Posts Tagged ‘free speech’

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.

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

Would Orwell Be Branded a Terrorist? The Government’s War on Thought Crimes

Posted: September 24, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices—taking advantage of our freedom of speech—who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.”—Nat Hentoff

The Trump administration is taking its war on free speech into the realm of thought crimes.

This is more than politics.

In declaring “Antifa”—a loose ideology based on opposition to fascism—as a domestic terrorist organization, the government has given itself a green light to treat speech, belief, and association as criminal acts. With this one executive order, political dissent has been rebranded as terrorism and free thought recast as a crime.

Critics will argue that “Antifa” means rioting and property destruction. But violent acts are already crimes, handled under ordinary law.

What’s new—and dangerous—is punishing people not for violence, but for what they believe, say, or with whom they associate. Peaceful protest, political speech, and nonviolent dissent are now being lumped together with terrorism.

Violence should be prosecuted. But when peaceful protest and dissent are treated as terrorism, the line between crime and thought crime disappears.

When the government polices political belief, we’re no longer talking about crime—we’re talking about thought control.

This opens the door to guilt by association, thought crimes, and McCarthy-style blacklists, making it possible for the government to treat peaceful protesters, critics, or even casual sympathizers as terrorists.  

Protesters who identify with anti-fascist beliefs—or who, under this administration, simply challenge its power grabs and overreaches—can now be surveilled, prosecuted, and silenced, not for acts of violence but for what they think, say, or believe.

Under this executive order, George Orwell—the antifascist author of 1984—would become an enemy of the state.

This is how dissent becomes labeled as “terrorism” in a police state: by targeting political thought instead of criminal conduct.

Once you can be investigated and punished for your associations or sympathies, the First Amendment is reduced to empty words on paper.

Nor is this an isolated development. It is part of a larger pattern in which the right to think and speak freely without government interference or fear of retribution—long the bedrock of American liberty—is treated as a conditional privilege rather than an inalienable right, granted only to those who toe the official line and revoked from those who dare dissent.

The warning signs are everywhere.

The Pentagon now requires reporters to pledge not to publish “unauthorized” information. Broadcasters silence comedians after political outrage. Social media platforms delete or deplatform disfavored viewpoints.

The common thread running through these incidents is not their subject matter but their method.

Government officials don’t need to pass laws criminalizing dissent when they can simply ensure that dissent is punished and compliance rewarded.

The result is a culture of self-censorship.

The First Amendment was written precisely to prevent this kind of chilling effect.

The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized that speech does not lose protection simply because it is offensive, controversial, or even hateful.

Yet today, by redefining unpopular expression as “dangerous” or “unauthorized,” government officials have come up with a far more insidious way of silencing their critics.

In fact, the Court has held that it is “a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment…that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.” It is not, for example, a question of whether the Confederate flag represents racism but whether banning it leads to even greater problems—namely, the loss of freedom in general.

Along with the constitutional right to peacefully (and that means non-violently) assemble, the right to free speech allows us to challenge the government through protests and demonstrations and to attempt to change the world around us—for the better or the worse—through protests and counterprotests.

If citizens cannot stand out in the open and voice their disapproval of their government, its representatives, and its policies without fearing prosecution, then the First Amendment—with all its robust protections for speech, assembly, and petition—is little more than window dressing: pretty to look at, but serving little real purpose.

Living in a representative republic means that each person has the right to take a stand for what they think is right—whether that means marching outside the halls of government, wearing clothing with provocative statements, or simply holding up a sign.

That is what the First Amendment is supposed to be about: assuring the citizenry of the right to express their concerns about their government, in the time, place, and manner best suited to ensuring those concerns are heard.

Unfortunately, through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps and politically expedient court rulings, government officials have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it little more than the right to file a lawsuit against those in power.

In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges authority, exposes corruption, or encourages the citizenry to push back against injustice.

The machinery of censorship is more entrenched than ever.

With growing monopolies of the media, a handful of corporate gatekeepers dominate the digital public square. Government regulators hold powerful levers—licenses, contracts, antitrust threats—that can be used to manipulate content so that only what is approved is publicized. And a public increasingly conditioned to equate harm with offense becomes an unwitting accomplice to suppression, cheering the silencing of adversaries without realizing that the same tools will be used against them tomorrow.

This crackdown on expression is not limited to government action.

Corporate America has now taken the lead in policing speech online, with social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube using their dominance to censor, penalize, and regulate what users can say. Under the banner of “community standards” against obscenity, violence, hate speech, or intolerance, they suspend or ban users whose content strays from approved orthodoxy.

Make no mistake: this is fascism, American-style.

As presidential advisor Bertram Gross warned in Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, “Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties, or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism. . . . In America, it would be super modern and multi-ethnic—as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. As a warning against its cosmetic façade, subtle manipulation, and velvet gloves, I call it friendly fascism. What scares me most is its subtle appeal.”

The appeal here is the self-righteous claim to be fighting evils—hatred, violence, intolerance—using the weapons of Corporate America. But those weapons are easily redirected. Today they are aimed at “hate.” Tomorrow they will be aimed at dissent.

The effect is the same: the range of permissible ideas shrinks until only government-approved truths remain.

Combine this with Trump’s Antifa executive order, and the danger becomes unmistakable.

By labeling a loose ideology as terrorism, the government opens the door to treat political opposition as criminal conspiracy. Combine that with corporate censorship, and the result is chilling.

Together, they create a chokehold on dissent.

The Constitution’s promise of free speech becomes little more than words on paper if every outlet for expression—public or private—is policed, monitored, or denied.

“Free speech for me but not for thee” is how my good friend and free speech purist Nat Hentoff used to sum up this double standard.

We have entered an era in which free speech has become regulated speech: celebrated when it reflects the values of the majority, tolerated when it doesn’t, and branded “dangerous” when it dares to challenge political, religious, or cultural comfort zones.

President Trump, who regularly mocks critics while trying to muzzle those who speak out against him, may be the perfect poster child for this age of intolerance. Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, anti-bullying policies, hate-crime statutes, zero-tolerance rules—these legalistic tools, championed by politicians and prosecutors across the political spectrum, have steadily corroded the core freedom to speak one’s mind.

The U.S. government has become particularly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against its many injustices.

Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that is being flagged, censored, surveilled, or investigated by the government: “hate speech,” “intolerant speech,” “conspiratorial speech,” “treasonous speech,” “incendiary speech,” “anti-government speech,” “extremist speech,” and more.

By rebranding dissent as dangerous speech, government officials have given themselves the power to police expression without judicial oversight.

This is not a partisan issue.

Under one administration, speech may be stifled in the name of fighting “misinformation.” Under another, it may be curbed in the name of rooting out “dangerous” or “hateful” speech.

The justifications change with the politics of the moment, but the outcome is the same: less speech, narrower debate, and more fear.

The stakes could not be higher.

If we no longer have the right to tell an ICE agent to get off our property, to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before entering our home, to stand outside the Supreme Court with a protest sign, to approach an elected representative to share our views, or  if we no longer have the right to voice our opinions in public—no matter how offensive, intolerant, or politically incorrect—then we do not have free speech.

Just as surveillance stifles dissent, government censorship gives rise to self-censorship, breeds compliance, smothers independent thought, and fuels the kind of frustration that can erupt in violence.

The First Amendment is meant to be a steam valve: allowing people to speak their minds, air grievances, and contribute to a dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world. When that valve is shut—when there is no one to hear what people have to say— frustration builds, anger grows, and society becomes more volatile.

Silencing unpopular viewpoints with which the majority might disagree—whether by shouting them down, censoring them, or criminalizing them—only empowers the Deep State. The motives—discouraging racism, condemning violence, promoting civility—may sound well-intentioned, but the result is always the same: intolerance, indoctrination, and infantilism.

The police state could not ask for better citizens than those who do its censoring for it.

This is how a nation of free people becomes an extension of the surveillance state, turning citizens against each other while the government grows stronger.

The path forward is clear.

As Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his dissent in Colten v. Kentucky, “we need not stay docile and quiet” in the face of authority.

The Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials.

What is required is more speech not less—even when it offends.

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’s time to make the government hear us—see us—and heed us.

This is the ultimate power of free speech.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/2s49rpmp

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

Court Rules: Trump Can’t Impose State-Sanctioned Ideology on Harvard

Posted: September 6, 2025 in Uncategorized
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BOSTON, Mass. — In a major victory for the First Amendment and academic freedom, a federal court has ruled that the Trump administration’s blatant attempt to force Harvard University to conform to the government’s ideological viewpoint is unconstitutional.

The ruling by Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the U.S. District Court in Boston found that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment when it froze $2.2 billion dollars in research funding in an effort “to require Harvard to overhaul its governance, hiring, and academic programs to comport with the government’s ideology and prescribed viewpoint.” The Rutherford Institute joined a broad coalition of civil liberties organizations—including the ACLU, ACLU of Massachusetts, Cato Institute, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Knight First Amendment Institute, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press—in opposing the Trump administration’s attempts to wage a political war on academic freedom and ideological independence.

“This ruling is a powerful rebuke of the government’s attempt to police thought and punish dissent,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “By weaponizing federal funding to force ideological conformity, the Trump administration wasn’t just targeting Harvard—it was launching a war on the First Amendment itself. If the government can dictate what is taught in a university classroom, it won’t stop there—it will try to dictate what is preached in the pulpit, printed in the press, and spoken in the streets. This kind of ideological tyranny is the very danger the First Amendment was written to prevent.”

The district court’s ruling comes in response to an April 2025 move by the Trump administration to cancel billions in research funding and blacklist Harvard from future grants unless the university agreed to: vet students, faculty, and departments for “viewpoint diversity”; alter its hiring, admissions, and curriculum choices to conform to the government’s ideological preferences; submit to a third-party audit of programs that “reflect ideological capture”; and install new leadership committed to enforcing the government’s demands. Refusing to “surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights” and “be taken over by the federal government,” Harvard then filed a lawsuit challenging the government’s actions.

In coming to Harvard’s defense, the coalition’s amicus brief argued that the government cannot use its financial power to force any private institution—liberal or conservative—to adopt state-sanctioned views. The First Amendment, the brief emphasizes, guarantees that private universities retain autonomy over what to teach, how to teach, who will teach, and whom to admit—free from government control or interference. The federal court agreed, ordering the restoration of all previously withdrawn grants and prohibiting the federal government from denying future research funding to Harvard in retaliation for the exercise of its First Amendment rights.

Cecillia D. Wang, Ben Wizner, Vera Eidelman, Brian Hauss, Jessie J. Rossman, and Rachel E. Davidson at ACLU advanced the arguments in the amicus brief in President and Fellows of Harvard College v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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/ycx9acu7

Can the Government Decide What Counts as Worship? Court Says Yes—Rutherford Says No

Posted: August 7, 2025 in Uncategorized
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RICHMOND, Va. — The Rutherford Institute is once again warning that if the government is allowed to deny freedom to one segment of the citizenry, it will eventually extend that tyranny to all citizens.

The Institute’s warning comes in response to a trial court’s decision in Christian Scholars Network, Inc. v. Montgomery County and Town of Blacksburg to deny equal treatment to a faith-based campus study center—despite providing tax-exempt status to other religious and charitable organizations offering similar services. At issue is whether the Christian Scholars Network (CSN)—a nonprofit religious organization that holds Bible studies, worship services, prayer meetings, and faith-based community events at its Bradley Study Center—is entitled to the same tax-exempt treatment granted to other religious groups. The case raises critical constitutional questions about religious liberty, government neutrality, and equal protection for nontraditional faith practices under the First Amendment and the Virginia Constitution.

“The First Amendment forbids the government from picking and choosing which religious groups are ‘worthy’ of constitutional protection,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Whether it’s a church, a synagogue, a mosque, or a campus study center, the principle is the same: all faiths must be treated equally under the law. When the government starts elevating one form of religious practice over another, it sets a dangerous precedent that threatens freedom of belief for everyone.”

The Rutherford Institute’s lawsuit on behalf of Christian Scholars Network (CSN) comes amid growing concerns about governmental attempts to define religion narrowly, often to the detriment of minority or nontraditional faith communities. In 2019, CSN, a nonprofit ministry exempt from federal income tax by the IRS under section 501(c)(3), opened the Bradley Study Center near the Virginia Tech campus to cultivate a thoughtful exploration of the Christian faith and how one’s faith connects to their studies, work, and life. CSN uses the Study Center property for worship services, prayer meetings, Bible and theological book studies, and a Fellows Program for Virginia Tech students to meet weekly for religious discussions and fellowship. Despite fulfilling a comparable mission as other religious organizations, CSN was denied a property tax exemption on the grounds that its activities allegedly did not constitute “worship” and that it is not a “religious association” under Virginia law.

In coming to CSN’s defense, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute argue that the government’s refusal to recognize CSN’s religious character violates the Establishment Clause, fosters religious discrimination, and imposes a narrow, outdated definition of worship that excludes faith communities outside traditional, hierarchical structures. Institute attorneys also pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin, which affirms the right of faith-based organizations to operate free from government discrimination based on the structure or style of their worship and ministry. After the trial court refused to grant CSN an exemption, ruling that CSN must be like a traditional church to receive the tax exemption, attorneys with The Rutherford Institute appealed to the Virginia Court of Appeals.

Affiliate attorneys Melvin E. Williams and Meghan A. Strickler of Williams & Strickler, PLC helped advance the arguments on appeal in Christian Scholars Network, Inc. v. Montgomery County and Town of Blacksburg.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated, and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Case History

October 25, 2023 • Rutherford Institute Sues Over Discrimination of a Christian Study Center 

September 05, 2024 • Rutherford Institute Takes Government to Trial Over Discrimination of a Christian Study Center

Source: https://tinyurl.com/2kjxj7vx

The Real National Emergency: Endless Wars, Failing Infrastructure, and a Dying Republic

Posted: June 18, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”—President Dwight D. Eisenhower (April 16, 1953)

Seventy years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the cost of a military-industrial complex, America is still stealing from its own people to fund a global empire.

In 2025 alone, the U.S. has launched airstrikes in Yemen (Operation Rough Rider), bombed Houthi-controlled ports and radar installations (killing scores of civilians), deployed greater numbers of troops and multiple aircraft carriers to the Middle East, and edged closer to direct war with Iran in support of Israel’s escalating conflict.

Each of these “new” fronts has been sold to the public as national defense. In truth, they are the latest outposts in a decades-long campaign of empire maintenance—one that lines the pockets of defense contractors while schools crumble, bridges collapse, and veterans sleep on the streets at home.

This isn’t about national defense. This is empire maintenance.

It’s about preserving a military-industrial complex that profits from endless war, global policing, and foreign occupations—while the nation’s infrastructure rots and its people are neglected.

The United States has spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military-industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

America’s role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion.

And now, the price of empire is rising again.

Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

America’s military empire spans nearly 800 bases in 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

For 20 years, the U.S. war machine propped up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost. When troops left Afghanistan, the military-industrial complex simply shifted theaters—turning Yemen, Iran, and the Red Sea into new frontlines.

Each new conflict is marketed as national defense. In reality, it’s business as usual for the Pentagon’s global footprint, with American soldiers used as pawns in the government’s endless quest to control global markets, prop up foreign regimes, and secure oil, data, and strategic ports—all while being told it’s for liberty.

This is how the military-industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $10 trillion waging its endless wars, much of it borrowed, much of it wasted, all of it paid for in blood and taxpayer dollars.

Add Yemen and the Middle East escalations of 2025, and the final bill for future wars and military exercises waged around the globe will total in the tens of trillions.

Co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

Even if we ended the government’s military meddling today and brought all of the troops home, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

The fact that such price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

The bombing of Yemen’s Ras Isa port by U.S. forces—killing more than 80 civilians—is just the latest example of war crimes justified as national interest.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

With the 2025 escalation, those numbers will only rise.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

The nation’s infrastructure is in shambles. Public schools are underfunded. Mental health care is collapsing. Basic needs like housing, transportation, and clean water go unmet. Meanwhile, government contractors drop bombs on third-world villages and call it strategy.

This isn’t just bad budgeting. It’s moral bankruptcy. A country that can’t care for its own people has no business policing the rest of the world.

Bridges collapse, water systems fail, students drown in debt, and veterans sleep on the streets—while the Pentagon builds runways in the desert and funds proxy wars no one can explain.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of overhauling.

We are funding our own collapse. The roads rot while military convoys roll. The power grid fails while the drones fly. Our national strength is being siphoned off to feed a war machine that produces nothing but death, debt, and dysfunction.

We don’t need another war. We need a resurrection of the republic.

It’s time to stop policing the world. Bring the troops home. Shut down the military bases. End the covert wars. Slash the Pentagon’s budget. The path to peace begins with a full retreat from empire.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, war is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

In the end, it’s not just the empire that falls. It’s the republic it hollowed out along the way.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3k2jfchj

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.

Weaponizing Immigration: Trump Administration Accused of Using Deportation Powers to Punish Protesters, Chill Political Speech

Posted: June 17, 2025 in Uncategorized
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NEWARK, NJ — Warning that the Trump administration’s actions likely pose a serious threat to constitutional rights, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the government from deporting a legal U.S. resident under a little-used statute that allows the Secretary of State to deport non-citizens for expressing views deemed contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests.

Although the Supreme Court affirmed in 1945 that freedom of speech applies to all persons within the United States, including non-citizens, the Trump Administration has systematically weaponized its immigration enforcement in order to punish political dissent, targeting university students engaged in peaceful political protests for arrests, detentions and deportations. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate married to a U.S. citizen and father to a newborn, was arrested on March 8, 2025, by agents with the Department of Homeland Security for his vocal yet nonviolent criticism of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. In coming to Mahmoud Khalil’s defense, a legal coalition that includes The Rutherford Institute and FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) warned that allowing deportation based on a government official’s disapproval of someone’s speech threatens free expression for everyone.

“Political speech—even when unpopular or controversial—is protected under the Constitution,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If non-citizens can be jailed or deported simply for criticizing government policy, then we’re all at risk. The First Amendment protects everyone on American soil—citizen or not—but this case threatens to undermine that fundamental freedom.”

Although Mahmoud Khalil has not been accused of any vandalism or physical violence related to his protest activity at Columbia University, he was arrested and transported to an out-of-state detention center in Louisiana where he remains in ICE custody, far from his attorneys and family. In response to a Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, asking for Khalil’s release, the federal court granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting the government from detaining or deporting Khalil based on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that Khalil’s nonviolent protest activity would compromise a U.S. foreign policy interest—a determination which the court found likely violates due process rights when coupled with First Amendment protections. The judge warned that if such a law can be used against Khalil, “then other, similar statutes can also one day be made to apply. Not just in the removal context, as to foreign nationals. But also in the criminal context, as to everyone.” The court further invoked a chilling analogy: “Imagine…how quickly our constitutional [alarms] would rise if a local police chief were granted the power to arrest any person whose mere presence would cause potentially serious adverse consequences for the public peace.”

The court gave the Trump administration 40 hours to appeal or release Khalil from this charge. However, government lawyers did neither. Instead, the Trump administration pivoted, justifying Khalil’s ongoing detention on a second charge for allegedly failing to disclose that he was a member of certain humanitarian organizations—such as the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees—on his 2024 application for lawful permanent residence.

Ronnie London, Conor Fitzpatrick, Will Creeley, and others at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) advanced the arguments in the Khalil v. Trump 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.

Case History

March 20, 2025 • Deporting Non-Citizen Protesters Sets a Dangerous Precedent of Punishment and Retaliation for All Americans

Litigation: Mahmoud Khalil v. Donald Trump

New Jersey District Court

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mr24wkyc

The Spectacle of a Police State: This Is Martial Law Without a Formal Declaration of War

Posted: June 10, 2025 in Uncategorized
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Reporter: “What’s the bar for sending in the Marines?”

Trump: “The bar is what I think it is.“

In Trump’s America, the bar for martial law is no longer constitutional—it’s personal.

Indeed, if ever we needed proof that Donald Trump was an operative for the Deep State, this is it.

Despite what Trump would have us believe, the Deep State is not the vast numbers of federal employees who have been fired as part of his government purge.

Rather, the Deep State refers to the entrenched network of unelected bureaucrats, intelligence agencies, military contractors, surveillance firms, and corporate lobbyists that operate beyond the reach of democratic accountability. It is a government within a government—an intelligence-industrial complex that persists regardless of who sits in the Oval Office and whose true allegiance lies not with the Constitution but with power, profit, and control.

In other words, the Deep State doesn’t just survive presidential administrations—it recruits them. And in Trump, it has found a showman willing to turn its agenda into a public performance of raw power—militarized, theatrical, and loyal not to the Constitution, but to dominance.

What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is the latest chapter in that performance.

Trump is flexing his presidential muscles with a costly, violent, taxpayer-funded military display intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.

Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.

As columnist Thomas Friedman predicted years ago, “Some presidents, when they get into trouble before an election, try to ‘wag the dog’ by starting a war abroad. Donald Trump seems ready to wag the dog by starting a war at home.”

This is yet another manufactured crisis fomented by the Deep State.

When Trump issues a call to “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” explaining to reporters that he wants to have them “everywhere,” we should all be alarmed.

This is martial law without a formal declaration of war.

This heavy-handed, chest-thumping, politicized, militarized response to what is clearly a matter for local government is yet another example of Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and the limits of his power.

Political protests are protected by the First Amendment until they cross the line from non-violent to violent. Even when protests turn violent, constitutional protocols remain for safeguarding communities: law and order must flow through local and state chains of command, not from federal muscle.

By breaking that chain of command, Trump is breaking the Constitution.

Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by civilian police, despite the objections of local and state leaders, crosses the line into authoritarianism.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

In the span of a single week, the Trump administration is providing the clearest glimpse yet of its unapologetic, uncompromising, corrupt allegiance to the authoritarian Deep State.

First came the federalization of the National Guard, deployed to California in response to protests sparked by violent and aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country. Then, just days later, the president is set to preside over a lavish, taxpayer-funded military parade in the nation’s capital.

These two events bookend the administration’s unmistakable message: dissent will be crushed, and power will be performed.

Trump governs by force (military deployment), fear (ICE raids, militarized policing), and spectacle (the parade).

This is the spectacle of a police state. One side of the coin is militarized suppression. The other is theatrical dominance. Together, they constitute the language of force and authoritarian control.

Wrapped in the rhetoric of “public safety” and “restoring order,” the federalization of California’s National Guard is not about security. It’s about signaling power.

This is the first time in over half a century that a president has forcibly deployed the National Guard against a state governor’s wishes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s public opposition to the deployment was met not with dialogue, but with the threat of arrest from Trump himself—a move that evokes the worst abuses of executive power.

This is more than political theater; it is a constitutional crisis in motion.

As we have warned before, this tactic is familiar.

In times of political unrest, authoritarian regimes invoke national emergencies as pretexts to impose military solutions. The result? The Constitution is suspended, civilian control is overrun, and the machinery of the state turns against its own people.

This is precisely what the Founders feared when they warned against standing armies on American soil: that one day, the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them. Where the military marches at home, the Republic trembles.

And this is not unprecedented.

It is a textbook play from the authoritarian handbook, deployed with increasing frequency under Trump. The optics are meant to intimidate, to broadcast control, and to discourage resistance before it begins.

Fear is the Deep State’s favorite tool—it doesn’t just control the people, it conditions them to surrender voluntarily.

Thus, deploying the National Guard in this manner is not just a political maneuver—it is a strategic act of fear-based governance designed to instill terror, particularly among vulnerable communities, and ensure compliance.

As President Harry S. Truman observed, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

Under Trump, the lines between a civilian democracy and a military regime continue to blur. American streets increasingly resemble war zones, where peaceful protests are met with riot gear, armored vehicles, and surveillance drones.

America is being transformed into a battlefield before our eyes.

Militarized police. Riot squads. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Stun grenades. Crowd control and intimidation tactics.

From federal law enforcement to local police, from border patrol to the intelligence agencies, the guiding doctrine is the same: treat Americans as suspects first, citizens second—if at all.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

This is the language of force.

This is what happens when the rule of law gets replaced by the rules of force: war becomes the organizing principle of domestic governance, law becomes subordinate to command, and liberty is reclassified as a liability.

The war zone mentality—where citizens are treated like insurgents to be subdued—is a hallmark of authoritarian rule.

This transformation is not accidental—it’s strategic. The government now sees the public not as constituents to be served but as potential combatants to be surveilled, managed, and subdued. In this new paradigm, dissent is treated as insurrection, and constitutional rights are treated as threats to national security.

What we are witnessing today is also part of a broader setup: an excuse to use civil unrest as a pretext for militarized overreach.

You want to turn a peaceful protest into a riot? Bring in the militarized police with their guns and black uniforms and warzone tactics and “comply or die” mindset. Ratchet up the tension across the board. Take what should be a healthy exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turn it into a lesson in authoritarianism.

We saw signs of this strategy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where police failed to de-escalate and at times exacerbated tensions during protests that should have remained peaceful. The resulting chaos gave authorities cover to crack down—not to protect the public, but to reframe protest as provocation and dissent as disorder.

Charlottesville was the trial run—California is the main event.

Then and now, the objective wasn’t to preserve peace and protect the public. It was to delegitimize dissent and cast protest as provocation.

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

The government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power. While all kinds of labels are now applied to “unacceptable” speech, the message is clear: Americans have no right to express themselves if what they are saying is at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Which brings us to this present moment: there’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.

Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Tensions rise, violence escalates, and federal armies move in. Meanwhile, despite the protests and the outrage, the government’s abuses continue unabated.

It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the Deep State. The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.

They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another. They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces. They want us silent, servile and compliant.

They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, much less attempt to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully.

This is how it begins.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.

Today, California is being staged as the test site for the coming crackdown.

The Trump administration provokes unrest through inhumane policies—in this case, mass ICE raids—then paints the resulting protests as violent threats to national security. The answer? Deploy the military.

It’s a cynical and calculated loop: create the crisis, then respond with force. This strategy transforms protest into pretext, dissent into justification for domination.

There are disturbing echoes of history in these tactics, and they come with grave legal implications. We have seen this before.

It has been 55 years since President Nixon deployed the National Guard to put down anti-war student protests, culminating in the Kent State massacre. During the civil rights era, peaceful demonstrators were met with dogs, firehoses, and police batons. In more recent memory, federal agents cracked down on Occupy Wall Street encampments and Black Lives Matter protests with militarized force.

All of it under the guise of order.

Trump’s tactics fall squarely in that lineage.

His use of the military against civilians violates the spirit—if not the letter—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is meant to bar federal military involvement in domestic affairs. It also raises severe constitutional questions about the infringement of First Amendment rights to protest and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure.

Modern tools of repression compound the threat. AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing software, biometric databases, and fusion centers have made mass control seamless and silent. The state doesn’t just respond to dissent anymore; it predicts and preempts it.

While boots are on the ground in California, preparations are underway for a military spectacle in Washington, D.C.

At first glance, a military procession might seem like a patriotic display. But in this context, it is something far darker. Trump’s parade is not a celebration of service; it is a declaration of supremacy. It is not about honoring troops; it is about reminding the populace who holds the power and who wields the guns.

This is how authoritarian regimes govern—through spectacle. North Korea, Russia, and China use grandiose military pageants to project strength and silence dissent. Mussolini marched troops as theater in carefully staged public displays to bolster fascist control. Augusto Pinochet filled Chile’s streets with tanks to intimidate critics and consolidate power. All of it designed not to honor the nation—but to dominate it.

By sandwiching a military crackdown between a domestic troop deployment and a showy parade, Trump is sending a unified message: dissent is weakness. Obedience is strength. You are being watched.

This is not about immigration. It is not about security. It is not even about protest.

This is about power. Raw, unchecked, theatrical power. And whether we, the people, will accept a government that rules not by consent, but by coercion.

The Constitution was not written to accommodate authoritarian pageantry. It was written to restrain it. It was never meant to sanctify conquest as governance.

We are at a crossroads.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Strip away that consent, and all that remains is conquest—through force, spectacle, and fear.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we allow the language of fear, the spectacle of dominance, and the machinery of militarized governance to become normalized, then we are no longer citizens of a republic—we are subjects of a police state.

The only question now is: will we rise up as citizens of a constitutional republic—or bow down as subjects of an authoritarian regime?

Source: https://tinyurl.com/y3vvk783

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.

Facing Court Losses, White House Considers Suspending Habeas Corpus

Posted: May 12, 2025 in Uncategorized
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BURLINGTON, Vt. — In the wake of a string of court challenges over its arrests, detentions and deportations of university students engaged in political protests, the Trump Administration is threatening to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, a constitutional principle with roots in British law that assures everyone in the United States, including noncitizens, of the right to challenge a detention in court.

The White House’s admission that it is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus came on the same day that the U.S. District Court for Vermont ordered the immediate release of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student who was seized on the street near her apartment by masked, plainclothes ICE agents; shoved into an unmarked car; and transported out of state to a detention center pending deportation. Although never charged with a crime, Öztürk was targeted by government officials for co-authoring an op-ed in a student paper a year earlier expressing support for Palestinian civilians during a time of heightened international conflict. The Rutherford Institute joined a coalition of civil liberties organizations (including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the National Coalition Against Censorship, PEN America, Cato Institute, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association) to file an amicus brief in Öztürk v. Trump challenging the legality of Öztürk’s arrest and detention through her petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

“This is not about public safety. This is about silencing dissent. The U.S. government is weaponizing immigration enforcement to punish political dissent,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If the government can silence, detain, and deport individuals simply for speaking out on political issues, then no one’s speech is truly safe and we’re no longer operating under the Constitution. We’re living under a system of political policing.”

Öztürk, a Turkish national lawfully present in the U.S. on a student visa, is pursuing a doctorate in the Child Study and Human Development program at Tufts University. Unbeknownst to Öztürk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked her visa as part of a campaign by the Trump Administration to retaliate against those who publicly criticize Israel. Öztürk was detained without warning by masked, plainclothes agents on March 25, 2025, and transferred more than 1,500 miles away from her home in Massachusetts to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center. In its amicus brief challenging Öztürk’s detention as unconstitutional, the legal coalition contends that the government’s actions set a dangerous precedent in which political speech can be treated as evidence of threat, opening the door for officials to selectively punish individuals based on the content and viewpoint of their expression.

The implications reach far beyond Öztürk’s case. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has increasingly targeted immigrants and legal visa holders for arrest, deportation, or visa revocation based solely on their political expression. In one case, a legal aid attorney had her visa canceled after attending a peaceful protest. In another, a university lecturer was denied re-entry to the U.S. over critical social media posts. Such tactics, the coalition contends, create a sweeping chilling effect for anyone who dares to speak out against government policy.

Ronnie London, Conor Fitzpatrick, Colin McDonell, Will Creeley, and others at FIRE advanced the arguments in the Öztürk v. Trump 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.

Case History

May 01, 2025 • Civil Liberties Advocates Sound Alarm Over Arrest of PhD Student for Political Views

Source: https://tinyurl.com/22v9an5u

No One’s Speech Is Safe: Trump’s Deportation Machine Targets Dissenting Voices

Posted: May 2, 2025 in Uncategorized
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BURLINGTON, Vt. — Warning that the U.S. government is weaponizing immigration enforcement to punish political dissent, The Rutherford Institute has joined a coalition of civil liberties organizations in challenging the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student whose only alleged offense was expressing support for Palestinian civilians during a time of heightened international conflict.

In a joint amicus brief filed before the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont in Öztürk v. Trump, the coalition—including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the National Coalition Against Censorship, PEN America, Cato Institute, First Amendment Lawyers Association, and The Rutherford Institute—argues that Öztürk’s arrest by federal agents and the attempt to deport her represent a dangerous abuse of power rooted in viewpoint discrimination and retaliation against protected political speech.

“This is not about public safety. This is about silencing dissent,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If the government can silence, detain, and deport individuals simply for speaking out on political issues, then no one’s speech is truly safe and we’re no longer operating under a Constitution. We’re living under a system of political policing.”

Öztürk, a Turkish national lawfully present in the U.S. on a student visa, is pursuing a doctorate in the Child Study and Human Development program at Tufts University. She was seized on the street near her apartment on March 25, 2025, by masked, plainclothes agents who grabbed her as she screamed, handcuffed her, and took her away in an unmarked vehicle. Unbeknownst to Öztürk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had revoked her visa, apparently in response to an op-ed she co-wrote a year earlier in which she criticized her university’s administration for dismissing student government resolutions which aimed to hold Israel accountable for alleged violations of international law in Palestine—views that diverge sharply from the Trump Administration’s. She was detained without warning and transferred more than 1,500 miles away from her home in Massachusetts to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.

According to the brief, there are no allegations that Öztürk engaged in violence or illegal activity. The coalition contends that the government’s effort to suppress disfavored political views is flatly prohibited by the Constitution. Moreover, the government’s actions set a dangerous precedent in which political speech can be treated as evidence of threat or disloyalty. This, the coalition warns, opens the door for officials to selectively punish individuals based on the content and viewpoint of their expression. The implications reach far beyond Öztürk’s case. Since returning to office in 2025, the Trump Administration has increasingly targeted immigrants and legal visa holders for arrest, deportation, or visa revocation based solely on their political expression. In one case, a legal aid attorney had her visa canceled after attending a peaceful protest. In another, a university lecturer was denied re-entry to the U.S. over critical social media posts. Such tactics, the coalition contends, create a sweeping chilling effect—not only for immigrants, but for anyone who dares to speak out against government policy.

Ronnie London, Conor Fitzpatrick, Colin McDonell, Will Creeley, and others at FIRE advanced the arguments in the Ozturk v. Trump 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/3ne6t5rw

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