Posts Tagged ‘fourth amendment’

The Surveillance State Is Making a Naughty List—and You’re On It

Posted: December 16, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“He sees you when you’re sleeping.
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows if you’ve been bad or good,
So be good for goodness’ sake.”
   — “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”

For generations, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” has been treated as a playful reminder to children to be good because someone, somewhere, is watching.

Today, it reads less like a joke and more like a warning.

The Surveillance State is making a naughty list, and we’re all on it.

Long before Santa’s elves start loading his sleigh with toys for good girls and boys, the government’s surveillance apparatus is already at work—logging your movements, monitoring your messages, tracking your purchases, scanning your face, recording your license plate, and feeding it all into algorithmic systems designed to determine whether you belong on a government watchlist.

Unlike Santa’s naughty list, however, the consequences of landing on the government’s “naughty list” are far more severe than a stocking full of coal. They can include heightened surveillance, loss of privacy, travel restrictions, financial scrutiny, police encounters, or being flagged as a potential threat—often without notice, explanation, or recourse.

This is not fiction. This is not paranoia.

This is the modern surveillance state operating exactly as designed.

Santa Claus has long been the benign symbol of omniscient surveillance, a figure who watches, judges, and rewards. His oversight is fleeting, imaginary, and ultimately harmless.

The government’s surveillance is none of those things—and never was.

What was once dismissed as a joke—“Santa is watching”—has morphed into a chilling reality. Instead of elves, the watchers are data brokers, intelligence agencies, predictive algorithms, and fusion centers. Instead of a naughty-or-nice list, Americans are sorted into databases, risk profiles, and threat assessments—lists that never disappear.

The shift is subtle but profound.

Innocence is no longer presumed.

Everyone is watched. Everyone is scored. Everyone is a potential suspect.

This is the surveillance state in action.

Today’s surveillance state doesn’t require suspicion, a warrant, or probable cause. It is omnipresent, omniscient, and inescapable.

Your smartphone tracks your location. Your car records your movements. License plate readers log when and where you drive. Retail purchases create detailed consumer profiles. Smart speakers listen to everything you say. Home security cameras observe not just your property, but your neighbors, delivery drivers, and anyone who passes by.

The government’s appetite for data is insatiable.

In a dramatic expansion of surveillance reach, the Transportation Security Administration now shares airline passenger lists with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enabling ICE to identify and arrest travelers at airports based on immigration status.

In one incident, ICE arrested and immediately deported a college student with no criminal record who was flying home to spend Thanksgiving with her family.

What was once routine aviation security data has been transformed into an enforcement tool—merging civilian travel records with the machinery of deportation and demonstrating how ordinary movements can be weaponized by the state.

Even the most personal acts—like Christmas shopping—are now tracked in real time. Every item you buy, where you buy it, how you pay, and who you buy it for becomes part of a permanent digital record. That data does not stay confined to retailers. It is shared, sold, aggregated, and folded into sprawling surveillance ecosystems that blur the line between corporate data collection and government intelligence.

Companies like Palantir specialize in fusing these data streams into comprehensive behavioral profiles, linking financial activity, social media behavior, geolocation data, and government records into a single, searchable identity map.

The result is not merely a government that watches what you’ve done but one that claims the power to predict what you will do next.

It is a short step from surveillance to pre-crime.

While predictive policing and AI-driven risk assessments are marketed as tools of efficiency and public safety, in reality, they represent a dangerous shift from punishing criminal acts to policing potential behavior.

Algorithms—trained on historical data already shaped by over-policing, bias, and inequality—are now used to predict who might commit a crime, who might protest, or who might pose a “risk.” Even the way you drive—where you came from, where you were going and which route you took—is being analyzed by predictive intelligence programs for suspicious patterns that could get you flagged and pulled over.

Once flagged by an algorithm, individuals often have no meaningful way to challenge the designation. The criteria are secret. The data sources opaque. The decisions automated.

Accountability disappears.

This isn’t law enforcement as envisioned by the Founders. This is pre-crime enforcement—punishing people not for what they’ve done, but for what an AI machine predicts they might do.

At the same time, President Trump has openly threatened states that attempt to regulate artificial intelligence in order to protect citizens from its discriminatory and intrusive uses—seeking to clear the way for unchecked, nationwide deployment of these systems.

No government initiative has done more to normalize, expand, and entrench mass surveillance than the Trump administration’s war on immigration.

The Trump administration’s war on immigration has become the laboratory for the modern surveillance state.

Under the guise of border security, vast stretches of the country have been transformed into Constitution-free zones—places where the Fourth Amendment is treated as optional and entire communities are subjected to constant monitoring.

The federal government has transformed immigration policy into a proving ground for authoritarian surveillance tactics—testing tools, technologies, and legal shortcuts could be deployed with minimal public resistance and quietly repurposed for use against the broader population. As journalist Todd Miller warned, these areas have been transformed 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.”

Through ICE and DHS, the government fused immigration enforcement with corporate surveillance technologies—facial recognition, license-plate readers, cellphone tracking, and massive data-sharing agreements—creating a sprawling digital dragnet that now extends far beyond immigrants.

What began as a policy aimed at undocumented immigrants has now become a model for nationwide surveillance policing.

“What’s new,” reports the Brennan Center for Justice, “is that the federal government now openly says it will use its supercharged spy capabilities to target people who oppose ICE’s actions. Labeled as ‘domestic terrorists’ by the administration, these targets include anti-ICE protesters and anyone who allegedly funds them—all of them part of a supposed left-wing conspiracy to violently oppose the president’s agenda.”

The critical point is this: the surveillance infrastructure developed to track immigrants is now used to monitor everyone. Immigration enforcement served as the justification, the infrastructure, and the legal gray zone needed to create a permanent surveillance apparatus that treats all Americans as potential suspects.

All of this adds up to an algorithmic naughty list.

Government watchlists have exploded in size and scope.

Terrorist watchlists, no-fly lists, gang databases, protester tracking systems, and “suspicious activity” registries operate with little oversight and even less transparency.

People can be added to these lists without notification and can remain there indefinitely. Errors are common. Corrections are rare.

Social media posts are mined. Associations are mapped. Speech is scrutinized. Peaceful dissent is increasingly treated as a precursor to extremism.

The government’s watchlists aren’t just opaque databases hidden from public view. They are becoming public-facing instruments of political classification. Internal Justice Department memoranda now direct the FBI to compile lists of groups and networks it categorizes as possible domestic extremists, broadening counter-terror tools to sweep in ideological opponents and organizations without clear statutory definitions.

At the same time, the White House has launched an official “Offender Hall of Shame”—a public naughty list of journalists and media outlets it accuses of bias—even briefly circulating a video styled like Santa putting together a naughty list of offenders before deleting it amid backlash.

In this system, being “good” no longer means obeying the law. It means staying under the radar, avoiding attention, and never questioning authority.

The chilling effect is the point.

Once upon a time, privacy was recognized as a fundamental liberty—an essential buffer between the individual and the state. Today, it’s a conditional privilege, granted temporarily and revoked when it suits the police state’s purposes.

Under the banner of national security, public health, and law and order, surveillance powers continue to expand. Biometric identification—facial recognition, gait analysis, voice prints—are normalized.

What was once unthinkable has become routine.

Americans are being conditioned to accept constant monitoring as the price of safety. That resistance is suspicious. That anonymity is dangerous.

Yet history teaches us the opposite: societies that normalize surveillance do not become safer—they become more authoritarian.

A government that sees everything, everywhere, all the time, will eventually control everything.

The Founders understood this. That is why they enshrined protections against unreasonable searches and unchecked power. They knew liberty couldn’t survive under constant surveillance.

When the government knows where you go, what you buy, what you say, who you associate with, and what you believe, freedom becomes conditional.

This Christmas, we might joke about Santa watching from the North Pole, but we should be far more concerned about the watchers much closer to home.

The surveillance state doesn’t take a holiday. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t forget. And it doesn’t forgive easily.

So you see, the question is not whether we are being watched. We are.

The question, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is whether we will continue to accept a system that treats every citizen as a suspect—and whether we will reclaim the constitutional limits that once stood between liberty and the all-seeing state.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yc6cmv9m

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

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

Government Unchained: The Year the Constitution Lost Its Guardrails

Posted: December 8, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”—Abraham Lincoln

We now live in a nation where constitutional rights exist in theory, not in practice.

Yet what good are rights on paper when every branch of government is allowed to ignore, circumvent, chip away at or hollow them out in practice?

Two hundred and thirty-four years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791, the safeguards meant to shield “We the people” from government abuse are barely recognizable.

In ways the Founders could scarcely have imagined—and would never have tolerated—the safeguards meant to restrain government overreach have become little more than empty platitudes.

America’s founders understood that power corrupts and absolute power—especially when it comes to power-hungry governments fixated on amassing institutional power at the expense of individual freedoms—corrupts absolutely. That’s why they insisted on binding down the government “with the chains of the Constitution.”

In 2025, those chains have been cut link by link.

These links were not severed in secret. They snapped under the weight of executive orders issued without congressional authority, judicial doctrines that shield misconduct from accountability, and a Congress that no longer defends its own constitutional prerogatives.

If Americans are finally learning the true significance of constitutional limits, it is because the government keeps violating them—and daring anyone to stop it. Time and again, the message is being drummed into our heads that constitutional limits no longer apply when they inconvenience those in power.

Any government that treats rights as privileges—contingent on economic status, citizenship, race, orientation, religious beliefs, or political alignment—has already abandoned the Bill of Rights.

And a government that does so with the courts’ blessing is not a constitutional republic.

When rights become privileges, what we are left with is a two-tier system of freedom: those afforded the privilege of enjoying their constitutional rights vs. those targeted for exercising those same rights.

The Bill of Rights was intended as a bulwark. Each amendment was drafted as a barrier against a specific form of tyranny.

In 2025, every one of those barriers buckled under the weight of government corruption, political expediency, partisan politics, and institutional neglect.

The following is what it looked like to live without the protections of the Bill of Rights in the American police state.

First Amendment—Speech Without Protection: In 2025, the right to speak freely was not guaranteed—it was conditional. Political activism—especially around immigration, foreign policy, or policing—was treated as a national security concern. Students questioning government actions found themselves on watchlists. ICE agents used ideology as cause for detention. Peaceful protest was conflated with domestic extremism.

This year also saw revelations—via leaked FBI planning documents—that the government is preparing an expanded “extremist” classification system that goes far beyond violence or criminal activity. The categories include broad ideological markers that include anyone expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as labels such as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.” In other words, Americans are being profiled not for what they have done, but for what the government predicts they might think, believe, or someday express. It is the architecture of a pre-crime state.

Second Amendment—The Right to Self-Defense in a Militarized Nation. While the political class fixated on culture-war debates over gun ownership, the government quietly expanded the militarization of policing, federalized National Guard units, and broadened executive authority to deploy armed agents domestically. During several high-profile ICE operations, heavily armed federal teams equipped with military-grade gear conducted raids in residential neighborhoods, making it clear that this administration intends to rule by martial law.

Third Amendment—Quartering Without Quarters: The Rise of Domestic Militarization. The Third Amendment is often dismissed as obsolete. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although Americans no longer face the literal quartering of soldiers in their homes, the spirit of the Third Amendment—prohibiting the use of the military against the civilian population—has been trampled. Its purpose was to prevent exactly what we are seeing now: a permanent, militarized presence in civilian life, illustrated vividly when armored vehicles and tactical teams patrol residential neighborhoods during ICE operations.

Fourth Amendment—Privacy Without Boundaries. The Framers wrote the Fourth Amendment in response to “general warrants”: broad, suspicionless searches by the British Crown. In 2025, the digital equivalents of general warrants have become routine, executed at the speed of an algorithm and justified by the flimsiest of standards. Americans now live under surveillance so pervasive that privacy survives mostly in legal theory. In several cities, entire apartment complexes were subjected to geofence dragnets after minor incidents, sweeping innocent residents into criminal databases simply because their phones were nearby. Geofence warrants became routine, sweeping up location data from entire neighborhoods. Predictive policing tools—fueled by Palantir-style data fusion—were treated as legitimate substitutes for suspicion or probable cause. And the Supreme Court keeps lowering the threshold for intrusion.

Fifth & Sixth Amendments—Due Process Without Process. What we have seen emerge this year is a justice system where the government is accountable only to itself. Immigration courts—already overcrowded and under-resourced—operated as Constitution-lite tribunals where counsel was scarce, evidence was opaque, and the presumption of innocence evaporated. Executive detention powers continued to expand under the radar, with little oversight. Due process now bends to government expediency. For example, asylum seekers placed into “expedited removal” proceedings were denied meaningful hearings, legal counsel, or the ability to present evidence—procedures that would never withstand constitutional scrutiny in any ordinary court of law. In some instances, hearings lasted less than ten minutes. In others, decisions were issued without the accused ever speaking to a lawyer. This is not due process. It is bureaucracy masquerading as justice.

Seventh Amendment—Civil Justice Denied by Design. The right to a civil jury trial—already inaccessible for many—continued to erode in 2025, keeping ordinary Americans from ever getting their day in court, while corporations and government agencies enjoy legal shields that no ordinary citizen can penetrate. A right that exists only in theory—and which you cannot afford to exercise—is a right that has already been lost.

Eighth Amendment—Justice Without Humanity. Cruelty, once hidden, has now been codified as policy. The federal government allocated $170 billion to expand incarceration, including the construction of Alligator Alcatraz, the first of several planned megaprison complexes. The Kilmar Garcia case exposed the brutality of a system where preventable death, medical neglect, and inhumane conditions are treated as regrettable but acceptable collateral. In one widely reported incident, a detainee held on a nonviolent immigration violation died after being denied medical care for hours—a tragedy officials dismissed as “procedurally compliant,” revealing just how low the bar has fallen. These incidents are not anomalies. They are symptoms of a system designed for maximum control and minimum accountability, a system where cruelty is not an accident but an administrative outcome.

Ninth Amendment—Unenumerated Rights Crushed by Government Power. The Ninth Amendment affirms that the people retain rights beyond those listed in the Constitution. In 2025, those inherent liberties—bodily autonomy, privacy, freedom of movement, freedom from government coercion—were repeatedly undermined. Biometric surveillance was expanded. Predictive analytics categorized individuals as pre-criminal. Mandatory data-sharing regimes blurred the boundary between state and citizen. Bodily autonomy came under attack through proposed health-tracking mandates.

The Ninth Amendment’s warning has never been more relevant: the rights of the people do not end where the government’s imagination begins.

Tenth Amendment—Powers Reserved to the People Swept Aside. Federal overreach dominated 2025. Executive orders, emergency declarations, and federalized law enforcement displaced state and local authority. The Tenth Amendment’s guarantee that powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states—or to the people—has become meaningless under a system in which the executive branch claims inherent authority to:

  • deploy troops domestically,
  • commandeer local police,
  • surveil the populace, and
  • dictate immigration enforcement priorities.

When states attempted to challenge the federal deployment of troops or resist federalized policing mandates, the courts largely sided with the executive, leaving states with little more than symbolic sovereignty.

A government that disregards the Bill of Rights rarely stops there.

The collapse of the Bill of Rights would be alarming enough on its own, but it is only part of the story. Beyond these first ten amendments, the structural safeguards designed to limit government power—the separation of powers, checks and balances, transparency, and federalism—were also weakened dramatically.

Without an independent judiciary willing to restrain power, the founders recognized that the entire constitutional framework would collapse.

What we continue to witness is the U.S. Supreme Court’s abdication of its constitutional duties in favor of partisan politics. By refusing to review cases that cut to the heart of constitutional protections, the Court has effectively signaled to the executive branch that there is no constitutional line it cannot cross.

While the Supreme Court is not the only institution responsible for upholding the Constitution, when the Court refuses to act as a check on government power, every American suffers.

A constitutional crisis does not always erupt in dramatic fashion.

Sometimes it arrives quietly, in the form of a Court that declines to hear the very cases that would determine whether the Constitution still has meaning.

Here is what it means to live under the Constitution today.

For generations, Americans were taught that living under the Constitution meant:

  • The government cannot enter your home without a warrant.
  • The government cannot silence you for criticizing its actions.
  • The government cannot surveil you without probable cause.
  • The government cannot imprison you without due process.
  • The government cannot treat you as guilty until proven innocent.
  • The government cannot deploy troops against the public unless the Constitution expressly allows it.
  • The government cannot classify you as a threat solely for your beliefs.

Now consider what it means to live under the American Police State of 2025:

  • Your digital life is a government search zone.
  • Your speech can place you on a watchlist.
  • Your movements are tracked without a warrant.
  • Your property can be seized without meaningful judicial review.
  • Your community can be subjected to predictive policing algorithms with no oversight.
  • Your rights depend on which legal category you fall into.
  • And the courts increasingly refuse to intervene.

The gap between the promise of a constitutional republic and the practice of the American Police State has grown so vast that the rights Americans take for granted no longer resemble the realities they face in their daily lives.

America’s founders assumed the people—not the president, not the politicians, not the courts—would be the ones to keep the government in check.

What the police state wants is for us to meekly accept its constitutional violations as normal, inevitable, or justified. That complacency fuels and sustains tyranny.

We cannot afford to be complacent.

If Americans want a government bound by law, we must insist on it—daily, loudly, relentlessly and without apology or fear.

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 Constitution will not collapse all at once. It will erode one unchallenged abuse at a time—until future generations wonder how the people who inherited a framework for liberty allowed it to slip through their fingers.

If 2025 was the year the Constitution became optional, 2026 will determine whether it becomes obsolete.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mvses7du

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

Your Car Is Protected by the Fourth Amendment. A K-9’s Snout Shouldn’t Change That.

Posted: November 21, 2025 in Uncategorized
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WASHINGTON, DC — In yet another ruling that contributes to the steady normalization of police overreach, the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to rein in police K-9 drug-sniff searches during traffic stops.

By declining to hear an appeal in Mumford v. Iowa, the Court let stand an Iowa Supreme Court ruling that allows police to rely on a drug dog’s intrusion into a car’s interior during a traffic stop—even when officers lack probable cause to believe the car contains contraband. In a 5-2 decision in Mumford v. Iowa, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld as constitutional a search in which a police K-9 placed its paws on a car door and inserted its snout through an open window before alerting to drugs.

The Rutherford Institute, joined by Restore the Fourth, had urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the ruling, arguing that warrantless, nonconsensual intrusions into protected spaces violate the Fourth Amendment, which extends its protection to a person’s vehicle. The amicus brief further warned that allowing a police dog to breach the interior of a car provides no limiting principle: if a dog’s snout may trespass inside a vehicle without probable cause, then so might thermal-imaging devices, x-ray scanners, fiberscopes, or other police technologies.

“What this ruling makes clear is that no American is safe from government intrusion, not even during a routine traffic stop. This is how constitutional rights are lost—not in dramatic sweeps, but in small, incremental intrusions that courts refuse to check,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If a police dog’s snout can be used to justify a warrantless search of a car, then there is nothing to stop the government from using ever more intrusive technologies, surveillance tools, and police instrumentalities to invade our privacy with little to no judicial oversight.”

The case arose after an Iowa police officer initiated a traffic stop of Ashlee Mumford’s vehicle, claiming the last two numbers on her license plate were obscured by dirt and grime. The officer summoned a K-9 unit, and Mumford and her passenger were ordered out of the vehicle “for their own safety” while the handler walked the dog around the car to conduct a “free air sniff.” Because Mumford’s passenger had left his window open, the dog pushed its snout through the open window into the cabin before alerting to drugs. A subsequent search of the vehicle uncovered drugs in the glove compartment which apparently belonged to the passenger. Officers then searched Mumford’s purse—which she had taken with her upon exiting the vehicle—and found marijuana and a pipe.

Mumford moved to suppress all evidence found as a result of the K-9’s alert, but the Iowa Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that the dog’s intrusion through the open window of a legally stopped vehicle does not require the suppression of evidence under the Fourth Amendment. Two justices dissented, reasoning that if an officer cannot lawfully stick his head inside a car without probable cause, neither should a police dog—acting as an officer’s instrumentality—be permitted to do so. The dissent also questioned whether police could direct their drug dogs to climb entirely inside a vehicle’s passenger compartment. Pushing back against the Iowa Supreme Court’s characterization of the drug sniff intrusion as minimal, the amici warned that unconstitutional practices often gain a foothold through seemingly minor transgressions.

Anand Agneshwar, Anna K. Thompson, and Tamryn Holley of Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP advanced the arguments in the amicus brief.

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

Source: https://tinyurl.com/bdh4v37e

Police State Bounty Hunters: The Rise of ICE’s Unconstitutional War on America

Posted: October 15, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Brother, I am American. You are twisting my arm.”— Man shouts “I am American” while ICE agents detain him

Masked gunmen. Tasers. Tear gas. Pepper spray. Unmarked vehicles. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Racial profiling. Children traumatized. Families terrorized. Journalists targeted. Citizens detained. Disabled individuals, minors, the elderly, pregnant women, military veterans—snatched off the streets. Private property destroyed.

This is not a war zone. This is America.

This is what now passes for law-and-order policing by ICE agents in Trump’s America—and it is not making America safer or greater.

What began as an agency tasked with enforcing immigration law has metastasized into a domestic terror force.

From coast to coast, ICE goon squads—incognito, thuggish, fueled by profit-driven incentives and outlandish quotas, and empowered by the Trump administration to act as if they are untouchable—are prowling neighborhoods, churches, courthouses, hospitals, bus stops, and worksites, anywhere “suspected” migrants might be present, snatching people first and asking questions later.

Sometimes “later” comes hours, days or even weeks afterwards.

No one is off limits—not even American citizens.

Make no mistake: this is not how a constitutional republic operates. It is how a dictatorship behaves when it decides the rule of law—in this case, the Bill of Rights—is optional.

Journalists are being shoved to the pavement, forced into chokeholds, teargassed, and brutalized—in violation of the First Amendment. U.S. citizens, including toddlers, are being snatched up and carted off—in violation of the Fourth Amendment. People with no criminal records who have lived, worked and paid taxes in this country for decades are being made to disappear—in violation of habeas corpus.

This is not public safety. It is domestic terrorism, carried out by masked, militarized, lawless bounty hunters.

In California, ICE agents stopped a U.S. citizen and military veteran on his way to work. According to George Retes, agents fired tear gas, broke his car window, and applied physical force, including kneeling on him. Retes spent three days in federal custody with no charges, no call to his family, no access to a judge or an attorney, no shower, and no explanation for ICE’s actions before being released.

In Portland, a U.S. citizen outside his workplace was detained by masked, plainclothes agents who refused to identify themselves, threatened him with a dog, handcuffed him, hauled away in an unmarked vehicle, and held for hours without justification.

In Chicago, a local TV journalist was violently knocked to the ground by masked agents, handcuffed, arrested, and hauled to a detention center—then released without charges.

In Los Angeles, ICE agents handcuffed and detained a 23-year-old, heavily pregnant woman for over eight hours with a chain around her belly, accusing the native-born American of being from Mexico. Bruised and in labor, she went straight to the hospital upon release.

Two sisters were stopped outside a school, surrounded by at least ten ICE agents, who broke into their locked vehicle, dragged them out, and pinned them to the ground. Both women were later released without explanation.

Each of these incidents is presented as routine immigration enforcement. Yet collectively they reveal a government agency that has abandoned the principles of restraint, accountability, and due process in favor of brute force.

Justifying extreme measures—martial law, mass surveillance, suspension of constitutional safeguards— as necessary for “national security” has always been the refuge of tyrants, and this American police state is no different.

Under Trump, however, things are so much worse.

The rationalizations have become bolder, the violence more normalized, and the lies more transparent.

The biggest lie of all is the Department of Homeland Security’s claim that its costly, ego-driven, and unnecessary military invasion of Chicago—Operation Midway Blitz—rounded up “the worst of the worst pedophiles, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers.” In fact, DHS’ own data shows that out of more than 1,000 people rounded up, only 10 had criminal records.

As one Chicago resident remarked, “When Donald Trump campaigned, he said he was going after criminals, rapists and drug dealers. Now, they’re assaulting women, deporting children, mothers and fathers—not criminals. And if they’re criminals, he needs to prove it. We haven’t seen that evidence yet.”

Indeed, even the courts are finding the Trump administration’s so-called “evidence” of crime to be scant and/or unreliable.

Nationally, more than 70% of individuals rounded up by ICE nationally have no criminal convictions. Many have lived in the U.S. for decades, raised families, paid taxes, contributed to the economy, and worked the jobs most Americans refuse to do.

The blatantly false claim that immigrants are inherently violent criminals has also been repeatedly refuted by studies showing that immigrants—including undocumented ones—are less likely to commit crimes than Americans born in the U.S.

Even Trump’s insistence that certain states or cities are overrun with crime, thus necessitating his military invasions, collapses under scrutiny: crime remains at record lows nationwide.

The data simply does not support the rhetoric.

Violence rises and falls with social conditions, not partisan control. Yet, conveniently, only those states that have challenged the Trump administration’s abuses have been singled out for invasion by ICE and the National Guard.

Clearly, this is not about crime, safety, or jobs.

So what is really driving this campaign of terror?

What we are witnessing is the weaponization of fear.

A government that profits from panic and rewards blind obedience has turned immigration enforcement into a spectacle of domination—part deterrent, part distraction, and all political theater.

The timing is no coincidence.

The Trump administration has just announced its fifth military strike on a Venezuelan vessel it claims—without evidence—was engaged in illegal activity. The propaganda might scream about “foreign threats,” but these spectacles serve a different purpose: to divert public outrage away from falling poll numbers, a faltering economy, and growing unrest over the regime’s corruption and incompetence.

At home, ICE raids perform the same function as those boat strikes abroad—they keep the public frightened and the cameras fixed on the wrong enemy. Meanwhile, the scandals that should command national attention—the Epstein files implicating powerful allies, the graft, the insider enrichment—sink beneath the noise.

Each new show of force, each televised arrest or explosion, is meant to remind the populace who holds the power and how easily it can be turned inward.

This is not about border control or law enforcement. It is about control, period.

When a political regime begins to equate its own survival with the nation’s survival, every citizen becomes a potential suspect and every act of dissent a potential crime.

Against such a backdrop, ICE’s strategy is predatory and deliberate.

Lower court rulings have affirmed that ICE, DHS and the Trump Administration are willfully trampling the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

When ICE agents hunt people the way one might hunt animals in the wild, they cease to be officers of the law and become roving packs of lawless predators.

Lawless, paid predators, that is.

Thanks to the vast sums of taxpayer money funneled into ICE under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” financial incentives are turning ICE agents into bounty hunters.

In addition to recruiting ICE agents with $50,000 signing bonuses and $60,000 in student loan forgiveness, DHS is also promising to lavishly reward police agencies that allow their officers to operate as extensions of ICE with salary reimbursements, overtime pay and monthly bonuses.

Then there is the Trump administration’s directive to ICE to carry out a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day.  

No wonder citizens, lawful residents and immigrants with no criminal history are getting swept up. There simply aren’t enough violent criminals to fill these quotas.

While some lower courts have attempted to rein in ICE’s abuses, the U.S. Supreme Court has largely empowered them.

In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, a 6–3 Supreme Court order paused a district court injunction that would have barred ICE from stopping people based on perceived race, accent, or workplace location—in effect greenlighting racial profiling and roving patrols.

The court ruled that ICE’s criteria for targeting individuals—judging people by race, language, or job—does not rise to the constitutional level of reasonable suspicion.

But for an administration that mistakes might for right, the law is whatever justifies the hunt. “Everything we’re doing is very lawful,” Trump declared. “What they’re doing is not lawful.”

Martin Luther King Jr. offered the clearest rebuttal to that logic more than sixty years ago.

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written while jailed for participating in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, King reminded the world “that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’”

King then went on to explain how to distinguish between just and unjust laws:

“I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’ Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

King’s message was not about politics but about principle. His words remind us that legality and morality are not always the same — and that a nation that abandons moral law will soon find itself without any law at all.

A government that chains pregnant women, assaults journalists, and detains citizens without cause has lost its moral authority to govern.

King warned that the gravest threat to justice is not the clamor of bad people but the appalling silence of good ones. The same holds true today: silence in the face of government brutality is itself a form of consent.

Even in the face of the Trump administration’s heavy-handed repression, citizens have stepped up to meet military intimidation with moral conscience.

In Portland and other cities, protesters have embraced creative, nonviolent acts of symbolic resistance—appearing unclothed to expose the government’s hypocrisy, donning costumes to mock its fear, and standing silently before armed agents as living reminders of what it means to resist tyranny without becoming it.

These creative gestures recall the kind of moral witness King described: the courage to confront injustice with peace and strip it of its disguise.

The bottom line, as always, rests with “we the people.”

ICE does not protect America—it terrorizes America. And until it is reined in, dismantled, or reformed to operate wholly within constitutional boundaries, it will remain a standing army on domestic soil: unaccountable, unconstitutional, and un-American.

Tyranny always cloaks itself in the language of welfare and safety. And constitutional abuse transcends party lines.

Every regime that seeks to entrench its power begins by promising to protect the people from chaos, crime, or foreign enemies—then proceeds to manufacture both.

The raids, the strikes, the distractions are all part of the same design: to condition obedience, erase accountability, and cement totalitarian rule under the pretense of “law and order.”

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 Constitution is not a suggestion; it is the rule of law.

The Constitution is not a suggestion; it is the rule of law.

If ICE—and by extension, the DHS and the entire Trump regime—cannot operate within those limits, if it must hide behind masks and military might to exercise its power, then it has ceased to be lawful.

It has become exactly what the Framers of the Constitution feared: a government that wages war on its own people.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/65fmpevj

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

Trump’s Everywhere War: An Insurrection Against the Constitution

Posted: October 7, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“When they came in the middle of the night, they terrorized the families that were living there. There were children who were without clothing, they were zip tied, taken outside at 3 o’clock in the morning. A senior resident, an American citizen with no warrants, was taken outside and handcuffed for three hours. Doors were blown off their hinges, walls were broken through, immigration agents coming from Black Hawk helicopters … This is America.”—Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson

When the government can label anyone or anything an enemy in order to wage war, we are all in danger.

That danger is no longer theoretical.

In the same breath that the administration touts lethal military strikes against Venezuelan boats in Caribbean waters, federal agents are conducting coordinated militarized raids on homes in Chicago, rappelling down on apartment buildings from Black Hawk helicopters, dragging families out of their homes, separating children from their parents, and using zip ties to immobilize them—even citizens.

The message—spoken and unspoken—is that the government is on a war footing everywhere: abroad, at sea, and now at our front doors.

This “everywhere war” depends on a simple redefinition: call it a war, and the target becomes a combatant. Call the city a battlespace, and its residents become suspects.

What the White House is doing overseas to vessels it deems part of a terrorist network (without any credible proof or due process), it is now mimicking at home with door-kicking raids, mass surveillance, and ideological watchlists.

With the stroke of a pen, President Trump continues to set aside the constitutional safeguards meant to restrain exactly this kind of mission creep, handing himself and his agencies sweeping authority to disregard the very principles on which this nation was founded—principles intended to serve as constitutional safeguards against tyranny, corruption, abuse and overreach put in place by America’s founding fathers.

Take National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), for example.

NSPM-7 directs a government-wide campaign to “investigate,” “disrupt,” and “dismantle” so-called domestic threats, ordering agencies to pool their data, resources, and operations in service of this agenda.

What makes NSPM-7 so dangerous is not only its declared purpose but its breadth and secrecy. There are no clearly defined standards, no meaningful transparency, and no external oversight. The public is told only that the government will protect them—by watching them.

Yet the danger is not only in what the government hides, but in what it chooses to see.

Even more troubling is the way “threats” are defined.

What is being sold as a campaign to disrupt left-wing conspiracies has expanded to include ideology, rhetoric, and belief.

Clearly, this is not just another surveillance program.

NSPM-7 is a framework for rebranding dissent as a danger to be quashed.

The government has a long history of using vague definitions of “extremism” to justify ever-expanding control. Once dissent is rebranded as danger, every act of resistance can be swept into the government’s dragnet.

Whether through counterinsurgency tactics abroad or domestic militarization at home, the pattern is the same: dissent is rebranded as danger, and those who resist government narratives become subjects of investigation.

NSPM-7 merely formalizes this cycle of suspicion.

It also resurrects an old playbook with new machinery—COINTELPRO, digitized and centralized. The tools may be different, but the logic—neutralize dissent—is the same, now scaled up with modern surveillance and stitched together under executive direction. From there, the apparatus needs only a pretext—a checklist of behaviors, viewpoints, associations and beliefs—to justify recasting citizens as suspects.

For years now, the government has flagged certain viewpoints and phrases as potential markers of extremism.

To that list, you can now add “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-American,” among others.

What this means, in practice, is that sermons, protests, blog posts, or donor lists could all be flagged as precursors to terrorism.

Under this policy, America’s founders would be terrorists. Jesus himself would be blacklisted as “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist.”

Anything can be declared a war, and anyone can be redefined as an enemy combatant.

The definition shifts with political convenience, but the result is always the same: unchecked executive power.

The president has already labeled drug cartels “unlawful combatants” and insists the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict.”

The raids in Chicago and the White House’s evolving attitude towards surveillance confirm what follows from that logic: this war footing is not confined to foreign shores. It is being turned inward—toward journalists, political opponents, and ordinary citizens whose beliefs or associations are deemed “anti-American.”

By anti-American, this administration really means anti-government, especially when Trump is calling the shots.

According to local news reports, agents arrived in Black Hawk helicopters, trucks and military-style vans, using power tools to breach perimeter fencing, destroying property to gain entry, and zip-tying family members—including children—as they were separated and escorted from the building.

The imagery is unmistakably martial: a domestic operation staged and executed with battlefield methods.

This “everywhere war” lands on a country already saturated with domestic watchlists and dragnet filters.

Federal agencies have leaned on banks and data brokers to run broad, warrantless screens of ordinary Americans’ purchases and movements for so-called “extremism” indicators—everything from buying religious materials to shopping at outdoor stores or booking travel—none of which are crimes.

The point isn’t probable cause; it’s preemptive suspicion.

At the same time, geofence warrants and other bulk location grabs have exposed who went where and with whom—scooping up churchgoers, hotel guests, and passersby across entire city blocks—while a sprawling web of fusion and “real-time crime” centers ingests camera feeds, social posts, license-plate scans, facial recognition, and predictive-policing scores to flag “persons of interest” who have done nothing wrong.

This is how dissent gets relabeled as danger: by surrounding every American with the presumption of guilt first, and constitutional safeguards—if any—much later.

When merely looking a certain way or talking a certain way or voting a certain way is enough to get you singled out and subjected to dehumanizing, cruel treatment by government agents, we are all in danger.

When the president of the United States and his agents threaten to “intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the government’s demands, we are all in danger.

When the police state has a growing list of innocuous terms and behaviors that are suspicious enough to classify someone a terrorist, we are all in danger.

Today it is drug cartels. Yesterday it was immigrants. Tomorrow it could be journalists, political opponents, or ordinary citizens who express views deemed “anti-American.”

With NSPM-7, the Trump White House is not merely amplifying surveillance power—it is institutionalizing a regime in which thought, dissent, and ideological posture become the raw material for domestic investigations and suppression.

Make no mistake: this is an unprecedented escalation in the government’s war on privacy, dissent, and constitutional limits.

Consider the secret phone-records dragnet operated for more than a decade across multiple administrations—formerly “Hemisphere,” now “Data Analytical Services.”

By paying AT&T and exploiting privacy loopholes, the government has gained warrantless access to more than a trillion domestic call records a year, sweeping in not only suspects but their spouses, parents, children, friends—anyone they might have called. Training on the program has reportedly reached beyond drug agents to postal inspectors, prison officials, highway patrol, border units, and even the National Guard.

This is how a surveillance apparatus becomes a governing philosophy.

A presidency armed with NSPM-7 can fuse that kind of dragnet data with interagency “threat” frameworks and ideological watchlists, collapsing the wall between intelligence gathering and political control.

This is how tyrants justify tyranny in order to stay in power.

This is McCarthyism in a digital uniform.

Joseph McCarthy branded critics as Communist infiltrators. Donald Trump brands enemies as “combatants.”

The mechanism is the same: redefine dissent as treachery, then prosecute it under extraordinary powers.

For those old enough to have lived through the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something in the air that reeks of the heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian tactics that were hallmarks of the 1950s.

Back then, it was the government—spearheaded by Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee—working in tandem with private corporations and individuals to blacklist Americans suspected of being communist sympathizers.

By the time the witch hunts drew to a close, thousands of individuals (the vast majority innocent of any crime) had been accused of communist ties, investigated, subpoenaed, and blacklisted. Careers were ruined, suicides followed, immigration tightened, and free expression chilled.

Seventy-five years later, the same vitriol, fear-mongering, and knee-jerk intolerance are once again being deployed against anyone who dares to think for themselves.

All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably forward.

This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails.

The silence is becoming deafening.

What is unfolding is the logical culmination of years of bipartisan betrayals of the Bill of Rights, from the Cold War to the digital panopticon

What once operated in the shadows of intelligence agencies is now openly coordinated from the Oval Office.

For decades, presidents of both parties have waged a steady assault on the Constitution. Each crisis—Cold War, 9/11, pandemic—became an excuse to concentrate more power in the executive branch.

The Patriot Act normalized warrantless surveillance. The FISA courts gave secret cover for dragnet spying. The NSA’s metadata sweeps exposed millions of Americans’ phone records. Predictive policing and geofencing warrants turned smartphones into government informants.

Each measure, we were told, was temporary, limited, and necessary. None were rolled back. Each became the foundation for the next expansion.

Against this backdrop, NSPM-7 emerges as the next, more dangerous iteration.

What distinguishes it is not merely scale but centralization: the government has moved from piecemeal encroachments to a bold, centralized framework in which the White House claims the prerogative to oversee surveillance across agencies with virtually no external checks.

Oversight by Congress and the courts is reduced to a fig leaf.

This is how liberties die: not with a sudden coup, but with the gradual normalization of extraordinary powers until they are no longer extraordinary at all.

It is the embodiment of James Madison’s nightmare: the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the same hands.

From red-flag seizures and “disinformation” hunts to mail imaging, biometric databases, license-plate grids, and a border-zone where two-thirds of Americans now live under looser search rules, the default has flipped: everyone is collectible, everyone is rankable, and everyone is interruptible.

That is how a free people become reduced to databits first and citizens as an afterthought.

The constitutional stakes couldn’t be higher.

The Fourth Amendment promises that people shall be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. That promise is empty if the President can authorize the government to sweep up data, monitor communications, and track movements without individualized warrants or probable cause.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, association, and press. Those protections mean little if journalists fear their calls are tapped, if activists believe their networks are infiltrated, or if citizens censor themselves out of fear.

Separation of powers itself is on the line. By directing surveillance policy across government without legislative debate or judicial review, the White House is usurping authority never meant to rest in a single set of hands.

The risks are not hypothetical.

COINTELPRO targeted civil rights leaders and dissidents. The NSA’s bulk collection swept up millions of innocents. Fusion centers today track and analyze daily life.

What was once shocking—the idea that the government might listen in on every phone call or sift through every email—is now treated as the price of living in modern America.

If those older, less centralized programs were abused, why would NSPM-7—with broader reach and weaker oversight—be any different?

This is not speculation. We have seen this progression before.

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued reports on so-called “rightwing extremism” that swept broadly across the ideological spectrum. Economic anxiety, anti-immigration views, gun rights advocacy, even the military service of returning veterans were flagged as potential red flags for extremism.

The backlash was immediate, and DHS was forced to walk back the report, but the damage was done: dissenting views had been equated with dangerous plots.

That same playbook now risks becoming institutionalized under NSPM-7, which consolidates ideological profiling into a White House-directed mandate.

Imagine a journalist investigating corruption within the administration. Under NSPM-7, their sources and communications could be quietly monitored.

Imagine a nonprofit advocating for immigration reform. Its donors and staff could be swept into a database of “domestic threats.”

Imagine an attorney representing a controversial client. Even attorney-client privilege, once considered sacrosanct, could be eroded under a regime that treats dissent as subversion.

These scenarios are not alarmist—they are logical extensions of a system that places no real limits on executive discretion.

With NSPM-7, the line between foreign and domestic surveillance blurs entirely, and every citizen becomes a potential target of investigation.

Unless “we the people” demand accountability, NSPM-7 will become the new normal, entrenched in the machinery of government long after this administration has passed.

We must insist that surveillance be subject to the same constitutional limits that govern every other exercise of state power. We must demand transparency. We must pressure Congress to reclaim its role and courts to enforce constitutional duty. Most of all, we must cultivate a culture of resistance.

The Bill of Rights is not self-executing; it depends on the vigilance of the citizenry.

Civil liberties groups have already sounded the alarm, warning that NSPM-7 authorizes government-wide investigations into nonprofits, activists, and donors. Law scholars call it a dangerous overreach, a program as vague as it is menacing. Even law firms, normally cautious about critiquing executive power, are voicing concern about the risks it poses to attorney-client privilege.

When so many diverse voices converge in warning, we should pay attention.

And yet warnings alone will not stop this juggernaut, because NSPM-7 is not simply about technology or data collection. It is about power—and how fear is weaponized to consolidate that power.

If we are silent now, if we allow NSPM-7 to pass unchallenged, we will have no excuse when the surveillance state tightens its grip further.

When ideas themselves become a trigger for surveillance, the First Amendment loses.

America has entered dangerous territory.

A government that answers only to itself is not a constitutional republic—it is a rogue state. And NSPM-7, far from securing our freedoms, threatens to extinguish them.

Unchecked power is unconstitutional power.

As U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan cautioned in a recent ruling: “The government’s arguments paint with a broad brush and threaten to upend fundamental protections in our Constitution. But ours is not an autocracy; it is a system of checks and balances.”

Those checks only function if we insist on them.

With congressional Republicans having traded their constitutional autonomy for a place in Trump’s authoritarian regime, the courts—and the power of the people themselves—remain the last hope for reining in this runaway police state.

Cognizant that a unified populace poses the greatest threat to its power grabs, the Deep State—having co-opted Trump and the MAGA movement—is doing everything it can to keep the public polarized and fearful.

This has been a long game.

The contagion of fear that McCarthy once spread with the help of government agencies, corporations, and the power elite never truly died; it merely evolved.

NSPM-7 is its modern form, and Trump a modern-day McCarthy.

That anyone would support a politician whose every move has become antithetical to freedom is mind-boggling, but that is the power of politics as a drug for the masses.

That anyone who claims to want to “Make America Great Again” would sell out the country—and the Constitution—to do so says a lot.

That judges, journalists and activists are being threatened for daring to hold the line against the government’s overreaches and abuses speaks volumes.

One of Trump’s supporters sent an anonymous postcard to Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee assigned to a case challenging the Trump administration’s effort to deny full First Amendment protection to non-citizens lawfully present in the United States. The postcard taunted: “Trump has pardons and tanks… What do you have?”

Judge Young opened his opinion with a direct reply: “Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works in a specific case.”

The judge then proceeded to issue a blistering 161-page opinion that hinges on the language of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“No law” means “no law,” concluded Judge Young,

In other words, the First Amendment is not negotiable.

Non-citizens lawfully present in the United States “have the same free speech rights as the rest of us.”

This is the constitutional answer to NSPM-7’s everywhere-war logic.

When a president declares anything a battlefield and anyone a combatant, the First Amendment answers back: No law means no law.

It is not a permission slip the government can offer only to favored citizens or compliant viewpoints. It is a boundary the government may not cross.

So the question returns to us, the ones Judge Young addressed: “What do we have, and will we keep it?”

We have a constitutional republic, and we keep it by holding fast to the Constitution.

We keep it by refusing the normalization of the Executive Branch’s extraordinary overreaches and power grabs.

We keep it by insisting that dissent is not danger, speech is not suspicion, and watchlists are not warrants.

We keep it by demanding congressional oversight with teeth, courts that enforce first principles, and communities that resist fear when fear is used to rule.

In closing, Judge Young quoted Ronald Reagan’s warning, issued in 1967: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation  away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”

Reagan’s words would be flagged under NSPM-7, but it doesn’t change the challenge.

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 hard work of defending freedom rests as always with “we the people.”

Let’s get to it.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yc6c7af3

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

Battlefield America: Trump’s War on the Enemy Within—the American People

Posted: October 2, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“The era of the Department of Defense is over… From this moment forward, the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: warfighting… We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country… You kill people and break things for a living.” — Pete Hegseth

“America is under invasion from within… That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within… We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military… it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”—President Donald Trump in remarks to more than 800 of the country’s top military leaders

Distractions abound. Don’t be distracted.

The American police state under Donald Trump has mastered the art of delivering endless diversions, constant uproar, and wall-to-wall chaos designed to prevent us from focusing on any single issue for long.

This is how psyops work: keep the populace reactive, confused, fearful and pliant while power consolidates.

According to the Trump administration, “we the people” are now the enemy from within.

Over the course of just one week, we’ve been bombarded with headlines about government shutdowns, a presidential directive aimed at blacklisting dissent, threats by Trump to deploy the National Guard into states he considers political opponents, the politicization of the military, tariffs that inflict economic pain on American consumers, and the administration’s unabashed embrace of graft and grift.

In the midst of it all, Pete Hegseth, the newly styled Secretary of War, compelled a sudden gathering of the top military brass for a costly $6 million exercise that amounted to little more than chest-thumping, propaganda and grandstanding.

With Hegseth at the helm of the renamed Department of War, calling for a new “warrior ethos,” the Trump administration is celebrating aggression and blind obedience over peacekeeping, honor and constitutional duty.

Both the rebranding of the War Department and the warrior-ethos pep rally signaled a profound shift in how the Deep State—which has consolidated its powers under Trump—views the role of the military, our constitutional government, and the American people.

It is a shift we cannot afford to ignore.

The name change alone is significant.

After World War II, “War” was deliberately retired from the department’s name to emphasize restraint in the wake of global conflicts that cost humanity dearly in terms of lives, fortunes and peace. That nominal bulwark has now been discarded. And with it, the very idea that America’s military exists for defense rather than conquest.

Reviving the Department of War signals to the bureaucracy, the brass, and the public that aggression—not defense—is the organizing principle.

The Pentagon has been rechristened not as a fortress against foreign threats but as a machine for waging endless war here at home: Democratic cities will become military staging grounds; rules of engagement will be loosened to maximize “lethality”; and militarized police will be given a license to kill their fellow Americans.

This is not the language of defense. It is the language of aggression and occupation.

A standing army on domestic soil was precisely what the Founders feared. They lived under troops quartered in their towns. They knew what happens when government treats its own citizens as a hostile force.

Two centuries later, their fear has become our reality.

For years, federal and state agencies have blurred the line between soldiers and police. Armored vehicles on neighborhood streets. Combat training in American towns. Laws allowing indefinite detention of citizens without trial.

Methodically, a war culture has been transplanted from the battlefield abroad to the homeland.

With armored tanks on our streets, SWAT raids treated as routine, and citizens viewed as combatants rather than neighbors with rights, the results are predictable: abuse, eroded liberties, and the slow death of a constitutional republic.

This is the future we warned was coming: every city a potential conflict zone, every protest a pretext for deployment, every citizen a suspect.

Trump’s reckless call to use “dangerous cities” as military training grounds doesn’t just echo this dystopia—it completes the circle.

Under the banner of “war,” the government is giving itself license to treat the American people as the enemy.

And Trump, buoyed by the power of the presidency and his ability to use taxpayer dollars for his own grandiose plans—building ballrooms, hiring thugs with extravagant bonuses for arrests and roundups, erecting detention centers—is now attempting to bribe the military with over $1 trillion in spending in 2026 if only they will march to a dictator’s drum.

But this is precisely the scenario the Founders sought to guard against. They understood that “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

Their warning is clear to everyone but the die-hard devotees of the American police state: a standing army puts the American people squarely in the crosshairs of a tyrannous regime.

A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the American people of any vestige of freedom. How can there be liberty when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones overhead?

It was for this reason the Founders vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military regime ruled by force.

They opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

That basic civics lesson hasn’t sunk in with Trump, who seems to relish ruling with brute force and using the military to kill with impunity.

Just listen to him brag about bombing Venezuelan fishing boats and killing the occupants without any attempt at due process: he sounds like every power-hungry madman who aspires to become a dictator.

And then there’s Hegseth, who—despite professing devotion to Jesus, the prince of peace—has dismissed pacifism as “naive and dangerous,” insisting: “From this moment forward, the only mission… is warfighting, preparing for war and preparing to win.”

But in declaring war as the mission, Hegseth and Trump reveal exactly how far they have strayed from the Constitution.

They are a lesson in how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely—exactly the danger that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general in World War II, warned against:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Eisenhower’s words were prophetic, because the rise of misplaced power did not begin with Trump. Trump and his administration didn’t create this quagmire from nothing—the present police state and its tools of terror have been in the works for a long time.

Back in 2008, the U.S. Army War College issued a report urging the military to be prepared to put down civil unrest within the country.

Summarizing the report, journalist Chris Hedges wrote, “The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a ‘violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,’ which could be provoked by ‘unforeseen economic collapse,’ ‘purposeful domestic resistance,’ ‘pervasive public health emergencies’ or ‘loss of functioning political and legal order.’ The ‘widespread civil violence,’ the document said, ‘would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.’”

In 2009, DHS reports labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists, calling on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. 

Fast forward to the present day, and you have NSPM-7, Trump’s new national security directive, which equates anyone with “anti-Christian” or “anti-capitalism” or “anti-American” views as domestic terrorists.

Add to this: “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, which envisions using armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as concern for the national security.

The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

At three-and-a-half minutes in, the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

That phrase should sound chillingly familiar.

Trump’s supporters know it as a rallying cry against corruption in Washington. But in the Pentagon’s scenario, “drain the swamps” means clearing urban centers of “noncombatants” and engaging adversaries in high-intensity conflict.

But here’s the catch: in the Pentagon’s lexicon, those “noncombatants” are not foreign armies at all. Who are they?

They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.” They are “threats.” They are the “enemy.”

They are civilians. Protesters. The unemployed. The poor. Dissidents. In short: us.

Welcome to Battlefield America.

In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.

We are the have-nots. And once you see that division clearly, the rest falls into place.

Suddenly it all begins to make sense: the surveillance systems, the civil unrest drills, fusion centers, the databases of dissidents. The extremism reports, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons across government agencies—and equipping them for war against their own citizens. 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 build Big Brother into every device we own. Cars, phones, smart homes, loyalty cards, streaming services—they all track us.

All of this has taken place in broad daylight, funded with our dollars.

It’s astounding how convenient we’ve made it for the government to lock down the nation.

So, what exactly is the government preparing for?

By “government,” I don’t mean the two-party bureaucracy of Republicans and Democrats. I mean Government with a capital “G”: the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of power: corporatized, militarized, and contemptuous of freedom. And it is not waiting for some distant tomorrow.

The future is here.

By waging endless wars abroad, bringing the instruments of war home, turning police into soldiers, criminalizing dissent, and making peaceful revolution nearly impossible, the government has engineered an environment where domestic violence becomes inevitable.

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

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re already enemies of the state.

For years, the government has warned of domestic terrorism, erected surveillance, and trained law enforcement to equate anti-government views (that is, exercising your constitutional rights) with extremism. Now that groundwork has paid off.

What the government failed to explain—until Trump—was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own choosing.

“We the people” have become enemy #1.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/msaunc87

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

Standing Armies at Home: Civil Liberties Groups Oppose Trump’s National Guard Takeover

Posted: September 22, 2025 in Uncategorized
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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — A coalition of free speech organizations is asking the federal courts to rein in President Trump’s unprecedented use of the military against civilians, especially as a means of silencing and punishing disfavored speech, warning that such actions echo the very abuses the nation’s Founders sought to prevent. The filing comes amid Trump’s ongoing threats to deploy troops to Memphis, Baltimore, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, often over the objections of state governors.

In an amicus brief before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Newsom v. Trump, The Rutherford Institute joined the ACLU, its state affiliates, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University to challenge Trump’s June 2025 order federalizing the California National Guard and deploying active-duty Marines in Los Angeles to quell protests against his immigration raids. The coalition’s brief argues that the President’s claim of unilateral, unreviewable authority to deploy troops on American streets is “extreme, unprecedented, and incompatible with the history, traditions, and laws of the United States.”

“The Founders warned against standing armies on American soil, fearing that the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by local police violates the Posse Comitatus Act and crosses the line into authoritarianism.”

On June 7, 2025, President Trump invoked a rarely used statute, 10 U.S.C. § 12406, to forcibly federalize the California National Guard and deploy thousands of troops against largely peaceful protesters in Los Angeles. The protests erupted after armed federal agents carried out aggressive immigration raids, sparking public outrage. The federal government escalated the situation by unleashing military troops armed with tear gas, pepper balls, and flash-bang grenades on demonstrators that included journalists, legal observers, clergy, children, and elected officials. Trump claimed that the protests “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government.”

Five days later, the federal district court found that “[Trump’s] actions were illegal—both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment,” and thus issued a temporary restraining order to return control of the National Guard to the Governor. But a panel of the Ninth Circuit then stayed that initial restraining order pending appeal, giving high deference to the President’s authority. While this appeal has been pending, the district court ruled on Sept. 2, 2025, that the federal government also violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the use of the military for domestic policing absent express constitutional or statutory authorization.

The coalition’s brief before the Ninth Circuit stresses that: 1) History and tradition strictly limit military deployments against civilians; 2) Military policing threatens the First Amendment by suppressing lawful protests, political dissent, and association; and 3) Unchecked troop deployments risk authoritarian abuse, because the President cannot label ordinary political opposition as “rebellion” to justify military force. With 300 National Guard troops to remain deployed in Los Angeles through Election Day, the dangers of Trump’s military deployments are not theoretical: internal assessments reveal that troops’ presence in Washington, D.C. has been perceived by the public as “leveraging fear.”  

Hina Shamsi, Charlie Hogle, Sean M. Lau, and other ACLU attorneys advanced the arguments in the amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute is a nonprofit civil liberties organization dedicated to making the government play by the rules of the Constitution. To this end, the Institute defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a broad range of issues affecting their freedoms.  

Source: tinyurl.com/2bmsy45p

Political Gaslighting: The Government’s Latest Playbook for Dismantling the Constitution

Posted: September 17, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“That was when they suspended the Constitution… There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

What we are witnessing is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; it is a government over the people.

Call it what it is: political gaslighting—the regime says one thing while doing the opposite, and insists on the citizenry’s trust while dismantling the very checks and balances that make trust possible.

So when the powers-that-be claim to be protecting the Constitution, they’re dismantling it at every turn. In this way, the mechanisms of constitutional government—separation of powers, federalism, due process, and the Bill of Rights—are being hollowed out in plain sight.

Although this dismantling did not start with President Trump, it has accelerated beyond imagining.

What was once a slow bleed is now a hemorrhage—and it is not random. The damage is unfolding on two parallel tracks: a steady, methodical, bureaucratic erosion (rule changes, executive orders, new databases) paired with shock-and-awe surges (National Guard deployments, mass round-ups, headline-grabbing prosecutions).

The words may say “freedom” and “order,” but the deeds smack of tyranny.

Attorney General Pam Bondi vows to punish “hateful” speech even as the administration normalizes hateful rhetoric and violent imagery. Vice President JD Vance promises to “go after” those with a “leftist” ideology while preaching free-speech absolutism for allies.

The Trump administration denounces “hate speech” even as it excuses and downplays the Jan. 6 riots; pledges fiscal restraint while shoveling billions into surveillance, prisons, and domestic deployments; wraps itself in law-and-order while tolerating lawlessness by cronies; sermonizes about faith and morality while normalizing cruelty as governance; and peddles outrage over waste while spending lavishly on the trappings of office.

Rights are framed as absolute for friends and privileges for critics. That is the opposite of constitutional government, which holds everyone—especially those in power—to the same rule of law, applied evenly.

If the government can police ideas, deploy troops at home, run dragnets by algorithm, disappear people into distant prisons, build spectacle cages, and amass power in one office, then no American is safe—including those who cheer these efforts today.

If you believe in limited government, equal justice, and due process—whatever your party—these double standards should alarm you most, because the precedents being cheered today will be wielded against you tomorrow.

What follows is a running ledger of the gaslighting playbook and its constitutional costs.

The Gaslight: “We’re Restoring the Constitution.”
Reality: The “temporary” powers created after 9/11 have hardened into a permanent police-state architecture—Patriot Act surveillance, secret FISA processes and National Security Letters, DHS fusion centers, a diluted Fourth Amendment “border zone,” civil-asset forfeiture, Pentagon 1033 militarization, Real ID, facial-recognition and geofence warrants—now run at full throttle across administrations.
The Cost: A police state.

The Gaslight: “We Value Law and Order.”
Reality: The administration deployed Marines and the National Guard into American streets to police protests protected by the First Amendment. On September 2, 2025, a federal judge ruled that the administration’s deployment of thousands of Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles—ostensibly for immigration protests—violated the Posse Comitatus Act, describing a “top-down, systemic effort” to militarize civil law enforcement. The Constitution’s framers feared standing armies and military occupations of American communities.
The Cost: The death of Posse Comitatus.

The Gaslight: “We Defend Free Speech.”
Reality: Dissent is criminalized, expressive conduct is relitigated, and disfavored groups face terror labels and IRS pressure. Protest is a right, not a privilege, yet the government increasingly recasts organized dissent as conspiracy. After the Charlie Kirk shooting, the White House floated designating “antifa” and other liberal groups as domestic terrorists, bringing racketeering cases against funders, and targeting nonprofits critical of the administration—all while downplaying right-wing violence. Fold in Bondi’s vow to target “hateful” speech and Vance’s pledge to eradicate “leftist ideology,” and power slides from punishing unlawful acts to policing ideas.
The Cost: A weaponized First Amendment.

The Gaslight: “We’re Protecting You from Extremists.”  
Reality: Watchlists without due process, elastic “material support” theories, politicized “extremism” labels, and donor targeting that treat journalists, whistleblowers, activists—even parents at school boards—as suspects first and citizens second. Speaking truth to power is reframed as a security risk. In free societies, the state fears the citizen; in unfree ones, the citizen fears the state.
The Cost: Dissent rebranded as extremism.

The Gaslight: “We’re Ending Federal Censorship.”
Reality: On Day One, the President signed an order to “end federal censorship.” Read closely, it asserts sweeping control over how agencies interact with media platforms and broadcasters, rebranding ordinary outreach and fact-checking as First Amendment violations, while positioning the Executive as referee of the private square. By centralizing power over the flow of information in the Executive Branch, it threatens the independence of the very private forums where Americans speak. The test of free speech is whether the government stays out of the marketplace of ideas—not whether it curates it to the President’s liking.
The Cost: The state as speech referee.

The Gaslight: “We Use Smart Tech, Not Dragnet Surveillance.”
Reality: The administration is fusing government databases and outsourcing “intelligence” to private vendors in such a way that data becomes the warrant. ICE’s new $30 million deal with Palantir to build “ImmigrationOS” promises to identify, track, and deport people using AI-driven analytics and cross-agency data sharing. Add in geofence warrants, face-scan dragnets, and fusion-center “suspicious activity” pipelines, and you get a domestic intelligence system that presumes guilt by data trail.
The Cost: Probable cause replaced by algorithms.

The Gaslight: “We’re Tough on Crime.”
Reality: This year, U.S. agencies financed the transfer of migrants to El Salvador’s mega-prison (CECOT), where families and lawyers lost contact with detainees for months. Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention site whetted the government’s appetite for scaled-up incarceration, converting state prisons into immigration jails nationwide. These attempts by the Trump administration constitute an end run around longstanding constitutional protections for anyone accused of a crime. The common denominator is spectacle over justice, expansion over restraint.  
The Cost: The death of due process.

The Gaslight: “We’re Compassionate, Not Cruel.”  
Reality: The push to clear homeless encampments combines criminalization with expanded involuntary commitments. A July 24, 2025 executive order encourages states to funnel people into institutions and mental-health courts, tying funding to “maximum” use of commitments—an end-run around the presumption of liberty that undergirds due process.
The Cost: Bureaucratic coercion over compassion.

The Gaslight: “We’re Streamlining Government.”
Reality: The separation of powers was intended to serve as a check against any one government agency becoming too powerful. Yet the administration has pressed an aggressive unitary-executive theory to encroach on independent agencies, such as the Federal Reserve. Scholars warn this could erase the independence of agencies designed to check the White House.
The Cost: Checks and balances gutted.

The Gaslight: “We’re Keeping America Safe Overseas.”
Reality: Killing by assassination, not authorization. Twice in recent months, U.S. forces have launched unannounced attacks on Venezuelan boats, killing crews without warning or due process, on the mere assertion that they were drug traffickers.
The Cost: War powers and judicial oversight bypassed.

The Gaslight: “We’re Fixing Wasteful Spending.”
Reality: Having poured billions into surveillance, prisons, and domestic deployments, the “police-state budget” unravels the economy while eroding liberty.
The Cost: A debt-funded police state.

Many who cherish ordered liberty, limited government, fiscal restraint, and constitutional morality would normally recoil at these tactics under any other administration, so why not now?

Principles should not change because the party in power has changed, and yet that’s exactly what continues to drive the double standard.

If there’s a constitutional scorecard, “we the people” are on the losing team right now.

The First Amendment is buckling as protest is chilled, expressive conduct is targeted, opponents are threatened with terror labels, and the Executive Branch expands control over the speech ecosystem.

The Fourth and Fifth Amendments have been weakened by AI surveillance and cross-agency fusion that normalize suspicionless tracking, while offshore detention and coerced commitments compromise due process.

The Eighth Amendment is mocked by harsh, theatrical detention regimes.

Federalism and the Tenth Amendment give way when federal troops step into local policing.

Separation of powers erodes as an inflated unitary-executive theory encroaches on independent agencies.

War powers are skirted by extrajudicial killings abroad. And fiscal responsibility is inverted as surveillance and prison appropriations swell while liberty contracts.

What must happen now?

Congress must codify guardrails against domestic military use—tighten Posse Comitatus, narrow Insurrection Act exceptions, and mandate transparency for any domestic mission. Courts and prosecutors should reaffirm expressive rights, rejecting end-runs around Texas v. Johnson and refusing cases that criminalize symbolism.

Lawmakers must impose bright-line limits on data fusion, bar cross-agency pooling for generalized surveillance, and require algorithmic transparency and adversarial testing before any tool touches liberty. The U.S. must prohibit outsourcing detention to abusive regimes, close loopholes, and apply human-rights scrutiny to every foreign arrangement.

The independence of watchdogs and the Fed needs protection through clear “for cause” standards. States and cities should decriminalize homelessness and fund housing-first approaches instead of coercive commitments.

Congress must reassert war powers, requiring explicit authorization before any attack abroad. And fiscal sanity must be restored: sunset emergency outlays for surveillance and prison build-outs, mandate GAO audits of domestic deployments and fusion contracts, and attach civil-liberties impact statements to major security spending.

Our job as citizens is not to trust the government but to bind it down with the Constitution. “In questions of power,” Thomas Jefferson warned, we must “bind [government] down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Whatever you do, don’t trust the government with your privacy. Don’t trust it with your property: no-knock raids and forfeiture turn “private” property into whatever authorities permit you to keep.

Don’t trust it with your finances: Washington spends money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford. Don’t trust it with your life: force without accountability is not protection.

Above all, don’t trust it with your freedoms: on paper, rights endure; in practice, they are rationed by policy memos, watchlists, and shifting lines in the sand.

This should never be a right-vs-left debate; it’s the State vs. your liberty.

If you wouldn’t trust your worst political enemy with these weaponized tools, you shouldn’t trust your favorite politician with them either.

So think nationally, act locally.

Rebuild the habits of self-government where you live: know your neighbors and officials; know your rights and your city charter; ask who runs the jail and demand transparency; vet the people you entrust with power; and hold officials to account—show up, file requests, appeal, document, organize.

This is the work in front of us—not knee-jerk outrage, but persistent, consistent work to fortify the “chains of the Constitution.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we let emergency rule become ordinary rule—military troops as beat cops, protest as crime, data as warrant, assassination as policy, money as politics—there won’t be a Constitution left to defend.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/ydxdjx5b

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

How Tyranny Becomes Entrenched: 9/11 and the Police State’s Endless Power Grabs

Posted: September 10, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.”—Thomas Paine

They said it was for safety.
They said it was for order.
They said it was for the good of the nation.

They always say it’s for something good… until it isn’t.

Nearly a quarter-century after 9/11, we are still living with the consequences of fear-driven government power grabs. What began as “temporary” measures for our security have hardened into a permanent architecture of control.

The bipartisan police-state architecture that began with 9/11 has been passed from president to president and party to party, each recycling the same justifications—safety, security, patriotism—to expand its powers at the expense of the citizenry.

So they locked down the country “for our safety.”
They expanded surveillance “for our security.”
They rounded up anyone who challenged the narrative “for the common good.”
They erased names, ideas, and histories “to prevent offense.”
They forced schools to teach only what was politically correct “for the children.”
They censored speech “for our protection.”
They targeted dissenters “to preserve peace.”
They militarized the streets and called it “law and order.”

These very abuses—once denounced when carried out by the Left—are now cheered, defended, and excused when carried out by the Right.

People who once spoke passionately about truth, freedom, and faith have now fallen silent in the face of injustice, or worse, convinced themselves that nothing is wrong. The very voices that should be warning against tyranny are instead excusing it or looking away.

This is the danger of double standards in politics: every tyranny is rationalized in the moment by its chorus of defenders.

But history teaches that what goes around comes around. If you justify it now, you’ll have no defense when the tables turn.

And yet, time and again, the lies we tell ourselves make it possible. The cult of personality. The blind loyalty to party. The belief that “our side” can’t be the villain.

It never ceases to amaze how far people will go to excuse the actions of their favorite tyrant, even when those actions are the very things they once swore to oppose.

The pattern of justifying tyranny is as old as power itself. Every abuse comes wrapped in the same excuse: we had to do it.

After 9/11, Americans were told the Patriot Act and mass surveillance were “necessary to prevent terrorism.” The result was a sprawling security state that tracks every phone call, every online search, every purchase. The justification was security. The cost was freedom.

Under Obama, drone warfare and the prosecution of whistleblowers were defended as “keeping America safe.” The president even claimed the power to assassinate U.S. citizens abroad without trial. The result was an unaccountable government acting as judge, jury and executioner. The justification was safety. The cost was due process.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and mandates were imposed in the name of “public health,” laying the groundwork for a Nanny State empowered to micromanage every aspect of our lives—where we go, what we buy, who we see. The result was government claiming control over every aspect of daily life. The justification was saving lives. The cost was the right to govern our bodies.

Under Trump, the script is familiar.

National Guard deployments in American cities are justified as “restoring order.” Sweeping surveillance is framed as “protecting communities.” Crackdowns on dissent are defended as “stopping criminals.” Mental health round-ups of the homeless are justified as “helping the vulnerable.” Militarized patrols on city streets are justified as “cleaning up the streets.” Turning ICE into a roving army of lawless thugs is justified as “protecting citizenship.” Censorship and efforts to sanitize American history are now being lauded by the same voices that railed against “cancel culture.”

That same logic has taken a deadly turn abroad. At Trump’s direction, the U.S. carried out a series of preemptive military strikes this year—against Iran’s nuclear sites, against the Houthis in Yemen, and most recently against what the administration claimed was a drug-trafficking boat off the coast of Venezuela. The White House has justified these deadly attacks—carried out without congressional approval or constitutional authorization—as part of the president’s unilateral war-making authority.

This, too, is part of the bipartisan police-state architecture built after 9/11, when presidents claimed open-ended authority to wage preemptive war without meaningful congressional oversight.

What began with Afghanistan and Iraq has metastasized into a global battlefield where any president can launch attacks—on Iran, on Yemen, on Venezuela—without accountability.

As always, the justification is order, safety, and patriotism. The cost is truth, justice and freedom.

Every time Trump expands his powers, the chorus is the same: It wouldn’t be necessary if Democrats had done their job. If you don’t break the law, you have nothing to fear. If you’re not doing anything wrong, why worry?

These are the oldest excuses for tyranny—and they never change. Only the partisanship does.

What makes Trump and those who came before him especially dangerous is not merely their willingness to wield power but the eagerness of their enablers to excuse and defend it at every turn.

History shows that bullies and strongmen can only rise when mobs rally to their side. A tyrant’s greatest weapon is not his fist, but the crowd that cheers him on, intimidates his critics, and convinces itself that might makes right.

The machinery of authoritarianism always needs a chorus of defenders, and today that chorus is louder, more organized, and more dismissive of constitutional limits than ever before.

We have been building to this moment for a long time. Even so, why do people accept tyranny so easily?

First, the cult of personality. When people invest blind faith in a leader, they will excuse anything he does. If he says surveillance is necessary, they believe it. If he says dissenters are enemies, they cheer their punishment. It is the psychology of the mob, cloaked in the loyalty of the true believer.

Second, fear as a political weapon. Every despot knows that frightened people will tolerate almost anything. Fear of terrorism. Fear of crime. Fear of disease. Fear of immigrants. Fear of collapse. Fear makes people beg for the chains that bind them.

Third, the “our side” fallacy. People imagine tyranny is only tyranny when the other side does it. When their side does it, they call it leadership. They call it patriotism. They call it protection. But the abuse doesn’t change when the party label does. Wrong is wrong.

Every new regime that seizes power promises it will use extraordinary authority only for good. And every regime—without exception—uses it to entrench itself at the expense of liberty.

Every generation tells itself the same lies to excuse the same abuses.

Consider the whiplash of partisan double standards:

  • Conservatives who blasted the Obama administration for NSA spying now cheer Trump’s Palantir partnership and AI-driven surveillance that tracks Americans’ digital footprints.
  • Democrats who embraced Biden’s use of emergency orders to advance their agenda have been quick to denounce Trump for ruling by executive order.
  • Those who bristled at COVID mandates under Democrats now applaud Trump’s use of government force to impose his own version of “public safety.”
  • Both sides flip-flop on free speech. Conservatives denounced censorship on college campuses but defend banning “dangerous” books and surveilling dissidents, while liberals oppose Trump’s attempt to whitewash history yet defend platforms censoring speech they deem “harmful” or “hateful.”

The double standard is breathtaking.

Tyranny doesn’t change depending on who carries it out. Yet partisans convince themselves it does. They say: It’s different this time. It’s necessary. It’s for us.

In truth, the only difference is who holds the whip.

The Constitution was designed to restrain exactly this impulse. It does not say: “These rights apply only when the other party is in power.” It does not say: “The executive may rule by decree if he is popular.”

James Madison warned that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But men are not angels. That is why the Constitution separates powers, guarantees due process, and protects speech and assembly—especially in times of crisis.

Every time one party tramples these limits, the other eventually inherits those same powers and uses them in turn. The Patriot Act, passed under Bush, was wielded aggressively under Obama, Trump, and Biden. The executive orders one president signs become the precedents for the next.

“What you excuse today,” history warns us, “will be used against you tomorrow.”

The descent into tyranny always begins with justifications.

The Roman Republic collapsed into empire because senators claimed Caesar needed extraordinary powers to restore order. The republic never recovered.

In 1930s Germany, emergency decrees were defended as temporary measures to stabilize society. They became the permanent architecture of dictatorship.

In post-9/11 America, warrantless surveillance and secret courts were sold as temporary protections. Nearly a quarter-century later, they remain fixtures of government power.

Tyranny is never announced as tyranny. It is always justified as safety, morality, and order. It is always explained away as temporary. And it is always defended by people who believe they are on the winning side.

And so here we are.

A president issues executive orders that erode the Bill of Rights. His supporters applaud. Another president expands surveillance or censorship. His supporters applaud.

Both sides denounce the abuses of their opponents yet sanction the same abuses when carried out by their own.

This is how liberty dies—not with a sudden coup, but with partisan politics valued more than principled freedom.

The police state thrives on this selective outrage. It does not matter which party is in power. The machinery of control grows. The Constitution withers. And the people are left squabbling over whose tyrant is better.

There is only one antidote: principle.

You cannot defend freedom by defending tyranny when your side is in power. You cannot preserve liberty by cheering for its destruction. You cannot expect constitutional limits to shield you tomorrow if you discard them today.

The warnings span centuries. The Founders foresaw the danger: James Madison cautioned against the “gradual and silent encroachments” of government. Thomas Jefferson warned that the natural tendency of power is to grow.

Justice Louis Brandeis later confirmed it from the vantage point of the modern state: “the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

Those warnings went unheeded after 9/11, and we have been paying the price ever since. The bipartisan police-state architecture built in those years has only grown stronger, repurposed by each new administration.

Unless we find the courage to dismantle it, today’s justifications will become tomorrow’s permanent chains.

The lesson is clear: if you want liberty, you must defend it consistently—even when it restrains your own party, your own leader, your own side. Especially then.

What you excuse today will be used against you tomorrow.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it does not matter whether the abuse comes draped in red or blue. It does not matter whether it is cheered by the Right or justified by the Left.

Tyranny, once excused, becomes entrenched.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3htehha7

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surveillance has always arrived dressed as progress.

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

What began as voluntary has become inescapable and mandatory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it won’t stop there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This dystopian trajectory has been long foreseen and forewarned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve seen this dystopia before.

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

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

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

That concern is no longer theoretical.

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

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

This isn’t a left or right issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mr24w458

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

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