WASHINGTON, D.C. — Denouncing the Trump Administration’s ongoing attempts to suppress dissent and chill lawful First Amendment activity, The Rutherford Institute has joined a broad coalition of eleven legal and civil liberties organizations to challenge President Trump’s use of presidential executive orders to retaliate against perceived political opponents.
The coalition, which includes the ACLU, ACLU of DC, CATO, Electronic Frontier Foundation, FIRE, the Institute for Justice, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the Society for the Rule of Law, and The Rutherford Institute, filed an amicus brief in Perkins Coie LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice asking a federal court to strike down the president’s executive order as a violation of the separation of powers and an unconstitutional infringement on the rights to free speech, advocacy and due process.
“That the Trump Administration is weaponizing the government in order to wage a war against dissent, against due process, and against the very foundations of our constitutional republic should be a warning to all Americans,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. These threats against the legal community and ‘we the people’ are merely the first round of the Trump Administration’s effort to turn the Bill of Rights into a Bill of Conditional Privileges.”
In an effort to punish the law firm of Perkins Coie and discourage any other law firms from challenging the Trump Administration’s ongoing efforts to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump issued an Executive Order directing the federal government to suspend the firm’s security clearances, cease providing all goods and services, terminate any contracts with the firm and those who do business with the firm, limit the firm’s access to federal buildings and employees, and refrain from hiring employees of the firm. The intent behind the president’s actions, per former advisor Steve Bannon, is to “put those law firms out of business” so that they can no longer use the system of checks and balances to prevent the Administration from violating the Constitution.
Perkins Coie filed a lawsuit to prevent the implementation of Trump’s Order on grounds that it violates the separation of powers and the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Warning that Trump’s actions constitute a brazen attack on the independence of the legal profession and the judicial branch, the legal coalition’s amicus brief argues that Trump’s Executive Order not only infringes the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and petitioning the government, but it also essentially gives the government an unfettered veto over a person’s right to choice of counsel due to the government pushing for a cancel culture and creating a blacklist of firms, similar to what the NRA previously claimed was done to it by a New York state official. Moreover, if the executive order is allowed to stand, it could set a precedent for future Administrations of either political party to suppress challenges to a president’s unconstitutional policies and actions and to deter lawyers from representing the president’s political opponents and any clients adverse to the Administration.
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.
“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”—James Madison
It’s no joke: America is becoming a Constitution-free zone.
Little by little, our rights are being whittled down in the name of national security.
Where do you draw the line?
How much tyranny will Americans tolerate in the name of national security?
At what point does this slippery slope of power grabs lead to dictatorship?
Will we let border police trample on the rights of everyone they encounter, including legal residents and citizens? Turn a blind eye when men, women and children are forcibly detained by gangs of plainclothes agents and made to disappear? Will we accept a national ID card that enables the government to target individuals and groups it deems undesirable? Will we tolerate AI-powered surveillance cameras and drones that track us more effectively than they protect us? Will we censor ourselves, fearing that any expression of dissent will mark us as anti-government?
Will we abandon the constitutional principles our founders fought for? This is the bargain the police state demands of us.
Take immigration, for example.
President Trump wants us to believe that the nation’s security is so threatened by illegal immigrants that we should tolerate roving bands of ICE and border patrol agents disregarding the Constitution at every turn.
But these government agents aren’t just disregarding it—they’re trampling it with the blessing of the man who swore to “preserve, protect and defend” that very same Constitution.
First Amendment rights to free speech, assembly, and protest. Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Fifth Amendment guarantees of due process. Sixth Amendment protections ensuring a right to legal counsel. Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishments. Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law.
All of these and more are being imperiously swept aside in the Trump Administration’s pursuit of an America “for Americans and Americans only.”
Trump has invoked wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act to justify the expulsion of illegal immigrants, whom Trump has likened to terrorists, killers, criminals, and enemies of the state.
However, with national security being used as a pretext to strip away rights on a larger scale than just criminals, the individuals targeted by the Trump Administration’s overreach represent a broader cross-section of American society: immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who live and work in the mainland of the United States. (It is estimated that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, contributing $59.4 billion to the federal government, including payments for federal income tax and federal social insurance such as Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance. In other words, they are paying for entitlement programs for which they do not receive benefits.)
Individuals whose visas allow them to legally reside in the U.S. are also being rounded up and made to disappear without due process.
Some are being targeted based on their nationality. Some are being racially profiled. Some are being classified as criminal based solely on the fact that they have tattoos. Some, like Abrego Garcia, are being mistakenly snatched up and deported to private prisons in foreign countries, beyond the physical reach of U.S. courts.
And then there are the scientists, doctors, academics and students who are being rounded up because at some point they voiced their concerns about the mounting death toll in Palestine.
For example, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk wrote an op-ed calling for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. That’s all it took for her to be placed on the government’s enemies list, stripped of her visa without warning or notice, surrounded on the street by a small army of masked agents, and whisked out of state to a detention center 1500 miles away without any family or friend knowing her whereabouts.
These arbitrary roundups and deportations are not just violations of the Fifth Amendment’s due process protections. They also trample the First Amendment’s right to free speech and assembly, particularly for those who speak out against government policies.
These actions are not limited to just immigrants or perceived enemies—they extend to anyone daring to challenge the status quo. Whether it’s activists, academics, or everyday citizens, being targeted for political expression is an assault on the very essence of free speech.
In this way, these round-ups represent the beginning of the slippery slope, leading not just to arbitrary detentions and the expansion of private prisons as an extension of the police state but to an eventual authoritarian regime where dissent is suppressed, and constitutional rights are discarded.
These round-ups are increasingly occurring in cities like New York, Boston, and northern Virginia, with many U.S. citizens also being swept up in warrantless searches, surveillance, and overreach from federal and local law enforcement.
Where once the nation’s border constituted a thin line, it is becoming an ever-thickening zone dominated by authoritarianism and an utter disregard for the rule of law.
This zone impacts millions of Americans who have never been near a border—citizens who live in everyday places, like urban and suburban areas, yet are subject to government overreach.
As journalist Todd Miller explains, that expanding border region now extends “100 miles inland around the United States—along the 2,000-mile southern border, the 4,000-mile northern border and both coasts… This ‘border’ region now covers places where two-thirds of the US population (197.4 million people) live… The ‘border’ has by now devoured the full states of Maine and Florida and much of Michigan.”
In this authoritarian reshaping of America, no one is safe, not even in their own homes.
The government’s ever-expanding, Constitution-free zone translates to greater numbers of Americans being subject to warrantless searches, ID checkpoints, transportation checks, and even surveillance on private property far beyond the boundaries of the borderlands.
With Trump considering plans to turn a portion of the southern border into an expansive military installation policed by active-duty troops, we’re going to see even more of these assaults on our freedoms. As Trump promised after Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was arrested because of his anti-war activism, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”
Across the nation, local police forces are becoming militarized extensions of federal agencies like CBP and DHS, routinely receiving federal funds and training to act as armed enforcers of national security policies. By the time you add the military into that equation, you’ve got all the necessary ingredients for martial law.
The CBP, with its more than 60,000 Customs and Border Protection employees, supplemented by the National Guard and the U.S. military, is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a national police force imbued with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies.
Just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to local police agencies in the form of grants to transform them into extensions of the military.
As Miller points out, the government has turned the nation’s expanding border regions into “a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance.”
In much the same way that police across the country have been schooled in the art of sidestepping the Constitution, border agents have nearly unlimited discretion to stop, search, interrogate and arrest anyone they “suspect,” based on arbitrary factors such as:
Driving an unusual vehicle.
Passengers appearing “suspicious.”
Having a dusty or modified car.
Avoiding eye contact or looking too long at an officer.
These arbitrary and broad criteria make it easy for any citizen to be targeted without just cause, turning everyday travel into a potential confrontation with law enforcement. In other words, anything goes when it comes to the police state’s justifications for undermining our rights.
These troubling developments at the borders are just one part of a broader erosion of constitutional rights that has been underway for decades in the name of national security.
When we look back at history, we see a consistent pattern of political power grabbing in the name of national security. From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the War on Terror, the price of security is always paid by our freedoms—and each step we take brings us closer to a system where those in power determine the limits of our liberty by using national security as an excuse to curtail fundamental freedoms.
Fast-forward to the present, and Donald Trump capitalized on this historical pattern by claiming that the only way to keep America safe from dangerous immigrants was to build an expensive border wall, expand the reach of border patrol, and enlist the military to “assist” with border control.
Continuing this trend, Joe Biden sent thousands of active-duty troops to the southern border, in anticipation of more than 10,000 illegal crossings per day—reinforcing the military presence and fortifying the unchecked power at the border.
And now Trump is doubling down on everything he and his predecessors have done to fortify this unchecked power.
This pattern of exploiting national security fears for authoritarian control has continued into the present day with Trump’s immigration crisis becoming a pretext for greater control, a strategy to stoke fear and justify authoritarianism.
Yet despite the propaganda coming from the White House, the looming problem is not so much that the U.S. is being invaded by hostile forces at the border, but rather that the U.S. Constitution is under assault from within by a power-hungry cabal at the highest levels of power.
Before long, the only Americans qualified to live freely in Trump’s America will be those who march in lockstep with the Deep State’s dictates, and even absolute compliance is no guarantee of safety.
It used to be that the Constitution was our only reliable safety net, but that is being systematically dismantled.
This is what it means to weaponize the government.
When the government turns its power against its own people—through surveillance, retaliation, censorship, and intimidation—it ceases to serve the public and instead becomes a weapon of oppression.
Time and again, leaders have stretched—or outright shattered—the limits of power, weaponizing government power through unjust laws, surveillance, or outright suppression.
Each power grab is a step toward the erosion of liberty.
John Adams used the Alien and Sedition Acts to prosecute journalists and political opponents.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, allowing the military to detain individuals without trail and suppressing Confederate sympathizers and political dissenters.
Under Woodrow Wilson, the Espionage and Sedition Acts were used to crack down on anti-war activists, socialists, and labor organizers, including Eugene V. Debs, who spoke out against World War I.
Spanning numerous presidential administrations, from FDR to Nixon, the FBI’s covert intelligence program COINTELPRO was used to infiltrate, discredit and disrupt civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and other political dissidents.
In a bid to fight so-called disinformation, Biden pressured social media companies to censor and suppress individuals expressing views perceived as conspiratorial or extremist, especially as they related to COVID-19.
Indeed, Ken Hughes, an investigative journalist who spent two decades listening to Richard Nixon’s Secret White House Tapes, has concluded that Nixon’s abuses of presidential power—which included weaponizing the government to “sabotage Vietnam peace talks to damage the Democrats’ 1968 presidential campaign, to time his withdrawal from Vietnam to help his 1972 reelection campaign, and to spring former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa from prison in return for the union’s political support”—pale beside Trump’s abuses.
The danger is not so much Trump as it is his enablers-to-abuse, the many minions within his administration and beyond who are eager to carry out unlawful orders, defy the courts, ignore Congress’ mandate, trample rights, and butcher the Constitution, all in the so-called name of putting America first.
If this keeps up, America, once looked upon as a bastion of freedom and economic opportunity, will be the last place anyone ever thinks of when they hear the words freedom, justice and equality.
Don’t be so carried away by fear-inducing tales of rapists and foreign invaders and corruption that you let the government get away with murder… the painful execution of our rights.
That way lies tyranny.
You can see the pattern forming already.
When anti-war protesters are made to disappear—snatched up late at night by plain-clothes men who refuse to identify themselves and then transported thousands of miles away, to a private prison in a state more favorable to dubious detentions—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.
When huge swaths of our nation’s history (including the Constitution and Bill of Rights) are being erased from websites, government buildings, archives, educational curriculum—in the so-called name of combatting discrimination—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.
When Trump administration sycophants from the vice president on down are openly deriding and defying the courts while proclaiming the imperial supremacy of their exalted leader, we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.
When the president of the United States threatens other nations militarily, talks openly about seizing foreign lands, stirs up international tensions, and rattles the war drums, we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.
Trump, adept at twisting facts and spinning lies, is working hard to insist that these end-runs around the rule of law are for our safety.
The only real protection we have against tyranny is the rule of law, provided that you have a populace and a system of government that holds the rule of law as inviolable.
That is our real power: the extent to which we hold fast to the Constitution and demand that the government and its agents do so, as well.
The moment that we relent in that commitment—the moment that we look the other way and let first a few encroachments slide, then ever more and more—is the moment that the Constitution loses its power to protect us against tyranny.
That is what is unfolding right now.
This is the devil’s bargain that we are being asked to enter into with Trump: empty promises and a one-way street to a dictatorship in exchange for our freedoms.
When any politician suggests that you relinquish your freedoms—of speech, assembly, due process, association, etc.—in exchange for promises of greater security, you’d better beware. Your freedoms will be next on the chopping block.
When any politician persuades you to look the other way while innocent individuals are rounded up alongside suspected criminals just because they look a certain way or talk a certain way or belong to a particular demographic, you’d better beware. Your right to due process will be next.
When any politician comes up with a vast array of reasons why he doesn’t need to obey court rulings—because they were issued verbally, because his power trumps that of the courts, because he doesn’t need to follow the law outside America’s borders—you’d better beware. This shifty reasoning for breaking the law could be used against you next.
There can be no doubt about the nature of what is taking place right now.
This is war.
President Trump’s justification for defying the courts and doing whatever he wants in pursuit of his political agenda (arresting protesters, carrying out mass arrests and deportations, muzzling critics, seizing funds, dismantling agencies, usurping congressional powers) is that “this is war.”
Here’s the thing, though: Trump may be using his war powers as commander-in-chief to bypass the Constitution at every turn, but the only war being waged is a war against the Constitution and the rule of law and the American people.
In ruling after ruling, the courts, which have the judicial power to rein in overreach and misconduct, are repeatedly declaring unconstitutional the Trump administration’s steady dismantling of the government and refusal to stay within the purview of his official powers. And still Trump is unilaterally hacking away at the very foundations of our system of government.
If the president refuses to be held accountable, if he insists that his power is supreme, if he abuses the power of his office to wreak havoc and revenge, if he reduces our republic to rubble and tramples over the Constitution and disregards the rule of law, he is aligning himself with every despot, dictator and tyrant to have walked the earth.
We’ve been here before. We know how this story ends.
It takes time and effort and a willingness on the part of “we the people” to look beyond our differences and stand united in opposition to oppression, but when we do that, freedom prevails in the end.
Next year will be the 250th anniversary of the birth of this country, when America’s founders declared their independence from King George’s tyranny. What’s just as important, however, is what came before that: the small steps of rebellion, resistance and outrage that said, “enough is enough.”
What we are now experiencing is a civil war, devised and instigated in part by the Deep State.
The objective: compliance and control.
The strategy: destabilize the economy, polarize the populace, escalate racial and political tensions, intensify the use of violence, and then, when all hell breaks loose, clamp down on the nation for the good of the people and the security of the nation.
The outcome for this particular conflict is already foregone: the Deep State wins.
The Deep State wins by ensuring that we are censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down. It wins by monitoring our speech and activities for any sign of “extremist” activity. It wins by ensuring that we are estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us. It wins by saddling us with taxation without representation and a government without the consent of the governed.
“We” may have contributed to our downfall through our inaction and gullibility, but we are also the only hope for a free future.
After all, the Constitution begins with those three beautiful words, “We the people.”
Those three words were intended as a reminder to future generations that there is no government without us: our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.
When we forget that, when we allow the “Me” of a self-absorbed, narcissistic, politically polarizing culture to override our civic duties as citizens to collectively stand up to tyranny and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution, that is when tyranny rises and freedom falls
Remember, there is power in numbers.
Not the kinds of numbers that Trump likes to spout about landslide victories and electoral mandates, but the most powerful numbers of all: the sheer, overwhelming mass of humanity that is “we the people” of these United States of America.
If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests with us.
Ultimately, that’s what the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution is all about: it affirms that “we the people” have all the power, and what powers we do not explicitly give to the federal government or the states, we retain. We may appoint government representatives to act in our stead, but we never relinquish that power altogether.
That’s where Trump and his Deep State handlers get it wrong. Speaking through him and his administration, they claim that this dismantling of the federal government is a bid to return power to local communities and state governments, but it’s not their government to dismantle, nor is it their power to return.
We are the government, and we are the power, and it’s time “we the people” reminded the government and its henchmen of that important fact.
The power still lies with us.
We must resist every attempt to erode our freedoms, demand accountability, and uphold the Constitution—before it’s too late.
It’s time to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.
Nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the Constitution.
Flood your representatives’ phone lines, inboxes and townhall meetings with your discontent.
Protest everything that tramples on the Constitution.
Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree.
Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc.
Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it.
If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it.
Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it. That’s their job: make them do it.
The Deep State’s war on truth is being waged with doubletalk, delusion and propaganda.
Through deliberate manipulation of language—what George Orwell called “doublespeak”—Donald Trump has provided cover for the Deep State’s continued grip on power.
While promising to drain the swamp, his administration has instead relied on contradictory policies, misinformation, and propaganda to further entrench the very system he claims to oppose. Although the Trump administration is merely the latest frontman for the Deep State’s efforts to maintain its stranglehold on power, we are approaching a tipping point beyond which there may be no turning back to freedom as we have known it.
This is how “we the people” remain on the losing end of this devil’s bargain that is life in the American police state.
What we desperately need is a reality check, and that starts by disconnecting from the Deep State’s propaganda-riddled, manipulated alternative reality about the state of our nation.
While President Trump, well versed in the “art of the deal,” appears to be saying all the right things about peace, corruption, graft, wasteful spending, free speech, equality, bloated bureaucracy, national security, etc., his administration’s actions tell a far different story about his priorities and his loyalties, which remain self-serving, imperial, flagrantly unconstitutional and intended to keep the Deep State in power.
As always, actions speak louder than words.
When the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are still missing from the White House’s website, that oversight—or deliberate omission—speaks volumes.
Any government that can’t be bothered to include the Constitution among its priorities, or include it anywhere on its administration’s website, is not a government that can be trusted to abide by the Constitution.
Then again, trust has little to do with it.
The Constitution is a contract between the people and the government. What we have been experiencing over the course of both Republican and Democratic presidencies, is a breach of contract. Where the Trump administration differs from those that have come before it is in its willingness to go rogue in defiance of Congress, the courts and the rule of law.
You don’t wage a “common sense” revolution by discarding the Constitution. That way lies dictatorship.
Remember, how you do something is just as important as why you do it.
So, what’s really going on?
As a populace, we have become so desensitized to political lies, especially Trump’s barrage of lies, that we shrug them off and move on. But in doing so, we act as enablers for what hides beneath those lies.
Make no mistake: the Deep State—the real Deep State, not the decoy version of it that Trump trots out to justify dismantling our constitutional republic—hides behind that rhetoric.
As journalist Shawn McCreesh explains, “In order to remake the government, President Trump and his administration are remaking the language used to describe the government. An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched. In its place is a new vocabulary, honed by the president and echoed by his many imitators in the capital. It is a vocabulary containing many curious uses of doublespeak.”
The term is derived from George Orwell’s 1984, in which “doublethink” and “Newspeak” are used to manipulate the masses into going along with the government’s agenda.
For example, McCreesh points to “one presidential order titled ‘Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ [that] calls for weaponizing the federal government against itself. Another titled ‘Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling’ demands that ‘patriotic education’ be taught to children… Even as the president signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,’ he signed other orders policing language.”
Consider some of Trump’s other uses of alternative facts, misdirection and misnomers to advance the Deep State’s agenda.
Trump’s path to nationalism by way of isolationism is in fact empire building. At the same time that Trump is declaring himself a nationalist, breaking ranks with America’s allies, withdrawing from international accords, and ceding ground to authoritarian regimes such as Russia, he is also declaring his intent to lay claim to foreign lands such as Gaza, Greenland and Canada as part of a global power grab.
Trump’s path to saving money is spending money. At the same time that Trump claims to be shining a spotlight on wasteful spending in the hopes of balancing the budget, he is also as guilty of spending—and wasting—taxpayer dollars at an alarming rate. At the same that he’s empowering Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to drastically reduce the federal workforce in a bid to save money, he is pushing tax cuts that would add $5-10 trillion to the 10-year deficit. As Reuters reports, DOGE’s savings claims are thus far “unverifiable and its calculations have been riddled with errors and corrections.”
Trump’s path to law and order is allowing the police to act lawlessly. At the same time that the Trump administration is advocating for impose harsher penalties and increased prison sentences, even for nonviolent crimes, Trump is dismantling government policies aimed at holding police accountable for official misconduct.
Trump’s path to efficiency is giving rise to even greater inefficiency. Likening DOGE to a chainsaw hacking away at a bloated bureaucracy, Musk has been wiping out whole segments of the federal workforce, agency by agency, with little thought to what programs might suffer as a result or how to keep the government functioning. As CNN reports, “There have been a lot of reports of federal workers being fired then quickly rehired once agencies realized people with critical skills had been let go…for example: Those managing the US nuclear arsenal, and those working at USDA on the response to the bird flu outbreak.”
Trump’s path to economic triumph is spelling economic disaster. Trump continues to forge ahead with his imposition of tariffs on America’s major trading partners despite warnings from economists and the business sector alike that tariffs will hurt, rather than help, the economy and could lead to a recession and a spike in inflation.
Trump’s path to free speech is censorship. At the same time that Trump claims to be liberating conservative speech from the muzzling power of political correctness, he is embarking on a massive crackdown on lawful First Amendment activities that would criminalize protest activities and punish individuals and groups advocating for policies that contradict White House executive orders.
Trump’s path to transparency is replacing watchdogs with yes-men and loyalists. At the same time that Trump claims to be bringing transparency back to government, his administration is methodically dismantling all of the systemic checks intended to protect whistleblowers and serve as bulwarks against government corruption.
When you set aside the mountain of contradictory policies and propaganda that have become hallmarks of Trump’s time in office, a grim picture emerges: Trump’s efforts to make America great again are really just a variation on one theme, which is keeping the Deep State in power at the expense of our freedoms.
Indeed, George Orwell’s fictional 1984 could increasingly be mistaken for the Trump Administration’s instruction manual on how to remake the government in the dystopian image of Oceania, the authoritarian regime run by Big Brother.
While America’s founders envisioned a separation of powers held in check by three coequal branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) as the means of thwarting abuse by any one branch, Orwell’s Oceania has four branches of government (the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty) that work together to maintain Big Brother’s chokehold on power.
As Orwell explains, “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”
According to Orwell, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
Thus, the Ministry of Peace is tasked with waging perpetual war in order to keep the government in power. The Ministry of Love is tasked with meting out torture and punishment in order to brainwash the populace into loving Big Brother. The Ministry of Plenty is tasked with maintaining a state of perpetual poverty, scarcity and financial shortages, the rationale being that an impoverished populace is easier to control. And the Ministry of Truth is tasked with disseminating propaganda and rewriting history and language in order to keep the citizens compliant.
The key to this last undertaking, maintaining a chokehold on power, is what Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels referred to as the “big lie.”
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” stated Goebbels. “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism, came to the same conclusion:
Pay attention. Question everything. Dare to be different. Don’t follow the mob. Don’t let yourself become numb to the world around you. Be compassionate. Be humane. Most of all, don’t allow yourselves to become so desensitized to Trump’s brand of politics that you tolerate behavior in government officials that you would never tolerate from your own children (lying, bullying, name-calling, greed, etc.).
When all is said and done, Trump’s path to putting America First is really about putting Trump first and leaving Americans in bondage to the Deep State.
In Orwell’s world, the state maintained power through deception.
In Trump’s America, doublespeak remains the Deep State’s most powerful weapon—one that thrives as long as the public fails to recognize it for what it is—and Trump is proving to be its most effective mouthpiece.
“You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with—its Constitution.”— Seven Days in May (1964)
Anyone who wants to put America first needs to start by putting the Constitution first.
This should be non-negotiable.
Winning an election does not give President Trump—or any politician—the authority to sidestep the Constitution and remake the government at will.
That’s not how a constitutional republic works, even in pursuit of the so-called greater good.
Thus far, those defending the Trump administration’s worst actions, which range from immoral and unethical to blatantly unconstitutional, have resorted to repeating propaganda and glaring non-truths while insisting that the Biden administration was worse.
“They did it first” and “they did it worse” are not justifications for disregarding the law.
For that matter, omitting the Constitution from the White House website—pretending it never existed—does not give the president and the agencies within the Executive Branch the right to circumvent the rule of law or, worse, nullify the Constitution.
Mounting a populist revolution to wrest power from the Deep State only to institute a different Deep State is not how you make America great again.
How you do something is just as important as why you do something, and right now, the means by which the Trump administration is attempting to accomplish many of its end goals are antithetical to every principle on which this nation was founded: natural rights, popular sovereignty, the rule of law, the rejection of monarchical law, the need for transparency and accountability, due process, liberty, equality, and limited government, to name just a few.
Whether the concerns driving this massive overhaul of the government are legitimate is not the question. We are certainly overdue for a reckoning when it comes to our bloated, corrupt, unaccountable, out-of-control bureaucracy.
So far, however, the Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated government dysfunction, undermined constitutional rights, and deepened public distrust.
Trump is not making America great again. In fact, things are getting worse by the day.
Rather than draining the swamp of corrupt, moneyed interests, Trump has favored the oligarchy with intimate access to the halls of power. At last count, the billionaires tapped to serve on Trump’s cabinet had a total net worth of $382.2 billion, more than the GDP of 172 different countries.
Rather than reducing the actual size of the government, it appears that the groundwork is being laid by Trump’s administration to replace large swaths of the federal workforce with artificial intelligence-powered systems. In other words, instead of reducing government overreach, Trump’s administration is replacing human oversight with artificial intelligence—expanding automation rather than shrinking bureaucracy.
Despite claims of saving the country billions through massive layoffs and terminations, cancelled leases and contracts, and the discovery of wasteful or corrupt spending, the supporting documentation provided by DOGE, the so-called department of efficiency headed up by Elon Musk, has been shown to be riddled by errors and miscalculations.
Despite campaign promises to bring down prices “on Day One,” inflation is on the rise again and financial markets are tumbling on fears that Americans will be the ones to pay the price for Trump’s threatened tariffs.
In defiance of states’ rights and in a complete about-face given his own past statements about the authority of state and local governments, Trump is increasingly attempting to browbeat the states into compliance with the dictates of the federal government. Historically, legal precedent has tended to favor the states, whose sovereignty rests in the Tenth Amendment.
All appearances to the contrary, Trump is not so much scaling back the nation’s endless wars as he appears to be genuflecting to authoritarian regimes in the hopes of building an international authoritarian alliance with fascist governments, while announcing plans to seize other countries’ lands, a clear act of military provocation.
Trump’s eagerness to expand the U.S. prison system and impose harsher punishments, including the death penalty, has been hailed by private prison investors, who anticipate growing their wealth by locking up more people. This would inevitably result in more American citizens being locked up for nonviolent crimes. In addition to using Guantanamo as an off-shore prison, the Trump administration has also floated the idea of imprisoning American “criminals” in other countries, which could create significant roadblocks to judicial due process.
Not the numbers, not the policies, not the promises.
If Trump continues to put into power people who are more loyal to him than they are to the Constitution, the consequences will be dire.
Nullifying the Constitution is not how you make America great again.
The Constitution provides a protocol for wresting back control of a government that oversteps. Those powers rest with Congress and the courts, but that will take time.
Daily, lawsuits are being filed challenging Trump’s broad-ranging and overreaching power grabs. In case after case, the courts are knocking back Trump’s attempts to do an end run around the rule of law.
What a waste of political capital.
Trump may not have been given a mandate to act as a dictator or a king, but he was given a mandate to rein in a government that had grown out of control.
That mandate came with one iron-clad condition, which Trump swore to abide by: the U.S. Constitution.
No government official should be allowed to play fast and loose with the rule of law.
That should have been the lesson of the Watergate scandal, which resulted in Richard Nixon’s impeachment and subsequent resignation for engaging in burglary, bribery, and surveillance. Instead, it signaled the beginning of a race to see how far a president could go in terms of breaking the law without being reined in.
What has taken place since then, with every subsequent presidential administration, makes Nixon’s criminal endeavors look like child’s play.
So where does that leave us?
The job of holding the government accountable does not belong to any one person or party. It belongs to all of us, “We the people,” irrespective of political affiliations and differences of race, religion, gender, education, economics, social strata or any other labels used to divide us.
“In questions of power,” instructed Thomas Jefferson, “let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”
“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties,” concluded James Madison.
In other words, our job is not to make excuses for the Trump administration’s blatant power grabs or come up with reasons why we should be long-suffering or patient in the face of the government’s overreaches and infringements on individual rights.
In the words of the great 1976 film Network, our job in the words of the immortal Howard Beale is to say, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” And then do something about it.
Call the White House. Call your representatives in Congress. Show up at town hall meetings.
Make your voices heard, not in a partisan way, but as citizens who know their rights and recognize that we have been on this slippery slope to tyranny for too long.
Politics may rely on our fixation with a two-party system of Republicans and Democrats devoted to maintaining the status quo, but the survival of our constitutional republic transcends party lines.
“We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore. Mr. President, it’s too much.’”—Donald Trump
Almost one month into the Trump presidency, and the Constitution and the entire section on the various branches of government and how they work together are still missing from the White House website.
This is no small thing.
This omission, deliberate or inadvertent, speaks volumes about the priorities of this current administration. It also explains a lot about the legal mindset that is driving the Trump train, which continues to push forward with a theory of unitary executive power.
You know what is not driving the Trump government? Any sense that it is bound by the rule of law, i.e, the U.S. Constitution. As Trump recently declared, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
Then again, Trump has never made any pretense of his aspirations to rule as a strongman. As the Washington Postreports:
In 2017, he claimed “an absolute right to do what I want with the Justice Department.” In 2019, he claimed that Article II of the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” In 2020, he said he could override state and local public health orders related to the coronavirus pandemic by saying: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total.” In 2022, he said that purported voter fraud in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” In 2023, he mused that he would be a dictator, but only on Day One of his presidency. And a year ago, he argued that presidents should have total immunity from criminal prosecution, even for “EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE.’ ”
Listen, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Then again, maybe the majority of Americans just don’t care about the Constitution anymore.
Maybe all they care about are the “endless wins” that the Trump administration never ceases to claim for itself, but if we’re being brutally honest about the state of the country, “we the people” are on a solid losing streak.
While the team colors and the police state’s outward allegiances may have changed, from a constitutional perspective, we’re still losing in all the ways that matter, and the Deep State is still winning.
Indeed, far from protecting our freedoms, the Trump administration is taking the Deep State’s unconstitutional disregard for civil liberties to new extremes.
When you step away from the polarizing rhetoric and government spin long enough to look at the many ways in which the American police state is continuing to lockdown our freedoms, you’ll notice that not much has changed for the better.
Has the Trump administration put an end to the police state’s use of surveillance on the American people? Has it scaled back the deployment of military forces domestically in violation of Posse Comitatus? Has it ceased the government’s war on cash? Has it stepped back from the NDAA’s threat of indefinite detentions? Has it de-militarized the police? Has it kicked the oligarchs out of the government’s inner circle? Has it been transparent and accountable in all of its dealings?
The answer to all of those questions is a resounding “no.”
Rather than minimizing the power of the police state, the Trump administration appears to be doubling down on its commitment to police state tactics of fear, intimidation and brutality.
Consider for yourselves.
Free speech is still being undermined. The First Amendment prohibits the government from suppressing free speech activities by the public, the media, protesters, religious individuals, or by restricting the right of the people to assemble and associate with one another, yet we no longer have any real freedom of speech. We are moving fast down a slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American who criticizes the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association. Although President Trump issued an executive order denouncing government censorship, primarily for speech with which he agrees, his administration has ostensibly engaged in a campaign of intimidation and coercion against news organizations that dare to disagree with or criticize his administration, as well as whistleblowers. Likewise, under the guise of fighting politically correct DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies and cancel culture, the Trump administration is engaging in its own campaign to cancel out expressive activities and content of which it disapproves, including anti-war protests.
We’re still being subjected to expansive surveillance. All of the monitoring tools and weapons in the government’s surveillance arsenal that are being used to identify, track and target those on the Trump’s administration’s enemies list—facial recognition, biometrics, license plate readers, fusion centers, cell phone location tracking, etc.—can and will be used against the American people. AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude. Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer. With every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
The government’s police powers are still being weaponized. With Trump claiming the power to target anyone or any group he perceives as a “threat,” i.e., an “enemy from within,” anyone who disagrees with the government could be placed on a government watch list. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.
Americans are still being treated as suspects. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides. Having launched a precrime program during his first administration, the Trump administration would have no qualms about using AI predictive and surveillance technologies to classify, segregate and flag the populace.
We’re still unofficially under martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics. With Trump having pledged to deploy the military domestically to work in conjunction with local police to address domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants, the American homeland is increasingly being transformed into a battlefield.
We’re still being flagged based on our viewpoints, activities and associations. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
Police shootings of unarmed citizens will continue. In the wake of Trump’s decision to reverse and revoke many of the policies intended to implement police reform and discourage police misconduct and stem the time of police brutality, we can expect the use of excessive force by police to continue unabated.
We still don’t have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
We still have an imperial president. Although President Trump has made no secret of his authoritarian impulses, he is not the first president to rule by fiat through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements. These unchecked powers enable all sitting president to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.
In other words, the seeds of chaos are still being sown, and it’s the U.S. government that will reap the harvest.
My friends, if this is winning, I can’t imagine what losing will look like, but it won’t be pretty.
All of this dismantling of government agencies, weakening of the economy, and fomenting of civil unrest feeds right back into the Deep State’s plot to destabilize the nation.
That’s barely five short years away now, but we’re being moved steadily in that direction.
According to “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” the U.S. military plans to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.
The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.
Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.
Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.
What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.
We’re already enemies of the state.
You want to bring about real change? Start by wresting back control of our government from the oligarchs, technocrats and Deep State operatives who are still running the show.
Reject the propaganda and the polarizing rhetoric and the “us vs. them” tactics that reduce the mass power of the populace to warring, powerless factions.
Find common ground with your fellow citizens and push back against the government’s brutality, inhumanity, greed, corruption and power grabs.
Be dangerous in the best way possible: by thinking for yourself, by refusing to be silenced, by choosing sensible solutions over political expediency and bureaucracy.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the solution to what ails this country is really not that complicated: decency, compassion, common sense, generosity balanced by fiscal responsibility, fairness, a commitment to freedom principles, and a firm rejection of the craven, partisan politics of the Beltway elites who have laid the groundwork for the Deep State’s ongoing authoritarian coup d’etat.
“You shall have no other gods before me.”—The Ten Commandments
“Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.”—Donald Trump
Politics has become our national religion.
While those on the Left have feared a religious coup by evangelical Christians on the Right, the danger has come from an altogether different direction: our constitutional republic has given way to a theocracy structured around the worship of a political savior.
For all intents and purposes, politics has become America’s God.
Pay close attention to the political conventions for presidential candidates, and it becomes immediately evident that Americans have allowed themselves to be brainwashed into worshipping a political idol manufactured by the Deep State.
In a carefully choreographed scheme to strip the American citizenry of our power and our rights, “we the people” have become victims of the Deep State’s confidence game.
Every confidence game has six essential stages: 1) the foundation to lay the groundwork for the illusion; 2) the approach whereby the victim is contacted; 3) the build-up to make the victim feel like they’ve got a vested interest in the outcome; 4) the corroboration (aided by third-party conspirators) to legitimize that the scammers are, in fact, on the up-and-up; 5) the pay-off, in which the victim gets to experience some small early “wins”; and 6) the “hurrah”— a sudden manufactured crisis or change of events that creates a sense of urgency.
In this particular con game, every candidate dangled before us as some form of political savior—including Donald Trump and Kamala Harris—is part of a long-running, elaborate scam intended to persuade us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we live in a constitutional republic.
In this way, the voters are the dupes, the candidates are the shills, and as usual, it’s the Deep State rigging the outcome.
Terrorist attacks, pandemics, economic uncertainty, national security threats, civil unrest: these are all manipulated crises that add to the sense of urgency and help us feel invested in the outcome of the various elections, but it doesn’t change much in the long term.
No matter who wins this election, we’ll all still be prisoners of the Deep State.
Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.
When it comes to the power players that call the shots, there is no end to their voracious appetite for more: more money, more power, more control. Thus, since 9/11, the government’s answer to every problem has been more government and less freedom.
Yet despite what some may think, the Constitution is no magical incantation against government wrongdoing. Indeed, it’s only as effective as those who abide by it.
However, without courts willing to uphold the Constitution’s provisions when government officials disregard it and a citizenry knowledgeable enough to be outraged when those provisions are undermined, the Constitution provides little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like.
Unfortunately, the courts and the police have meshed in their thinking to such an extent that anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism.
Consequently, America no longer operates under a system of justice characterized by due process, an assumption of innocence, probable cause and clear prohibitions on government overreach and police abuse. Instead, our courts of justice have been transformed into courts of order, advocating for the government’s interests, rather than championing the rights of the citizenry, as enshrined in the Constitution.
The rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, once the map by which we navigated sometimes hostile government terrain, has been unceremoniously booted out of the runaway car that is the U.S. government by the Deep State.
What we are dealing with is a rogue government whose policies are dictated more by greed than need. Making matters worse, “we the people” have become so gullible, so easily distracted, and so out-of-touch that we have ignored the warning signs all around us in favor of political expediency in the form of electoral saviors.
Yet it’s not just Americans who have given themselves over to political gods, however.
Evangelical Christians, seduced by electoral promises of power and religious domination, have become yet another tool in the politician’s toolbox.
For instance, repeatedly conned into believing that Republican candidates from George W. Bush to Donald Trump will save the church, evangelical Christians have turned the ballot box into a referendum on morality. Yet in doing so, they have shown themselves to be as willing to support totalitarian tactics as those on the Left.
This was exactly what theologian Francis Schaeffer warned against: “We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way, ‘We should not wrap Christianity in our national flag.’”
Equating religion and politics, and allowing the ends to justify the means, only empowers tyrants and lays the groundwork for totalitarianism.
This way lies madness and the certain loss of our freedoms.
If you must vote, vote, but don’t make the mistake of consecrating the ballot box.
“You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country…why in the name of God don’t you have any faith in the system of government you’re so hell-bent to protect? You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with—its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.”—Seven Days in May (1964)
No doubt about it: the coup d’etat was successful.
That January 6 attempt by so-called insurrectionists to overturn the election results was not the real coup, however. Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to swoop in and take control.
It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned.
This new order didn’t emerge into being this week, or this month, or even this year, however.
Indeed, the real coup happened when our government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations.”
We’ve been mired in this swamp for decades now.
Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State’s tune.
Writing in 1980, Gross predicted a future in which he saw:
…a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion…
This stealthy, creeping, silent coup that Gross prophesied is the same danger that writer Rod Serling envisioned in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.
Incredibly enough, almost 60 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the Constitution. Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today’s current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May, which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain.
The premise is straightforward.
With the Cold War at its height, an unpopular U.S. President signs a momentous nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Believing that the treaty constitutes an unacceptable threat to the security of the United States and certain that he knows what is best for the nation, General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidential hopeful, plans a military takeover of the national government. When Gen. Scott’s aide, Col. Casey (Kirk Douglas), discovers the planned military coup, he goes to the President with the information. The race for command of the U.S. government begins, with the clock ticking off the hours until the military plotters plan to overthrow the President.
Needless to say, while on the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is saved in a matter of hours, in the real world, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past half century.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.
The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That’s a done deal, but martial law disguised as national security is only one small part of the greater deception we’ve been fooled into believing is for our own good.
How do you get a nation to docilely accept a police state? How do you persuade a populace to accept metal detectors and pat downs in their schools, bag searches in their train stations, tanks and military weaponry used by their small town police forces, surveillance cameras in their traffic lights, police strip searches on their public roads, unwarranted blood draws at drunk driving checkpoints, whole body scanners in their airports, and government agents monitoring their communications?
Try to ram such a state of affairs down the throats of the populace, and you might find yourself with a rebellion on your hands. Instead, you bombard them with constant color-coded alerts, terrorize them with shootings and bomb threats in malls, schools, and sports arenas, desensitize them with a steady diet of police violence, and sell the whole package to them as being for their best interests.
This is not the language of a free people. This is the language of force.
Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned.
Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.
Meanwhile, the police have been transformed into extensions of the military while the nation itself has been transformed into a battlefield. This is what a state of undeclared martial law looks like, when you can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized and in some cases killed merely for not complying with a government agent’s order or not complying fast enough. This hasn’t just been happening in crime-ridden inner cities. It’s been happening all across the country.
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 create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.
So you see, January 6 and its aftermath provided the government and its corporate technocrats the perfect excuse to show off all of the powers they’ve been amassing so assiduously over the years.
Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.
I’m referring to “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.
I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.
This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.
Brace yourself.
There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.
Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.
And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.
John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.
This is a con game, a scam, a grift, a hustle, a bunko, a swindle, a flimflam, a gaffle, and a bamboozle.
In this carefully choreographed scheme to strip the American citizenry of our power and our rights, “we the people” are nothing more than marks, suckers, stooges, mugs, rubes, or gulls.
We are victims of the Deep State’s confidence game.
Every confidence game has six essential stages: 1) the foundation to lay the groundwork for the illusion; 2) the approach whereby the victim is contacted; 3) the build-up to make the victim feel like they’ve got a vested interest in the outcome; 4) the corroboration (aided by third-party conspirators) to legitimize that the scammers are, in fact, on the up-and-up; 5) the pay-off, in which the victim gets to experience some small early “wins”; and 6) the “hurrah”— a sudden manufactured crisis or change of events that creates a sense of urgency.
In this particular con game, every candidate dangled before us as some form of political savior—including Donald Trump and Joe Biden—is part of a long-running, elaborate scam intended to persuade us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we live in a constitutional republic.
In this way, the voters are the dupes, the candidates are the shills, and as usual, it’s the Deep State rigging the outcome.
Terrorist attacks, pandemics, civil unrest: these are all manipulated crises that add to the sense of urgency and help us feel invested in the outcome of the various elections, but it doesn’t change much in the long term.
No matter who wins this election, we’ll all still be prisoners of the Deep State.
We just haven’t learned to recognize our prison walls as such.
It’s like that old British television series The Prisoner, which takes place in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic retirement community known only as The Village.
Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in The Village, a beautiful resort with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.
While luxurious, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked. Residents of the Village are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.
First broadcast in Great Britain 50-some years ago, The Prisoner dystopian television series —described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.
The series’ protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan is Number Six.
Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.
“I am not a number. I am a free man,” was the mantra chanted on each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role.
In the opening episode (“The Arrival”), Number Six meets Number Two, who explains to him that he is in The Village because information stored “inside” his head has made him too valuable to be allowed to roam free “outside.”
Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.
Number Six refuses to comply.
In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”
Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.
Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.” Still, he refuses to give up. “Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”
Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.
As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”
The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.
As Thill noted, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”
The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.
The American Police State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.
Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”
Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be while funding its existence.
Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the new mantra of the architects of the Deep State and their corporate collaborators (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Instagram, etc.).
Government eyes are watching you.
They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.
Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between obeying the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.
When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.
However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.
Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.
A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.
Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.
This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.
It is a prison from which there will be no escape. Certainly not if the government and its corporate allies have anything to say about it.
As Glenn Greenwald notes:
“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”
None of this will change, no matter who wins this upcoming presidential election.
And that’s the hustle, you see: because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, the day after a new president is sworn in, we’ll still find ourselves prisoners of the Village.
This should come as no surprise to those who haven’t been taking the escapist blue pill, who haven’t fallen for the Deep State’s phony rhetoric, who haven’t been lured in by the promise of a political savior: we never stopped being prisoners.
So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to conform to a group mind and the tyranny of mob-think as controlled by the Deep State.
Think for yourself. Be an individual. As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”
You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, until you come to terms with the fact that the government is the problem (no matter which party dominates), you’ll never be free.
John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” — H. L. Mencken
The U.S. government is working hard to destabilize the nation.
No, this is not another conspiracy theory.
Although it is certainly not far-fetched to suggest that the government might be engaged in nefarious activities that run counter to the best interests of the American people, doing so will likely brand me a domestic terrorist under the FBI’s new classification system.
Observe for yourself what is happening right before our eyes.
Domestic terrorism fueled by government entrapment schemes. Civil unrest stoked to dangerous levels by polarizing political rhetoric. A growing intolerance for dissent that challenges the government’s power grabs. Police brutality tacitly encouraged by the executive branch, conveniently overlooked by the legislatures, and granted qualified immunity by the courts. A weakening economy exacerbated by government schemes that favor none but a select few. An overt embrace of domestic surveillance tactics if Congress goes along with the Trump Administration’s request to permanently re-authorize the NSA’s de-activated call records program. Heightened foreign tensions and blowback due to the military industrial complex’s profit-driven quest to police and occupy the globe.
The seeds of chaos are being sown, and it’s the U.S. government that will reap the harvest.
The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.
Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.
The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030—that’s barely ten short years away—but the future is here ahead of schedule.
We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.
By waging endless wars abroad, by bringing the instruments of war home, by transforming police into extensions of the military, by turning a free society into a suspect society, by treating American citizens like enemy combatants, by discouraging and criminalizing a free exchange of ideas, by making violence its calling card through SWAT team raids and militarized police, by fomenting division and strife among the citizenry, by acclimating the citizenry to the sights and sounds of war, and by generally making peaceful revolution all but impossible, the government has engineered an environment in which domestic violence is becoming almost inevitable.
The danger signs are screaming out a message
The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.
What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.
The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—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.
And then comes the kicker.
Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”
Drain the swamps.
Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?
Ah yes.
Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans.
Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.”
And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting?
They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.”
They are “threats.”
They are the “enemy.”
They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).
In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.
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.
If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.
Suddenly it all begins to make sense.
The events of recent years: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.
The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.
This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.
You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls.
Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that there is nothing they can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.
Before long, no one will even notice the floundering economy, the blowback arising from military occupations abroad, the police shootings, the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and all of the other mounting concerns.
It’s happening already.
The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.
Few seem to care about the government’s endless wars abroad that leave communities shattered, families devastated and our national security at greater risk of blowback.
The Deep State’s tactics are working.
We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helmmilitary drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.
Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned about the government’s nefarious schemes to lock down the nation.
Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.
Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.
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 create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.
All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.
And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats.
Seriously, think about it.
The government claims to be protecting us from cyberterrorism, but who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.
The government claims to be protecting us from foreign armed threats, but who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government. For that matter, where did ISIS get many of their deadliest weapons, including assault rifles and tanks to anti-missile defenses? From the U.S. government.
The government claims to be protecting us from terrorist plots, but what country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.
The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.
The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.
Just think about it for a minute: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars.
Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.
Did I say Machiavellian? This is downright evil.
We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.
It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by government propaganda.
Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.
I’m referring to “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.
I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.
Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.
What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.
You want to change things? Start by rejecting the political labels and the polarizing rhetoric and the “us vs. them” tactics that reduce the mass power of the populace to puny, powerless factions.
Find common ground with your fellow citizens and push back against the government’s brutality, inhumanity, greed, corruption and power grabs.
Be dangerous in the best way possible: by thinking for yourself, by refusing to be silenced, by choosing sensible solutions over political expediency and bureaucracy.
When all is said and done, the solution to what ails this country is really not that complicated: decency, compassion, common sense, generosity balanced by fiscal responsibility, fairness, a commitment to freedom principles, and a firm rejection of the craven, partisan politics of the Beltway elites who have laid the groundwork for the government’s authoritarian coup d’etat.
John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.
John W. Whitehead, Constitutional Attorney 