Archive for July, 2025

The New Gulag: Mental Health Detentions and the Criminalization of Dissent

Posted: July 31, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity.”—Hannah Arendt

The government’s war on homelessness—much like its war on terrorism, its war on drugs, its war on illegal immigration, and its war on COVID-19—is yet another Trojan Horse.

First, President Trump issues an executive order empowering federal agencies to clear out homeless encampments and lock up the homeless in mental institutions using involuntary civil commitment laws intended for dealing with individuals experiencing mental health crises.

Days later, a gunman allegedly suffering from a mental illness opens fire in New York City, killing four before turning the gun on himself.

Coming on the heels of Trump’s executive order aimed at “ending crime and disorder on America’s streets,” the shooting has all the makings of a modern-day Reichstag fire: a tragedy weaponized to justify allowing the government use mental illness as a pretext for locking more people up without due process.

An Orwellian exercise in doublespeak, Trump’s executive order suggests that jailing the homeless, rather than providing them with affordable housing, is the “compassionate” solution to homelessness.

According to USA Today, social workers, medical experts and mental health service providers say the president’s approach “will likely worsen homelessness across the country, particularly because Trump’s order contains no new funding for mental health or drug treatment. Additionally, they say the president appears to misunderstand the fundamental driver of homelessness: People can’t afford housing.”

And then comes the kicker: Trump wants to see more use of civil commitments (forced detentions) for anyone who is perceived as posing a risk “to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.”

Translation: the government wants to use homelessness as a pretext for indefinitely locking up anyone who might pose a threat to its chokehold on police state power.

When you consider the ramifications of giving the American police state that kind of authority to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, you’ll understand why some might view these looming mental health round-ups with trepidation.

By directing police to carry out forced detentions of individuals based not on criminal behavior but on perceived mental instability or drug use, the Trump administration is attempting to sidestep fundamental constitutional protections—due process, probable cause, and the presumption of innocence—by substituting medical discretion for legal standards.

Taken to its authoritarian limits, this could allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling dissidents who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

Police in cities like New York have already been empowered to forcibly detain individuals for psychiatric evaluations, based on vague, subjective criteria: having “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibiting “excessive fears,” or refusing “voluntary treatment.”

What happens when these criteria are expanded to encompass anyone who challenges the police state’s narrative?

Once the government is allowed to control the narrative over who is deemed mentally unfit, mental health care could become yet another pretext for pathologizing dissent in order to disarm and silence the government’s critics.

Take heed: this has the potential to become the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes, cloaked in the guise of public health and safety.

According to the Associated Press, federal agencies have been exploring how to incorporate “identifiable patient data” into their surveillance toolkits, including behavioral health records.

The infrastructure is already in place to profile and detain individuals based on perceived psychological “risks.”

The government is actively exploring how to use data from wearable health devices—including heart rate, stress response, and sleep patterns—to flag individuals for intervention. Now imagine a future in which your Fitbit or Apple Watch triggers a mental health alert, resulting in your forced removal “for your own safety.”

Mass surveillance combined with artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, and government access to behavioral health records could pave the way for a regime of police state authoritarianism by way of preemptive mental health detentions.

If the police state is equipping itself to monitor, flag, and detain anyone it deems mentally unfit, without criminal charges or trial, this could be the tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

This is not about public safety. It’s about control.

We’ve seen this tactic before. When governments seek to suppress dissent without provoking outrage, they turn to psychiatric labels.

Throughout history, from Cold War-era Soviet gulags to modern pre-crime initiatives, authoritarian regimes have used psychiatric labels to isolate, discredit, and eliminate dissidents.  As historian Anne Applebaum notes, administrative exile, which required no trial and due process, “was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state. Soviet dissidents were often declared mentally ill, institutionalized in prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, and subjected to forced medication and psychological torture.

Totalitarian regimes used such tactics to isolate political dissidents from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally.

In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:

The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.

Warrantless seizures, surveillance, indefinite detention, isolation, exile…sound familiar?

What’s unfolding in America is the modern police state’s version of that same script.

Civil commitment laws are found in all states and employed throughout American history.

Under the doctrines of parens patriae and police power, the government already claims authority to confine those deemed unable to act in their own best interest or who pose a threat to society.

When fused, these doctrines give the state enormous discretion to preemptively lock people up based on speculative future threats, not actual crimes.

This discretion is now expanding at warp speed.

The result is a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

Once dissent is equated with danger—and danger with illness—those who challenge the state become medicalized threats, subject to detention not for what they’ve done, but for what they believe.

We’ve already seen what happens when dissent is pathologized and criminalized, and civil commitment laws are weaponized:

  • Russ Tice, an NSA whistleblower, was labeled “mentally unbalanced” after attempting to testify in Congress about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.
  • Adrian Schoolcraft, an NYPD officer who exposed police corruption, was forcibly committed to a mental facility in retaliation.
  • Brandon Raub, a Marine who posted controversial political views on Facebook, was arrested and detained in a psychiatric ward under Virginia’s mental health laws.

These cases aren’t anomalies—they’re warning signs.

Government programs like Operation Vigilant Eagle, launched in 2009, characterized military veterans as potential domestic terrorists if they showed signs of being “disgruntled or disillusioned.” A 2009 DHS report broadly defined “rightwing extremists” as anyone seen as antigovernment.

The result? A surveillance dragnet aimed at military veterans, political dissidents, gun owners, and constitutionalists.

Now, under the banner of mental health, the same dragnet is being equipped with red flag gun laws, predictive policing, and involuntary detention authority.

In theory, these laws are meant to prevent harm. In practice, they punish thought, not conduct.

Trump’s latest executive order doesn’t just target the homeless—it establishes a precedent for rounding up anyone deemed a threat to the government’s version of law and order.

The same playbook that pathologized opposition to war or police brutality as “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” could now be used to classify political dissent as a psychiatric illness.

This is not hyperbole.

The government’s ability to silence dissent by labeling it as dangerous or diseased is well documented—and now it’s about to be codified into law.

Red flag gun laws, for example, authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others. The stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats. No mental health diagnosis is required. No criminal charge. Just a hunch. Those most likely to be targeted? The people already on government watch lists: political activists, veterans, gun owners, and anyone labeled an “extremists”— a term that now applies to anyone critical of the government.

While the intention may appear reasonable—disarming people who pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others—the problem arises when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of a police state that equates dissent with extremism.

This is the same police state that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

The same police state whose agents are weaving a web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using AI, social media surveillance, behavior sensing software, and citizen snitches to identify potential threats.

The same police state that renews the NDAA year after year—authorizing the indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens.

The same police state that considers you suspicious based on your religion, your bumper stickers, or your political beliefs.

As a New York Times editorial warns, you may be labeled an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, believe the economy is about to collapse, fear the government will soon declare martial law, or display too many political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

This is the same police state that now wants access to your mental health data, your digital footprint, your biometric records—and the legal authority to detain you for your own good.

And it’s the same police state that, facing rising protests, unrest, and collapsing public trust, is seeking new ways to suppress dissent—not through open force, but under the cover of public health.

This is where thought crimes become real crimes.

We’ve seen this trajectory before.

The war on drugs.

The war on terror.

The war on COVID.

Each began with real concerns. Each ended as a tool of compliance, coercion, and control.

Now, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are entering a new war: the war on anti-government dissidents.

We are fast approaching a future where you can be locked up for the thoughts you think, the beliefs you hold, or the questions you ask.

The government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.

It will start with the homeless.

Then the mentally ill.

Then the so-called extremists.

Then the critics, the contrarians, and the constitutionalists.

Eventually, it will come for anyone who dares to get in the government’s way.

This is how tyranny rises. This is how freedom falls.

Unless we resist this creeping mental health gulag, the prison gates will eventually close on us all.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3hy6km93

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

The Untouchables: The Sexual Predators Within America’s Power Elite

Posted: July 22, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Now by coming in and being part of the cover-up, the Trump administration has become part of it. I mean, it’s just you cannot see it any other way.”—Alex Jones, InfoWars

Once again, the American police state is choosing to protect predators, not victims.

Jeffrey Epstein—the hedge fund billionaire/convicted serial pedophile and sex trafficker—may be dead, but the machinery that empowered and protected him is still very much alive.

You see, the Epstein case was never just about Epstein—it was about the entire edifice of power that shields the ruling class, silences victims, and erases accountability.

Thus, the latest about-face declarations from the Trump administration—that Epstein had no client list, that he did in fact kill himself, and that there’s nothing more to discuss or investigate so we should just move on—have only reinforced what many have suspected all along: the system is rigged in order to protect the power elite because the power elite are the system.

In this age of partisan politics and a deeply polarized populace, corruption—especially when it involves sexual debauchery, depravity and predatory behavior—has become the great equalizer.

With the reemergence of Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost in the public discourse, we are once again reminded of just how deep the rot goes.

Politics, religion, entertainment, business, law enforcement, the military—it doesn’t matter the arena or affiliation: all are riddled with the kind of seedy, depraved behavior that gets a free pass when it involves the powerful.

For years, the Epstein case has stood as a grotesque emblem of the depravity within America’s power elite: billionaires, politicians, and celebrities who allegedly trafficked in sex with young girls while insulated from accountability.

It is believed that Epstein, who died in jail after being arrested on charges of molesting, raping and sex trafficking dozens of young girls, operated a sex trafficking ring not only for his own personal pleasure but also for that of his friends and business associates.

According to The Washington Post, “several of the young women…say they were offered to the rich and famous as sex partners at Epstein’s parties.”

Despite the government’s insistence there’s nothing more to see, here’s what the public record already reveals:

  • Epstein ferried his friends about on his private plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express” after the Nabokov novel, due to the presence of what appeared to be underage girls on board.
  • Both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were counted among Epstein’s friends.
  • Both Clinton and Trump were at one time passengers on the Lolita Express.
  • Both Clinton and Trump are renowned womanizers who have been accused of sexual impropriety by a significant number of women over the years. In fact, The Rutherford Institute represented Paula Jones in her landmark sexual harassment lawsuit against then-President Clinton—a case that helped expose how far the political establishment will go to shield its own.

So you have to wonder… when President Trump, who has used his administration’s war on human trafficking to justify expanding the government’s police state powers, quietly dismantles the very government agencies tasked with investigating and exposing sex trafficking… what exactly is going on?

The message from the top is clear: there will be no accountability.

President Trump has flatly refused to appoint a special prosecutor. His allies in Congress have gone silent. And the same politicians who demand the harshest punishments for undocumented immigrants, protesters, or whistleblowers have nothing to say about the systematic abuse of minors by men in their own orbit.

This isn’t justice. It’s a double standard—one set of rules for the untouchables, and another for everyone else.

If it looks like a cover-up, smells like a cover-up, and appears to benefit all the usual suspects, is it so far-fetched to suspect that the government is once again closing ranks to protect the members of its power elite?

We’ve seen it before: from the CIA’s MK-Ultra experiments and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations to the Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra, CIA black sites, and NSA mass surveillance.

Each time, secrecy protected the powerful and betrayed the people.

And it will keep happening—again and again—unless we confront the truth hiding in plain sight: that abuse of power is not an aberration of the system—it is the system.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the shadow economy of sex trafficking, where power, profit, and predation converge.

The trafficking of children, the shielding of perpetrators, the systematic silencing of victims—this isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a business model.

This is America’s seedy underbelly.

Child sex trafficking—the buying and selling of women, young girls and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old—has become big business in America. It is the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either. Boys account for over a third of victims in the U.S. sex industry.

Who buys a child for sex?

Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

Ordinary men, yes. But then there are the so-called extraordinary men—like Jeffrey Epstein—with wealth, connections, and protection who are allowed to operate according to their own rules.

These men skate free of accountability because the criminal justice system panders to the powerful, the wealthy and the elite.

Over a decade ago, when Epstein was first charged with raping and molesting young girls, he was gifted a secret plea deal with then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, President Trump’s first term Labor Secretary, that allowed him to evade federal charges and be given the equivalent of a slap on the wrist: allowed to “work” at home six days a week before returning to jail to sleep.

That secret plea deal has since been ruled illegal by a federal judge.

Yet here’s the thing: Epstein did not act alone.

I refer not only to Epstein’s accomplices, who recruited and groomed the young girls he is accused of raping and molesting, but his circle of influential friends and colleagues that at one time included Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

As the Associated Press points out, “The arrest of the billionaire financier on child sex trafficking charges is raising questions about how much his high-powered associates knew about the hedge fund manager’s interactions with underage girls, and whether they turned a blind eye to potentially illegal conduct.”

In fact, a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals allowing a 2,000-page document linked to the Epstein case to be unsealed references allegations of sexual abuse involving “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.”

This is not a minor incident involving minor players. Nor are these partisan missteps.

They are systemic betrayals. The predators wear red and blue alike, and the silence spans both aisles of power.

This is the darkness at the heart of the American police state: a system built to shield the powerful from justice.

Sex slaves. Sex trafficking. Secret societies. Powerful elites. Government corruption. Judicial cover-ups.

Once again, fact and fiction mirror each other.

Twenty years ago, Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut provided viewing audiences with a sordid glimpse into a secret sex society that indulged the basest urges of its affluent members while preying on vulnerable young women. It is not so different from the real world, where powerful men, insulated from accountability, indulge their base urges.

Kubrick suggested these secret societies flourish because the public chooses not to see what’s right in front of them, content to navigate life in denial about the ugly, obvious truths in our midst.

In so doing, we become accomplices to abusive behavior in our midst.

This is how corruption by the power elite flourishes.

For years, investigative journalists and survivors have documented how blackmail, intelligence agency ties, and financial leverage helped shield elite sexual predators—not just from prosecution, but from public scrutiny.

For every Epstein who is—finally—called to account for his illegal sexual exploits after years of being given a free pass by those in power, there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) more in the halls of power and wealth whose predation continues unabated.

While Epstein’s alleged crimes are heinous enough on their own, he is part of a larger narrative of how a culture of entitlement becomes a cesspool and a breeding ground for despots and predators.

Power corrupts. Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Give any one person—or government agency—too much power and allow them to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will be abused.

History proves it. The present moment confirms it.

We see this dynamic play out every day in communities across America.

A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses aspiring actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs a civilian hospital and gets away with it.

It’s no coincidence that the same administration dismantling offices tasked with fighting human trafficking is also defunding the few agencies left to hold law enforcement accountable.

Under President Trump, the Department of Justice has been restructured to prioritize loyalty over justice, protection over prosecution. Offices once dedicated to civil rights enforcement, police oversight, and public accountability have been gutted or quietly sidelined.

Consider the case of former Louisville officer Brett Hankison, who blindly fired ten rounds into Breonna Taylor’s apartment during a botched no-knock raid. Hankison was ultimately convicted—not for killing Taylor, but for depriving others of their civil rights. And yet Trump’s DOJ asked the court to sentence Hankison to one day in prison—the equivalent of time served during booking.

In other words, in Trump’s view, the powerful and their enforcers should walk free while the dead are buried and the public is told to move on.

And it’s not just trigger-happy policing that goes unpunished.

Across the country, law enforcement officers have repeatedly been caught running sex trafficking rings, abusing women and girls in their custody, or exploiting their badge to coerce sex—with little to no consequence.

From Louisiana to Ohio to New York, officers have been arrested for trafficking underage girls, assaulting vulnerable women, and raping detainees—often shielded by unions, prosecutors, or a blue wall of silence.

This isn’t a few bad apples. It’s a culture of impunity baked into the system.

This is how the system works, protecting the untouchables—not because they’re innocent, but because the system has made them immune.

Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sex crimes, government corruption, or the rule of law.

It’s the same old story all over again: man rises to power, man abuses power abominably, man intimidates and threatens anyone who challenges him with retaliation or worse, and man gets away with it because of a culture of compliance in which no one speaks up because they don’t want to lose their job or their money or their place among the elite.

Sexual predators aren’t the only threat.

For every Epstein or Clinton, every Weinstein, Ailes, Cosby, or Trump who eventually gets called out for his sexual misbehavior, there are hundreds—thousands—of others in the American police state who are getting away with murder—in many cases, literally—simply because they can.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

For too long now, Americans have tolerated an oligarchy in which a powerful, elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots.

We need to restore the rule of law for all people, no exceptions.

The rule of law means no one gets a free pass—no matter their wealth, status, or political connections.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the empowerment of petty tyrants and political gods must end.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/y6fycmbz

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

The Wearables Trap: How the Government Plans to Monitor, Score, and Control You

Posted: July 16, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“When the states legalize the deliberate ending of certain lives… it will eventually broaden the categories of those who can be put to death with impunity.”—Nat Hentoff, The Washington Post, 1992

Bodily autonomy—the right to privacy and integrity over our own bodies—is rapidly vanishing.

The debate now extends beyond forced vaccinations or invasive searches to include biometric surveillance, wearable tracking, and predictive health profiling.

We are entering a new age of algorithmic, authoritarian control, where our thoughts, moods, and biology are monitored and judged by the state.

This is the dark promise behind the newest campaign by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, to push for a future in which all Americans wear biometric health-tracking devices.

Under the guise of public health and personal empowerment, this initiative is nothing less than the normalization of 24/7 bodily surveillance—ushering in a world where every step, heartbeat, and biological fluctuation is monitored not only by private companies but also by the government.

In this emerging surveillance-industrial complex, health data becomes currency. Tech firms profit from hardware and app subscriptions, insurers profit from risk scoring, and government agencies profit from increased compliance and behavioral insight.

This convergence of health, technology, and surveillance is not a new strategy—it’s just the next step in a long, familiar pattern of control.

Surveillance has always arrived dressed as progress.

Every new wave of surveillance technology—GPS trackers, red light cameras, facial recognition, Ring doorbells, Alexa smart speakers—has been sold to us as a tool of convenience, safety, or connection. But in time, each became a mechanism for tracking, monitoring, or controlling the public.

What began as voluntary has become inescapable and mandatory.

The moment we accepted the premise that privacy must be traded for convenience, we laid the groundwork for a society in which nowhere is beyond the government’s reach—not our homes, not our cars, not even our bodies.

RFK Jr.’s wearable plan is just the latest iteration of this bait-and-switch: marketed as freedom, built as a cage.

According to Kennedy’s plan, which has been promoted as part of a national campaign to “Make America Healthy Again,” wearable devices would track glucose levels, heart rate, activity, sleep, and more for every American.

Participation may not be officially mandatory at the outset, but the implications are clear: get on board, or risk becoming a second-class citizen in a society driven by data compliance.

What began as optional self-monitoring tools marketed by Big Tech is poised to become the newest tool in the surveillance arsenal of the police state.

Devices like Fitbits, Apple Watches, glucose trackers, and smart rings collect astonishing amounts of intimate data—from stress and depression to heart irregularities and early signs of illness. When this data is shared across government databases, insurers, and health platforms, it becomes a potent tool not only for health analysis—but for control.

Once symbols of personal wellness, these wearables are becoming digital cattle tags—badges of compliance tracked in real time and regulated by algorithm.

And it won’t stop there.

The body is fast becoming a battleground in the government’s expanding war on the inner realms.

The infrastructure is already in place to profile and detain individuals based on perceived psychological “risks.” Now imagine a future in which your wearable data triggers a mental health flag. Elevated stress levels. Erratic sleep. A skipped appointment. A sudden drop in heart rate variability.

In the eyes of the surveillance state, these could be red flags—justification for intervention, inquiry, or worse.

RFK Jr.’s embrace of wearable tech is not a neutral innovation. It is an invitation to expand the government’s war on thought crimes, health noncompliance, and individual deviation.

It shifts the presumption of innocence to a presumption of diagnosis. You are not well until the algorithm says you are.

The government has already weaponized surveillance tools to silence dissent, flag political critics, and track behavior in real time. Now, with wearables, they gain a new weapon: access to the human body as a site of suspicion, deviance, and control.

While government agencies pave the way for biometric control, it will be corporations—insurance companies, tech giants, employers—who act as enforcers for the surveillance state.

Wearables don’t just collect data. They sort it, interpret it, and feed it into systems that make high-stakes decisions about your life: whether you get insurance coverage, whether your rates go up, whether you qualify for employment or financial aid.

As reported by ABC News, a JAMA article warns that wearables could easily be used by insurers to deny coverage or hike premiums based on personal health metrics like calorie intake, weight fluctuations, and blood pressure.

It’s not a stretch to imagine this bleeding into workplace assessments, credit scores, or even social media rankings.

Employers already offer discounts for “voluntary” wellness tracking—and penalize nonparticipants. Insurers give incentives for healthy behavior—until they decide unhealthy behavior warrants punishment. Apps track not just steps, but mood, substance use, fertility, and sexual activity—feeding the ever-hungry data economy.

This dystopian trajectory has been long foreseen and forewarned.

In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), compliance is maintained not through violence but by way of pleasure, stimulation, and chemical sedation. The populace is conditioned to accept surveillance in exchange for ease, comfort, and distraction.

In THX 1138 (1971), George Lucas envisions a corporate-state regime where biometric monitoring, mood-regulating drugs, and psychological manipulation reduce people to emotionless, compliant biological units.

Gattaca (1997) imagines a world in which genetic and biometric profiling predetermines one’s fate, eliminating privacy and free will in the name of public health and societal efficiency.

In The Matrix (1999), written and directed by the Wachowskis, human beings are harvested as energy sources while trapped inside a simulated reality—an unsettling parallel to our increasing entrapment in systems that monitor, monetize, and manipulate our physical selves.

Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg, depicts a pre-crime surveillance regime driven by biometric data. Citizens are tracked via retinal scans in public spaces and targeted with personalized ads—turning the body itself into a surveillance passport.

The anthology series Black Mirror, inspired by The Twilight Zone, brings these warnings into the digital age, dramatizing how constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear.

Taken collectively, these cultural touchstones deliver a stark message: dystopia doesn’t arrive overnight.

As Margaret Atwood warned in The Handmaid’s Tale,  “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” Though Atwood’s novel focuses on reproductive control, its larger warning is deeply relevant: when the state presumes authority over the body—whether through pregnancy registries or biometric monitors—bodily autonomy becomes conditional, fragile, and easily revoked.

The tools may differ, but the logic of domination is the same.

What Atwood portrayed as reproductive control, we now face in a broader, digitized form: the quiet erosion of autonomy through the normalization of constant monitoring.

When both government and corporations gain access to our inner lives, what’s left of the individual?

We must ask: when surveillance becomes a condition of participation in modern life—employment, education, health care—are we still free? Or have we become, as in every great dystopian warning, conditioned not to resist, but to comply?

That’s the hidden cost of these technological conveniences: today’s wellness tracker is tomorrow’s corporate leash.

In a society where bodily data is harvested and analyzed, the body itself becomes government and corporate property. Your body becomes a form of testimony, and your biometric outputs are treated as evidence. The list of bodily intrusions we’ve documented—forced colonoscopies, blood draws, DNA swabs, cavity searches, breathalyzer tests—is growing.

To this list we now add a subtler, but more insidious, form of intrusion: forced biometric consent.

Once health tracking becomes a de facto requirement for employment, insurance, or social participation, it will be impossible to “opt out” without penalty. Those who resist may be painted as irresponsible, unhealthy, or even dangerous.

We’ve already seen chilling previews of where this could lead. In states with abortion restrictions, digital surveillance has been weaponized to track and prosecute individuals for seeking abortions—using period-tracking apps, search histories, and geolocation data.

When bodily autonomy becomes criminalized, the data trails we leave behind become evidence in a case the state has already decided to make.

This is not merely the expansion of health care. It is the transformation of health into a mechanism of control—a Trojan horse for the surveillance state to claim ownership over the last private frontier: the human body.

Because ultimately, this isn’t just about surveillance—it’s about who gets to live.

Too often, these debates are falsely framed as having only two possible outcomes: safety vs. freedom, health vs. privacy, compliance vs. chaos. But these are illusions. A truly free and just society can protect public health without sacrificing bodily autonomy or human dignity.

We must resist the narrative that demands our total surrender in exchange for security.

Once biometric data becomes currency in a health-driven surveillance economy, it’s only a matter of time before that data is used to determine whose lives are worth investing in—and whose are not.

We’ve seen this dystopia before.

In the 1973 film Soylent Green, the elderly become expendable when resources grow scarce. My good friend Nat Hentoff—an early and principled voice warning against the devaluation of human life—sounded this alarm decades ago. Once pro-choice, Hentoff came to believe that the erosion of medical ethics—particularly the growing acceptance of abortion, euthanasia, and selective care—was laying the groundwork for institutionalized dehumanization.

As Hentoff warned, once the government sanctions the deliberate ending of certain lives, it can become a slippery slope: broader swaths of the population would eventually be deemed expendable.

Hentoff referred to this as “naked utilitarianism—the greatest good for the greatest number. And individuals who are in the way—in this case, the elderly poor—have to be gotten out of the way. Not murdered, heaven forbid. Just made comfortable until they die with all deliberate speed.”

That concern is no longer theoretical.

In 1996, writing about the Supreme Court’s consideration of physician-assisted suicide, Hentoff warned that once a state decides who shall die “for their own good,” there are “no absolute limits.” He cited medical leaders and disability advocates who feared that the poor, elderly, disabled, and chronically ill would become targets of a system that valued efficiency over longevity.

Today, data collected through wearables—heart rate, mood, mobility, compliance—can shape decisions about insurance, treatment, and life expectancy. How long before an algorithm quietly decided whose suffering is too expensive, whose needs are too inconvenient, or whose body no longer qualifies as worth saving?

This isn’t a left or right issue.

Dehumanization—the process of stripping individuals or groups of their dignity, autonomy, or moral worth—cuts across the political spectrum.

Today, dehumanizing language and policies aren’t confined to one ideology—they’re weaponized across the political divide. Prominent figures have begun referring to political opponents, immigrants, and other marginalized groups as “unhuman”—a disturbing echo of the labels that have justified atrocities throughout history.

As reported by Mother Jones, J.D. Vance endorsed a book by influencer Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec that advocates crushing “unhumans” like vermin.

This kind of rhetoric isn’t abstract—it matters.

How can any party credibly claim to be “pro‑life” when it devalues the humanity of entire groups, stripping them of the moral worth that should be fundamental to civil society?

When the state and its corporate allies treat people as data, as compliance issues, or as “unworthy,” they dismantle the very notion of equal human dignity.

In such a world, rights—including the right to bodily autonomy, health care, or even life itself—become privileges doled out only to the “worthy.”

This is why our struggle must be both political and moral. We can’t defend bodily sovereignty without defending every human being’s equal humanity.

The dehumanization of the vulnerable crosses political lines. It manifests differently—through budget cuts here, through mandates and metrics there—but the outcome is the same: a society that no longer sees human beings, only data points.

The conquest of physical space—our homes, cars, public squares—is nearly complete.

What remains is the conquest of inner space: our biology, our genetics, our psychology, our emotions. As predictive algorithms grow more sophisticated, the government and its corporate partners will use them to assess risk, flag threats, and enforce compliance in real time.

The goal is no longer simply to monitor behavior but to reshape it—to preempt dissent, deviance, or disease before it arises. This is the same logic that drives Minority Report-style policing, pre-crime mental health interventions, and AI-based threat assessments.

If this is the future of “health freedom,” then freedom has already been redefined as obedience to the algorithm.

We must resist the surveillance of our inner and outer selves.

We must reject the idea that safety requires total transparency, or that health requires constant monitoring. We must reclaim the sanctity of the human body as a space of freedom—not as a data point.

The push for mass adoption of wearables is not about health. It is about habituation.

The goal is to train us—subtly, systematically—to accept government and corporate ownership of our bodies.

We must not forget that our nation was founded on the radical idea that all human beings are created equal, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These rights are not granted by the government, the algorithm, or the market. They are inherent. They are indivisible. And they apply to all of us—or they will soon apply to none of us.

The Founders got this part right: their affirmation of our shared humanity is more vital than ever before.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the task before us is whether we will defend that humanity—or surrender it, one wearable at a time. Now is the time to draw the line—before the body becomes just another piece of state property.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mr24w458

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Wrong Address, Wrong Target, Real Justice: U.S. Supreme Court Holds FBI Liable for Botched SWAT Raid

Posted: July 11, 2025 in Uncategorized
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WASHINGTON, DC — In a unanimous opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government can be held accountable for a botched FBI SWAT raid that targeted the wrong home and terrorized an innocent family.

The case stems from a middle-of-the-night SWAT raid in which heavily armed FBI agents in tactical gear stormed the home of Curtrina Martin, deployed a flashbang grenade, and held Hilliard Cliatt and Martin at gunpoint before realizing they had the wrong address. The Supreme Court’s decision in Martin v. United States affirms that the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause does not shield the federal government from liability under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). The Rutherford Institute and the National Police Accountability Project filed an amicus brief urging the Court to allow victims of such reckless raids to hold the government accountable.

“These SWAT raids have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned excuse to let heavily armed police crash through doors in the dead of night,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Too often, they’re marked by incompetence, devastation, and death—leaving a trail of broken homes and broken lives, while law enforcement escapes accountability.”

As part of “Operation Red Tape,” an FBI initiative targeting gang activity in Georgia, agents sought to execute an arrest warrant at the home of a suspected gang member. However, during a pre-raid drive-by, the team leader used his personal GPS and misidentified the home—failing to verify the street name and house number. Hours later, as part of a pre-dawn raid, the SWAT team descended on Martin’s house, a block from the actual target, breached the front door, and deployed a flashbang. Believing they were being burglarized, Martin attempted to reach her 7-year-old child. Only after detaining Cliatt and Martin at gunpoint did agents realize their mistake in targeting the wrong house.

Having been “left with personal injuries and property damage—but few explanations and no compensation,” the family filed a lawsuit alleging negligence, trespass, false arrest and imprisonment, emotional distress, and assault and battery under the FTCA. Although the Eleventh Circuit dismissed the case—holding that the Supremacy Clause barred such claims—the Supreme Court reversed. Pointing out that “the Supremacy Clause supplies a rule of decision when federal and state laws conflict”, the Supreme Court explained that the FTCA itself is the “supreme” federal law and explicitly allows state-law tort claims against the government. In a concurring opinion, Justices Sotomayor and Jackson noted that Congress specifically amended the FTCA to hold the federal government accountable after a 1973 incident where 15 officers mistakenly raided multiple homes, holding innocent families at gunpoint. That amendment, they emphasized, was designed to ensure accountability for precisely these kinds of abuses. The Court sent the lawsuit back for further proceedings.

The amicus brief in Martin v. United States was authored by Eugene R. Fidell with the Yale Law School Supreme Court Clinic, along with Charles A. Rothfeld of Mayer Brown LLP and Paul W. Hughes of McDermott Will & Emery LLP.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Case History

April 10, 2025 • Wrong Address, Wrong Target, Real Terror: U.S. Supreme Court Agrees to Hear FBI Raid Case

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yc38sh3n

The Rise of the Prison State: Trump’s Push for Megaprisons Could Lock Us All Up

Posted: July 9, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“You think we’re arresting people now? You wait till we get the funding to do what we got to do.”—Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar

America is rapidly becoming a nation of prisons.

Having figured out how to parlay presidential authority in foreign affairs in order to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump is using his immigration enforcement powers to lock up—and lock down—the nation.

After all, a police state requires a prison state. And no one is cheering louder than the private prison corporations making money hand over fist from Trump’s expansion of federal detention.

Under the guise of national security and public safety, the Trump administration is engineering the largest federal expansion of incarceration and detention powers in U.S. history.

At the center of this campaign is Alligator Alcatraz, a federal detention facility built in the Florida Everglades and hailed by the White House as a model for the future of federal incarceration. But this is more than a new prison—it is the architectural symbol of a carceral state being quietly constructed in plain sight.

With over $170 billion allocated through Trump’s megabill, we are witnessing the creation of a vast, permanent enforcement infrastructure aimed at turning the American police state into a prison state.

The scope of this expansion is staggering.

The bill allocates $45 billion just to expand immigrant detention—a move that will make ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history, with more money than the FBI, the DEA, and the Bureau of Prisons combined.

Yet be warned: what begins with ICE rarely ends with ICE.

Trump’s initial promise to crack down on “violent illegal criminals” has evolved into a sweeping mandate: a mass, quota-driven roundup campaign that detains anyone the administration deems a threat, regardless of legal status and at significant expense to the American taxpayer: immigrants, activists, journalists, business owners, military veterans, and even spouses of American citizens.

What’s more, the vast majority of those being detained are not violent criminals.

According to analyst Robert Reich, 71.7 percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record. Many are longtime residents, laborers, and small business owners—people who have contributed to the economy for years.

Removing these individuals from the workforce and imprisoning them not only devastates families and communities—it burdens taxpayers and weakens the economy.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, it costs more than $150 a day to detain a single immigrant—totaling over $3 billion annually for ICE detention alone. Meanwhile, undocumented workers contribute an estimated $96 billion in federal, state and local taxes each year, and billions more in Social Security and Medicare taxes that they can never claim.

These are the workers who keep industries running—doing the jobs many Americans refuse. Locking them up doesn’t save money; it dismantles the very labor force that sustains the economy.

Like so many of the Trump administration’s grandiose plans, the math doesn’t add up.

Just as Trump’s tariffs have failed to revive American manufacturing and instead raised consumer prices, this detention-state spending spree will cost taxpayers far more than it saves.

It’s not just authoritarian—it’s bad economics, funneling tax dollars into a bureaucracy that grows government while delivering no real public benefit.

We’re being told it’s about public safety and border control—but in reality, it’s a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy that shifts billions from productive parts of the economy into a black hole of surveillance, cement, and razor wire.

Making matters worse, many of these detained immigrants are then exploited as a pool of cheap labor inside the very facilities where they’re held.

In other words, this isn’t just a prison expansion—it’s a taxpayer-funded machine that extracts labor from the very people it imprisons, while draining billions from the economy and undermining the industries it claims to protect in order to help corporations make a larger profit.

According to The New York Times, at least 60,000 immigrants were put to work in ICE detention centers in 2013—more than were employed by any single private employer in the country at the time. Paid as little as 13 cents an hour—or nothing at all—these civil detainees were used to prepare meals, clean facilities, and even provide services to other government institutions.

Unlike convicted criminals, these individuals are not serving sentences. Most are civil detainees awaiting immigration hearings, and roughly half are ultimately allowed to stay in the country. Yet while they await due process, they are locked up, stripped of their rights, and forced to work for pennies on the dollar—all while the government and its contractors avoid paying minimum wage and save tens of millions a year in labor costs.

This isn’t just about cutting corners. It’s a taxpayer-subsidized racket—a corporatist scheme where politically connected companies profit from government largesse, growing the very bureaucratic state that so-called fiscal conservatives once claimed to oppose.

This kind of exploitation is not limited to immigration detention.

An investigation by the Associated Press found that prisoners in the United States—many held in private or underregulated facilities—are part of a multibillion-dollar empire that supplies a hidden labor supply chain linked to hundreds of popular food brands and supply companies.

As the Associated Press reports, “The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.”

It’s no coincidence that 90 percent of people in immigration detention are held in privately run facilities. These corporations profit from every additional body behind bars—and have lobbied aggressively for the policies that keep the beds full. Their contracts often guarantee minimum occupancy levels, creating perverse incentives to detain more people, for longer periods, at the expense of justice and human rights.

The implications for Trump’s detention empire are chilling.

At a time when the administration is promising mass deportations to appease anti-immigrant hardliners, it is simultaneously constructing a parallel economy in which detained migrants can be pressed into near-free labor to satisfy the needs of industries that depend on migrant work.

What Trump is building isn’t just a prison state—it’s a forced labor regime, where confinement and exploitation go hand in hand. And it’s a high price to pay for a policy that creates more problems than it solves.

As the enforcement dragnet expands, so too does the definition of who qualifies as an enemy of the state.

Erected under the banner of law and order, this permanent infrastructure of incarceration and enforcement is being put in place now for use tomorrow—not just against violent criminals who happen to be undocumented immigrants, but against whoever the government deems undesirable.

Increasingly, not even citizenship is a safeguard against the carceral state—as one recent case involving a legal U.S. resident arrested for his political views makes chillingly clear.

The Trump administration is now pushing to review and revoke the citizenship of Americans it deems national security risks—targeting them for arrest, detention, and deportation.

Unfortunately, the government’s definition of “national security threat” is so broad, vague and unconstitutional that it could encompass anyone engaged in peaceful, nonviolent, constitutionally protected activities—including criticism of government policy or the policies of allied governments like Israel.

In Trump’s prison state, no one is beyond the government’s reach.

Just ask Mahmoud Khalil, a legal U.S. resident married to a U.S. citizen who was detained for months by ICE for daring to peacefully oppose Israel’s war efforts in Gaza. Khalil’s arrest was not based on any crime—but on his political views, which the government labeled a national security concern under a little-used statute that allows the Secretary of State to deport non-citizens for expressing views deemed contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests.

A federal judge ultimately ordered Khalil’s release, finding that the detention likely violates due process rights when coupled with First Amendment protections. As the judge warned, if such a law can be used against Khalil, “then other, similar statutes can also one day be made to apply. Not just in the removal context, as to foreign nationals. But also in the criminal context, as to everyone.”

In other words, exercising your First Amendment rights can land you in a cell—citizen or not.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to criminalize dissent and expand the machinery needed to enforce it, this is not a partisan expansion—it’s a structural one and it is being built to outlast any single presidency.

Look closer and you’ll see the outlines of a system built not for justice, but for mass containment and control.

This isn’t speculation. We’ve seen this trajectory before.

Critics of the post-9/11 security state—left, right, and libertarian alike—have long warned that the powers granted to fight terrorism and control immigration would eventually be turned inward, used against dissidents, protestors, and ordinary citizens.

That moment has arrived.

Power, once granted, rarely shrinks. It merely changes hands.

That’s why the Founders placed limits on federal power in the first place—because they knew that even well-meaning government programs would metastasize into tyranny if left unchecked.

Yet Trump’s most vocal supporters remain dangerously convinced they have nothing to fear from this expanding enforcement machine. But history—and the Constitution—say otherwise.

Our founders understood that unchecked government power, especially in the name of public safety, is the most dangerous threat to liberty. That’s why they enshrined rights like due process, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches.

Those safeguards are now being hollowed out.

Immigration courts already operate without juries and allow indefinite detention. Civil liberties have been eroded by predictive policing, no-knock raids, and dragnet surveillance. Asset forfeiture laws allow the government to seize property without charges.

Now, with billions more in detention funding, these tactics are being scaled up and normalized for broader use.

And the public is being conditioned to accept it.

The pageantry surrounding Alligator Alcatraz isn’t just about capacity—it’s about spectacle. The prison, which was built in eight days, features more than 200 security cameras, 28,000-plus feet of barbed wire and 400 security personnel.

This is not a correctional facility. It’s a warning.

A government that rules by fear must maintain that fear.

Trump’s detention expansion—like the mass surveillance programs before it—is not about making America safe. It’s about following the blueprints for authoritarian control in order to lock down the country.

The Trump administration claims its expanding detention regime is aimed at curbing illegal immigration and violent crime. In reality, the new federal budget significantly broadens ICE’s mandate and resources, supercharges its reach through private-public surveillance partnerships, and grants it sweeping policing powers to investigate so-called domestic threats, operate pretrial detention centers, and detain individuals without formal charges under emergency powers.

These are not the tools of a free society. They are the instruments of a permanent security state.

We’re told we must trade liberty for security. But whose security, and at what cost?

With this expansion, we are moving from a nation of laws to a nation of executive decrees, predictive enforcement, and pre-crime detention. Already, courtrooms have become conveyor belts to prison, designed to serve the state, not justice.

The government’s targets may be the vulnerable today—but the infrastructure is built for everyone: Trump’s administration is laying the legal groundwork for indefinite detention of citizens and noncitizens alike.

Executive power during a declared emergency knows few bounds. And those bounds are becoming looser with every new bill, every new detention center, every new algorithm.

This is not just about building prisons. It’s about dismantling the constitutional protections that make us free.

A nation cannot remain free while operating as a security state. And a government that treats liberty as a threat will soon treat the people as enemies.

This is not a partisan warning. It is a constitutional one.

Trump’s supporters may cheer the crackdown now, but what happens when these powers are turned inward?

What happens when a future administration—left, right, or otherwise—decides that your political speech, your religious views, or your refusal to comply with a federal mandate constitutes a threat to order?

What happens when you’re arrested under suspicion, held without trial, and processed through a court system designed for speed, not fairness?

What happens when Alligator Alcatraz becomes the model for every state?

We are dangerously close to losing the constitutional guardrails that keep power in check.

The very people who once warned against Big Government—the ones who decried the surveillance state, the IRS, and federal overreach—are now cheering for the most dangerous part of it: the unchecked power to surveil, detain, and disappear citizens without full due process.

Limited government, not mass incarceration, is the backbone of liberty.

The Founders warned that the greatest threat to liberty was not a foreign enemy, but domestic power left unchecked. That’s exactly what we’re up against now. A nation cannot claim to defend freedom while building a surveillance-fueled, prison-industrial empire.

Trump’s prison state is not a defense of America. It’s the destruction of everything America was meant to defend.

We can pursue justice without abandoning the Constitution. We can secure our borders and our communities without turning every American into a suspect and building a federal gulag.

But we must act now.

History has shown us where this road leads. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once the machinery of tyranny is built, it rarely stays idle.

If we continue down this path, cheering on bigger prisons, broader police powers, and unchecked executive authority—if we fail to reject the dangerous notion that more prisons, more power, and fewer rights will somehow make us safer—if we fail to restore the foundational limits that protect us from government overreach before those limits are gone for good—we may wake up to find that the prisons and concentration camps the police state is building won’t just hold others.

One day, they may hold us all.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mrx94ftu

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Inalienable Rights in an Age of Tyranny: The Government Is Playing God

Posted: July 1, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“When a long train of abuses and usurpations… evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”—Declaration of Independence (1776)

We are now struggling to emerge from the wreckage of a constitutional republic, transformed into a kleptocracy (government by thieves), collapsing into kakistocracy (government by the worst), and enforced by a police state algogracy (rule by algorithm).

This week alone, the Trump administration is reportedly erecting protest barricades around the White House, Congress is advancing legislation that favors the wealthy, and President Trump is grandstanding at the opening of a detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Against such a backdrop of government-sponsored cruelty, corruption and shameless profiteering at taxpayer expense, what, to the average American, is freedom in an age when the government plays god—determining who is worthy of rights, who qualifies as a citizen, and who can be discarded without consequence?

What are inalienable rights worth if they can be redefined, delayed, or revoked by executive order?

Frederick Douglass posed a similar challenge more than 170 years ago when he asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”

His question was a searing indictment not just of slavery but of a government that proclaimed liberty while denying it to millions—a hypocrisy that persists in a system still governed by institutions more committed to power than principle.

Every branch of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—has, in one way or another, abandoned its duty to uphold the Constitution. And both parties have prioritized profit and political theater over justice and the rights of the governed.

The founders of this nation believed our rights come from God, not government. That we are born free, not made free by bureaucrats or judges. That among these rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—none can be taken away without destroying the very idea of government by consent.

And yet that is precisely what’s happening.

We now live under a government that has become judge, jury, and executioner—writing its own laws, policing its own limits, and punishing those who object.

This is not what it means to be free.

When presidents rule by fiat, when agencies strip citizenship from naturalized Americans, when police act as both enforcers and executioners, and when courts rubber-stamp the erosion of basic protections, the distinction between a citizen and a subject begins to collapse.

What do inalienable rights mean in a country where:

  • Your citizenship can be revoked based solely on the government’s say-so?
  • Your freedom can be extinguished by surveillance, asset seizure, or indefinite detention?
  • Your property can be taken, your speech censored, and your life extinguished without due process?
  • Your life can be ended without a trial, a warning, or a second thought, because the government views you as expendable?

The answer is stark: they mean nothing—unless we defend them.

When the government—whether president, Congress, court, or local bureaucrat—claims the right to determine who does and doesn’t deserve rights, then no one is safe. Individuals become faceless numbers. Human beings become statistics. Lives become expendable. Dignity becomes disposable.

It is a slippery slope—justified in the name of national security, public safety, and the so-called greater good—that leads inevitably to totalitarianism.

Unfortunately, we have been dancing with this devil for far too long, and now, the mask has come off.

This is what authoritarianism looks like in America today.

Imagine living in a country where government agents crash through doors to arrest citizens merely for criticizing government officials. Where police stop and search you on a whim. Where carrying anything that resembles a firearm might get you arrested—or killed. Where surveillance is constant, dissent is criminalized, and loyalty is enforced through fear.

If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

But this scenario isn’t new. It’s the same kind of tyranny that drove American colonists to sever ties with Great Britain nearly 250 years ago.

Back then, American colonists lived under the shadow of an imperial power and an early police state that censored their speech, surveilled their movements, taxed their livelihoods, searched their homes without cause, quartered troops in their towns, and punished them for daring to demand liberty.

It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters.

The Declaration of Independence—drafted by Thomas Jefferson and signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who risked everything—was their response. It was more than a list of grievances. It was a document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, a call to arms against a system that had ceased to represent the people and instead sought to dominate them.

Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death, because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.

Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up. They understood that silence in the face of tyranny is complicity. So they stood together, pledging “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” to the cause of freedom.

Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would remain secure for future generations.

The result: our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

The Constitution and Bill of Rights were meant to enshrine the liberties they fought for: due process, privacy, free speech, the right to bear arms, and limits on government power.

Now, nearly two and a half centuries later, those freedoms hang by a thread.

Imagine the shock and outrage these 56 men would feel were they to discover that almost 250 years later, the government they had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic police state in which exercising one’s freedoms—at a minimum, merely questioning a government agent—is often viewed as a flagrant act of defiance.

In fact, had Jefferson and his compatriots written the Declaration of Independence today, they would almost certainly be labeled extremists, placed on government watchlists, targeted by surveillance, and prosecuted as domestic threats.

Read the Declaration of Independence again, and you’ll see the grievances they laid at the feet of King George—unjust laws, militarized policing, surveillance, censorship, and the denial of due process—are the very abuses “we the people” suffer under today.

Had Jefferson written the Declaration about the American police state in 2025, it might have read like a criminal indictment of the crimes perpetrated by a government that:

Polices by fear and violence:

Surveils and represses dissent:

Strips away rights:

Concentrates unchecked power in the executive:

  • bypassing Congress with executive orders, sidelining the courts, and ruling by decree;
  • weaponizing federal agencies to suppress opposition and silence critics;
  • treating constitutional limits as optional and the presidency as a personal fiefdom.

These are not isolated abuses.

They are the logical outcomes of a government that has turned against its people.

They reveal a government that has claimed the god-like power to decide who gets rights—and who doesn’t. Who counts as a citizen—and who doesn’t. Who gets to live—and who becomes expendable.

All along the spectrum of life—from the unborn child to the elderly—the government continues to treat individuals endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights as if they are criminals, subhumans, or enemies of the state.

That is not freedom. It is tyranny.

And it must be called by its true name.

The truth is hard, but it must be said: the American police state has grown drunk on power, money, and its own authority.

The irony is almost too painful to articulate.

On the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—a document that rebuked government corruption, tyranny, and injustice—we find ourselves surrounded by its modern-day equivalents.

This week’s spectacle—protest barricades, legislation to benefit the rich, and Trump’s appearance at Alligator Alcatraz, a.k.a. “Gator Gitmo”—shows how completely we have inverted the spirit of 1776.

That a president would celebrate the Fourth of July while inaugurating a modern-day internment camp—far from the reach of the courts or the Constitution—speaks volumes about the state of our nation and the extent to which those in power now glorify the very forms of tyranny the Founders once rose up against.

This is not law and order.

This is political theater, carceral cruelty, and authoritarianism in plain sight.

It is what happens when a nation that once prided itself on liberty now builds monuments to its own fear and domination.

The spectacle doesn’t end with detention camps and barricades. It extends into commerce, corruption, and self-enrichment at the highest levels of power.

President Trump is now marketing his own line of fragrances—a branding exercise so absurd it would be laughable if it weren’t a flagrant violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. His investments are booming. And all across his administration, top officials are shamelessly using public office to line their pockets, even as they push legislation to strip working-class Americans of the most basic benefits and protections, while claiming to be rooting out corruption and inefficiency.

This is not governance. This is kleptocracy—and it is happening in plain sight.

In the nearly 250 years since early Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, “we the people” have worked ourselves back under the tyrant’s thumb—only this time, the tyrant is one of our own making.

The abuses they once suffered under an imperial power haven’t disappeared. They’ve evolved.

We are being robbed blind by political grifters and corporate profiteers. We are being silenced by bureaucrats and blacklists. We are being watched by data miners and digital spies. We are being caged by militarized enforcers with no regard for the Constitution. And we are being ruled by presidents who govern not by law, but by executive decree.

Given the fact that we are a relatively young nation, it hasn’t taken very long for an authoritarian regime to creep into power.

Unfortunately, the bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight.

The architecture of oppression—surveillance, militarism, censorship, propaganda—was built slowly, brick by brick, law by law, war by war.

It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.

The building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of—police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.—were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests.

The result is an empire in decline and a citizenry under siege.

But if history teaches us anything, it’s that the power of the people—when awakened—is stronger than any empire.

For decades, the Constitution has been our shield against tyranny.

But today, it’s under siege. And now we must be the shield.

Surveillance is expanding. Peaceful dissent is being punished. Judges are being targeted. The presidency is issuing decrees and bypassing the rule of law.

Every institution meant to check power is being tested—and in some cases, broken.

This is the moment to stand in front of the Constitution and defend it.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the fight for freedom is never over. But neither is it lost—so long as we refuse to surrender, refuse to remain silent, and refuse to accept tyranny as the price of safety.

It is time to remember who we are. To reclaim the Constitution. To resist the march toward authoritarianism. And to reassert—boldly and without apology—that our rights are not up for negotiation.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yc8n9rsj

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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