ethnicity.
But is this driving a mass atrocity event?
Malwords Drive Bad Behavior
A sample of 3,600 news websites producing a corpus of 200 million words monthly reveals two primary malwords have dominated over the past year-- PANDEMIC and VACCINE-- with a second tier populated by MANDATE, OMICRON, DELTA VARIANT, UNVACCINATED, MISINFORMATION, etc-- graphing as follows:
Benchmarking against 1942 malword levels provides a couple of potential explanations why media-driven hysteria has so far not produced an immediate jackbooted government response.
First, the numbers are not holding up. Primary COVID malword frequencies start well above 1942 WPM's, but become increasingly dependent on "sugar highs" from secondaries like DELTA VARIANT (peak 176 WPM) and OMICRON (peak 482 WPM) to prop up a steadily eroding narrative around PANDEMIC and VACCINE.
Second, the malword set is not that visceral WWII vintage. PANDEMIC, UNVACCINATED, OMICRON, etc. comes from a vocabulary better suited to scrabble than to rolling people out of bed ready to track down enemies of our democracy, drag them off to concentration camps, and strip them of citizenship.
But that could be changing.
Closing the Enthusiasm Gap
Countries like Australia have become very comfortable committing atrocities under guise of COVID against their own citizens, despite running malword levels only in the 700's over the past year. The US Department of Homeland Security's latest bulletin designating those who question the government as domestic terrorists is a step in Australia's direction. But the window for doubling down may be closing, as even blue states ditch lockdowns and mandates on pandemic-weary citizens.
An end-run around weariness is wartime powers. Precedent and temptation are certainly there for Ukraine, but the malwords and the polling numbers are not. Russia and/or China would have to attack the US on its own soil to reverse this. A cyber strike against critical infrastructure is most likely, but even without a false flag, Americans will be asked to send their kids to die for a distant border when their own is walk-thru, their power is out, their heating cut off, their store shelves bare, their money worthless, and cultural Marxists in charge. It's hard to see a popular revolt not breaking out.
It already is. And the Biden regime is waging a pre-emptive, proxy war on TRUCKERS through the media. Malword density shot from years at 1.0 WPM to 16.3 WPM in a week and are trending higher. Collocated terms such as STRIKE, PROTEST, CROSS-BORDER, SUPPORTERS, FREEDOM, FARMERS, and PORT signal what our rulers are really worried about. If the truckers succeed, can farmers and longshoremen be far behind? Along with police, fire, sanitation, and nurses' unions?
That is why Trudeau has said. "This must stop!" It must stop, or the globalist order is in danger of toppling. Will mass atrocity be the only tool left to preserve that order? The answer may lie in what happens in Ottawa, and at the US northern border.
Harvey Oxenhorn is a cybersecurity consultant, and author of the upcoming book, The Atrocity Algorithm: How the Media Became the Enemy of the People. Follow him on Gettr, Gab, and MeWe @HarveyOxenhorn