An Orwellian Poll Question
© 2021 Clifford C. Nichols, Esq.
The morning after President Biden’s inauguration, I was amazed—and yet not entirely too shocked—to receive on my cell phone the following unsolicited photo of former President Trump accompanied by a text message from someone named Belle who asked only a single question:
Hi, I'm Belle from MDC with a quick survey.
Do you think President Trump should be charged with treason?
1 Yes
2 No
Reply STOP to end these messages.
My first thought was: who wants to know?
Is this a poll being taken by a pro-Trump patriot hoping to somehow impede the second impeachment of the President by showing that people are opposed to it? Not likely. Few would think a poll would persuade people like Pelosi or Schumer to stop their attacks on a man they blindly hate, much less be willing to spend money on a poll based on such an empty hope.
In my view, it was more likely a poll being taken by anti-Trump Republicans or Democrat leftists to achieve one of two purposes. It is to either: (i) identify people in America—like me— who are opposed to the left’s current narrative that the former President is a seditionist: and/or, (2) to determine the popular support for that narrative going forward.
Thus, hoping to find out more, I texted Belle back with the following question:
Hi Belle,
What is the MDC?
Her response was textbook 1984 doublespeak:
I am not exactly sure what the initials stand for but we are a third party research firm who conducts the survey, so for the sake of complete neutrality, I do not know the name of the client, who funded the survey, or how they got your number. It won't take long to have your voice heard and make a difference. What do you say? (emphasis added)
My answer will somehow make a difference? How? I am not on a jury panel hearing the case. So, for whom will it make a difference? Belle claimed to not know—or was unwilling to disclose—either who she works for or on whose behalf she is asking such a question. And yet, Belle was asking me—and I presume an untold number of others—to tell her if we would or would not support the President being indicted, prosecuted, and I assume convicted for a crime that potentially carries the death penalty?
To say the least, I found this chilling … I tried to imagine how I would feel if such a poll question were asked about me or someone I loved and I had no idea who was asking or who in America was being asked to answer such a hideous question.
My curiosity piqued, I did a quick online search to learn what I could about the “MDC” that Belle had referred to—a trip that took me only further down what already seemed like an Orwellian rabbit hole.
Contrary to what Belle indicated in her initial text— it appears MDC is not a company. Rather it stands for Mobile Data Collection— a name given to a software platform provided by a company called NOMAD. According to its website, it is a company that describes itself as the provider of “Humanitarian Operations Mobile Acquisition of Data.” They provide subscribers—who I concluded is likely Belle’s true employer—with the technology needed to anonymously collect data from people like me via the mass texting to cell phone data bases of unknown origin provided by the subscribers.
Armed with this almost useless “info,” I had at least one more question for Belle:
Sorry, Belle … just one more question. Has your client provided any specific facts or allegations upon which my answer should be based?
Not surprisingly, Belle did not respond.
Her silence should sound an alarm to us all: we are now living in extremely dangerous times.
Has our society now arrived at a place where lynch mob organizers could be taking polls to determine if they would have sufficient ideologically-based animus in the population to support the indictment, prosecution and conviction of people they hate—like President Trump—without any regard to the factual or evidentiary legitimacy of the charges being brought?
There was a time in our nation’s past when such a derogation of any American’s constitutional rights to due process would have shocked the conscience of most citizens. But Belle’s poll only confirmed for me that we have truly allowed ourselves to become a post-constitutional society that is evolving rapidly toward some form of totalitarianism. That is a place where what is just, moral and legal is arbitrarily—and now unilaterally—defined by self-appointed progressive arbiters of “truth” based on polls who are taking control of our nation. A place where railroading people the left disagrees with via “criminal convictions” is justified more by polls than upon conclusions based on facts, evidence, due process and the rule of law. A place where a totalitarian state is being allowed by us to emerge in this country that will define and control what is our “reality”—where “truth” is whatever those in power decide it is.
On this point, consider this week’s impeachment proceedings to remove a President from an office he has already surrendered. In the real world of not too long ago, such a proceeding would have been immediately ridiculed as defying logic, reason and accountability, and thus summarily dismissed by a great majority in Congress as being moot. But that is not the world we are living in today.
In the minds of the current congressional majority, led by the likes of Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell and others, the language of our Constitution they like to refer to as “living” evidently entitles them to “kill” any language it may contain that presents any impediment to the achievement of their purposes. For them, it is enough to believe they have been able to persuade a sufficient quorum of Americans to share in their animus and convict a man pursuant to a constitutional impeachment procedure that no longer applies to a man who has left his office and is now a private citizen.
As a nation, to allow such jurisprudential malignancies to prevail will cause us to transcend beyond the pale of their temporary political malice into a more permanent sphere of tyranny that can only be described as absolute evil. Soon—if not already—we will witness our national “town square” be transformed into a coliseum-like arena controlled by a dystopian police state similar to that of ancient Rome. A place where free speech, due process, debate and even ideological differences are no longer tolerated. A place where censorship prevails, free speech is removed and the fate of ideological gladiators who dare challenge the lies of the “empire” are determined by authoritarian rulers who will decide what is “justice” largely based on “polls” taken of the spectators seated around him in the coliseum. Left unsaid, however, is that it is also a place where the spectators being polled by the emperor have been made to understand implicitly that if they do not wish to be the next “gladiator” thrown into the arena to die, they would be wise to suppress any moral outrage they may be harboring toward the totalitarian regime in which they find themselves living and vote accordingly.
And with that in mind, perhaps I should just stop here. As I indicated above, I would hate to find Belle’s next poll to be about me. So, let me leave you with this. Should any out there doubt the gravity of my concerns expressed here, I would refer them to discuss the matter further with people who have had far more practical experience dealing with such matters than I—people like L. Lin Wood, Gen. Michael Flynn, Sydney Powell, Roger Stone, Dr. Simon Gold, Michael Lindell, Brandon Straka, Couy Griffin, and perhaps even former President Donald J. Trump.
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