WASHINGTON, DC — In a ruling that leaves thousands of military servicemembers and their families without meaningful recourse when the government’s negligence causes harm, the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to reconsider a 1950 judicial doctrine that prevents military personnel from suing the federal government for non-combat injuries deemed “incident to service,” even when a civilian in the same situation could bring a claim.
For decades, the Feres doctrine has drawn criticism across the ideological spectrum for its expansive and often devastating consequences. Courts have interpreted “incident to service” so broadly that it now bars claims arising from medical malpractice, car accidents, and even sexual assault by another servicemember—harms far removed from the battlefield. The Rutherford Institute and the Constitutional Accountability Center had filed an amicus brief in Beck v. United States, urging the Court to overturn Feres because it contradicts the text and purpose of the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) and denies military families the same legal protections afforded to civilians.
“No American should be denied the right to hold the government accountable for negligence and harm merely because they wear a military uniform,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The Constitution does not permit a two-tiered system of justice—one for civilians and a lesser one for those who serve—and neither should we.”
Staff Sergeant Cameron Beck was living and working at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, serving on active duty in the Wing Cybersecurity Office. One afternoon, he drove home for lunch with his wife and seven-year-old son. As he traveled along a Base road, a civilian federal employee—driving a government-owned van while distracted by her cell phone—struck and killed him. She later pleaded guilty to operating her vehicle in a careless and imprudent manner and admitted the crash was “100 percent” her fault.
Beck’s widow and son filed a wrongful-death lawsuit under the FTCA, the law that allows individuals to sue the federal government for negligence of its employees. But because Beck happened to be on Base, on active duty, and subject to recall—even though he was riding home during off-duty hours and was not engaged in a military activity—the lower courts dismissed the case under the Feres doctrine. Therefore, the government could not be held liable, and the family was left with no meaningful path to justice.
While the family received some limited benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, Justice Thomas (who dissented from the Court’s decision in this case) has pointed out that these benefits often amount to only a fraction of what a civilian family could obtain in court. Yet, Feres bars lawsuits by servicemembers when a civilian would be allowed to sue based on the same acts by the same federal employee. The amicus brief in Beckwarned that the Feres doctrine has drifted so far from its original purpose that it now bars even the most straightforward negligence claims—such as the careless operation of a government vehicle by a civilian employee that results in the death of a servicemember not engaged in any military activity.
Miriam Becker-Cohen, Brianne J. Gorod, Elizabeth B. Wydra, and Nargis Aslami with the Constitutional Accountability Center advanced the arguments in the Beck amicus brief.
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.
Every military servicemember’s oath is a pledge to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
It is not an oath to a politician. It is not an oath to a party. And it is not an oath to the police state.
Yet what happens when those same men and women are being told—by their own government—that obedience to power and loyalty to a political leader come before allegiance to the Constitution they swore to uphold?
That question isn’t hypothetical.
It is the moral line now being tested in real time, and it goes to the heart of what kind of country we are: do we live in a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law, or in a militarized police state where “legality” is whatever the person with the most power and the biggest army say it is?
The answer becomes painfully clear when you look at what our troops are being ordered to do—and what “we the people” are tacitly allowing them to be ordered to do—in the so-called name of national security.
Members of the military are now being deployed domestically to police their fellow American citizens in ways that trample the spirit, if not the letter, of the Posse Comitatus Act.
It’s legally dubious enough that the military is being used to enforce immigration crackdowns and police protests in American cities. But now they’re being tasked with killing civilians far from any declared battlefield in the absence of an imminent threat—all while being told that questioning the legality of those missions is itself a form of disloyalty.
So, which is it: obedience to the Constitution or the Commander-in-Chief?
According to multiple accounts, after an initial “lethal, kinetic” strike disabled the vessel and killed nine men on board, a second strike was carried out to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage—an alleged “double tap strike” that legal experts warn could constitute murder or a war crime if the survivors no longer posed a threat.
In all, the boat was reportedly hit four times: twice to kill the eleven occupants on board and twice more to sink the boat.
Even the Pentagon’s manual on the law of war says combatants who are “wounded, sick, or shipwrecked” no longer pose a threat and should not be attacked.
Some Republicans who have, until now, turned a blind eye to the Trump administration’s most egregious offenses against the Constitution appear reluctant to let this one slide.
Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has done an about-face.
Hegseth—who bragged about watching the September 2 strike live—now claims he wasn’t in the room when the second strike happened.
Suddenly, the White House—which had been gleefully chest-thumping over its power to kill extrajudicially—is signaling its willingness to scapegoat subordinates in the chain of command.
Clearly, it’s a lesson learned too late: when you’re dealing with power-hungry authoritarians, loyalty is no guarantee of protection. It’s always the men and women who carry out the unlawful orders—not the ones who give them—who end up paying the price.
Here’s the problem, though. While the media fixates on who will bear the blame for ordering the double-tap strike, the government war machine is moving forward, full steam ahead.
The Sept. 2 boat strike was part of a broader Trump administration campaign of maritime attacks that has already killed at least 80 people at sea, all without a formal declaration of war or due process—evidence of who they were or what they had done—to warrant an extrajudicial execution.
This is yet another of Trump’s everywhere, endless wars—this time at sea—sold as toughness on “narco-terrorists” at a moment when his poll numbers are slipping, economic promises have failed to manifest, and new Epstein-related revelations continue to surface.
When presidents manufacture new fronts in a forever war whenever they need a distraction, we should all beware.
The Trump administration has tried to frame this preemptive maritime war on suspected “narco-terrorists” as a “non-international armed conflict” with designated terrorist organizations.
Yet what it amounts to is an undeclared war, launched in international waters, without just cause and without congressional authorization.
The legal landscape is not murky—it is clear.
Most of the public debate has revolved around those technical legalities—what kind of conflict this is, which statutes apply, which court might have jurisdiction—yet what is really at stake is whether we are training a generation of American troops to believe that loyalty to a leader can excuse disobedience to, or even override, the Constitution.
Three bodies of law converge here: the Constitution’s allocation of war powers, the international law of armed conflict, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
First, there has been no declaration of war by Congress. Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war. The president cannot start wars based solely on his own authority.
Second, the law of armed conflict and the law of the sea forbid killing shipwrecked survivors who pose no immediate threat.
A command to “kill everybody” is precisely the kind of order these guardrails were written to forbid.
The rationale that “I was just following orders” is not a defense to war crimes. That is the core lesson of the Nuremberg Trials and the modern law of armed conflict.
Of course, the police state wants mindless automatons who obey unquestioningly.
Arendt, a Holocaust survivor, denounced Eichmann, a senior officer who organized Hitler’s death camps, for being a bureaucrat who unquestioningly carried out orders that were immoral, inhumane and evil. This, Arendt concluded, was the banality of evil, the ability to engage in wrongdoing or turn a blind eye to it, without taking any responsibility for your actions or inactions.
Coincidentally, the same year that Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published, Martin Luther King Jr. penned his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he points out “that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
In other words, there comes a time when law and order are in direct opposition to justice.
If the government can redefine “self-defense” to justify killing incapacitated survivors on a sinking boat, then it can justify killing anyone—at home or abroad, in uniform or out of it.
No matter how the White House spins it, however, these are crimes and those involved—from Hegseth on down—could find themselves in legal jeopardy and should be held accountable.
The pressure on the military is mounting.
The Orders Project, a nonpartisan initiative that helps connect servicemembers with outside legal counsel, reports a spike in calls from military personnel concerned that they could be asked to carry out an illegal order or pressured to take part in missions that violate their training in the laws of war.
Given Hegseth’s much-publicized approach to waging war without constraints—he has openly derided the military’s Judge Advocate General corps and championed a more “unshackled” approach to lethal force—these concerns are reasonable.
For re-stating what every recruit is taught in basic training, these lawmakers have been accused by President Trump of “sedition” and branded as “traitors” who should be arrested and punished by death. The FBI has reportedly opened an investigation. Hegseth has even threatened to recall one of the lawmakers—Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain—to active duty in order to court-martial him for his remarks.
The message from the top could not be clearer: allegiance to the Constitution is a crime.
Every person like myself who has served in uniform has experienced the tension between following orders and honoring that oath. Discipline requires obedience, but a constitutional republic requires lawful obedience.
That is why the oath matters.
It is not an oath to a man, a party, or a policy agenda. It is an oath to a charter of law: the Constitution.
That principle is not antiquated. It is the foundation of American civil-military relations. Remove it, and what remains is not a republic but a personality cult with weapons.
The danger becomes even clearer when you examine the rhetoric now shaping national policy.
According to U.S. prosecutors, Hernández—quoted as saying he wanted to “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos by flooding the United States with cocaine”—took bribes from drug traffickers and had the country’s armed forces protect a cocaine laboratory and shipments to the U.S.
Yet conscripting the military to do the dirty work of the police state—and then throwing them under the bus for doing so—takes us into even darker territory.
The U.S. government’s weaponization of the armed forces for political power is a betrayal of the Constitution, but it is also a betrayal of the very men and women who swore to give their lives for it.
And once a government shows a willingness to break faith with its defenders, it will break faith with anyone.
A government that can discard its military service members can discard its whistleblowers and truth-tellers who expose corruption.
A government that can discard its military service members can discard its journalists, judges, and watchdogs in the press and the courts who insist on transparency and limits to power.
A government that can discard its military service members can discard its political opponents and dissidents, its religious and racial minorities, its immigrants and asylum seekers, its small business owners and workers who organize, its parents and community members who speak up locally, and any citizen who dares to say “no” when the state demands “yes.”
This betrayal of those who swore an oath to the Constitution is not an accident—it is a warning.
Today is Giving Tuesday—a day when people across the country choose to support the causes that matter most. And this year, the stakes for freedom could not be higher.
Everywhere we turn, the government is expanding its power:
· Surveillance programs are monitoring ordinary Americans.
· Executive orders are being used to bypass constitutional limits.
· Police powers are growing more militarized and unchecked.
· Dissenters are being censored, silenced, and punished.
· The Bill of Rights is treated as optional—especially when inconvenient.
The Constitution cannot defend itself—and defending it has nothing to do with politics.
At a time where every issue is twisted into a partisan wedge, The Rutherford Institute remains committed to something far more enduring: the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, and the fundamental liberties that belong to all Americans—no matter who holds power.
We don’t play politics. We don’t take sides. We stand on the side of the Constitution.
The Constitution needs people who are willing to stand up. People who refuse to surrender their freedoms quietly. People who say “no” to the steady erosion of their rights.
The Constitution draws a clear line between the rule of law and the rule of power. The Rutherford Institute is working to hold that line.
· Hold officials accountable for violating the rule of law
· Speak truth to power without fear or favor
Our work has never been more critical. In recent months, The Rutherford Institute has:
· Fought warrantless digital surveillance in cases challenging geofence searches and mass data sweeps.
· Defended students, journalists, and activists targeted for their protected speech.
· Challenged the use of excessive police force and militarized tactics in situations where the Fourth Amendment was ignored.
· Opposed executive actions that bypass constitutional safeguards and expand unchecked government power.
Every one of these battles depends on supporters who believe the Constitution still matters.
Thanks to a $250,000 Matching Gift Challenge Grant, Giving Tuesday contributions will go twice as far in helping The Rutherford Institute hold the constitutional line against government overreach.
“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”—Michael Corleone, The Godfather
Pay-to-play schemes. Protection rackets. Extortion. Corruption. Self-enrichment. Graft. Grift. Brutality. Roaming bands of thugs smashing car windows and terrorizing communities. Immunity for criminal behavior coupled with prosecutions of whistleblowers.
This is how a crime syndicate operates—not a constitutional republic.
What we are witnessing today is the steady transformation of the federal government—especially the executive branch—into a criminalized system of power in which justice is weaponized, law is selectively enforced, and crime becomes a form of political currency.
While the American police state has long marched in lockstep with the old truism that power corrupts—and absolute power corrupts absolutely—the Trump administration has ceased even the pretense of being bound by the Constitution.
Rather than abiding by the rule of law, this administration operates as if there are two separate legal systems: one for themselves and their cronies, and one for everyone else.
The corruption is off the charts, the conflicts of interest are in your face, and the brazenness is staggering.
Journalist David D. Kirkpatrick calculates that Donald Trump and his immediate family have made more than $3.4 billion from his time in the White House, including more than $2.3 billion from various cryptocurrency ventures alone.
In May 2025, Trump was accused of selling access to accumulate personal wealth when he hosted a private event for 220 crypto investors who had bought into his meme coin. News reports estimate that buyers spent about $148 million in total on the coin and associated perks, with some spending $1.8 million to attend.
The average American can’t get any kind of access to our elected representatives, but the wealthy can buy their way through the door.
Measured against this reality, Thomas Jefferson’s warning to bind government down “by the chains of the Constitution” sounds almost quaint.
How do you use the Constitution to guard against government misconduct when the government has effectively rendered the Constitution null and void?
It has become increasingly difficult to pretend that we are still dealing with a functioning republic.
What we have instead is a government that behaves like a criminal enterprise: rewarding loyalty, punishing dissent, monetizing public service, and enriching itself through favors, loopholes, and outright graft.
Consider the pay-to-play culture that now permeates the highest levels of power.
The Foreign Gifts and Decoration Act bars the president and federal officials from accepting gifts worth more than $480 from foreign governments (unless they’re accepted on behalf of the United States—meaning they would then belong to the American people—or purchased by the official). Yet congressional investigators have already documented more than a hundred foreign gifts to Trump and his family that went unreported for months in violation of disclosure rules.
The publicly-reported gifts being showered upon President Trump by foreign governments and politically connected foreign corporations include: a gold crown, a Rolex desk clock and a one-kilogram personalized gold bar worth $130,000, and a $400 million luxury Boeing 747.
These are not tokens of diplomacy; they are currency—investments in influence, access, and favorable policy.
As Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, explains, “It’s unconstitutional in the United States for the president or anyone else in a position of power to receive anything of value from a foreign government. That is unconstitutional. But if the gift is from a foreign corporation or a private interest, it’s not technically prohibited under the emoluments clause of the Constitution. But it’s still a very, very dangerous precedent to set that foreign interests can give gifts to the president and then get a concession on tariffs or anything else.”
In many cases, these gifts went unreported to the State Department, only coming to light through House investigations and watchdog reports—concealed from the public and from Congress until after the fact.
That secrecy was not accidental. It was strategic.
Federal contracts, regulatory decisions, and diplomatic overtures increasingly appear correlated with the interests of those giving the gifts. A growing number of domestic and foreign business interests appear to be receiving preferential treatment from agencies whose regulatory decisions align suspiciously with Trump’s personal business deals advancing behind the scenes.
And then there are more obvious pay-to-play schemes like the White House Ballroom, a projected 90,000-square-foot monstrosity funded by tech and defense giants such as Apple, Google, Palantir and Lockheed Martin—corporate donors who now help underwrite the president’s vanity project even as their regulatory and contracting interests sit squarely in his hands.
This quid pro quo governance—private profit in exchange for public policy—does not resemble republican self-government. It resembles a protection racket, where the powerful exchange favors not for the public good but for personal gain—and access and immunity are available for purchase by those willing to pay.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are told that the system is blind, impartial, and committed to the “rule of law.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
According to a bombshell investigation by the New York Times, career attorneys inside the Department of Justice spent the first ten months of Trump’s second term documenting—often in real time—how the justice system was being hijacked to serve political priorities rather than legal ones.
Federal lawyers told the Times that they were instructed to drop cases for political reasons, to hunt for evidence to justify flimsy investigations, and to defend executive actions they believed had no legal basis or were plainly unlawful. They also detailed the work they were told to abandon—cases involving terrorism plots, corruption, and white-collar fraud—because those investigations did not serve the administration’s political priorities.
As Dena Robinson, a former Justice Department lawyer for the Civil Rights Division, remarked on Pam Bondi’s transformation of the department into a political tool, “One thing that stuck out to me was her insistence that we served at the pleasure of the president and that we were enforcing the president’s priorities. We swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.”
Prosecution for enemies, immunity for allies, and indifference toward actual crime: this is the Trump administration’s modus operandi.
In case after case—from prosecutions tied to the politically-charged James Comey indictment, to challenges over Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, to lawsuits alleging the government is attempting to circumvent basic due process protections in immigration cases by shipping people to offshore detention facilities in third countries, often in partnership with private prison contractors, where legal safeguards are far weaker—courts have scolded federal lawyers for withholding records, mischaracterizing facts, or offering assertions that crumble under scrutiny.
When the government lies to the courts, it is not just lying to a judge but to the American people. We are the ultimate arbiters of justice. It is our rights that ultimately hang in the balance.
Unfortunately, the rot doesn’t stop there.
The presidential pardon—intended to be a mechanism for mercy—has become a political reward system.
The numbers speak volumes.
During Trump’s first term, he issued 238 pardons and commutations; less than a year into his second term, he has issued nearly 2,000 pardons, costing victims and taxpayers more than $1.3 billion.
According to The Marshall Project, among those pardoned by Trump, “One faced a four-year prison sentence in a $675 million fraud case for marketing an electric truck that wasn’t drivable. Another tried to overthrow the government. A tax cheat avoided prison and $4.4 million in restitution after his mom donated $1 million to the president.” Another pardon recipient was facing “charges of child pornography and the sexual assault of a preadolescent girl.”
Whether Trump pardons Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sex traffic teenaged girls, remains to be seen. However, since Trump has taken office, Maxwell has enjoyed dramatic improvements in her prison life: a transfer to a minimum-security federal prison, custom meals delivered to her cell, snacks and refreshments provided during private meetings with family and friends—even special access to a puppy and unlimited toilet paper.
As ProPublicadetails, Trump’s pardons overwhelmingly benefit political loyalists, donors, grifters, extremists, and individuals either convicted of crimes in pursuit of Trump’s ambitions or who might help to advance those ambitions in the future—or both.
These are not miscarriages of justice being corrected; they are protection payments, signals to future operatives: do what we need you to do, and we will take care of you.
The message is unmistakable: Commit crimes that benefit those in power, and those in power will absolve you.
The double standard is staggering.
Critics, journalists, students, and whistleblowers face investigations, surveillance, and in some cases arrest for constitutionally protected activities—while those charged with committing actual crimes in support of the administration are shielded, absolved, or financially rewarded.
That is not the rule of law. That is the rule of power.
In a constitutional government, the pardon power is meant to temper justice with mercy.
In an unrestrained government, the pardon power becomes a mechanism for shielding insiders, silencing potential witnesses, rewarding political operatives, and signaling to future enforcers that their loyalty will be repaid.
Once justice is weaponized—once the government becomes both the ultimate lawmaker and the ultimate lawbreaker—once the president decides that his own power, not the Constitution, is the highest authority—the distinction between governance and criminality collapses.
A government that can ignore transparency laws will hide its misconduct.
A government that can lie to the courts will lie to its people.
A government that can criminalize political opposition can criminalize anyone.
A government that can pardon loyal criminals can persecute those who expose them.
This is not hypothetical. It is happening now.
Look at the surveillance state: millions of Americans monitored through AI-powered tools, data-mined by private intelligence contractors, and flagged by opaque algorithms—while the government shields its own communications, decisions, and financial entanglements behind secrecy laws and executive privilege.
Look at policing: violent, militarized crackdowns on immigrants, journalists, and protesters—even as the administration dismisses, excuses, or encourages lawlessness among vigilantes, paramilitary groups, and politically aligned street militias.
Look at foreign policy: threats to bomb Venezuela—transparent attempts to distract from falling polling numbers and the widening Epstein scandal—being framed as “national security” rather than what they are: geopolitical aggression with no constitutional or moral grounding. This isn’t defensive war; it is a land grab masquerading as patriotism, no different in principle from Putin’s overreach in Ukraine or Israel’s expansionist aims in Gaza, except that the United States has even less pretense of legitimate territorial claim.
Look at governance: executive orders increasingly treated as substitutes for legislation, bypassing Congress, the courts, and constitutional checks. The president no longer requests authority; he assumes it.
Look at transparency: the administration’s refusal to release the October jobs numbers—an unprecedented hiding of core economic data—under the pretext that the government shutdown made the figures unusable. Former Labor Department officials warn that the missing report comes just as private data are flashing recession-level job losses. When a government refuses to share basic economic indicators with the public, it is no longer governing. It is manipulating.
This is not constitutionalism. This is consolidation—an executive branch absorbing the functions of lawmaking, law enforcement, and legal interpretation into a single, unaccountable center of power.
This is not “law and order.” This is the government redefining order in its own image and using law to enforce its will.
The Founders warned us about this.
Yet here we are, watching a government that no longer even pretends to fear the Constitution. A government that openly cultivates a culture of impunity, where criminality is not a hindrance to power but an asset—evidence of loyalty, aggression, and willingness to “do what needs to be done.”
A government like this does not serve the people—it rules them. It does not protect rights—it manages them. It does not uphold law—it deploys law as a weapon.
It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the actions of the American government and those of a cartel—one that wears suits instead of masks, but engages in the same core behaviors: loyalty above legality, retaliation against critics, protection for insiders, secrecy, intimidation, and the monetization of public office.
This is how nations fall—not through foreign invasion but through internal corruption.
When the government becomes the greatest violator of rights, the people lose faith in justice.
When the government becomes the greatest source of disinformation, the people lose faith in truth.
When the government becomes the greatest beneficiary of criminality, the people lose faith in democracy itself.
Democracy becomes theater. Elections become rituals. Rights become privileges granted or revoked at the discretion of those in power.
The Constitution is not a self-enforcing document. It has no army, no treasury, no enforcement bureau of its own. It binds only those who agree to be bound by its edicts. When officials refuse to be bound, the Constitution becomes a relic—a symbol invoked rhetorically but ignored in practice.
The only way out is the way the Founders intended: by rebinding government down with the chains of the Constitution. But those chains must be enforced by “We the People.” They must be tightened around those who wield power.
Without constitutional chains, the president becomes an imperial dictator.
Without oversight, the justice system becomes a political weapon.
Without accountability, government becomes a self-serving, money-laundering enterprise masquerading as legitimate authority.
If America is to remain a free nation, those chains must be tightened—not loosened, ignored, or replaced with partisan loyalty.
The rule of law must apply to the powerful, not just the powerless.
The justice system must serve the public, not the president.
“Kleptocracy: a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people.”—Cambridge Dictionary
America has been backsliding into kleptocratic territory for years now, but this may finally be it.
A kleptocracy is literally “rule by thieves.”
It is a form of government in which a network of ruling elites “steal public funds for their own private gain using public institutions.” As analyst Thomas Mayne explains, it’s “a system based on virtually unlimited grand corruption coupled with, in the words of American academic Andrew Wedeman, ‘near-total impunity for those authorized to loot by the thief-in-chief’—namely the head of state.”
One could fairly say that a kleptocracy was always going to be the end result of the oligarchy that was America.
The signs were visible long before now: power and wealth have been trading places for decades.
So now we find ourselves in this present moment where billionaires are running the show.
The optics are undeniable: while the country suffers through a government shutdown, with welfare programs shuttered and inflation, healthcare and basic cost-of-living expenses skyrocketing, the elite are living it up.
In the White House, President Trump is redecorating, transforming what had been known as “the people’s house” into a palace fit for an American king, complete with marbled bathrooms and a sprawling, gold-fitted ballroom. The rest of the administration, taking its cue from their leader, are jetting around at taxpayer expense for lavish vacations, sporting events—and decadent parties at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida retreat.
The responses to criticisms either deflect to how other administrations wasted money or, in the case of the ballroom, insist the project is privately funded—and therefore beyond reproach because taxpayers aren’t paying for it.
But money is never truly “private” once it purchases influence over public office. The moment a government accepts such funding, it becomes indebted to the funders rather than accountable to the people.
Case in point: the list of donors to Trump’s White House ballroom.
This is how you bring about a kleptocracy—one crooked buy-in at a time.
The constitutional question that follows is unavoidable: if presidents and agencies can do whatever they please simply because someone else foots the bill, what remains of constitutional, representative government?
Follow that rationale to its end and you find yourself in dangerous territory.
If a president can privately fund a ballroom, could he privately fund a battalion? If a cabinet agency can accept donations to expand its reach, could it sell policy favors to the highest bidder?
If every public act can be recast as a private transaction, then the public no longer governs—it merely observes.
That is why the defense of demolishing and reconstructing the White House ballroom—an undertaking never authorized by Congress—on the grounds that no public funds will be used does not pass constitutional muster.
This safeguard was designed not as a bureaucratic formality but as the chief restraint on executive abuse—the people’s means of holding the presidency to account.
Once presidents can raise private money to do what the people’s representatives refuse to fund, that weapon is disarmed.
What follows is the slow unraveling of constitutional restraint, replaced by the notion that money—not law—sets the limits of power. The same mechanism that once protected the people from tyranny now becomes the means of financing it.
What was meant as a safeguard becomes a loophole—a backdoor to unchecked power.
The logic is as seductive as it is corrupting: if private dollars cover the cost, the Constitution doesn’t apply.
By that reasoning, a president could wage war, build prisons, or launch surveillance programs—all without congressional authorization—so long as a billionaire or corporate sponsor signs the check.
That’s not democracy. It’s privatized despotism.
This is how republics fall: not only through coups and crises, but through the quiet substitution of private interests for public authority.
What begins as a gift ends as a purchase. What begins as a renovation ends as a revolution in how power operates.
We have already seen this creeping privatization at every level of government: private contractors running prisons and wars, corporate donors dictating policy priorities, and surveillance and censorship outsourced to tech firms.
Now the presidency itself is for sale—brick by brick, ballroom by ballroom.
The Founders feared monarchs; they never imagined CEOs with armies or presidents who could raise war chests independent of Congress. Yet that is exactly where we are headed: toward a government financed by private power and answerable only to it.
When public power can be bought, sold, or sponsored, the Constitution becomes nothing more than a branding tool—and when a nation mistakes private funding for public legitimacy, it ceases to be a republic at all.
The power of the purse was meant to be the people’s last line of defense against tyranny.
In the architecture of the Constitution, Congress alone was entrusted with the ability to raise and spend money—not because the Founders trusted legislators more than presidents, but because they feared concentrated power. They understood that whoever controls the purse ultimately controls the government itself.
Without that restraint, the president could accumulate funds, build armies, and buy loyalty at will, consolidating power beyond constitutional limits—what Madison called “the very definition of tyranny.”
When presidents or agencies can act outside congressional appropriations by appealing to private donors, super PACs, or corporate “partners,” they dissolve the constitutional boundary between public office and private gain.
Decisions that once required debate and oversight now happen behind closed doors, in boardrooms and donor suites. The result is a shadow government financed by privilege instead of the people.
The privatization of power isn’t theoretical—it is happening in plain sight.
This is what a pay-to-play police state looks like: private actors deputized to do the government’s bidding, free from constitutional safeguards, answerable only to the wallet that funds them.
Once the machinery of enforcement can be financed, directed, or rewarded through private channels, the rule of law gives way to the rule of money. Government ceases to function as a neutral arbiter and becomes a contractor for hire, wielding the badge, the gun, and the gavel on behalf of whoever can afford its services.
These arrangements substitute profit for principle and contract for Constitution, blurring the line between the state and its sponsors: private donors finance political events in public buildings, corporate partners shape executive policy, and billionaires underwrite the very forces—military, law enforcement, surveillance—that keep the rest of the population in check.
A police state funded by private wealth is even more dangerous than one funded by public taxes, because it answers to no electorate, no oversight committee, no constitutional restraint. Its accountability points upward—to financiers—not outward to the people it governs.
Under such a system, justice becomes transactional. Enforcement becomes selective. Rights become negotiable.
What began as the privatization of services metastasizes into the privatization of sovereignty: the executive branch no longer merely executes the law—it markets it. The idea of constitutional limits erodes the moment the state claims exemption by calling its actions “privately financed.”
And so, when a president boasts that he could raise his own army—through donors, contractors or loyalists—he is not being metaphorical. He is articulating the next logical stage of a government that has already sold itself to the highest bidders.
The Founders warned that liberty would perish when the instruments of power could be bought or sold. We are watching that prophecy unfold in real time.
In the pay-to-play police state, money doesn’t just talk—it arrests, surveils, and kills.
The fight to restore constitutional government begins where it was first betrayed: not merely with who pays, but with who decides.
If Congress no longer controls the nation’s spending—and if presidents, agencies, and corporations can bypass public consent by courting private benefactors—then the people no longer control their government.
That is not democracy; that is debt servitude to power.
The Founders knew that taxation and representation rise and fall together—and representation means more than writing a check. It means the power to set priorities, to attach conditions, to withhold funds, and to say no.
A government funded independently of its citizens will inevitably rule independently of them; it will spend without oversight, act without restraint, and enforce without accountability. That is why Madison stressed that “the power over the purse … is the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the people’s representatives against executive encroachments.”
The inverse is also true: once the president depends on private money, the people become dependent on the will of those who pay the president.
In other words, an oligarchy—and when that oligarchy turns government itself into a vehicle for enrichment, a kleptocracy.
To reclaim the republic, the people must reclaim ownership of both the purse and the plan—the money that funds the government and the mandates governing how those funds are used.
That requires drawing a hard constitutional line between public office and private enrichment; restoring congressional authority over every dollar spent in the name of the American people; and dismantling the system of shadow funding—super PACs, donor networks, corporate partnerships, and “public-private collaborations”—that now serve as pipelines for corruption disguised as efficiency. It also requires the sunlight of disclosure for any outside contribution touching government action, and strict prohibitions on off-budget schemes that treat private cash as a license to ignore the law.
Most of all, it requires remembering that citizenship is a public trust, not a private transaction.
We need more than the right to pay for our government—we need the right to say how those payments are used, and the power to refuse when they are misused or abused.
The moment we accept the notion that government may do whatever it wants so long as someone else pays for it, we have already sold the republic.
As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the restoration of liberty will not come from new donors, new deals, or new rulers—it will come from a renewed insistence that power in America flows only from one source: We the People.
Our forebears fought a revolution to end taxation without representation. We may yet have to fight another—this time, against representation without appropriation, where officials claim the right to govern without the duty to answer to those they are supposed to represent.
Remember, they are the servants. We the People are supposed to be the masters.
Masked gunmen. Tasers. Tear gas. Pepper spray. Unmarked vehicles. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Racial profiling. Children traumatized. Families terrorized. Journalists targeted. Citizens detained. Disabled individuals, minors, the elderly, pregnant women, military veterans—snatched off the streets. Private property destroyed.
This is not a war zone. This is America.
This is what now passes for law-and-order policing by ICE agents in Trump’s America—and it is not making America safer or greater.
What began as an agency tasked with enforcing immigration law has metastasized into a domestic terror force.
From coast to coast, ICE goon squads—incognito, thuggish, fueled by profit-driven incentives and outlandish quotas, and empowered by the Trump administration to act as if they are untouchable—are prowling neighborhoods, churches, courthouses, hospitals, bus stops, and worksites, anywhere “suspected” migrants might be present, snatching people first and asking questions later.
Sometimes “later” comes hours, days or even weeks afterwards.
No one is off limits—not even American citizens.
Make no mistake: this is not how a constitutional republic operates. It is how a dictatorship behaves when it decides the rule of law—in this case, the Bill of Rights—is optional.
Journalists are being shoved to the pavement, forced into chokeholds, teargassed, and brutalized—in violation of the First Amendment. U.S. citizens, including toddlers, are being snatched up and carted off—in violation of the Fourth Amendment. People with no criminal records who have lived, worked and paid taxes in this country for decades are being made to disappear—in violation of habeas corpus.
This is not public safety. It is domestic terrorism, carried out by masked, militarized, lawless bounty hunters.
In California, ICE agents stopped a U.S. citizen and military veteran on his way to work. According to George Retes, agents fired tear gas, broke his car window, and applied physical force, including kneeling on him. Retes spent three days in federal custody with no charges, no call to his family, no access to a judge or an attorney, no shower, and no explanation for ICE’s actions before being released.
Two sisters were stopped outside a school, surrounded by at least ten ICE agents, who broke into their locked vehicle, dragged them out, and pinned them to the ground. Both women were later released without explanation.
Each of these incidents is presented as routine immigration enforcement. Yet collectively they reveal a government agency that has abandoned the principles of restraint, accountability, and due process in favor of brute force.
Justifying extreme measures—martial law, mass surveillance, suspension of constitutional safeguards— as necessary for “national security” has always been the refuge of tyrants, and this American police state is no different.
The rationalizations have become bolder, the violence more normalized, and the lies more transparent.
The biggest lie of all is the Department of Homeland Security’s claim that its costly, ego-driven, and unnecessary military invasion of Chicago—Operation Midway Blitz—rounded up “the worst of the worst pedophiles, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers.” In fact, DHS’ own data shows that out of more than 1,000 people rounded up, only 10 had criminal records.
The blatantly false claim that immigrants are inherently violent criminals has also been repeatedly refuted by studies showing that immigrants—including undocumented ones—are less likely to commit crimes than Americans born in the U.S.
Even Trump’s insistence that certain states or cities are overrun with crime, thus necessitating his military invasions, collapses under scrutiny: crime remains at record lows nationwide.
The data simply does not support the rhetoric.
Violence rises and falls with social conditions, not partisan control. Yet, conveniently, only those states that have challenged the Trump administration’s abuses have been singled out for invasion by ICE and the National Guard.
Clearly, this is not about crime, safety, or jobs.
So what is really driving this campaign of terror?
What we are witnessing is the weaponization of fear.
A government that profits from panic and rewards blind obedience has turned immigration enforcement into a spectacle of domination—part deterrent, part distraction, and all political theater.
The timing is no coincidence.
The Trump administration has just announced its fifth military strike on a Venezuelan vessel it claims—without evidence—was engaged in illegal activity. The propaganda might scream about “foreign threats,” but these spectacles serve a different purpose: to divert public outrage away from falling poll numbers, a faltering economy, and growing unrest over the regime’s corruption and incompetence.
At home, ICE raids perform the same function as those boat strikes abroad—they keep the public frightened and the cameras fixed on the wrong enemy. Meanwhile, the scandals that should command national attention—the Epstein files implicating powerful allies, the graft, the insider enrichment—sink beneath the noise.
Each new show of force, each televised arrest or explosion, is meant to remind the populace who holds the power and how easily it can be turned inward.
This is not about border control or law enforcement. It is about control, period.
When a political regime begins to equate its own survival with the nation’s survival, every citizen becomes a potential suspect and every act of dissent a potential crime.
Against such a backdrop, ICE’s strategy is predatory and deliberate.
Lower court rulings have affirmed that ICE, DHS and the Trump Administration are willfully trampling the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
When ICE agents hunt people the way one might hunt animals in the wild, they cease to be officers of the law and become roving packs of lawless predators.
In addition to recruiting ICE agents with $50,000 signing bonuses and $60,000 in student loan forgiveness, DHS is also promising to lavishly reward police agencies that allow their officers to operate as extensions of ICE with salary reimbursements, overtime pay and monthly bonuses.
No wonder citizens, lawful residents and immigrants with no criminal history are getting swept up. There simply aren’t enough violent criminals to fill these quotas.
While some lower courts have attempted to rein in ICE’s abuses, the U.S. Supreme Court has largely empowered them.
In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, a 6–3 Supreme Court order paused a district court injunction that would have barred ICE from stopping people based on perceived race, accent, or workplace location—in effect greenlighting racial profiling and roving patrols.
The court ruled that ICE’s criteria for targeting individuals—judging people by race, language, or job—does not rise to the constitutional level of reasonable suspicion.
But for an administration that mistakes might for right, the law is whatever justifies the hunt. “Everything we’re doing is very lawful,” Trump declared. “What they’re doing is not lawful.”
Martin Luther King Jr. offered the clearest rebuttal to that logic more than sixty years ago.
In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written while jailed for participating in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, King reminded the world “that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’”
King then went on to explain how to distinguish between just and unjust laws:
“I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’ Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
King’s message was not about politics but about principle. His words remind us that legality and morality are not always the same — and that a nation that abandons moral law will soon find itself without any law at all.
A government that chains pregnant women, assaults journalists, and detains citizens without cause has lost its moral authority to govern.
King warned that the gravest threat to justice is not the clamor of bad people but the appalling silence of good ones. The same holds true today: silence in the face of government brutality is itself a form of consent.
Even in the face of the Trump administration’s heavy-handed repression, citizens have stepped up to meet military intimidation with moral conscience.
In Portland and other cities, protesters have embraced creative, nonviolent acts of symbolic resistance—appearing unclothed to expose the government’s hypocrisy, donning costumes to mock its fear, and standing silently before armed agents as living reminders of what it means to resist tyranny without becoming it.
These creative gestures recall the kind of moral witness King described: the courage to confront injustice with peace and strip it of its disguise.
The bottom line, as always, rests with “we the people.”
ICE does not protect America—it terrorizes America. And until it is reined in, dismantled, or reformed to operate wholly within constitutional boundaries, it will remain a standing army on domestic soil: unaccountable, unconstitutional, and un-American.
Tyranny always cloaks itself in the language of welfare and safety. And constitutional abuse transcends party lines.
Every regime that seeks to entrench its power begins by promising to protect the people from chaos, crime, or foreign enemies—then proceeds to manufacture both.
The raids, the strikes, the distractions are all part of the same design: to condition obedience, erase accountability, and cement totalitarian rule under the pretense of “law and order.”
The Constitution is not a suggestion; it is the rule of law.
If ICE—and by extension, the DHS and the entire Trump regime—cannot operate within those limits, if it must hide behind masks and military might to exercise its power, then it has ceased to be lawful.
It has become exactly what the Framers of the Constitution feared: a government that wages war on its own people.
“When they came in the middle of the night, they terrorized the families that were living there. There were children who were without clothing, they were zip tied, taken outside at 3 o’clock in the morning. A senior resident, an American citizen with no warrants, was taken outside and handcuffed for three hours. Doors were blown off their hinges, walls were broken through, immigration agents coming from Black Hawk helicopters … This is America.”—Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson
When the government can label anyone or anything an enemy in order to wage war, we are all in danger.
This “everywhere war” depends on a simple redefinition: call it a war, and the target becomes a combatant. Call the city a battlespace, and its residents become suspects.
What the White House is doing overseas to vessels it deems part of a terrorist network (without any credible proof or due process), it is now mimicking at home with door-kicking raids, mass surveillance, and ideological watchlists.
With the stroke of a pen, President Trump continues to set aside the constitutional safeguards meant to restrain exactly this kind of mission creep, handing himself and his agencies sweeping authority to disregard the very principles on which this nation was founded—principles intended to serve as constitutional safeguards against tyranny, corruption, abuse and overreach put in place by America’s founding fathers.
What makes NSPM-7 so dangerous is not only its declared purpose but its breadth and secrecy. There are no clearly defined standards, no meaningful transparency, and no external oversight. The public is told only that the government will protect them—by watching them.
Yet the danger is not only in what the government hides, but in what it chooses to see.
Even more troubling is the way “threats” are defined.
What is being sold as a campaign to disrupt left-wing conspiracies has expanded to include ideology, rhetoric, and belief.
Clearly, this is not just another surveillance program.
The government has a long history of using vague definitions of “extremism” to justify ever-expanding control. Once dissent is rebranded as danger, every act of resistance can be swept into the government’s dragnet.
Whether through counterinsurgency tactics abroad or domestic militarization at home, the pattern is the same: dissent is rebranded as danger, and those who resist government narratives become subjects of investigation.
NSPM-7 merely formalizes this cycle of suspicion.
It also resurrects an old playbook with new machinery—COINTELPRO, digitized and centralized. The tools may be different, but the logic—neutralize dissent—is the same, now scaled up with modern surveillance and stitched together under executive direction. From there, the apparatus needs only a pretext—a checklist of behaviors, viewpoints, associations and beliefs—to justify recasting citizens as suspects.
For years now, the government has flagged certain viewpoints and phrases as potential markers of extremism.
To that list, you can now add “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-American,” among others.
What this means, in practice, is that sermons, protests, blog posts, or donor lists could all be flagged as precursors to terrorism.
Under this policy, America’s founders would be terrorists. Jesus himself would be blacklisted as “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist.”
Anything can be declared a war, and anyone can be redefined as an enemy combatant.
The definition shifts with political convenience, but the result is always the same: unchecked executive power.
The president has already labeled drug cartels “unlawful combatants” and insists the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict.”
The raids in Chicago and the White House’s evolving attitude towards surveillance confirm what follows from that logic: this war footing is not confined to foreign shores. It is being turned inward—toward journalists, political opponents, and ordinary citizens whose beliefs or associations are deemed “anti-American.”
By anti-American, this administration really means anti-government, especially when Trump is calling the shots.
According to local news reports, agents arrived in Black Hawk helicopters, trucks and military-style vans, using power tools to breach perimeter fencing, destroying property to gain entry, and zip-tying family members—including children—as they were separated and escorted from the building.
The imagery is unmistakably martial: a domestic operation staged and executed with battlefield methods.
This “everywhere war” lands on a country already saturated with domestic watchlists and dragnet filters.
Federal agencies have leaned on banks and data brokers to run broad, warrantless screens of ordinary Americans’ purchases and movements for so-called “extremism” indicators—everything from buying religious materials to shopping at outdoor stores or booking travel—none of which are crimes.
The point isn’t probable cause; it’s preemptive suspicion.
At the same time, geofence warrants and other bulk location grabs have exposed who went where and with whom—scooping up churchgoers, hotel guests, and passersby across entire city blocks—while a sprawling web of fusion and “real-time crime” centers ingests camera feeds, social posts, license-plate scans, facial recognition, and predictive-policing scores to flag “persons of interest” who have done nothing wrong.
This is how dissent gets relabeled as danger: by surrounding every American with the presumption of guilt first, and constitutional safeguards—if any—much later.
When merely looking a certain way or talking a certain way or voting a certain way is enough to get you singled out and subjected to dehumanizing, cruel treatment by government agents, we are all in danger.
When the police state has a growing list of innocuous terms and behaviors that are suspicious enough to classify someone a terrorist, we are all in danger.
Today it is drug cartels. Yesterday it was immigrants. Tomorrow it could be journalists, political opponents, or ordinary citizens who express views deemed “anti-American.”
With NSPM-7, the Trump White House is not merely amplifying surveillance power—it is institutionalizing a regime in which thought, dissent, and ideological posture become the raw material for domestic investigations and suppression.
Make no mistake: this is an unprecedented escalation in the government’s war on privacy, dissent, and constitutional limits.
Consider the secret phone-records dragnet operated for more than a decade across multiple administrations—formerly “Hemisphere,” now “Data Analytical Services.”
By paying AT&T and exploiting privacy loopholes, the government has gained warrantless access to more than a trillion domestic call records a year, sweeping in not only suspects but their spouses, parents, children, friends—anyone they might have called. Training on the program has reportedly reached beyond drug agents to postal inspectors, prison officials, highway patrol, border units, and even the National Guard.
This is how a surveillance apparatus becomes a governing philosophy.
A presidency armed with NSPM-7 can fuse that kind of dragnet data with interagency “threat” frameworks and ideological watchlists, collapsing the wall between intelligence gathering and political control.
This is how tyrants justify tyranny in order to stay in power.
This is McCarthyism in a digital uniform.
Joseph McCarthy branded critics as Communist infiltrators. Donald Trump brands enemies as “combatants.”
The mechanism is the same: redefine dissent as treachery, then prosecute it under extraordinary powers.
For those old enough to have lived through the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something in the air that reeks of the heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian tactics that were hallmarks of the 1950s.
Back then, it was the government—spearheaded by Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee—working in tandem with private corporations and individuals to blacklist Americans suspected of being communist sympathizers.
By the time the witch hunts drew to a close, thousands of individuals (the vast majority innocent of any crime) had been accused of communist ties, investigated, subpoenaed, and blacklisted. Careers were ruined, suicides followed, immigration tightened, and free expression chilled.
Seventy-five years later, the same vitriol, fear-mongering, and knee-jerk intolerance are once again being deployed against anyone who dares to think for themselves.
All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably forward.
This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails.
The silence is becoming deafening.
What is unfolding is the logical culmination of years of bipartisan betrayals of the Bill of Rights, from the Cold War to the digital panopticon
What once operated in the shadows of intelligence agencies is now openly coordinated from the Oval Office.
For decades, presidents of both parties have waged a steady assault on the Constitution. Each crisis—Cold War, 9/11, pandemic—became an excuse to concentrate more power in the executive branch.
The Patriot Act normalized warrantless surveillance. The FISA courts gave secret cover for dragnet spying. The NSA’s metadata sweeps exposed millions of Americans’ phone records. Predictive policing and geofencing warrants turned smartphones into government informants.
Each measure, we were told, was temporary, limited, and necessary. None were rolled back. Each became the foundation for the next expansion.
Against this backdrop, NSPM-7 emerges as the next, more dangerous iteration.
What distinguishes it is not merely scale but centralization: the government has moved from piecemeal encroachments to a bold, centralized framework in which the White House claims the prerogative to oversee surveillance across agencies with virtually no external checks.
Oversight by Congress and the courts is reduced to a fig leaf.
This is how liberties die: not with a sudden coup, but with the gradual normalization of extraordinary powers until they are no longer extraordinary at all.
It is the embodiment of James Madison’s nightmare: the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the same hands.
From red-flag seizures and “disinformation” hunts to mail imaging, biometric databases, license-plate grids, and a border-zone where two-thirds of Americans now live under looser search rules, the default has flipped: everyone is collectible, everyone is rankable, and everyone is interruptible.
That is how a free people become reduced to databits first and citizens as an afterthought.
The constitutional stakes couldn’t be higher.
The Fourth Amendment promises that people shall be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. That promise is empty if the President can authorize the government to sweep up data, monitor communications, and track movements without individualized warrants or probable cause.
The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, association, and press. Those protections mean little if journalists fear their calls are tapped, if activists believe their networks are infiltrated, or if citizens censor themselves out of fear.
Separation of powers itself is on the line. By directing surveillance policy across government without legislative debate or judicial review, the White House is usurping authority never meant to rest in a single set of hands.
The risks are not hypothetical.
COINTELPRO targeted civil rights leaders and dissidents. The NSA’s bulk collection swept up millions of innocents. Fusion centers today track and analyze daily life.
What was once shocking—the idea that the government might listen in on every phone call or sift through every email—is now treated as the price of living in modern America.
If those older, less centralized programs were abused, why would NSPM-7—with broader reach and weaker oversight—be any different?
This is not speculation. We have seen this progression before.
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued reports on so-called “rightwing extremism” that swept broadly across the ideological spectrum. Economic anxiety, anti-immigration views, gun rights advocacy, even the military service of returning veterans were flagged as potential red flags for extremism.
The backlash was immediate, and DHS was forced to walk back the report, but the damage was done: dissenting views had been equated with dangerous plots.
That same playbook now risks becoming institutionalized under NSPM-7, which consolidates ideological profiling into a White House-directed mandate.
Imagine a journalist investigating corruption within the administration. Under NSPM-7, their sources and communications could be quietly monitored.
Imagine a nonprofit advocating for immigration reform. Its donors and staff could be swept into a database of “domestic threats.”
Imagine an attorney representing a controversial client. Even attorney-client privilege, once considered sacrosanct, could be eroded under a regime that treats dissent as subversion.
These scenarios are not alarmist—they are logical extensions of a system that places no real limits on executive discretion.
With NSPM-7, the line between foreign and domestic surveillance blurs entirely, and every citizen becomes a potential target of investigation.
Unless “we the people” demand accountability, NSPM-7 will become the new normal, entrenched in the machinery of government long after this administration has passed.
We must insist that surveillance be subject to the same constitutional limits that govern every other exercise of state power. We must demand transparency. We must pressure Congress to reclaim its role and courts to enforce constitutional duty. Most of all, we must cultivate a culture of resistance.
The Bill of Rights is not self-executing; it depends on the vigilance of the citizenry.
Civil liberties groups have already sounded the alarm, warning that NSPM-7 authorizes government-wide investigations into nonprofits, activists, and donors. Law scholars call it a dangerous overreach, a program as vague as it is menacing. Even law firms, normally cautious about critiquing executive power, are voicing concern about the risks it poses to attorney-client privilege.
When so many diverse voices converge in warning, we should pay attention.
And yet warnings alone will not stop this juggernaut, because NSPM-7 is not simply about technology or data collection. It is about power—and how fear is weaponized to consolidate that power.
If we are silent now, if we allow NSPM-7 to pass unchallenged, we will have no excuse when the surveillance state tightens its grip further.
When ideas themselves become a trigger for surveillance, the First Amendment loses.
America has entered dangerous territory.
A government that answers only to itself is not a constitutional republic—it is a rogue state. And NSPM-7, far from securing our freedoms, threatens to extinguish them.
Unchecked power is unconstitutional power.
As U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan cautioned in a recent ruling: “The government’s arguments paint with a broad brush and threaten to upend fundamental protections in our Constitution. But ours is not an autocracy; it is a system of checks and balances.”
Those checks only function if we insist on them.
With congressional Republicans having traded their constitutional autonomy for a place in Trump’s authoritarian regime, the courts—and the power of the people themselves—remain the last hope for reining in this runaway police state.
Cognizant that a unified populace poses the greatest threat to its power grabs, the Deep State—having co-opted Trump and the MAGA movement—is doing everything it can to keep the public polarized and fearful.
This has been a long game.
The contagion of fear that McCarthy once spread with the help of government agencies, corporations, and the power elite never truly died; it merely evolved.
NSPM-7 is its modern form, and Trump a modern-day McCarthy.
That anyone would support a politician whose every move has become antithetical to freedom is mind-boggling, but that is the power of politics as a drug for the masses.
That anyone who claims to want to “Make America Great Again” would sell out the country—and the Constitution—to do so says a lot.
That judges, journalists and activists are being threatened for daring to hold the line against the government’s overreaches and abuses speaks volumes.
One of Trump’s supporters sent an anonymous postcard to Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee assigned to a case challenging the Trump administration’s effort to deny full First Amendment protection to non-citizens lawfully present in the United States. The postcard taunted: “Trump has pardons and tanks… What do you have?”
Judge Young opened his opinion with a direct reply: “Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works in a specific case.”
The judge then proceeded to issue a blistering 161-page opinion that hinges on the language of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
“No law” means “no law,” concluded Judge Young,
In other words, the First Amendment is not negotiable.
Non-citizens lawfully present in the United States “have the same free speech rights as the rest of us.”
This is the constitutional answer to NSPM-7’s everywhere-war logic.
When a president declares anything a battlefield and anyone a combatant, the First Amendment answers back: No law means no law.
It is not a permission slip the government can offer only to favored citizens or compliant viewpoints. It is a boundary the government may not cross.
So the question returns to us, the ones Judge Young addressed: “What do we have, and will we keep it?”
We have a constitutional republic, and we keep it by holding fast to the Constitution.
We keep it by refusing the normalization of the Executive Branch’s extraordinary overreaches and power grabs.
We keep it by insisting that dissent is not danger, speech is not suspicion, and watchlists are not warrants.
We keep it by demanding congressional oversight with teeth, courts that enforce first principles, and communities that resist fear when fear is used to rule.
“The era of the Department of Defense is over… From this moment forward, the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: warfighting… We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country… You kill people and break things for a living.” — Pete Hegseth
“America is under invasion from within… That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within… We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military… it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”—President Donald Trump in remarks to more than 800 of the country’s top military leaders
Distractions abound. Don’t be distracted.
The American police state under Donald Trump has mastered the art of delivering endless diversions, constant uproar, and wall-to-wall chaos designed to prevent us from focusing on any single issue for long.
This is how psyops work: keep the populace reactive, confused, fearful and pliant while power consolidates.
According to the Trump administration, “we the people” are now the enemy from within.
Over the course of just one week, we’ve been bombarded with headlines about government shutdowns, a presidential directive aimed at blacklisting dissent, threats by Trump to deploy the National Guard into states he considers political opponents, the politicization of the military, tariffs that inflict economic pain on American consumers, and the administration’s unabashed embrace of graft and grift.
In the midst of it all, Pete Hegseth, the newly styled Secretary of War, compelled a sudden gathering of the top military brass for a costly $6 million exercise that amounted to little more than chest-thumping, propaganda and grandstanding.
With Hegseth at the helm of the renamed Department of War, calling for a new “warrior ethos,” the Trump administration is celebrating aggression and blind obedience over peacekeeping, honor and constitutional duty.
Both the rebranding of the War Department and the warrior-ethos pep rally signaled a profound shift in how the Deep State—which has consolidated its powers under Trump—views the role of the military, our constitutional government, and the American people.
It is a shift we cannot afford to ignore.
The name change alone is significant.
After World War II, “War” was deliberately retired from the department’s name to emphasize restraint in the wake of global conflicts that cost humanity dearly in terms of lives, fortunes and peace. That nominal bulwark has now been discarded. And with it, the very idea that America’s military exists for defense rather than conquest.
Reviving the Department of War signals to the bureaucracy, the brass, and the public that aggression—not defense—is the organizing principle.
The Pentagon has been rechristened not as a fortress against foreign threats but as a machine for waging endless war here at home: Democratic cities will become military staging grounds; rules of engagement will be loosened to maximize “lethality”; and militarized police will be given a license to kill their fellow Americans.
This is not the language of defense. It is the language of aggression and occupation.
A standing army on domestic soil was precisely what the Founders feared. They lived under troops quartered in their towns. They knew what happens when government treats its own citizens as a hostile force.
Two centuries later, their fear has become our reality.
For years, federal and state agencies have blurred the line between soldiers and police. Armored vehicles on neighborhood streets. Combat training in American towns. Laws allowing indefinite detention of citizens without trial.
Methodically, a war culture has been transplanted from the battlefield abroad to the homeland.
With armored tanks on our streets, SWAT raids treated as routine, and citizens viewed as combatants rather than neighbors with rights, the results are predictable: abuse, eroded liberties, and the slow death of a constitutional republic.
This is the future we warned was coming: every city a potential conflict zone, every protest a pretext for deployment, every citizen a suspect.
Trump’s reckless call to use “dangerous cities” as military training grounds doesn’t just echo this dystopia—it completes the circle.
Under the banner of “war,” the government is giving itself license to treat the American people as the enemy.
And Trump, buoyed by the power of the presidency and his ability to use taxpayer dollars for his own grandiose plans—building ballrooms, hiring thugs with extravagant bonuses for arrests and roundups, erecting detention centers—is now attempting to bribe the military with over $1 trillion in spending in 2026 if only they will march to a dictator’s drum.
But this is precisely the scenario the Founders sought to guard against. They understood that “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”
Their warning is clear to everyone but the die-hard devotees of the American police state: a standing army puts the American people squarely in the crosshairs of a tyrannous regime.
A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the American people of any vestige of freedom. How can there be liberty when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones overhead?
It was for this reason the Founders vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military regime ruled by force.
They opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.
That basic civics lesson hasn’t sunk in with Trump, who seems to relish ruling with brute force and using the military to kill with impunity.
And then there’s Hegseth, who—despite professing devotion to Jesus, the prince of peace—has dismissed pacifism as “naive and dangerous,” insisting: “From this moment forward, the only mission… is warfighting, preparing for war and preparing to win.”
But in declaring war as the mission, Hegseth and Trump reveal exactly how far they have strayed from the Constitution.
They are a lesson in how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely—exactly the danger that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general in World War II, warned against:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Eisenhower’s words were prophetic, because the rise of misplaced power did not begin with Trump. Trump and his administration didn’t create this quagmire from nothing—the present police state and its tools of terror have been in the works for a long time.
Back in 2008, the U.S. Army War College issued a report urging the military to be prepared to put down civil unrest within the country.
Summarizing the report, journalist Chris Hedges wrote, “The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a ‘violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,’ which could be provoked by ‘unforeseen economic collapse,’ ‘purposeful domestic resistance,’ ‘pervasive public health emergencies’ or ‘loss of functioning political and legal order.’ The ‘widespread civil violence,’ the document said, ‘would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.’”
What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as concern for the national security.
The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.
At three-and-a-half minutes in, the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”
But here’s the catch: in the Pentagon’s lexicon, those “noncombatants” are not foreign armies at all. Who are they?
They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.” They are “threats.” They are the “enemy.”
They are civilians. Protesters. The unemployed. The poor. Dissidents. In short: us.
Welcome to Battlefield America.
In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.
We are the have-nots. And once you see that division clearly, the rest falls into place.
Suddenly it all begins to make sense: the surveillance systems, the civil unrest drills, fusion centers, the databases of dissidents. The extremism reports, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military.
Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to build Big Brother into every device we own. Cars, phones, smart homes, loyalty cards, streaming services—they all track us.
All of this has taken place in broad daylight, funded with our dollars.
It’s astounding how convenient we’ve made it for the government to lock down the nation.
So, what exactly is the government preparing for?
By “government,” I don’t mean the two-party bureaucracy of Republicans and Democrats. I mean Government with a capital “G”: the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
This is the hidden face of power: corporatized, militarized, and contemptuous of freedom. And it is not waiting for some distant tomorrow.
The future is here.
By waging endless wars abroad, bringing the instruments of war home, turning police into soldiers, criminalizing dissent, and making peaceful revolution nearly impossible, the government has engineered an environment where domestic violence becomes inevitable.
Be warned: in the future envisioned by the military, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.
For years, the government has warned of domestic terrorism, erected surveillance, and trained law enforcement to equate anti-government views (that is, exercising your constitutional rights) with extremism. Now that groundwork has paid off.
What the government failed to explain—until Trump—was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own choosing.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — A coalition of free speech organizations is asking the federal courts to rein in President Trump’s unprecedented use of the military against civilians, especially as a means of silencing and punishing disfavored speech, warning that such actions echo the very abuses the nation’s Founders sought to prevent. The filing comes amid Trump’s ongoing threats to deploy troops to Memphis, Baltimore, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, often over the objections of state governors.
In an amicus brief before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Newsom v. Trump, The Rutherford Institute joined the ACLU, its state affiliates, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University to challenge Trump’s June 2025 order federalizing the California National Guard and deploying active-duty Marines in Los Angeles to quell protests against his immigration raids. The coalition’s brief argues that the President’s claim of unilateral, unreviewable authority to deploy troops on American streets is “extreme, unprecedented, and incompatible with the history, traditions, and laws of the United States.”
“The Founders warned against standing armies on American soil, fearing that the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by local police violates the Posse Comitatus Act and crosses the line into authoritarianism.”
On June 7, 2025, President Trump invoked a rarely used statute, 10 U.S.C. § 12406, to forcibly federalize the California National Guard and deploy thousands of troops against largely peaceful protesters in Los Angeles. The protests erupted after armed federal agents carried out aggressive immigration raids, sparking public outrage. The federal government escalated the situation by unleashing military troops armed with tear gas, pepper balls, and flash-bang grenades on demonstrators that included journalists, legal observers, clergy, children, and elected officials. Trump claimed that the protests “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government.”
Five days later, the federal district court found that “[Trump’s] actions were illegal—both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment,” and thus issued a temporary restraining order to return control of the National Guard to the Governor. But a panel of the Ninth Circuit then stayed that initial restraining order pending appeal, giving high deference to the President’s authority. While this appeal has been pending, the district court ruled on Sept. 2, 2025, that the federal government also violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the use of the military for domestic policing absent express constitutional or statutory authorization.
The coalition’s brief before the Ninth Circuit stresses that: 1) History and tradition strictly limit military deployments against civilians; 2) Military policing threatens the First Amendment by suppressing lawful protests, political dissent, and association; and 3) Unchecked troop deployments risk authoritarian abuse, because the President cannot label ordinary political opposition as “rebellion” to justify military force. With 300 National Guard troops to remain deployed in Los Angeles through Election Day, the dangers of Trump’s military deployments are not theoretical: internal assessments reveal that troops’ presence in Washington, D.C. has been perceived by the public as “leveraging fear.”
Hina Shamsi, Charlie Hogle, Sean M. Lau, and other ACLU attorneys advanced the arguments in the amicus brief.
The Rutherford Institute is a nonprofit civil liberties organization dedicated to making the government play by the rules of the Constitution. To this end, the Institute defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a broad range of issues affecting their freedoms.
“That was when they suspended the Constitution… There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
What we are witnessing is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; it is a government over the people.
Call it what it is: political gaslighting—the regime says one thing while doing the opposite, and insists on the citizenry’s trust while dismantling the very checks and balances that make trust possible.
So when the powers-that-be claim to be protecting the Constitution, they’re dismantling it at every turn. In this way, the mechanisms of constitutional government—separation of powers, federalism, due process, and the Bill of Rights—are being hollowed out in plain sight.
Although this dismantling did not start with President Trump, it has accelerated beyond imagining.
What was once a slow bleed is now a hemorrhage—and it is not random. The damage is unfolding on two parallel tracks: a steady, methodical, bureaucratic erosion (rule changes, executive orders, new databases) paired with shock-and-awe surges (National Guard deployments, mass round-ups, headline-grabbing prosecutions).
The words may say “freedom” and “order,” but the deeds smack of tyranny.
Rights are framed as absolute for friends and privileges for critics. That is the opposite of constitutional government, which holds everyone—especially those in power—to the same rule of law, applied evenly.
If the government can police ideas, deploy troops at home, run dragnets by algorithm, disappear people into distant prisons, build spectacle cages, and amass power in one office, then no American is safe—including those who cheer these efforts today.
If you believe in limited government, equal justice, and due process—whatever your party—these double standards should alarm you most, because the precedents being cheered today will be wielded against you tomorrow.
What follows is a running ledger of the gaslighting playbook and its constitutional costs.
The Gaslight: “We’re Restoring the Constitution.” Reality: The “temporary” powers created after 9/11 have hardened into a permanent police-state architecture—Patriot Act surveillance, secret FISA processes and National Security Letters, DHS fusion centers, a diluted Fourth Amendment “border zone,” civil-asset forfeiture, Pentagon 1033 militarization, Real ID, facial-recognition and geofence warrants—now run at full throttle across administrations. The Cost: A police state.
The Gaslight: “We Value Law and Order.” Reality: The administration deployed Marines and the National Guard into American streets to police protests protected by the First Amendment. On September 2, 2025, a federal judge ruled that the administration’s deployment of thousands of Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles—ostensibly for immigration protests—violated the Posse Comitatus Act, describing a “top-down, systemic effort” to militarize civil law enforcement. The Constitution’s framers feared standing armies and military occupations of American communities. The Cost: The death of Posse Comitatus.
The Gaslight: “We Defend Free Speech.” Reality: Dissent is criminalized, expressive conduct is relitigated, and disfavored groups face terror labels and IRS pressure. Protest is a right, not a privilege, yet the government increasingly recasts organized dissent as conspiracy. After the Charlie Kirk shooting, the White House floated designating “antifa” and other liberal groups as domestic terrorists, bringing racketeering cases against funders, and targeting nonprofits critical of the administration—all while downplaying right-wing violence. Fold in Bondi’s vow to target “hateful” speech and Vance’s pledge to eradicate “leftist ideology,” and power slides from punishing unlawful acts to policing ideas. The Cost: A weaponized First Amendment.
The Gaslight: “We’re Protecting You from Extremists.” Reality: Watchlists without due process, elastic “material support” theories, politicized “extremism” labels, and donor targeting that treat journalists, whistleblowers, activists—even parents at school boards—as suspects first and citizens second. Speaking truth to power is reframed as a security risk. In free societies, the state fears the citizen; in unfree ones, the citizen fears the state. The Cost: Dissent rebranded as extremism.
The Gaslight: “We’re Ending Federal Censorship.” Reality: On Day One, the President signed an order to “end federal censorship.” Read closely, it asserts sweeping control over how agencies interact with media platforms and broadcasters, rebranding ordinary outreach and fact-checking as First Amendment violations, while positioning the Executive as referee of the private square. By centralizing power over the flow of information in the Executive Branch, it threatens the independence of the very private forums where Americans speak. The test of free speech is whether the government stays out of the marketplace of ideas—not whether it curates it to the President’s liking. The Cost: The state as speech referee.
The Gaslight: “We Use Smart Tech, Not Dragnet Surveillance.” Reality: The administration is fusing government databases and outsourcing “intelligence” to private vendors in such a way that data becomes the warrant. ICE’s new $30 million deal with Palantir to build “ImmigrationOS” promises to identify, track, and deport people using AI-driven analytics and cross-agency data sharing. Add in geofence warrants, face-scan dragnets, and fusion-center “suspicious activity” pipelines, and you get a domestic intelligence system that presumes guilt by data trail. The Cost: Probable cause replaced by algorithms.
The Gaslight: “We’re Tough on Crime.” Reality: This year, U.S. agencies financed the transfer of migrants to El Salvador’s mega-prison (CECOT), where families and lawyers lost contact with detainees for months. Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention site whetted the government’s appetite for scaled-up incarceration, converting state prisons into immigration jails nationwide. These attempts by the Trump administration constitute an end run around longstanding constitutional protections for anyone accused of a crime. The common denominator is spectacle over justice, expansion over restraint. The Cost: The death of due process.
The Gaslight: “We’re Compassionate, Not Cruel.” Reality: The push to clear homeless encampments combines criminalization with expanded involuntary commitments. A July 24, 2025 executive order encourages states to funnel people into institutions and mental-health courts, tying funding to “maximum” use of commitments—an end-run around the presumption of liberty that undergirds due process. The Cost: Bureaucratic coercion over compassion.
The Gaslight: “We’re Streamlining Government.” Reality: The separation of powers was intended to serve as a check against any one government agency becoming too powerful. Yet the administration has pressed an aggressive unitary-executive theory to encroach on independent agencies, such as the Federal Reserve. Scholars warn this could erase the independence of agencies designed to check the White House. The Cost: Checks and balances gutted.
The Gaslight: “We’re Keeping America Safe Overseas.” Reality: Killing by assassination, not authorization. Twice in recent months, U.S. forces have launched unannounced attacks on Venezuelan boats, killing crews without warning or due process, on the mere assertion that they were drug traffickers. The Cost: War powers and judicial oversight bypassed.
The Gaslight: “We’re Fixing Wasteful Spending.” Reality: Having poured billions into surveillance, prisons, and domestic deployments, the “police-state budget” unravels the economy while eroding liberty. The Cost: A debt-funded police state.
Many who cherish ordered liberty, limited government, fiscal restraint, and constitutional morality would normally recoil at these tactics under any other administration, so why not now?
Principles should not change because the party in power has changed, and yet that’s exactly what continues to drive the double standard.
If there’s a constitutional scorecard, “we the people” are on the losing team right now.
The First Amendment is buckling as protest is chilled, expressive conduct is targeted, opponents are threatened with terror labels, and the Executive Branch expands control over the speech ecosystem.
The Fourth and Fifth Amendments have been weakened by AI surveillance and cross-agency fusion that normalize suspicionless tracking, while offshore detention and coerced commitments compromise due process.
The Eighth Amendment is mocked by harsh, theatrical detention regimes.
Federalism and the Tenth Amendment give way when federal troops step into local policing.
Separation of powers erodes as an inflated unitary-executive theory encroaches on independent agencies.
War powers are skirted by extrajudicial killings abroad. And fiscal responsibility is inverted as surveillance and prison appropriations swell while liberty contracts.
What must happen now?
Congress must codify guardrails against domestic military use—tighten Posse Comitatus, narrow Insurrection Act exceptions, and mandate transparency for any domestic mission. Courts and prosecutors should reaffirm expressive rights, rejecting end-runs around Texas v. Johnson and refusing cases that criminalize symbolism.
Lawmakers must impose bright-line limits on data fusion, bar cross-agency pooling for generalized surveillance, and require algorithmic transparency and adversarial testing before any tool touches liberty. The U.S. must prohibit outsourcing detention to abusive regimes, close loopholes, and apply human-rights scrutiny to every foreign arrangement.
The independence of watchdogs and the Fed needs protection through clear “for cause” standards. States and cities should decriminalize homelessness and fund housing-first approaches instead of coercive commitments.
Congress must reassert war powers, requiring explicit authorization before any attack abroad. And fiscal sanity must be restored: sunset emergency outlays for surveillance and prison build-outs, mandate GAO audits of domestic deployments and fusion contracts, and attach civil-liberties impact statements to major security spending.
Our job as citizens is not to trust the government but to bind it down with the Constitution. “In questions of power,” Thomas Jefferson warned, we must “bind [government] down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
Whatever you do, don’t trust the government with your privacy. Don’t trust it with your property: no-knock raids and forfeiture turn “private” property into whatever authorities permit you to keep.
Don’t trust it with your finances: Washington spends money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford. Don’t trust it with your life: force without accountability is not protection.
Above all, don’t trust it with your freedoms: on paper, rights endure; in practice, they are rationed by policy memos, watchlists, and shifting lines in the sand.
This should never be a right-vs-left debate; it’s the State vs. your liberty.
If you wouldn’t trust your worst political enemy with these weaponized tools, you shouldn’t trust your favorite politician with them either.
So think nationally, act locally.
Rebuild the habits of self-government where you live: know your neighbors and officials; know your rights and your city charter; ask who runs the jail and demand transparency; vet the people you entrust with power; and hold officials to account—show up, file requests, appeal, document, organize.
This is the work in front of us—not knee-jerk outrage, but persistent, consistent work to fortify the “chains of the Constitution.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we let emergency rule become ordinary rule—military troops as beat cops, protest as crime, data as warrant, assassination as policy, money as politics—there won’t be a Constitution left to defend.
John W. Whitehead, Constitutional Attorney 