What's going on over by you all?

[LAC]

Also meant to say, this sort of tactic is as old as the hills. There are many dialectics, but the main one used to bring in more centralised control is the Hegalian Dialectic. Essentially you want to make a change but you know it will be unpopular so you create an event or series of events (a problem) that causes outrage and leads people to demand that "something must be done" and the very thing that must be done is the very same change that was unpopular previously, but through the appropriate engineered event/s and the associated 'reaction' you now have the pretext to implement the previously unpopular 'solution'.

The end game is seldom reached by just one of these events but through a series of them (the frog in the boiling pot analogy), which at each stage robs people of their freedoms on the pretext of protecting them from a perceived threat.