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When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins

Posted: March 12, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: civil liberties, Constitution, democracy, dissent, first amendment, free speech, government, history, israel, Mahmoud, news, police state, politics, Trump

“Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters… officials will use it to silence opposition broadly.”—Heather Cox Richardson, historian

You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.

You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.

You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

There’s always a boomerang effect.

Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

Arresting political activists engaged in lawful, nonviolent protest activities is merely the shot across the bow.

The chilling of political speech and suppression of dissident voices are usually among the first signs that you’re in the midst of a hostile takeover by forces that are not friendly to freedom.

This is how it begins.

Consider that Khalil Mahmoud, an anti-war protester and recent graduate of Columbia University, was arrested on a Saturday night by ICE agents who appeared ignorant of his status as a legal U.S. resident and his rights thereof. That these very same ICE agents also threatened to arrest Mahmoud’s eight-months-pregnant wife, an American citizen, is also telling.

This does not seem to be a regime that respects the rights of the people.

Indeed, these ICE agents, who were “just following orders” from on high, showed no concern that the orders they had been given were trumped up, politically motivated and unconstitutional.

If this is indeed the first of many arrests to come, what’s next? Or more to the point, who’s next?

We are all at risk.

History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. What starts as a crackdown on so-called “threats” quickly expands to include anyone who challenges those in power.

President Trump has made it clear that Mahmoud’s arrest is just “the first arrest of many to come.” He has openly stated his intent to target noncitizens who engage in activities he deems contrary to U.S. interests—an alarmingly vague standard that seems to change at his whim, the First Amendment be damned.

If history is any guide, the next targets will not just be immigrants or foreign-born activists. They will be American citizens who dare to speak out.

If you need further proof of Trump’s disregard for constitutional rights, look no further than his recent declaration that boycotting Tesla is illegal—a chilling statement that reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of both free speech and the rule of law.

For the record, there is nothing illegal about exercising one’s First Amendment right of speech, assembly, and protest in a nonviolent way to bring about social change by boycotting private businesses. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982) that nonviolent boycotts are a form of political speech which are entitled to First Amendment protection.

The problem, unfortunately, when you’re dealing with a president who believes that he can do whatever he wants because he is the law is that anyone and anything can become a target.

Mahmoud is the test case.

As journalists Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine Rowley, and Maya Sulkin point out, Mahmoud’s arrest for being a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States” (note: he is not actually accused of breaking any laws) is being used as a blueprint for other arrests to come.

What this means is that anyone who dares to disagree with the government and its foreign policy and express that disagreement could be considered a threat to the country’s “national security interests.”

Yet the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

Indeed, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty. Certainly, if there is one freedom among the many spelled out in the Bill of Rights that is especially patriotic, it is the right to criticize the government.

Unfortunately, the Deep State doesn’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

Throughout history, U.S. presidents have used their power to suppress dissent. The Biden administration equated the spread of “misinformation” with terrorism. Trump called the press “the enemy of the people” and suggested protesting should be illegal. Obama expanded anti-protest laws and cracked down on whistleblowers. Bush’s Patriot Act made it a crime to support organizations the government deemed terrorist, even in lawful ways. This pattern stretches back centuries—FDR censored news after Pearl Harbor, Woodrow Wilson outlawed criticism of war efforts, and John Adams criminalized speaking against the government.

Regardless of party, those in power have repeatedly sought to limit free speech. What’s new is the growing willingness to criminalize political dissent under the guise of national security.

Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now, but Trump’s antagonism towards free speech is taking this hostility to new heights.

The government has a history of using crises—real or manufactured—to expand its power.

Once dissent is labeled a threat, it’s only a matter of time before laws meant for so-called extremists are used against ordinary citizens. Criticizing policy, protesting, or even refusing to conform could be enough to put someone on a watchlist.

We’ve seen this before.

The government has a long list of “suspicious” ideologies and behaviors it uses to justify surveillance and suppression. Today’s justification may be immigration; tomorrow, it could be any form of opposition.

This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

It’s just a matter of time.

It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

The groundwork has already been laid.

Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government could get you labeled as a terrorist.

After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.

Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.

This is not just about one administration or one set of policies. This is a broader pattern of governmental overreach that has been allowed to unfold, unchecked and unchallenged. And at the heart of this loss of freedom is a fundamental misunderstanding—or even a deliberate abandonment—of what sovereignty really means in America.

Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.

In other words, as the preamble to the Constitution states, in America, “we the people”—sovereign citizens—call the shots.

So, when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.

That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?

In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.

The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.”

This is how far our republic has fallen and how desensitized “we the people” have become to this constant undermining of our freedoms.

If we are to put an end to this steady slide into totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none, we must begin by refusing to allow the politics of fear to shackle us to a dictatorship.

President Trump wants us to believe that the menace we face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.

Don’t believe it. That argument has been tried before.

The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence and illegal immigration have all been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

We are walking a dangerous path right now.

Political arrests. Harassment. Suppression of dissident voices. Retaliation. Detention centers for political prisoners.

These are a harbinger of what’s to come if the Trump administration carries through on its threats to crack down on any and all who exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech and protest.

We are being acclimated to bolder power grabs, acts of lawlessness, and a pattern of intimidation, harassment, and human rights violations by government officials. And yet, in the midst of this relentless erosion of our freedoms, the very concept of sovereignty—the foundational idea that the people, not the government, hold ultimate power—has been all but forgotten.

“Sovereignty” used to mean something fundamental in America: the idea that the government serves at the will of the people, that “we the people” are the rightful rulers of this land, and that no one, not even the president, is above the law. But today, that notion is scarcely discussed, as the government continues its unchecked expansion.

We have lost sight of the fact that our power is meant to restrain the government, not the other way around.

Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, derailed or desensitized.

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 moment these acts of aggression becomes the new normal, authoritarianism won’t be a distant threat; it will be reality.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/2rt4sxhr

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

The Deep State’s War on Truth—Waged with Doublespeak, Delusion and Propaganda

Posted: March 5, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: civil liberties, Constitution, Deep State, democracy, Donald Trump, free speech, news, Orwell, police state, politics, Trump

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” — George Orwell

The Deep State’s war on truth is being waged with doubletalk, delusion and propaganda.

Through deliberate manipulation of language—what George Orwell called “doublespeak”—Donald Trump has provided cover for the Deep State’s continued grip on power.

While promising to drain the swamp, his administration has instead relied on contradictory policies, misinformation, and propaganda to further entrench the very system he claims to oppose. Although the Trump administration is merely the latest frontman for the Deep State’s efforts to maintain its stranglehold on power, we are approaching a tipping point beyond which there may be no turning back to freedom as we have known it.

This is how “we the people” remain on the losing end of this devil’s bargain that is life in the American police state.

What we desperately need is a reality check, and that starts by disconnecting from the Deep State’s propaganda-riddled, manipulated alternative reality about the state of our nation.

While President Trump, well versed in the “art of the deal,” appears to be saying all the right things about peace, corruption, graft, wasteful spending, free speech, equality, bloated bureaucracy, national security, etc., his administration’s actions tell a far different story about his priorities and his loyalties, which remain self-serving, imperial, flagrantly unconstitutional and intended to keep the Deep State in power.

As always, actions speak louder than words.

When the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are still missing from the White House’s website, that oversight—or deliberate omission—speaks volumes.

Any government that can’t be bothered to include the Constitution among its priorities, or include it anywhere on its administration’s website, is not a government that can be trusted to abide by the Constitution.

Then again, trust has little to do with it.

The Constitution is a contract between the people and the government. What we have been experiencing over the course of both Republican and Democratic presidencies, is a breach of contract. Where the Trump administration differs from those that have come before it is in its willingness to go rogue in defiance of Congress, the courts and the rule of law.

You don’t wage a “common sense” revolution by discarding the Constitution. That way lies dictatorship.

Remember, how you do something is just as important as why you do it.

So, what’s really going on?

As a populace, we have become so desensitized to political lies, especially Trump’s barrage of lies, that we shrug them off and move on. But in doing so, we act as enablers for what hides beneath those lies.

Make no mistake: the Deep State—the real Deep State, not the decoy version of it that Trump trots out to justify dismantling our constitutional republic—hides behind that rhetoric.

As journalist Shawn McCreesh explains, “In order to remake the government, President Trump and his administration are remaking the language used to describe the government. An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched. In its place is a new vocabulary, honed by the president and echoed by his many imitators in the capital. It is a vocabulary containing many curious uses of doublespeak.”

Doublespeak, as media scholar Edward S. Herman defines it, is characterized by “the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.”

The term is derived from George Orwell’s 1984, in which “doublethink” and “Newspeak” are used to manipulate the masses into going along with the government’s agenda.

In true Orwellian fashion, Trump has mastered the art of doublespeak.

For example, McCreesh points to “one presidential order titled ‘Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ [that] calls for weaponizing the federal government against itself. Another titled ‘Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling’ demands that ‘patriotic education’ be taught to children… Even as the president signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,’ he signed other orders policing language.”

Consider some of Trump’s other uses of alternative facts, misdirection and misnomers to advance the Deep State’s agenda.

In true doublespeak fashion, Trump’s path to peace leads to more war. At the same time that he’s threatening to halt military aid to Ukraine in the name of securing peace with Russia, Trump’s administration is sending $4 billion in weapons and ammunition to Israel so it can continue to wage war on Gaza.

Trump’s path to nationalism by way of isolationism is in fact empire building. At the same time that Trump is declaring himself a nationalist, breaking ranks with America’s allies, withdrawing from international accords, and ceding ground to authoritarian regimes such as Russia, he is also declaring his intent to lay claim to foreign lands such as Gaza, Greenland and Canada as part of a global power grab.

Trump’s path to saving money is spending money. At the same time that Trump claims to be shining a spotlight on wasteful spending in the hopes of balancing the budget, he is also as guilty of spending—and wasting—taxpayer dollars at an alarming rate. At the same that he’s empowering Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to drastically reduce the federal workforce in a bid to save money, he is pushing tax cuts that would add $5-10 trillion to the 10-year deficit. As Reuters reports, DOGE’s savings claims are thus far “unverifiable and its calculations have been riddled with errors and corrections.”

Trump’s path to law and order is allowing the police to act lawlessly. At the same time that the Trump administration is advocating for impose harsher penalties and increased prison sentences, even for nonviolent crimes, Trump is dismantling government policies aimed at holding police accountable for official misconduct.

Trump’s path to efficiency is giving rise to even greater inefficiency. Likening DOGE to a chainsaw hacking away at a bloated bureaucracy, Musk has been wiping out whole segments of the federal workforce, agency by agency, with little thought to what programs might suffer as a result or how to keep the government functioning. As CNN reports, “There have been a lot of reports of federal workers being fired then quickly rehired once agencies realized people with critical skills had been let go…for example: Those managing the US nuclear arsenal, and those working at USDA on the response to the bird flu outbreak.”

Trump’s path to economic triumph is spelling economic disaster. Trump continues to forge ahead with his imposition of tariffs on America’s major trading partners despite warnings from economists and the business sector alike that tariffs will hurt, rather than help, the economy and could lead to a recession and a spike in inflation.

Trump’s path to draining the swamp is letting the swamp run the show. Building on the same patterns he exhibited during his first term, when Trump populated his administration with individuals engaged in a pattern of wasteful and extravagant spending on themselves at the taxpayers’ expense, Trump is once again prioritizing personal profit over the American people.

Trump’s path to free speech is censorship. At the same time that Trump claims to be liberating conservative speech from the muzzling power of political correctness, he is embarking on a massive crackdown on lawful First Amendment activities that would criminalize protest activities and punish individuals and groups advocating for policies that contradict White House executive orders.

Trump’s path to transparency is replacing watchdogs with yes-men and loyalists. At the same time that Trump claims to be bringing transparency back to government, his administration is methodically dismantling all of the systemic checks intended to protect whistleblowers and serve as bulwarks against government corruption.

Trump’s path to ending cancel culture is more cancel culture. At the same time that Trump has declared war against left-leaning, politically correct “wokeness,” he is replacing it with a right-leaning cancel culture that aims to do exactly what the left was accused of doing: renaming public spaces, erasing offensive parts of history, and silencing the opposition.

When you set aside the mountain of contradictory policies and propaganda that have become hallmarks of Trump’s time in office, a grim picture emerges: Trump’s efforts to make America great again are really just a variation on one theme, which is keeping the Deep State in power at the expense of our freedoms.

Indeed, George Orwell’s fictional 1984 could increasingly be mistaken for the Trump Administration’s instruction manual on how to remake the government in the dystopian image of Oceania, the authoritarian regime run by Big Brother.

While America’s founders envisioned a separation of powers held in check by three coequal branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) as the means of thwarting abuse by any one branch, Orwell’s Oceania has four branches of government (the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty) that work together to maintain Big Brother’s chokehold on power.

As Orwell explains, “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

According to Orwell, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

Thus, the Ministry of Peace is tasked with waging perpetual war in order to keep the government in power. The Ministry of Love is tasked with meting out torture and punishment in order to brainwash the populace into loving Big Brother. The Ministry of Plenty is tasked with maintaining a state of perpetual poverty, scarcity and financial shortages, the rationale being that an impoverished populace is easier to control. And the Ministry of Truth is tasked with disseminating propaganda and rewriting history and language in order to keep the citizens compliant.

The key to this last undertaking, maintaining a chokehold on power, is what Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels referred to as the “big lie.”

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” stated Goebbels. “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism, came to the same conclusion:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

This is how that slippery slope to authoritarianism begins, with lies that masquerade as truths and a populace disinclined to think for themselves.

Which brings us back to the tactics being deployed by the Trump administration.

Conformity, compliance and group think are necessary ingredients for tyrants to succeed.

Yet as historian Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic, “We are not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems, and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules.”

The answer, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is that we must re-learn what it means to think for ourselves.

Pay attention. Question everything. Dare to be different. Don’t follow the mob. Don’t let yourself become numb to the world around you. Be compassionate. Be humane. Most of all, don’t allow yourselves to become so desensitized to Trump’s brand of politics that you tolerate behavior in government officials that you would never tolerate from your own children (lying, bullying, name-calling, greed, etc.).

When all is said and done, Trump’s path to putting America First is really about putting Trump first and leaving Americans in bondage to the Deep State.

In Orwell’s world, the state maintained power through deception.

In Trump’s America, doublespeak remains the Deep State’s most powerful weapon—one that thrives as long as the public fails to recognize it for what it is—and Trump is proving to be its most effective mouthpiece.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/y9pbu645

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

Nullifying the Constitution Won’t Make America Great Again

Posted: February 26, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: civil liberties, Congress, Constitution, democracy, Donald Trump, government, news, police state, politics, Trump

“You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with—its Constitution.”— Seven Days in May (1964)

Anyone who wants to put America first needs to start by putting the Constitution first.

This should be non-negotiable.

Winning an election does not give President Trump—or any politician—the authority to sidestep the Constitution and remake the government at will.

That’s not how a constitutional republic works, even in pursuit of the so-called greater good.

Thus far, those defending the Trump administration’s worst actions, which range from immoral and unethical to blatantly unconstitutional, have resorted to repeating propaganda and glaring non-truths while insisting that the Biden administration was worse.

“They did it first” and “they did it worse” are not justifications for disregarding the law.

For that matter, omitting the Constitution from the White House website—pretending it never existed—does not give the president and the agencies within the Executive Branch the right to circumvent the rule of law or, worse, nullify the Constitution.

Mounting a populist revolution to wrest power from the Deep State only to institute a different Deep State is not how you make America great again.

How you do something is just as important as why you do something, and right now, the means by which the Trump administration is attempting to accomplish many of its end goals are antithetical to every principle on which this nation was founded: natural rights, popular sovereignty, the rule of law, the rejection of monarchical law, the need for transparency and accountability, due process, liberty, equality, and limited government, to name just a few.

Whether the concerns driving this massive overhaul of the government are legitimate is not the question. We are certainly overdue for a reckoning when it comes to our bloated, corrupt, unaccountable, out-of-control bureaucracy.

So far, however, the Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated government dysfunction, undermined constitutional rights, and deepened public distrust.

Trump is not making America great again. In fact, things are getting worse by the day.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the erosion of fundamental freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights. Government officials are muzzling the press, threatening protesters, and censoring online speech. Due process is being ignored altogether.

The government’s haphazard, massive and potentially illegal firing spree is leaving whole quadrants of the government understaffed and unable to carry out the necessary functions of government as it relates to veterans, education, energy, agriculture, and housing. A testament to how disorganized and chaotic this administration is can be seen in the administration’s frantic scramble to rehire critical employees fired without thought to how essential functions would continue.

Rather than draining the swamp of corrupt, moneyed interests, Trump has favored the oligarchy with intimate access to the halls of power. At last count, the billionaires tapped to serve on Trump’s cabinet had a total net worth of $382.2 billion, more than the GDP of 172 different countries.

Rather than reducing the actual size of the government, it appears that the groundwork is being laid by Trump’s administration to replace large swaths of the federal workforce with artificial intelligence-powered systems. In other words, instead of reducing government overreach, Trump’s administration is replacing human oversight with artificial intelligence—expanding automation rather than shrinking bureaucracy.

Despite claims of saving the country billions through massive layoffs and terminations, cancelled leases and contracts, and the discovery of wasteful or corrupt spending, the supporting documentation provided by DOGE, the so-called department of efficiency headed up by Elon Musk, has been shown to be riddled by errors and miscalculations.

While claiming to cut back on wasteful government spending in order to balance the federal budget, Trump is pushing to raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion while adding at least that much in tax cuts to benefit corporations and billionaires, all of which would be paid for by the already overburdened middle- and lower-classes.

Despite campaign promises to bring down prices “on Day One,” inflation is on the rise again and financial markets are tumbling on fears that Americans will be the ones to pay the price for Trump’s threatened tariffs.

In defiance of states’ rights and in a complete about-face given his own past statements about the authority of state and local governments, Trump is increasingly attempting to browbeat the states into compliance with the dictates of the federal government. Historically, legal precedent has tended to favor the states, whose sovereignty rests in the Tenth Amendment.

All appearances to the contrary, Trump is not so much scaling back the nation’s endless wars as he appears to be genuflecting to authoritarian regimes in the hopes of building an international authoritarian alliance with fascist governments, while announcing plans to seize other countries’ lands, a clear act of military provocation.

Trump’s eagerness to expand the U.S. prison system and impose harsher punishments, including the death penalty, has been hailed by private prison investors, who anticipate growing their wealth by locking up more people. This would inevitably result in more American citizens being locked up for nonviolent crimes. In addition to using Guantanamo as an off-shore prison, the Trump administration has also floated the idea of imprisoning American “criminals” in other countries, which could create significant roadblocks to judicial due process.

Then you have Trump’s frequent references to himself as an imperial ruler (the White House even shared images of Trump wearing a royal crown), coupled with his repeated trial balloon allusions to running for a third term in contravention of the 22^nd Amendment, which bars presidents from being elected more than twice.

Nothing adds up.

Not the numbers, not the policies, not the promises.

If Trump continues to put into power people who are more loyal to him than they are to the Constitution, the consequences will be dire.

Nullifying the Constitution is not how you make America great again.

The Constitution provides a protocol for wresting back control of a government that oversteps. Those powers rest with Congress and the courts, but that will take time.

Daily, lawsuits are being filed challenging Trump’s broad-ranging and overreaching power grabs. In case after case, the courts are knocking back Trump’s attempts to do an end run around the rule of law.

What a waste of political capital.

Trump may not have been given a mandate to act as a dictator or a king, but he was given a mandate to rein in a government that had grown out of control.

That mandate came with one iron-clad condition, which Trump swore to abide by: the U.S. Constitution.

No government official should be allowed to play fast and loose with the rule of law.

That should have been the lesson of the Watergate scandal, which resulted in Richard Nixon’s impeachment and subsequent resignation for engaging in burglary, bribery, and surveillance. Instead, it signaled the beginning of a race to see how far a president could go in terms of breaking the law without being reined in.

What has taken place since then, with every subsequent presidential administration, makes Nixon’s criminal endeavors look like child’s play.

So where does that leave us?

The job of holding the government accountable does not belong to any one person or party. It belongs to all of us, “We the people,” irrespective of political affiliations and differences of race, religion, gender, education, economics, social strata or any other labels used to divide us.

“In questions of power,” instructed Thomas Jefferson, “let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”

“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties,” concluded James Madison.

In other words, our job is not to make excuses for the Trump administration’s blatant power grabs or come up with reasons why we should be long-suffering or patient in the face of the government’s overreaches and infringements on individual rights.

In the words of the great 1976 film Network, our job in the words of the immortal Howard Beale is to say, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” And then do something about it.

Call the White House. Call your representatives in Congress. Show up at town hall meetings.

Make your voices heard, not in a partisan way, but as citizens who know their rights and recognize that we have been on this slippery slope to tyranny for too long.

Politics may rely on our fixation with a two-party system of Republicans and Democrats devoted to maintaining the status quo, but the survival of our constitutional republic transcends party lines.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no politician, of any party, will save America.

Only the Constitution—and the people who defend it—can do that.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mr27h7v4

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

The Deep State Wins Again: All the Ways ‘We the People’ Keep Losing Our Freedoms

Posted: February 20, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: civil liberties, Constitution, Deep State, democracy, Donald Trump, government, news, police state, politics, Trump

“We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore. Mr. President, it’s too much.’”—Donald Trump

Almost one month into the Trump presidency, and the Constitution and the entire section on the various branches of government and how they work together are still missing from the White House website.

This is no small thing.

This omission, deliberate or inadvertent, speaks volumes about the priorities of this current administration. It also explains a lot about the legal mindset that is driving the Trump train, which continues to push forward with a theory of unitary executive power.

You know what is not driving the Trump government? Any sense that it is bound by the rule of law, i.e, the U.S. Constitution. As Trump recently declared, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Then again, Trump has never made any pretense of his aspirations to rule as a strongman. As the Washington Post reports:

In 2017, he claimed “an absolute right to do what I want with the Justice Department.” In 2019, he claimed that Article II of the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” In 2020, he said he could override state and local public health orders related to the coronavirus pandemic by saying: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total.” In 2022, he said that purported voter fraud in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” In 2023, he mused that he would be a dictator, but only on Day One of his presidency. And a year ago, he argued that presidents should have total immunity from criminal prosecution, even for “EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE.’ ”

Listen, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.

Then again, maybe the majority of Americans just don’t care about the Constitution anymore.

Maybe, as journalist Zeynep Tufekci suggests, Americans want an authoritarian leader who embraces an “ends-justify-the-means leadership style.”

Maybe all they care about are the “endless wins” that the Trump administration never ceases to claim for itself, but if we’re being brutally honest about the state of the country, “we the people” are on a solid losing streak.

While the team colors and the police state’s outward allegiances may have changed, from a constitutional perspective, we’re still losing in all the ways that matter, and the Deep State is still winning.

Indeed, far from protecting our freedoms, the Trump administration is taking the Deep State’s unconstitutional disregard for civil liberties to new extremes.

When you step away from the polarizing rhetoric and government spin long enough to look at the many ways in which the American police state is continuing to lockdown our freedoms, you’ll notice that not much has changed for the better.

Has the Trump administration put an end to the police state’s use of surveillance on the American people? Has it scaled back the deployment of military forces domestically in violation of Posse Comitatus? Has it ceased the government’s war on cash? Has it stepped back from the NDAA’s threat of indefinite detentions? Has it de-militarized the police? Has it kicked the oligarchs out of the government’s inner circle? Has it been transparent and accountable in all of its dealings?

The answer to all of those questions is a resounding “no.”

Rather than minimizing the power of the police state, the Trump administration appears to be doubling down on its commitment to police state tactics of fear, intimidation and brutality.

Consider for yourselves.

Free speech is still being undermined. The First Amendment prohibits the government from suppressing free speech activities by the public, the media, protesters, religious individuals, or by restricting the right of the people to assemble and associate with one another, yet we no longer have any real freedom of speech. We are moving fast down a slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American who criticizes the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association. Although President Trump issued an executive order denouncing government censorship, primarily for speech with which he agrees, his administration has ostensibly engaged in a campaign of intimidation and coercion against news organizations that dare to disagree with or criticize his administration, as well as whistleblowers. Likewise, under the guise of fighting politically correct DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies and cancel culture, the Trump administration is engaging in its own campaign to cancel out expressive activities and content of which it disapproves, including anti-war protests.

We’re still being subjected to expansive surveillance. All of the monitoring tools and weapons in the government’s surveillance arsenal that are being used to identify, track and target those on the Trump’s administration’s enemies list—facial recognition, biometrics, license plate readers, fusion centers, cell phone location tracking, etc.—can and will be used against the American people. AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude. Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer. With every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

The government’s police powers are still being weaponized. With Trump claiming the power to target anyone or any group he perceives as a “threat,” i.e., an “enemy from within,” anyone who disagrees with the government could be placed on a government watch list. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.

Government whistleblowers are still being persecuted. While claiming to be rooting out inefficiency, the Trump administration has been methodically dismantling all of the agencies charged with acting as nonpartisan watchdogs of government corruption.

Americans are still being treated as suspects. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides. Having launched a precrime program during his first administration, the Trump administration would have no qualms about using AI predictive and surveillance technologies to classify, segregate and flag the populace.

We’re still unofficially under martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics. With Trump having pledged to deploy the military domestically to work in conjunction with local police to address domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants, the American homeland is increasingly being transformed into a battlefield.

We’re still being flagged based on our viewpoints, activities and associations. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

Police shootings of unarmed citizens will continue. In the wake of Trump’s decision to reverse and revoke many of the policies intended to implement police reform and discourage police misconduct and stem the time of police brutality, we can expect the use of excessive force by police to continue unabated.

We still don’t have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

We still have an imperial president. Although President Trump has made no secret of his authoritarian impulses, he is not the first president to rule by fiat through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements. These unchecked powers enable all sitting president to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

In other words, the seeds of chaos are still being sown, and it’s the U.S. government that will reap the harvest.

My friends, if this is winning, I can’t imagine what losing will look like, but it won’t be pretty.

All of this dismantling of government agencies, weakening of the economy, and fomenting of civil unrest feeds right back into the Deep State’s plot to destabilize the nation.

Remember that Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command which anticipated that all hell would break loose by 2030?

That’s barely five short years away now, but we’re being moved steadily in that direction.

According to “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” the U.S. military plans to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.

We’re already enemies of the state.

You want to bring about real change? Start by wresting back control of our government from the oligarchs, technocrats and Deep State operatives who are still running the show.

Reject the propaganda and the polarizing rhetoric and the “us vs. them” tactics that reduce the mass power of the populace to warring, powerless factions.

Find common ground with your fellow citizens and push back against the government’s brutality, inhumanity, greed, corruption and power grabs.

Be dangerous in the best way possible: by thinking for yourself, by refusing to be silenced, by choosing sensible solutions over political expediency and bureaucracy.

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 solution to what ails this country is really not that complicated: decency, compassion, common sense, generosity balanced by fiscal responsibility, fairness, a commitment to freedom principles, and a firm rejection of the craven, partisan politics of the Beltway elites who have laid the groundwork for the Deep State’s ongoing authoritarian coup d’etat.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/4bpah8sw

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

A Constitutional Crisis: Can the Rule of Law Survive This Presidency?

Posted: February 12, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: checks and balances, civil liberties, Constitution, DOGE, history, news, police state, politics, rule of law, supreme court, Trump

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

This has all the makings of a constitutional crisis.

According to law professor Amanda Frost, “a constitutional crisis occurs when one branch of government, usually the executive, ‘blatantly, flagrantly and regularly exceeds its constitutional authority — and the other branches are either unable or unwilling to stop it.’”

Consider for yourself.

The president has gone rogue, doubling down on his belief that “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

The vice president believes the president should be a law unto himself, i.e., unaccountable to the other branches of the government.

The Republican-controlled Congress appears to be deaf, dumb and blind to the Executive Branch’s blatantly unconstitutional overreaches.

The courts, which have in recent years largely rubberstamped the government’s power grabs, are ill-prepared to rein in a sitting president who is determined to do whatever he wants, the Constitution be damned.

In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court preemptively gave future presidents the green light to engage in all manner of criminal activities when it ruled 6-3 that presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution, provided the lawbreaking is related to their official duties.

Meanwhile, the Constitution is still missing from the White House’s website.

This last point is not an oversight.

Rather, it speaks volumes about the priorities of the current presidential administration, which operates as if the rule of law does not apply to itself.

Indeed, while President Trump’s predecessors paid lip service to the rule of law while sidestepping it at every opportunity, Trump has been unapologetic about his intentions to set aside whatever legal, moral or political barricades stand in the way of his end goals.

Rule by fiat—when presidents attempt to unilaterally impose their will through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements—is an offense to the Constitution.

It was offensive when Biden did it. It was offensive when Obama did it. And it is just as offensive when Trump does it.

Already, Trump has signed more executive orders in his first month than any other president in their first 100 days.

This is not a sign of strength and leadership. This is a red flag.

In bypassing Congress in order to carry out his ambitious agenda to “make America safe again,” “make America affordable and energy dominant again,” “drain the swamp,” and “bring back American values,” the Trump Administration risks transforming the executive branch into something akin to the very entities it often criticizes: an overreaching surveillance state, a nanny state that dictates individual choices, and a police state that prioritizes compliance over freedom.

It is particularly telling that while Trump and his Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are pledging to lay off huge swaths of federal employees and replace the workforce with artificial intelligence, the police state’s martial law apparatus will remain largely untouched.

This is how you prepare to lock down a nation.

This danger transcends party lines and tests the resilience of our constitutional framework.

How far will “we the people” allow the Executive Branch to continue to expand its power at the expense of established legal principles and the rule of law?

As much as past occupants of the White House and Congress would like us to believe otherwise, winning an election is not a populist mandate for one-party rule.

This way lies totalitarianism, by way of authoritarianism, and those who insist it can’t happen here need to pay better attention.

It’s happening already.

The following are 15 benchmarks of a totalitarian regime, according to Benjamin Carlson, a former editor at The Atlantic.

Media is controlled.

Dissent is equated to violence.

Legal system is co-opted by the state.

Power is exerted to prevent dissent.

State police are directed to protect the regime, not the people.

Financial, legal, and civil rights are contingent on compliance.

There is a mass conformity of behaviors and beliefs.

Power is concentrated in an inner ring of people and institutions.

Semi-organized violence is permitted.

Propaganda targets enemies of the state.

Whole classes of people are scapegoated and singled out for persecution.

Extra-legal action against internal enemies is condoned.

Unpredictable and harsh enforcement is used against unfavored classes.

The language of the constitution serves as a facade for the exercise of power.

And all private and public levers of power are used to enforce adherence to state orthodoxy.

To guard against these pitfalls, we must start by understanding the rule of law, and how it functions within our system of checks and balances.

The rule of law is the principle that everyone, including the government—and the president—must obey the law, which is embodied in the U.S. Constitution.

In a nutshell, the Constitution is the social contract—the people’s contract with the government—which outlines our expectations about the role of the government and its limits, a system of checks and balances dependent on a separation of powers, and the rights of the citizenry.

America’s founders established a system of checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in any single branch. To this end, the Constitution establishes three separate but equal branches of government: the legislative branch, which makes the law; the executive branch, which enforces the law; and the judicial branch, which interprets the law.

As constitutional scholar Linda Monk explains, “Within the separation of powers, each of the three branches of government has ‘checks and balances’ over the other two. For instance, Congress makes the laws, but the President can veto them, and the Supreme Court can declare them unconstitutional. The President enforces the law, but Congress must approve executive appointments and the Supreme Court rules whether executive action is constitutional. The Supreme Court can strike down actions by both the legislative and executive branches, but the President nominates Supreme Court justices, and the Senate confirms or denies their nominations.”

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat, nowhere in the Constitution is the president granted unilateral authority to act outside these established checks and balances, no matter how well-meaning his intentions might be or how worthy the goals (a balanced budget, safety, economic prosperity, etc.).

Writing for The Washington Post, Alan Charles Raul, general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, warns that not only is Trump acting extra-constitutionally, i.e., beyond the scope of the Constitution, but he lays out the case for why DOGE itself is unconstitutional:

“The protocols of the Constitution do not permit statutorily mandated agencies and programs to be transformed — or reorganized out of existence — without congressional authorization… The radical reorganization now underway is not just footfaulting over procedural lines; it is shattering the fundamental checks and balances of our constitutional order. The DOGE process, if that is what it is, mocks two basic tenets of our government: that we are nation of laws, not men and that it is Congress which controls spending and passes legislation. The president must faithfully execute Congress’s laws and manage the executive agencies consistent with the Constitution and lawmakers’ appropriations — not by any divine right or absolute power… [T]here is no reading of the Constitution that allows any president to claim that a political mandate, or a political promise made, obviates or supersedes the role for Congress… Even under the most aggressive view of the president’s ‘unitary executive’ control over the entire executive branch and independent agencies, it is Congress’s sole authority to appropriate and legislate for our entire government… [I]n the end, the president is constitutionally stuck with the policies for the federal government that Congress enacts and appropriates. No one man in America is the law — not even a Trump or an Elon Musk.”

Allowing the president to bypass established legal procedures in order to prioritize his own power over adherence to the rule of law ultimately undermines the principles of a constitutional government.

Which brings us to the present moment.

With Congress on the sidelines, the momentum is building for a constitutional showdown between the White House and the judiciary.

This is as it should be.

The job of the courts is to maintain the rule of law and serve as the referees in the power struggle between the President and Congress. That delicate balance between the three branches of government was intended to serve as a bulwark against tyranny and a deterrent to any who would overreach.

So for anyone, especially someone who has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, to suggest that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power” constitutes either an appalling admission of civic illiteracy or a bold-faced attempt to sidestep accountability.

When all is said and done, however, it is supposed to be “we the people” who hold the real power—not the president, not Congress, and not the courts. As the Tenth Amendment proclaims, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The government’s purpose is to serve the people, not the other way around.

Those first three words of the preamble to the Constitution say it all:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

This is not a monarchy with an imperial ruler. It is not a theocracy with a religious order. It is not a banana republic policed by a junta. It is not a crime syndicate with a mob boss. Nor is it a democracy with mob rule.

So, what’s the answer?

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, America’s founders were very clear about what to do when the government oversteps.

Bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution, advised Thomas Jefferson.

Take alarm at the first experiment on your freedoms, cautioned James Madison.

And if government leaders attempt to abuse their powers and usurp the rights of the people, get rid of them, warned the Declaration of Independence.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/bdcr9f54

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Sleepwalking into Tyranny: How Power is Silently Being Seized

Posted: February 5, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: authoritarianism, civil liberties, Constitution, coup, government, police state, Trump

“This is what militaries do during coups: you capture the major targets, with government buildings high on the list, and you take over communications and other systems.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian on fascism and authoritarian leaders

How something is done is just as important as why something is done.

To suggest that the ends justify the means is to launch oneself down a moral, ethical and legal rabbit hole that leaves us in a totalitarian bind.

We are already halfway down that road.

Whatever the justifications for discarding, even temporarily, the constitutional framework and protocols that have long served as the foundations for our republic (national security, an economic crisis, terrorists at the border, a global pandemic, etc.), none of them are worth the price we are being asked to pay—the rule of law—for what is amounting to a hostile takeover of the U.S. government by an oligarchic elite.

This is no longer a conversation about stolen elections, insurrections, or even the Deep State.

This has become a lesson in how quickly things can fall apart.

This is what all those years of partisan double standards and constitutional undermining and legislative sell-outs and judicial betrayals add up to: a coup by oligarchic forces intent on a hostile takeover.

The government’s past efforts to sidestep the rule of law pale in comparison to what is unfolding right now, which is nothing less than the complete dismantling of every last foundational principle for a representative government that answers to “we the people.”

This shock-and-awe blitz campaign of daily seizures, raids and overreaching executive orders is a deliberate attempt to keep us distracted and diverted while the government is remade in the image of an autocracy, one in which privacy, due process, the rule of law, free speech, and equality will all be contingent on whether you are worthy of the privilege of rights.

I have long insisted on the need to recalibrate the government, but this is not how one goes about it.

The issue is not whether the actions being taken by the Trump Administration are right or wrong—although there are many that are egregiously wrong and some that are long overdue—but whether the Executive Branch has the power to unilaterally override the Constitution.

If we allow this imperial coup to move forward without pushback or protest, we will be just as culpable as those signing the death warrant for our freedoms.

Power corrupts.

And absolute power corrupts absolutely.

However, it takes a culture of entitlement and a nation of compliant, willfully ignorant, politically divided citizens to provide the foundations of tyranny.

For too long now, America has played politics with its principles and allowed the president and his colleagues to act in violation of the rule of law.

“We the people” are paying the price for it now.

Since the early days of our republic, we have operated under the principle that no one is above the law.

As Thomas Paine observed in Common Sense, “In America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

Several years later, John Adams, seeking to reinforce this important principle, declared in the Massachusetts Constitution that they were seeking to establish “a government of laws and not of men.”

The history of our nation over the past 200-plus years has been the history of a people engaged in a constant struggle to maintain that tenuous balance between the rule of law—in our case, the United States Constitution—and the government leaders entrusted with protecting it, upholding it and abiding by it.

At various junctures, when that necessary balance has been thrown off by overreaching government bodies or overly ambitious individuals, we have found ourselves faced with a crisis of constitutional proportions.

Each time, we have taken the painful steps needed to restore our constitutional equilibrium.

That was then, this is now, and for too long now, we have failed to recognize and rectify the danger in allowing a single individual to declare himself the exception to the rule of law and assume the role of judge, jury, and executioner.

For all intents and purposes, we have become a nation ruled not by laws but by men, and fallible, imperfect men, at that.

We allowed Bush to overstep. We allowed Obama to overstep. We allowed Trump to overstep. We allowed Biden to overstep.

These power grabs by the Trump Administration, aided and abetted by Elon Musk, are more than an overstep, however.

All of us are in danger.

Those cheering the erection of migrant camps at Guantanamo, take heed: you could be next.

It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

Partisan politics have no place in what is unfolding now.

It’s just a matter of time.

The groundwork has already been laid.

So, it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government could get you labeled as a terrorist.

It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

It’s happened before.

As history shows, the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes.

One need only go back to the 1940s, when the federal government proclaimed that Japanese-Americans, labeled potential dissidents, could be put in concentration (a.k.a. internment) camps based only upon their ethnic origin, to see the lengths the federal government will go to in order to maintain “order” in the homeland.

The U.S. Supreme Court validated the detention program in Korematsu v. US (1944), concluding that the government’s need to ensure the safety of the country trumped personal liberties.

Although that Korematsu decision was never formally overturned, Chief Justice Roberts opined in Trump v. Hawaii (2018) that “the forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority.”

Roberts’ statements provide little assurance of safety in light of the government’s tendency to sidestep the rule of law when it suits its purposes. Pointing out that such blatantly illegal detentions could happen again—with the blessing of the courts—Justice Scalia once warned, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

We seem to be coming full circle on many fronts.

Consider that two decades ago we were debating whether non-citizens—for example, so-called enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay and Muslim-Americans rounded up in the wake of 9/11—were entitled to protections under the Constitution, specifically as they relate to indefinite detention.

Americans weren’t overly concerned about the rights of non-citizens then, nor do they seem all that concerned now. And yet in the near future we could well be the ones in the unenviable position of being targeted for indefinite detention by our own government.

Similarly, most Americans weren’t unduly concerned when the U.S. Supreme Court gave Arizona police officers the green light to stop, search and question anyone—ostensibly those fitting a particular racial profile—they suspect might be an illegal immigrant. More than a decade later, the cops largely have carte blanche authority to stop any individual, citizen and non-citizen alike, they suspect might be doing something illegal.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it will only be a matter of time before those brainwashed into believing that they have nothing to worry about learn the hard way that in a police state, it doesn’t matter who you are or how righteous you claim to be, because eventually, you will be lumped in with everyone else and everything you do will be “wrong” and suspect.

Martin Niemöller learned that particular lesson the hard way.

A German military officer turned theologian, Niemöller was an early supporter of Hitler’s rise to power. It was only when Hitler threatened to attack the churches that Niemöller openly opposed the regime. For his efforts, Niemöller was arrested, charged with activities against the government, fined, detained, and eventually interned in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945.

As Niemöller reportedly replied when asked by his cellmate why he ever supported the Nazi party:

“I find myself wondering about that too. I wonder about it as much as I regret it. Still, it is true that Hitler betrayed me… Hitler promised me on his word of honor, to protect the Church, and not to issue any anti-Church laws. He also agreed not to allow pogroms against the Jews… Hitler’s assurance satisfied me at the time…I am paying for that mistake now; and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.”

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mcta3fj3

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Can the Supreme Court Tame Trigger-Happy Cops?

Posted: February 4, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: civil liberties, Constitution, lethal force, police, police state, supreme court

WASHINGTON, DC — Should police be made to answer for their reckless actions leading to use of deadly force against unarmed citizens? That’s what the U.S. Supreme Court must decide.

Even as the Trump administration scales back oversight into police misconduct, it appears that the U.S. Supreme Court may be open to overturning the “moment-of-threat doctrine,” which has contributed to a climate where police unnecessarily escalate situations over relatively minor crimes and then respond to the perceived danger with excessive or deadly force. For instance, an Illinois sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Sonya Massey in her home after the deputy terrified her to seek cover by unnecessarily drawing his gun and then placed himself in close proximity to where he claimed she might throw hot water on him. In Ohio, pregnant mother Ta’Kiya Young was killed by a police officer who chose to place himself in front of her car as she slowly pulled out of her parking space. And in Arizona, police officers repeatedly punched and tasered Tyron McAlpin, who is deaf and has cerebral palsy, due to his startled response when the officers suddenly jumped out of their car at him. Weighing in on Barnes v. Felix, The Rutherford Institute warned that the “moment-of-threat doctrine” not only violates established Fourth Amendment principles for determining what constitutes a reasonable use of force, but it also encourages police to act recklessly with impunity

“In an age when police are increasingly militarized, weaponized and protected by the courts, run-of-the mill encounters between police and citizens are now inherently dangerous for any individual unlucky enough to be in a situation where police are inclined to respond to perceived challenges to their ‘authority’ by drawing and using their weapons,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Unfortunately, this mindset that any challenge to police authority is a threat that needs to be ‘neutralized’ is a dangerous one that is part of a greater nationwide trend that sets law enforcement officers beyond the reach of the Fourth Amendment.”

In the afternoon of April 28, 2016, a Harris County Texas police officer initiated a traffic stop of Ashtian Barnes due to a report by the Toll Road Authority that the license plate number on his vehicle had outstanding toll violations. When asked for proof of insurance, Barnes explained that the car had been rented a week earlier by his girlfriend and the documentation might be in the trunk. The officer claimed he smelled marijuana and ordered Barnes to open the trunk. A few seconds after Barnes opened the trunk, the car’s blinker toward the side of the Tollway to which Barnes pulled over turned off for about ten seconds. Once the same blinker turned back on, the officer shouted at Barnes not to move, stepped onto the door sill where the driver-side door was open, and shoved his gun into Barnes’s head. At that point, the car started to move, and the officer fired two shots into the car, killing Barnes. The incident was recorded on video. Barnes’s parents filed a lawsuit arguing that Barnes did not pose a threat justifying deadly force, especially in light of the fact that the officer jumped onto the car, but the trial court dismissed the case, concluding that the officer’s use of deadly force was “presumptively reasonable” because the moment of threat occurred when the officer was hanging onto the moving vehicle and feared for his safety. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal under its moment-of-threat doctrine, and the Supreme Court subsequently agreed to review the case on appeal.

Angela M. Liu, Peter J. McGinley, Christopher J. Merken, Steven Oberlander, Shane Sanderson, and Luke D. Yamulla of Dechert LLP advanced the arguments in the Barnes v. Felix amicus briefs.

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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/zdppzwry

The Rise of the Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean for Freedom and Government?

Posted: January 30, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, civil liberties, Constitution, police state, surveillance

“If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”—Elon Musk (2018)

The Deep State is about to go turbocharged.

While the news media fixates on the extent to which Project 2025 may be the Trump Administration’s playbook for locking down the nation, there is a more subversive power play taking place under cover of Trump’s unique brand of circus politics.

Take a closer look at what’s unfolding, and you will find that all appearances to the contrary, Trump isn’t planning to do away with the Deep State. Rather, he was hired by the Deep State to usher in the golden age of AI.

Get ready for Surveillance State 2.0.

To achieve this turbocharged surveillance state, the government is turning to its most powerful weapon yet: artificial intelligence. AI, with its ability to learn, adapt, and operate at speeds unimaginable to humans, is poised to become the engine of this new world order.

Over the course of 70 years, the technology has developed so rapidly that it has gone from early computers exhibiting a primitive form of artificial intelligence to machine learning (AI systems that learn from historic data) to deep learning (machine learning that mimics the human brain) to generative AI, which can create original content, i.e., it appears able to think for itself.

What we are approaching is the point of no return.

In tech speak, this point of no return is more aptly termed “singularity,” the point at which AI eclipses its human handlers and becomes all-powerful. Elon Musk has predicted that singularity could happen by 2026. AI scientist Ray Kurzweil imagines it happening it closer to 2045.

While the scientific community has a lot to say about the world-altering impact of artificial intelligence on every aspect of our lives, little has been said about its growing role in government and its oppressive effect on our freedoms, especially “the core democratic principles of privacy, autonomy, equality, the political process, and the rule of law.”

According to a report from Accenture, it is estimated that across both the public and private sectors, generative AI has the potential to automate a significant portion of jobs across various sectors.

Here’s a thought: what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force isn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

Certainly, Trump has made no secret of his plans to make AI a priority. Indeed, Trump signed the first-ever Executive Order on AI in 2019. More recently, Trump issued an executive order giving the technology sector a green light to develop and deploy AI without any guardrails in place to limit the risks it might pose to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety.

President Biden was no better, mind you. His executive order, which Trump repealed, merely instructed the tech sector to share the results of AI safety tests with the U.S. government.

Yet following much the same pattern that we saw with the rollout of drones, while the government has been quick to avail itself of AI technology, it has done little to nothing to ensure that rights of the American people are protected.

Indeed, we are altogether lacking any guardrails for transparency, accountability and adherence to the rule of law when it comes to the government’s use of AI.

As Karl Manheim and Lyric Kaplan point out in a chilling article in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology about the risks to privacy and democracy posed by AI, “[a]rtificial intelligence is the most disruptive technology of the modern era… Its impact is likely to dwarf even the development of the internet as it enters every corner of our lives… Advances in AI herald not just a new age in computing, but also present new dangers to social values and constitutional rights. The threat to privacy from social media algorithms and the Internet of Things is well known. What is less appreciated is the even greater threat that AI poses to democracy itself.”

Cue the rise of “digital authoritarianism” or “algocracy—rule by algorithm.”

In an algocracy, “Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEOs of Facebook and Google, have more control over Americans’ lives and futures than do the representatives we elect.”

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

How do we protect our privacy against the growing menace of overreach and abuse by a technological sector working with the government?

The ability to do so may already be out of our hands.

In 2024, at least 37 federal government agencies ranging from the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs to Health and Human Services reported more than 1700 uses of AI in carrying out their work, double from the year before. That does not even begin to touch on agencies that did not report their usage, or usage at the state and local levels.

Of those 1700 cases at the federal level, 227 were labeled rights- or safety-impacting.

A particularly disturbing example of how AI is being used by government agencies in rights- and safety-impacting scenarios comes from an investigative report by The Washington Post on how law enforcement agencies across the nation are using “artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence.”

This is what is referred to within tech circles as “automation bias,” a tendency to blindly trust decisions made by powerful software, ignorant to its risks and limitations. In one particular case, police used AI-powered facial recognition technology to arrest and jail a 29-year-old man for brutally assaulting a security guard. It would take Christopher Gatlin two years to clear his name.

Gatlin is one of at least eight known cases nationwide in which police reliance on AI facial recognition software has resulted in resulted in wrongful arrests arising from an utter disregard for basic police work (such as checking alibis, collecting evidence, corroborating DNA and fingerprint evidence, ignoring suspects’ physical characteristics) and the need to meet constitutional standards of due process and probable cause. According to The Washington Post, “Asian and Black people were up to 100 times as likely to be misidentified by some software as White men.”

The numbers of cases in which AI is contributed to false arrests and questionable police work is likely much higher, given the extent to which police agencies across the country are adopting the technology and will only rise in the wake of the Trump Administration’s intent to shut down law enforcement oversight and policing reforms.

“How do I beat a machine?” asked one man who was wrongly arrested by police for assaulting a bus driver based on an incorrect AI match.

It is becoming all but impossible to beat the AI machine.

When used by agents of the police state, it leaves “we the people” even more vulnerable.

So where do we go from here?

For the Trump Administration, it appears to be full steam ahead, starting with Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure venture aimed at building massive data centers. Initial reports suggest that the AI data centers could be tied to digital health records and used to develop a cancer vaccine. Of course, massive health data centers for use by AI will mean that one’s health records are fair game for any and all sorts of identification, tracking and flagging.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The surveillance state, combined with AI, is creating a world in which there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.

Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

It’s a setup ripe for abuse.

Writing for the Yale Journal, Manheim and Kaplan conclude that “[h]umans may not be at risk as a species, but we are surely at risk in terms of our democratic institutions and values.”

Privacy—Manheim and Kaplan succinctly describe it as “the right to make personal decisions for oneself, the right to keep one’s personal information confidential, and the right to be left alone are all ingredients of the fundamental right of privacy”— is especially at risk.

Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.

AI surveillance is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable by doing what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.

As Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO remarked, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”

The ramifications of any government wielding such unregulated, unaccountable power are chilling, as AI surveillance provides the ultimate means of repression and control for tyrants and benevolent dictators alike.

Indeed, China’s social credit system, where citizens are assigned scores based on their behavior and compliance, offers a glimpse into this dystopian future.

This is not a battle against technology itself, but against its misuse. It’s a fight to retain our humanity, our dignity, and our freedom in the face of unprecedented technological power. It’s a struggle to ensure that AI serves us, not the other way around.

Faced with this looming threat, the time to act is now, before the lines between citizen and subject, between freedom and control, become irrevocably blurred.

The future of freedom depends on it.

So demand transparency. Demand accountability.

Demand an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from the encroaching surveillance state.

We need safeguards in place to ensure the right to data ownership and control (the right to know what data is being collected about them, how it’s being used, who has access to it, and the right to be “forgotten”); the right to algorithmic transparency (to understand how algorithms that affect them make decisions, particularly in areas like loan applications, job hiring, and criminal justice) and due process accountability; the right to privacy and data security, including restrictions on government and corporate use of AI-powered surveillance technologies, particularly facial recognition and predictive policing; the right to digital self-determination (freedom from automated discrimination based on algorithmic profiling) and the ability to manage and control one’s online identity and reputation; and effective mechanisms to seek redress for harms caused by AI systems.

AI deployed without any safeguards in place to protect against overreach and abuse, especially within government agencies, has the potential to become what Elon Musk described as an “immortal dictator,” one that lives forever and from which there is no escape.

Whatever you choose to call it—the police state, the Deep State, the surveillance state—this “immortal dictator” will be the future face of the government unless we rein it in now.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, next year could be too late.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yy8etm6d

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Your Home at Risk: Warrantless Police Raids and Searches Could Soon Be on the Rise

Posted: January 24, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: civil liberties, fourth amendment, police state, search and seizure

WASHINGTON, DC —The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to protect homeowners from warrantless searches by police based merely on a suspicion that a person on probation or parole resides on the premises.

In refusing to hear an appeal in Bailey v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that could, as Rutherford Institute attorneys warned in their amicus brief, establish a slippery slope that allows police to carry out warrantless searches when police merely suspect but do not know or have probable cause to believe that a probationer lives on the premises.

“This case is about a creeping erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights that threatens every homeowner in America,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “We’re on a slippery slope towards a society where police can invade any home based on nothing more than a hunch. It’s an affront to the Constitution and a danger to us all.”

Under Arkansas Code § 16-93-106, persons who are placed on supervised probation or parole are required to agree to a waiver that allows any law enforcement officer to conduct a warrantless search of their person, residence, electronic device, or motor vehicle at any time, day or night, whenever requested by the law enforcement officer, and the search does not need to be based on an articulable suspicion that the person is committing or has committed a new criminal offense. If a person refuses to waive their Fourth Amendment rights, then they will not be eligible for supervised release. The Rutherford Institute’s amicus brief noted that nearly four million individuals across the country are subject to supervised probation or parole, and about 65% of jurisdictions require similar waivers while many other jurisdictions are in states, like Arkansas, which impose the waiver as a condition of supervised release. This raises a concern, potentially affecting millions of innocent third parties throughout the country, when police officers mistakenly suspect that a probationer who has waived his Fourth Amendment rights is living at another’s residence, and then use that waiver as justification to search the home without a warrant or any indication of criminal activity.

The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that police officers merely need reasonable suspicion to believe that the home is the probationer’s residence in order to conduct a search. But because police will often have reason to suspect a probationer or parolee is residing with a parent, sibling, or friend, The Rutherford Institute’s amicus brief warned that those relatives and friends will then lose their right to security in their homes. The brief highlighted many cases where the rights of innocent third parties have been violated by police searching their homes based on a mistaken suspicion that a family member or friend who was on probation or the subject of an arrest warrant lived there—in one case the police shot and killed the owner’s dog, and in other cases police drew guns in front of children and traumatized a parolee’s mother who then went to the hospital and took several days to recover. The Institute’s brief argued that police officers must at least establish the higher standard of probable cause that a home is actually the probationer’s residence to avoid such reckless and damaging searches.

Derek C. Reinbold, Brenna L. Darling, and Sven E. (Trip) Henningson of Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick P.L.L.C. advanced the arguments in the Bailey v. Arkansas amicus brief.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/4kfbmpze

The Constitution Has Gone AWOL: From Presidential Power Grabs to Martial Law

Posted: January 23, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: civil liberties, Constitution, government, imperial president, police state, politics, Trump

“Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”—Justice Neil Gorsuch

That didn’t take long.

Within days of Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights disappeared from the White House’s website.

While the Trump Administration insists the removal of these foundational documents will eventually be restored to the site, the timing and symbolism of their removal is hard to ignore. Especially in light of the flurry of executive orders issued by President Trump as a means of bypassing the very rule of law those documents were intended to ensure.

Already, Trump has unilaterally declared two national states of emergency, announced his intention to disregard the 14^th Amendment’s assurance of birthright citizenship, established two new government agencies, and pushed for an expansion of the death penalty.

So much for the Founders’ efforts to guard against this kind of concentrated, absolute power by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches to ensure that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government.

Mind you, Trump is not unique in his use of executive orders to bypass Congress and unilaterally impose his will upon the nation, but it is indicative of the fact that he, like his predecessors, will continue to serve as an imperial president, using executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

America, meet your latest dictator-in-chief.

Be warned: what is happening right now is political theater. Allow yourself to be distracted by it, and you will miss the real power play afoot: the expansion of unaccountable presidential power that exposes us to constitutional peril.

The Deep State is counting on us to be distracted.

Don’t fall for it.

We must be particularly leery when political promises to fix everything that is wrong with the nation are dependent on presidential power grabs and manufactured crises.

That’s the oldest trick in the book.

Whether the ends justify the means is never the point.

It is especially when the ends seem to justify the means that one must tread with particular caution.

That’s how we landed in this mess in the first place.

Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

As a result, we have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.

That indefinite state of crisis has remained constant, no matter which party has controlled Congress and the White House.

The seeds of this present madness were sown almost two decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.”

Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20) provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president.

It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be: civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

They have all become fair game to a government that continues to quietly assemble, test and deploy emergency powers a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution and can be activated at a moment’s notice.

We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

While these are powers the police state has been working to make permanent, they barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has unilaterally claimed for itself without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

As David C. Unger, observes in The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs:

“For seven decades we have been yielding our most basic liberties to a secretive, unaccountable emergency state – a vast but increasingly misdirected complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs that so define our present world that we forget that there was ever a different America. … Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

This is all happening according to schedule.

The civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters,” the government’s reliance on the armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems, the implicit declaration of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security: the powers-that-be have been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now.

As we have witnessed in recent years, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.

Yet according to documents obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.

Remember, these powers do not expire at the end of a president’s term. They remain on the books, just waiting to be used or abused by the next political demagogue.

So, too, every action taken by the current occupant of the White House and his predecessors to weaken the system of checks and balances, sidestep the rule of law, and expand the power of the executive branch of government makes us that much more vulnerable to those who would abuse those powers in the future.

Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents (Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.) have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.

The Executive Branch’s willingness to circumvent the Constitution by leaning heavily on the president’s so-called emergency powers constitutes a gross perversion of what limited power the Constitution affords the president.

As law professor William P. Marshall explains, “every extraordinary use of power by one President expands the availability of executive branch power for use by future Presidents.” Moreover, it doesn’t even matter whether other presidents have chosen not to take advantage of any particular power, because “it is a President’s action in using power, rather than forsaking its use, that has the precedential significance.”

In other words, each successive president continues to add to his office’s list of extraordinary orders and directives, expanding the reach and power of the presidency and granting him- or herself near dictatorial powers.

All of the imperial powers amassed by Obama, Bush, Trump, Biden and now Trump again—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects (including American citizens) indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to wage wars without congressional authorization, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to establish a standing army on American soil, to operate a shadow government, to declare national emergencies for any manipulated reason, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—have become a permanent part of the president’s toolbox of terror.

This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.

As an investigative report by the Brennan Center explains:

“There are currently 41 declared national emergencies, most of which have been in place for more than a decade… Some of the emergency powers Congress has made available to the president are so breathtaking in their vastness that they would make an autocrat do a spit take. Presidents can use emergency declarations to shut down communications infrastructure, freeze private assets without judicial process, control domestic transportation, or even suspend the prohibition on government testing of chemical and biological agents on unwitting human subjects.”

We must recalibrate the balance of power.

For starters, Congress should put an end to the use of presidential executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements as a means of getting around Congress and the courts.

At a minimum, as The Washington Post suggests, “all emergency declarations [s]hould expire automatically after three or six months, whereupon Congress would need to vote upon any proposed extension. It is time for both parties to recognize that governing via endless crises — even when they are employed to implement broadly popular policies that win plaudits from key political constituencies — subverts our system of constitutional government.”

We’ve got to start making both the president and the police state play by the rules of the Constitution.

As Justice Gorsuch recognized:

“Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat. A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes. We may even cheer on those who ask us to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.”

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history.

For example, over 90 years ago, the citizens of another democratic world power elected a leader who promised to protect them from all dangers. In return for this protection, and under the auspice of fighting terrorism, he was given absolute power.

This leader went to great lengths to make his rise to power appear both legal and necessary, masterfully manipulating much of the citizenry and their government leaders.

Unnerved by threats of domestic terrorism and foreign invaders, the people had little idea that the domestic turmoil of the times—such as street rioting and the fear of Communism taking over the country—was staged by the leader in an effort to create fear and later capitalize on it. In the ensuing months, this charismatic leader ushered in a series of legislative measures that suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus rights and empowered him as a dictator.

On March 23, 1933, the nation’s legislative body passed the Enabling Act, formally referred to as the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation,” which appeared benign and allowed the leader to pass laws by decree in times of emergency.

What it succeeded in doing, however, was ensuring that the leader became a law unto himself.

The leader’s name was Adolf Hitler.

The rest, as they say, is history. Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, history has a way of repeating itself.

Hitler’s rise to power should serve as a stark lesson to always be leery of granting any government leader sweeping powers.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3xtduj5u

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When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins

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The Deep State’s War on Truth—Waged with Doublespeak, Delusion and Propaganda

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Nullifying the Constitution Won’t Make America Great Again

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The Deep State Wins Again: All the Ways ‘We the People’ Keep Losing Our Freedoms

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A Constitutional Crisis: Can the Rule of Law Survive This Presidency?

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Sleepwalking into Tyranny: How Power is Silently Being Seized

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Can the Supreme Court Tame Trigger-Happy Cops?

The Rise of the Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean for Freedom and Government?

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Your Home at Risk: Warrantless Police Raids and Searches Could Soon Be on the Rise

The Constitution Has Gone AWOL: From Presidential Power Grabs to Martial Law

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