Posts Tagged ‘government’

Giving Thanks for Our Blessings Means Saying ‘No Thanks’ to Police State Tyranny

Posted: November 25, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.”—Daniel Webster

We find ourselves approaching that time of year when, as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, we’re supposed to give thanks as a nation and as individuals for our safety and our freedoms.

It’s not an easy undertaking.

The contrast between George Washington’s first Thanksgiving proclamation and the state of the nation today reveals how far we have drifted—and how low we have fallen—since Washington called upon early Americans (a nation of immigrants) to give thanks for a government that protected their safety and happiness, and for a Constitution designed to safeguard civil and religious liberty.

But how do you give thanks for freedoms that are constantly being eroded?

How do you express gratitude for one’s safety when the perils posed by the American police state grow more treacherous by the day?

How do you come together as a nation in thanksgiving when the powers-that-be continue to polarize and divide us into warring factions?

To our collective misfortune, we have been saddled with a government that is a far cry from Washington’s vision: governed by wise, just, constitutional laws; faithfully executed by principled public servants; promoting peace, virtue, and liberty; and fostering the prosperity of the nation.

Instead, the U.S. government has become a warring empire: lawless in its ambitions, militarized in its posture, abusive in its policing, and increasingly hostile to conscience, truth, and constitutional limits.

Washington never intended Thanksgiving to be a day of glib platitudes—a moment to be grateful for whatever crumbs the government chooses to bestow upon us. He intended it to be a day of reflection, honesty, and moral accounting, a day when the nation examines its failures, acknowledges its wrongs, and commits to restoring liberty in the year ahead.

If Thanksgiving is to mean anything in times such as these, it must also compel us to speak plainly about the forces that threaten our freedom. Giving thanks for our blessings requires the courage to say “no thanks” to the very forces working to strip away the blessings we claim to celebrate.

In that true spirit of Thanksgiving, here is a sobering list of things for which we should not give thanks in this age of the American police state.

Say “no thanks” to oligarchy and self-serving, pay-to-play politics. A pay-to-play culture now permeates the highest levels of government, dominated by a mindset that money—not law—defines the boundaries of power. America is being bought and sold by corporate elites and political cronies. “We the People” have been pushed into a permanent underclass, ruled by a political machine that monetizes every aspect of governance—surveillance, policing, incarceration, immigration enforcement, even war itself. Our elected officials increasingly represent the interests of the wealthy and well-connected rather than the rights and needs of the citizenry. This is oligarchy masquerading as representative government.

Say “no thanks” to an imperial presidency that rules by fiat. Executive power has metastasized into something the Framers would not recognize. In 2025 alone, we have seen:

• sweeping executive orders redefining law without Congress’ oversight or approval,
• federal agencies weaponized against political enemies,
• unilateral decisions to deploy federal troops domestically,
• and attempts to redefine constitutional rights by proclamation.

Whether the occupant of the Oval Office is a Republican or Democrat, the result is the same: presidents now behave as lawmakers, judges, and enforcers combined — a constitutional impossibility and a recipe for dictatorship. The Founders warned us plainly: when one person claims the authority to rule by decree, liberty is already in mortal danger.

Say “no thanks” to martial law and standing armies used against the American people. What once would have been unthinkable is now routine. National Guard units have been federalized to police protests. Tactical teams roam American streets outfitted like combat forces. A generation of Americans is growing up under the shadow of armored vehicles and militarized responses to ordinary civil unrest. This year’s federal deployments in California and elsewhere following ICE raids—justified by vague claims of “restoring order”—are only the latest sign. A government comfortable using soldiers against its own citizens is a government that has abandoned the constitutional line between civilian authority and military force.

Say “no thanks” to the government’s fear tactics. Fear is the oldest tool of tyranny. We have seen fear weaponized to justify:

• speech crackdowns,
• “domestic threat” watchlists,
• expanded surveillance authorities,
• “emergency powers” without end,
• and the rounding up of vulnerable populations under the guise of safety.

From mental-health “round-ups” to demands that soldiers obey unlawful commands without question, fear has become the operating currency of government power. When the people are afraid, they can be controlled. When one’s right to conscience is criminalized, that conscience can be silenced.

Say “no thanks” to endless wars. For more than two decades, the U.S. has been mired in endless wars without clear objectives, limits, or endpoints. The war footing has become perpetual—an unbroken justification for secrecy, surveillance, militarization, and unchecked executive power. Wars abroad have consequences at home: they brutalize our politics, exhaust our populace, expand federal power, and normalize the idea that violence—rather than diplomacy, law, or liberty—is the default solution for national problems.

Say “no thanks” to everywhere wars. When government can label anyone, anywhere, 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 communities across the country. The lesson to be learned: a nation permanently on war footing eventually turns its war machinery inward.

Say “no thanks” to the transformation of domestic police into extensions of the military.  For decades, billions in Pentagon gear—tanks, drones, armored carriers, battlefield weapons — have been funneled to local police under the 1033 military surplus program. Training once reserved for war zones has become standard for domestic policing. The results are unmistakable:

• SWAT raids for routine warrants,
• trigger-happy policing,
• a “kill or be killed” mentality,
• and communities patrolled like occupied territories.

The police are no longer peace officers. They are an occupying force.

Say “no thanks” to ICE raids that trample constitutional rights and terrorize communities. What began as an agency tasked with immigration enforcement has mutated into something far darker: a roaming domestic strike force. ICE’s quota-driven model incentivizes arrests at all costs, creating a bounty-hunter culture in which constitutional rights are obstacles, not guarantees. 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. No one is off limits—not even American citizens.

Say “no thanks” to a government mindset that seeks to transform the nation into a prison state. From the creation of Alligator Alcatraz to the administration’s $170 billion plan for megaprisons, the U.S. incarceration system is being expanded at breakneck speed. Combined with predictive enforcement, surveillance dragnets, and limits on due process, the United States is rapidly becoming a prison state — one that cages not only bodies, but autonomy, dissent, and opportunity.

Say “no thanks” to a surveillance state that has become a fourth branch of government.  We now live in a world in which everything—your words, your purchases, your location, your associations—is recorded, stored, and weaponized by the government and its corporate partners in crime. The surveillance state watches, catalogs, and predicts everything we do. This year alone has seen the normalization of:

• Palantir-powered national tracking systems,
• AI threat-scoring of ordinary Americans,
• geofence warrants turning whole neighborhoods into suspects,
• biometric mandates proposed as “public health tools,”
• and the creation of federal databases of “pre-crime indicators.”

Say “no thanks” to a government that punishes the poor. 2025 has brought a brutal resurgence of debtors’ courts, cash-bail coercion, poverty penalties, and retaliatory prosecutions. The criminal legal system has become a two-tiered caste structure—harsh for the poor, lenient for the powerful.

Say “no thanks” to policies that muzzle dissent. Whistleblowers, journalists, activists, and critics continue to find themselves targeted for speaking truth to power. In a climate where thought crimes and “dangerous ideas” are policed, those who criticize the government are increasingly being portrayed as traitors and subjected to investigation and prosecution.

Say “no thanks” to courts that rubber-stamp government power. Time and again, the courts have chosen order over justice, secrecy over transparency, and government power over constitutional rights—refusing to rein in geofence warrants, no-knock raids, military deployments, or the ever-expanding surveillance state.

Say “no thanks” to a government that criminalizes the rights enshrined in the Constitution. Perhaps the most alarming development of all is the growing chorus of political voices calling for the arrest—even the execution—of those who urge members of the military to follow their conscience and refuse unlawful, unconstitutional orders. Let us be clear: the American military’s oath is to the Constitution—not to any president, political agenda, or unlawful order. Anyone who suggests otherwise should be court-martialed.

Say “no thanks” to government theft disguised as fines, fees, taxes, and forfeitures. When the government can seize your home, your car, your money, or your property without due process, you are no longer a free citizen—you are a subject. Asset forfeiture, civil penalties, red-light cameras, code-enforcement schemes, and debt-trap fines have turned the government at all levels into a predatory revenue machine. The line between public property and private property has vanished. This is legalized theft.

At some point, we’ve got to face up to the uncomfortable truth that freedom is slipping through our fingers, and that the government now poses a greater threat to our safety than any outside force ever could.

We cannot keep pretending that “it can’t happen here” while it is happening all around us.

There comes a point at which no people—not even a patient, hopeful, long-suffering people—can continue pretending that the crumbs of liberty left to them constitute freedom.

Thanksgiving is supposed to remind us of our blessings. But it is also meant to remind us of our responsibilities.

A free people must do more than count their blessings.

We must guard them. We must assert them. We must defend them—even when doing so is dangerous, costly, or unpopular.

There is still time to turn back from the brink, but the hour is late.

If we want future generations to enjoy even a measure of the freedom we inherited, then “We the People” must refuse to go quietly into the machinery of the police state.

We must refuse to be governed by fear.

We must refuse to surrender our rights for the illusion of safety.

And we must refuse to bow to those who insist that conscience is treason and obedience is the highest virtue.

The Founders gave us a constitutional republic on the condition that we fight to keep it. That responsibility cannot be outsourced to politicians, courts, or parties. It rests squarely with the people themselves, with those who refuse to surrender conscience, rights, or truth to the demands of tyrants.

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 only force strong enough to restrain government overreach is an informed, engaged, and courageous citizenry that will not trade its birthright for the hollow comforts of authoritarianism.

The future of freedom depends not on presidents or parties but on “We the People”—ordinary individuals who refuse to be silent, refuse to be intimidated, and refuse to give up on the promise of America.

So this Thanksgiving, let us give thanks. But let us also say—with clarity and conviction—no thanks to tyranny, in whatever form it takes.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3z6wd9wz

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. 

America’s Crime Syndicate Government: Profiteering, Protection Rackets & a Pay-to-Play Presidency

Posted: November 19, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”—Michael Corleone, The Godfather

Pay-to-play schemes. Protection rackets. Extortion. Corruption. Self-enrichment. Graft. Grift. Brutality. Roaming bands of thugs smashing car windows and terrorizing communities. Immunity for criminal behavior coupled with prosecutions of whistleblowers.

This is how a crime syndicate operates—not a constitutional republic.

What we are witnessing today is the steady transformation of the federal government—especially the executive branch—into a criminalized system of power in which justice is weaponized, law is selectively enforced, and crime becomes a form of political currency.

While the American police state has long marched in lockstep with the old truism that power corrupts—and absolute power corrupts absolutely—the Trump administration has ceased even the pretense of being bound by the Constitution.

Rather than abiding by the rule of law, this administration operates as if there are two separate legal systems: one for themselves and their cronies, and one for everyone else.

The corruption is off the charts, the conflicts of interest are in your face, and the brazenness is staggering.

For instance, President Trump wants his own Justice Department to put American taxpayers on the line to pay him $230 million in damages over FBI investigations into his alleged past misconduct.

Journalist David D. Kirkpatrick calculates that Donald Trump and his immediate family have made more than $3.4 billion from his time in the White House, including more than $2.3 billion from various cryptocurrency ventures alone.

In May 2025, Trump was accused of selling access to accumulate personal wealth when he hosted a private event for 220 crypto investors who had bought into his meme coin. News reports estimate that buyers spent about $148 million in total on the coin and associated perks, with some spending $1.8 million to attend.

The average American can’t get any kind of access to our elected representatives, but the wealthy can buy their way through the door.

Measured against this reality, Thomas Jefferson’s warning to bind government down “by the chains of the Constitution” sounds almost quaint.

How do you use the Constitution to guard against government misconduct when the government has effectively rendered the Constitution null and void?

It has become increasingly difficult to pretend that we are still dealing with a functioning republic.

What we have instead is a government that behaves like a criminal enterprise: rewarding loyalty, punishing dissent, monetizing public service, and enriching itself through favors, loopholes, and outright graft.

Consider the pay-to-play culture that now permeates the highest levels of power.

The Foreign Gifts and Decoration Act bars the president and federal officials from accepting gifts worth more than $480 from foreign governments (unless they’re accepted on behalf of the United States—meaning they would then belong to the American people—or purchased by the official). Yet congressional investigators have already documented more than a hundred foreign gifts to Trump and his family that went unreported for months in violation of disclosure rules.

The publicly-reported gifts being showered upon President Trump by foreign governments and politically connected foreign corporations include: a gold crown, a Rolex desk clock and a one-kilogram personalized gold bar worth $130,000, and a $400 million luxury Boeing 747.

These are not tokens of diplomacy; they are currency—investments in influence, access, and favorable policy.

As Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, explains, “It’s unconstitutional in the United States for the president or anyone else in a position of power to receive anything of value from a foreign government. That is unconstitutional. But if the gift is from a foreign corporation or a private interest, it’s not technically prohibited under the emoluments clause of the Constitution. But it’s still a very, very dangerous precedent to set that foreign interests can give gifts to the president and then get a concession on tariffs or anything else.”

In many cases, these gifts went unreported to the State Department, only coming to light through House investigations and watchdog reports—concealed from the public and from Congress until after the fact.

That secrecy was not accidental. It was strategic.

At the same time, the conflicts of interest just keep piling up.

Federal contracts, regulatory decisions, and diplomatic overtures increasingly appear correlated with the interests of those giving the gifts. A growing number of domestic and foreign business interests appear to be receiving preferential treatment from agencies whose regulatory decisions align suspiciously with Trump’s personal business deals advancing behind the scenes.

And then there are more obvious pay-to-play schemes like the White House Ballroom, a projected 90,000-square-foot monstrosity funded by tech and defense giants such as Apple, Google, Palantir and Lockheed Martin—corporate donors who now help underwrite the president’s vanity project even as their regulatory and contracting interests sit squarely in his hands.

This quid pro quo governance—private profit in exchange for public policy—does not resemble republican self-government. It resembles a protection racket, where the powerful exchange favors not for the public good but for personal gain—and access and immunity are available for purchase by those willing to pay.

Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are told that the system is blind, impartial, and committed to the “rule of law.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

According to a bombshell investigation by the New York Times, career attorneys inside the Department of Justice spent the first ten months of Trump’s second term documenting—often in real time—how the justice system was being hijacked to serve political priorities rather than legal ones.

Federal lawyers told the Times that they were instructed to drop cases for political reasons, to hunt for evidence to justify flimsy investigations, and to defend executive actions they believed had no legal basis or were plainly unlawful. They also detailed the work they were told to abandon—cases involving terrorism plots, corruption, and white-collar fraud—because those investigations did not serve the administration’s political priorities.

As Dena Robinson, a former Justice Department lawyer for the Civil Rights Division, remarked on Pam Bondi’s transformation of the department into a political tool, “One thing that stuck out to me was her insistence that we served at the pleasure of the president and that we were enforcing the president’s priorities. We swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.”

Prosecution for enemies, immunity for allies, and indifference toward actual crime: this is the Trump administration’s modus operandi.

The courts are also growing increasingly leery over the federal government’s casual relationship with the truth.

In case after case—from prosecutions tied to the politically-charged James Comey indictment, to challenges over Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, to lawsuits alleging the government is attempting to circumvent basic due process protections in immigration cases by shipping people to offshore detention facilities in third countries, often in partnership with private prison contractors, where legal safeguards are far weaker—courts have scolded federal lawyers for withholding records, mischaracterizing facts, or offering assertions that crumble under scrutiny.

When the government lies to the courts, it is not just lying to a judge but to the American people. We are the ultimate arbiters of justice. It is our rights that ultimately hang in the balance.

Unfortunately, the rot doesn’t stop there.

The presidential pardon—intended to be a mechanism for mercy—has become a political reward system.

The numbers speak volumes.

During Trump’s first term, he issued 238 pardons and commutations; less than a year into his second term, he has issued nearly 2,000 pardons, costing victims and taxpayers more than $1.3 billion.

According to The Marshall Project, among those pardoned by Trump, “One faced a four-year prison sentence in a $675 million fraud case for marketing an electric truck that wasn’t drivable. Another tried to overthrow the government. A tax cheat avoided prison and $4.4 million in restitution after his mom donated $1 million to the president.” Another pardon recipient was facing “charges of child pornography and the sexual assault of a preadolescent girl.”

Whether Trump pardons Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sex traffic teenaged girls, remains to be seen. However, since Trump has taken office, Maxwell has enjoyed dramatic improvements in her prison life: a transfer to a minimum-security federal prison, custom meals delivered to her cell, snacks and refreshments provided during private meetings with family and friends—even special access to a puppy and unlimited toilet paper.

As ProPublica details, Trump’s pardons overwhelmingly benefit political loyalists, donors, grifters, extremists, and individuals either convicted of crimes in pursuit of Trump’s ambitions or who might help to advance those ambitions in the future—or both.

A judiciary committee report found that “Trump’s pardons have made criminals $1.3 [billion] richer by allowing them to keep the money they stole from their victims and dodge their fines. The pardon power in Trump’s hands is a way to take a huge amount of wealth that is legally owed to victims and transfer it back to the criminals who stole it from them in the first place.”

These are not miscarriages of justice being corrected; they are protection payments, signals to future operatives: do what we need you to do, and we will take care of you.

The message is unmistakable: Commit crimes that benefit those in power, and those in power will absolve you.

The double standard is staggering.

Critics, journalists, students, and whistleblowers face investigations, surveillance, and in some cases arrest for constitutionally protected activities—while those charged with committing actual crimes in support of the administration are shielded, absolved, or financially rewarded.

That is not the rule of law. That is the rule of power.

In a constitutional government, the pardon power is meant to temper justice with mercy.

In an unrestrained government, the pardon power becomes a mechanism for shielding insiders, silencing potential witnesses, rewarding political operatives, and signaling to future enforcers that their loyalty will be repaid.

Once justice is weaponized—once the government becomes both the ultimate lawmaker and the ultimate lawbreaker—once the president decides that his own power, not the Constitution, is the highest authority—the distinction between governance and criminality collapses.

A government that can ignore transparency laws will hide its misconduct.

A government that can lie to the courts will lie to its people.

A government that can criminalize political opposition can criminalize anyone.

A government that can pardon loyal criminals can persecute those who expose them.

This is not hypothetical. It is happening now.

Look at the surveillance state: millions of Americans monitored through AI-powered tools, data-mined by private intelligence contractors, and flagged by opaque algorithms—while the government shields its own communications, decisions, and financial entanglements behind secrecy laws and executive privilege.

Look at policing: violent, militarized crackdowns on immigrants, journalists, and protesters—even as the administration dismisses, excuses, or encourages lawlessness among vigilantes, paramilitary groups, and politically aligned street militias.

Look at foreign policy: threats to bomb Venezuela—transparent attempts to distract from falling polling numbers and the widening Epstein scandal—being framed as “national security” rather than what they are: geopolitical aggression with no constitutional or moral grounding. This isn’t defensive war; it is a land grab masquerading as patriotism, no different in principle from Putin’s overreach in Ukraine or Israel’s expansionist aims in Gaza, except that the United States has even less pretense of legitimate territorial claim.

Look at governance: executive orders increasingly treated as substitutes for legislation, bypassing Congress, the courts, and constitutional checks. The president no longer requests authority; he assumes it.

Look at transparency: the administration’s refusal to release the October jobs numbers—an unprecedented hiding of core economic data—under the pretext that the government shutdown made the figures unusable. Former Labor Department officials warn that the missing report comes just as private data are flashing recession-level job losses. When a government refuses to share basic economic indicators with the public, it is no longer governing. It is manipulating.

This is not constitutionalism. This is consolidation—an executive branch absorbing the functions of lawmaking, law enforcement, and legal interpretation into a single, unaccountable center of power.

This is not “law and order.” This is the government redefining order in its own image and using law to enforce its will.

The Founders warned us about this.

Yet here we are, watching a government that no longer even pretends to fear the Constitution. A government that openly cultivates a culture of impunity, where criminality is not a hindrance to power but an asset—evidence of loyalty, aggression, and willingness to “do what needs to be done.”

A government like this does not serve the people—it rules them. It does not protect rights—it manages them. It does not uphold law—it deploys law as a weapon.

It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the actions of the American government and those of a cartel—one that wears suits instead of masks, but engages in the same core behaviors: loyalty above legality, retaliation against critics, protection for insiders, secrecy, intimidation, and the monetization of public office.

This is how nations fall—not through foreign invasion but through internal corruption.

When the government becomes the greatest violator of rights, the people lose faith in justice.

When the government becomes the greatest source of disinformation, the people lose faith in truth.

When the government becomes the greatest beneficiary of criminality, the people lose faith in democracy itself.

Democracy becomes theater. Elections become rituals. Rights become privileges granted or revoked at the discretion of those in power.

The Constitution is not a self-enforcing document. It has no army, no treasury, no enforcement bureau of its own. It binds only those who agree to be bound by its edicts. When officials refuse to be bound, the Constitution becomes a relic—a symbol invoked rhetorically but ignored in practice.

The only way out is the way the Founders intended: by rebinding government down with the chains of the Constitution. But those chains must be enforced by “We the People.” They must be tightened around those who wield power.

Without constitutional chains, the president becomes an imperial dictator.

Without oversight, the justice system becomes a political weapon.

Without accountability, government becomes a self-serving, money-laundering enterprise masquerading as legitimate authority.

If America is to remain a free nation, those chains must be tightened—not loosened, ignored, or replaced with partisan loyalty.

The rule of law must apply to the powerful, not just the powerless.

The justice system must serve the public, not the president.

And 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 the people” must reclaim our role as the ultimate check on government misconduct.

For without constitutional restraints, there is no justice.

Without constitutional limits, there is no accountability.

And without accountability, there is no republic—only a crime syndicate masquerading as a government.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/5bnr3ebv

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. 

Rule by Thieves: The Police State Becomes a Pay-to-Play Shadow Government

Posted: November 4, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

“Kleptocracy: a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people.”—Cambridge Dictionary

America has been backsliding into kleptocratic territory for years now, but this may finally be it.

A kleptocracy is literally “rule by thieves.”

It is a form of government in which a network of ruling elites “steal public funds for their own private gain using public institutions.” As analyst Thomas Mayne explains, it’s “a system based on virtually unlimited grand corruption coupled with, in the words of American academic Andrew Wedeman, ‘near-total impunity for those authorized to loot by the thief-in-chief’—namely the head of state.”

One could fairly say that a kleptocracy was always going to be the end result of the oligarchy that was America.

The signs were visible long before now: power and wealth have been trading places for decades.

Indeed, it has been more than a decade since researchers at Princeton and Northwestern concluded that the U.S. is a functional oligarchy in which “political outcomes overwhelmingly favored very wealthy people, corporations, and business groups,” while the influence of ordinary citizens was at a “non-significant, near-zero level.”

So now we find ourselves in this present moment where billionaires are running the show.

The optics are undeniable: while the country suffers through a government shutdown, with welfare programs shuttered and inflation, healthcare and basic cost-of-living expenses skyrocketing, the elite are living it up.

In the White House, President Trump is redecorating, transforming what had been known as “the people’s house” into a palace fit for an American king, complete with marbled bathrooms and a sprawling, gold-fitted ballroom. The rest of the administration, taking its cue from their leader, are jetting around at taxpayer expense for lavish vacations, sporting events—and decadent parties at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida retreat.

The responses to criticisms either deflect to how other administrations wasted money or, in the case of the ballroom, insist the project is privately funded—and therefore beyond reproach because taxpayers aren’t paying for it.

But money is never truly “private” once it purchases influence over public office. The moment a government accepts such funding, it becomes indebted to the funders rather than accountable to the people.

Case in point: the list of donors to Trump’s White House ballroom.

It reads like a who’s who list of the government’s biggest contractors and those most eager to curry favor. Collectively, the corporations and individuals on the ballroom donor list have received staggering sums in government contracts in recent years, and more than half face or have faced government investigations or enforcement actions “that includes engaging in unfair labor practices, deceiving consumers and harming the environment.”

This is how you bring about a kleptocracy—one crooked buy-in at a time.

The constitutional question that follows is unavoidable: if presidents and agencies can do whatever they please simply because someone else foots the bill, what remains of constitutional, representative government?

Follow that rationale to its end and you find yourself in dangerous territory.

If a president can privately fund a ballroom, could he privately fund a battalion? If a cabinet agency can accept donations to expand its reach, could it sell policy favors to the highest bidder?

If every public act can be recast as a private transaction, then the public no longer governs—it merely observes.

That is why the defense of demolishing and reconstructing the White House ballroom—an undertaking never authorized by Congress—on the grounds that no public funds will be used does not pass constitutional muster.

The Constitution gives Congress—and only Congress—the power of the purse.

This safeguard was designed not as a bureaucratic formality but as the chief restraint on executive abuse—the people’s means of holding the presidency to account.

Once presidents can raise private money to do what the people’s representatives refuse to fund, that weapon is disarmed.

What follows is the slow unraveling of constitutional restraint, replaced by the notion that money—not law—sets the limits of power. The same mechanism that once protected the people from tyranny now becomes the means of financing it.

What was meant as a safeguard becomes a loophole—a backdoor to unchecked power.

The logic is as seductive as it is corrupting: if private dollars cover the cost, the Constitution doesn’t apply.

By that reasoning, a president could wage war, build prisons, or launch surveillance programs—all without congressional authorization—so long as a billionaire or corporate sponsor signs the check.

That’s not democracy. It’s privatized despotism.

This is how republics fall: not only through coups and crises, but through the quiet substitution of private interests for public authority.

What begins as a gift ends as a purchase. What begins as a renovation ends as a revolution in how power operates.

We have already seen this creeping privatization at every level of government: private contractors running prisons and wars, corporate donors dictating policy priorities, and surveillance and censorship outsourced to tech firms.

Now the presidency itself is for sale—brick by brick, ballroom by ballroom.

The Founders feared monarchs; they never imagined CEOs with armies or presidents who could raise war chests independent of Congress. Yet that is exactly where we are headed: toward a government financed by private power and answerable only to it.

When public power can be bought, sold, or sponsored, the Constitution becomes nothing more than a branding tool—and when a nation mistakes private funding for public legitimacy, it ceases to be a republic at all.

The power of the purse was meant to be the people’s last line of defense against tyranny.

In the architecture of the Constitution, Congress alone was entrusted with the ability to raise and spend money—not because the Founders trusted legislators more than presidents, but because they feared concentrated power. They understood that whoever controls the purse ultimately controls the government itself.

“Money,” Alexander Hamilton warned, “is the vital principle of the body politic.”

Without that restraint, the president could accumulate funds, build armies, and buy loyalty at will, consolidating power beyond constitutional limits—what Madison called “the very definition of tyranny.”

When presidents or agencies can act outside congressional appropriations by appealing to private donors, super PACs, or corporate “partners,” they dissolve the constitutional boundary between public office and private gain.  

Decisions that once required debate and oversight now happen behind closed doors, in boardrooms and donor suites. The result is a shadow government financed by privilege instead of the people.

The privatization of power isn’t theoretical—it is happening in plain sight.

As The Intercept recently revealed, the Trump administration has even floated cash bounties for private “bounty hunters” to locate and track immigrants on behalf of ICE. In other words, law enforcement is being farmed out to freelancers motivated not by duty or justice, but by profit.

This is what a pay-to-play police state looks like: private actors deputized to do the government’s bidding, free from constitutional safeguards, answerable only to the wallet that funds them.

Once the machinery of enforcement can be financed, directed, or rewarded through private channels, the rule of law gives way to the rule of money. Government ceases to function as a neutral arbiter and becomes a contractor for hire, wielding the badge, the gun, and the gavel on behalf of whoever can afford its services.

These arrangements substitute profit for principle and contract for Constitution, blurring the line between the state and its sponsors: private donors finance political events in public buildings, corporate partners shape executive policy, and billionaires underwrite the very forces—military, law enforcement, surveillance—that keep the rest of the population in check.

A police state funded by private wealth is even more dangerous than one funded by public taxes, because it answers to no electorate, no oversight committee, no constitutional restraint. Its accountability points upward—to financiers—not outward to the people it governs.

Under such a system, justice becomes transactional. Enforcement becomes selective. Rights become negotiable.

What began as the privatization of services metastasizes into the privatization of sovereignty: the executive branch no longer merely executes the law—it markets it. The idea of constitutional limits erodes the moment the state claims exemption by calling its actions “privately financed.”

And so, when a president boasts that he could raise his own army—through donors, contractors or loyalists—he is not being metaphorical. He is articulating the next logical stage of a government that has already sold itself to the highest bidders.

The Founders warned that liberty would perish when the instruments of power could be bought or sold. We are watching that prophecy unfold in real time.

In the pay-to-play police state, money doesn’t just talk—it arrests, surveils, and kills.

The fight to restore constitutional government begins where it was first betrayed: not merely with who pays, but with who decides.

If Congress no longer controls the nation’s spending—and if presidents, agencies, and corporations can bypass public consent by courting private benefactors—then the people no longer control their government.

That is not democracy; that is debt servitude to power.

The Founders knew that taxation and representation rise and fall together—and representation means more than writing a check. It means the power to set priorities, to attach conditions, to withhold funds, and to say no.

A government funded independently of its citizens will inevitably rule independently of them; it will spend without oversight, act without restraint, and enforce without accountability. That is why Madison stressed that “the power over the purse … is the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the people’s representatives against executive encroachments.”

The inverse is also true: once the president depends on private money, the people become dependent on the will of those who pay the president.

In other words, an oligarchy—and when that oligarchy turns government itself into a vehicle for enrichment, a kleptocracy.

To reclaim the republic, the people must reclaim ownership of both the purse and the plan—the money that funds the government and the mandates governing how those funds are used.

That requires drawing a hard constitutional line between public office and private enrichment; restoring congressional authority over every dollar spent in the name of the American people; and dismantling the system of shadow funding—super PACs, donor networks, corporate partnerships, and “public-private collaborations”—that now serve as pipelines for corruption disguised as efficiency. It also requires the sunlight of disclosure for any outside contribution touching government action, and strict prohibitions on off-budget schemes that treat private cash as a license to ignore the law.

Most of all, it requires remembering that citizenship is a public trust, not a private transaction.

We need more than the right to pay for our government—we need the right to say how those payments are used, and the power to refuse when they are misused or abused.

The moment we accept the notion that government may do whatever it wants so long as someone else pays for it, we have already sold the republic.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the restoration of liberty will not come from new donors, new deals, or new rulers—it will come from a renewed insistence that power in America flows only from one source: We the People.

Our forebears fought a revolution to end taxation without representation. We may yet have to fight another—this time, against representation without appropriation, where officials claim the right to govern without the duty to answer to those they are supposed to represent.

Remember, they are the servants. We the People are supposed to be the masters.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/492773nc

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 Vampire State: Feeding on Our Fear, Freedom and Finances

Posted: October 29, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.”—Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Monsters don’t always come wrapped in the trappings of horror or myth.

Most often, monsters in the real world look like ordinary people. They walk among us. They smile for the cameras. They promise protection and prosperity even as they feed on fear and obedience.

All is not as it seems.

We are living in two worlds.

There’s the world we’re shown—the bright, propaganda-driven illusion manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors—and the world we actually inhabit, where economic inequality widens, real agendas are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak, and “freedom” is rationed out in controlled, legalistic doses by militarized police and federal agents.

We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.

Tune out the distractions and diversions, and you run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: monsters with human faces walk among us.

Many of them work for the U.S. government.

Through its power grabs, brutality, greed, corruption, and tyranny, the government has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to fight—terrorism, torture, disease, drug trafficking, trafficking of persons, violence, theft, even scientific experimentations that treat humans as test subjects.

With every passing day, it becomes painfully evident that the American Police State has developed its own monstrous alter ego: the Vampire State.

Like its legendary namesake, it survives by draining the lifeblood of the nation—the sweat, money, labor, privacy, and freedoms of “We the People.”

One tax, one law, one war, one surveillance program at a time, it takes what it needs and bleeds us dry.

As in every great horror story, the most terrifying monsters are the ones that look familiar. Of all the gothic figures, Bram Stoker’s vampire—a cold, calculating predator bent on conquest—may be the closest to the waking nightmare unfolding before us.

Like its mythic counterpart, the Vampire State seduces its victims with promises of safety, comfort, and national greatness. Once trust is secured and access granted, it feeds slowly and methodically—just enough to keep the populace docile, but never enough to rouse them from their trance.

Lulled by propaganda and partisan loyalty, the people become what Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, feared most: a zombie-fied mob, mindless to the very monster that feeds on them.

Once it latches on, the Vampire State’s tyrannical hunger only grows.

The Vampire State feeds on fear. Fear is the oxygen of tyranny. Every crisis—real or manufactured—fuels the quest for more power. Serling showed how quickly panic corrodes a community in The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, where neighbors, convinced that danger lurks next door, transform into a violent mob and turn on each other. Our headlines change—drug wars and ICE raids, “domestic extremists” and pandemics, foreign hit lists and necessary military strikes—but the script remains the same: politicians play savior, and a browbeaten populace surrenders their rights for the illusion of safety.

Fear, however, is only the beginning. Once fear takes hold, the next step is to turn people against one another. Demagogues know well how to do this.

The Vampire State feeds on division. In He’s Alive, Serling’s young fanatic learns the oldest trick in the book: “The people will follow you if you give them something to hate.” The American Police State has perfected that art—pitting citizen against immigrant, left against right, protester against police, rich against poor—because a divided nation is far easier to control.

Division, in turn, breeds submission. Once a society is at war with itself, obedience becomes the only refuge.

The Vampire State feeds on obedience. In Serling’s The Obsolete Man, a religious librarian in an atheist society where books are destroyed is condemned to death for obsolescence. The real crime was individuality. Today, bureaucracies demand the same submission—teachers disciplined for dissent, journalists axed for challenging the prevailing order, citizens detained under executive orders for speech deemed “dangerous.” Resistance is drained until only compliance remains.

Obedience, however, is never enough. Tyranny requires endless sustenance—material, financial, and human.

The Vampire State feeds on wealth. No predator survives without a steady source of sustenance, and the state’s preferred meal is the taxpayer. Endless wars, bloated budgets, emergency powers and corporate concessions keep the machine humming. As in Judgment Night and The Purple Testament, the war engine consumes bodies and earnings while sanctioning the cost as “patriotism.” Trillions get funneled to defense contractors and prison profiteers even as the public is told is “no money” for justice, infrastructure, welfare, or the basic maintenance of a free society.

Yet even that cannot satisfy a regime that wants total control. To control completely, it must know everything about those in its power.

The Vampire State feeds on privacy. A true predator must know its prey. The predatory state now drinks deeply from the digital lifeblood of the nation—every call logged, every movement tracked, every purchase recorded. Palantir-powered surveillance, biometric checkpoints, facial recognition databases: this is Serling’s cautionary universe updated for the algorithmic age.

And when fear, division, obedience, wealth, and privacy have been mined to exhaustion, the Vampire State turns to its most precious prey—the human spirit.

The Vampire State feeds on hope. The final hunger is spiritual. It drains its victims of hope until despair is all that’s left. A hopeless populace is a controlled one. Serling warned repeatedly that when people lose their moral bearings, they risk becoming the very monsters they fear.

Every horror story reaches a moment when the victims realize what they’re up against. Ours has come. The question is how to break the spell.

While Rod Serling warned of what would happen if fear and conformity became our national creed, filmmaker John Carpenter showed what it looks like when that warning is ignored.

Best known for Halloween, Carpenter’s body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment concern.

Again and again, he portrays governments at war with their own citizens, technology turned against the public, and a populace too anesthetized to resist tyranny.

In Escape from New York, fascism is America’s future. In The Thing, humanity dissolves into paranoia. In Christine, technology turns murderous. In In the Mouth of Madness, evil triumphs when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”

And in They Live, Carpenter rips off the mask completely.

Two migrant workers discover that society is controlled by parasitic aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. The people—lulled by comfort, trained by propaganda, hypnotized by screens—serve as hosts for their oppressors.

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.

It was fiction—but barely.

The monsters Carpenter envisioned were symbolic; ours wear suits and wave flags.

Americans no longer need special Hoffman lenses to see who is draining us. They’re not aliens disguised by human masks; our overlords sit in high offices, issue executive orders, and promise to “save” us while feeding on our fears, labor, and freedoms.

Unless we awaken soon, the Vampire State will finish what both Serling and Carpenter tried to warn us about.

The time for allegory is over; the warning has become the world we live in.

The Vampire State’s power depends on darkness—on secrecy, silence, and the willing ignorance of those it drains.

The remedy is not another political savior or bureaucratic fix. It begins where Serling’s and Carpenter’s parables always began—with the awakening of individual conscience, and the courage to name the real monsters in our midst.

Just as sunlight destroys a vampire, a populace that thinks, questions, and refuses unlawful commands is the surest defense against tyranny.

We cannot fight monsters by becoming them. We cannot defeat evil by imitating its methods.

If the Vampire State thrives on fear, feeds on hate, is empowered by violence, and demands obedience, then our weapon must be courage, our antidote love, our defense nonviolence, and our answer disciplined, creative civil disobedience.

Every generation must relearn these truths.

Almost 250 years after America’s founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to unseat a tyrant, we find ourselves under the tyrant’s thumb again, saddled with a government that feeds on the fears of the public to expand its power; a bureaucracy that grows fat on the labor of the governed; a surveillance apparatus that gorges on data, privacy, and dissent; and a war machine that sustains itself on endless conflict.

These are the symptoms of a nation that has forgotten its own cure.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were meant to serve as stakes through the heart of authoritarian power, but they are not magic incantations.

With every act of blind obedience, every surrendered liberty, every law that elevates the government over the citizenry, our protections diminish.

When that happens, the story turns full circle: fiction becomes prophecy.

In Serling’s universe, there was always a narrator to warn us. In Carpenter’s, the heroes had to liberate themselves from the monsters’ trap.

Our task is both: to see the truth, and to act on it.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, monsters walk among us—because we have failed to see them for what they truly are.

The Vampire State is real. But so is the power of the human spirit to resist it.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/ed4um22m

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
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

“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.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

The United States of Tyranny: America Is Becoming a Constitution-Free Zone

Posted: April 1, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”—James Madison

It’s no joke: America is becoming a Constitution-free zone.

Little by little, our rights are being whittled down in the name of national security.

Where do you draw the line?

How much tyranny will Americans tolerate in the name of national security?

At what point does this slippery slope of power grabs lead to dictatorship?

Will we let border police trample on the rights of everyone they encounter, including legal residents and citizens? Turn a blind eye when men, women and children are forcibly detained by gangs of plainclothes agents and made to disappear? Will we accept a national ID card that enables the government to target individuals and groups it deems undesirable? Will we tolerate AI-powered surveillance cameras and drones that track us more effectively than they protect us? Will we censor ourselves, fearing that any expression of dissent will mark us as anti-government?

Will we abandon the constitutional principles our founders fought for? This is the bargain the police state demands of us.

Take immigration, for example.

President Trump wants us to believe that the nation’s security is so threatened by illegal immigrants that we should tolerate roving bands of ICE and border patrol agents disregarding the Constitution at every turn.

But these government agents aren’t just disregarding it—they’re trampling it with the blessing of the man who swore to “preserve, protect and defend” that very same Constitution.

First Amendment rights to free speech, assembly, and protest. Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Fifth Amendment guarantees of due process. Sixth Amendment protections ensuring a right to legal counsel. Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishments. Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law.

All of these and more are being imperiously swept aside in the Trump Administration’s pursuit of an America “for Americans and Americans only.”

Trump has invoked wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act to justify the expulsion of illegal immigrants, whom Trump has likened to terrorists, killers, criminals, and enemies of the state.

However, with national security being used as a pretext to strip away rights on a larger scale than just criminals, the individuals targeted by the Trump Administration’s overreach represent a broader cross-section of American society: immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who live and work in the mainland of the United States. (It is estimated that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, contributing $59.4 billion to the federal government, including payments for federal income tax and federal social insurance such as Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance. In other words, they are paying for entitlement programs for which they do not receive benefits.)

Individuals whose visas allow them to legally reside in the U.S. are also being rounded up and made to disappear without due process.

The reports of how these round-ups are being carried out—with ambushes on city streets, in broad daylight, at the hands of masked, plainclothes officers, and without any charges being levied, court hearings or defense attorneys notified—are beyond chilling.

Some are being targeted based on their nationality. Some are being racially profiled. Some are being classified as criminal based solely on the fact that they have tattoos. Some, like Abrego Garcia, are being mistakenly snatched up and deported to private prisons in foreign countries, beyond the physical reach of U.S. courts.

As Garcia’s attorney warned, the Trump Administration seems to have adopted the mindset that “the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

And then there are the scientists, doctors, academics and students who are being rounded up because at some point they voiced their concerns about the mounting death toll in Palestine.

With the Trump Administration now equating even the perception of antisemitism as terrorism, that puts anyone in the government crosshairs who even dares to suggest that the killing of civilian women and children in Palestine is wrong.

For example, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk wrote an op-ed calling for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. That’s all it took for her to be placed on the government’s enemies list, stripped of her visa without warning or notice, surrounded on the street by a small army of masked agents, and whisked out of state to a detention center 1500 miles away without any family or friend knowing her whereabouts.

These arbitrary roundups and deportations are not just violations of the Fifth Amendment’s due process protections. They also trample the First Amendment’s right to free speech and assembly, particularly for those who speak out against government policies.

These actions are not limited to just immigrants or perceived enemies—they extend to anyone daring to challenge the status quo. Whether it’s activists, academics, or everyday citizens, being targeted for political expression is an assault on the very essence of free speech.

In this way, these round-ups represent the beginning of the slippery slope, leading not just to arbitrary detentions and the expansion of private prisons as an extension of the police state but to an eventual authoritarian regime where dissent is suppressed, and constitutional rights are discarded.

This is not just happening at the southern border.

These round-ups are increasingly occurring in cities like New York, Boston, and northern Virginia, with many U.S. citizens also being swept up in warrantless searches, surveillance, and overreach from federal and local law enforcement.

Where once the nation’s border constituted a thin line, it is becoming an ever-thickening zone dominated by authoritarianism and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

This zone impacts millions of Americans who have never been near a border—citizens who live in everyday places, like urban and suburban areas, yet are subject to government overreach.

As journalist Todd Miller explains, that expanding border region now extends “100 miles inland around the United States—along the 2,000-mile southern border, the 4,000-mile northern border and both coasts… This ‘border’ region now covers places where two-thirds of the US population (197.4 million people) live… The ‘border’ has by now devoured the full states of Maine and Florida and much of Michigan.”

Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, or 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

In this authoritarian reshaping of America, no one is safe, not even in their own homes.

The government’s ever-expanding, Constitution-free zone translates to greater numbers of Americans being subject to warrantless searches, ID checkpoints, transportation checks, and even surveillance on private property far beyond the boundaries of the borderlands.

From facial recognition software to mass data collection, surveillance technology is being used to monitor immigrants and ordinary citizens alike who are not suspected of any crime.

With Trump considering plans to turn a portion of the southern border into an expansive military installation policed by active-duty troops, we’re going to see even more of these assaults on our freedoms. As Trump promised after Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was arrested because of his anti-war activism, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

Miller explains:

“In these vast domains, Homeland Security authorities can institute roving patrols with broad, extra-constitutional powers backed by national security, immigration enforcement and drug interdiction mandates. There, the Border Patrol can set up traffic checkpoints and fly surveillance drones overhead with high-powered cameras and radar that can track your movements. Within twenty-five miles of the international boundary, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agents can enter a person’s private property without a warrant.”

Across the nation, local police forces are becoming militarized extensions of federal agencies like CBP and DHS, routinely receiving federal funds and training to act as armed enforcers of national security policies. By the time you add the military into that equation, you’ve got all the necessary ingredients for martial law.

The CBP, with its more than 60,000 Customs and Border Protection employees, supplemented by the National Guard and the U.S. military, is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a national police force imbued with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies.

Just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to local police agencies in the form of grants to transform them into extensions of the military.

As Miller points out, the government has turned the nation’s expanding border regions into “a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance.”

In much the same way that police across the country have been schooled in the art of sidestepping the Constitution, border agents have nearly unlimited discretion to stop, search, interrogate and arrest anyone they “suspect,” based on arbitrary factors such as:

  • Driving an unusual vehicle.
  • Passengers appearing “suspicious.”
  • Having a dusty or modified car.
  • Avoiding eye contact or looking too long at an officer.

These arbitrary and broad criteria make it easy for any citizen to be targeted without just cause, turning everyday travel into a potential confrontation with law enforcement. In other words, anything goes when it comes to the police state’s justifications for undermining our rights.

These troubling developments at the borders are just one part of a broader erosion of constitutional rights that has been underway for decades in the name of national security.

When we look back at history, we see a consistent pattern of political power grabbing in the name of national security. From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the War on Terror, the price of security is always paid by our freedoms—and each step we take brings us closer to a system where those in power determine the limits of our liberty by using national security as an excuse to curtail fundamental freedoms.

Fast-forward to the present, and Donald Trump capitalized on this historical pattern by claiming that the only way to keep America safe from dangerous immigrants was to build an expensive border wall, expand the reach of border patrol, and enlist the military to “assist” with border control.

Continuing this trend, Joe Biden sent thousands of active-duty troops to the southern border, in anticipation of more than 10,000 illegal crossings per day—reinforcing the military presence and fortifying the unchecked power at the border.

And now Trump is doubling down on everything he and his predecessors have done to fortify this unchecked power.

This pattern of exploiting national security fears for authoritarian control has continued into the present day with Trump’s immigration crisis becoming a pretext for greater control, a strategy to stoke fear and justify authoritarianism.

Yet despite the propaganda coming from the White House, the looming problem is not so much that the U.S. is being invaded by hostile forces at the border, but rather that the U.S. Constitution is under assault from within by a power-hungry cabal at the highest levels of power.

Before long, the only Americans qualified to live freely in Trump’s America will be those who march in lockstep with the Deep State’s dictates, and even absolute compliance is no guarantee of safety.

It used to be that the Constitution was our only reliable safety net, but that is being systematically dismantled.

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 government is now the greatest threat to our safety, and there’s no border wall big enough to protect us from these ruffians in our midst.

The answer to this growing tyranny begins with us—“We the people.”

The Constitution should not be negotiable. Freedom is not negotiable.

You want to make America great again? Start by making America free again.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mrr944pv

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. 

Making Our Rights Disappear: The Authoritarian War on Due Process

Posted: March 26, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

“If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you. The Trump regime is already targeting immigrants who are here legally simply because they expressed opinions that Trump disagreed with. What makes you think he’ll stop there? With no court to verify anything the Trump regime alleges, you could be arrested and sent to a prison in El Salvador for having views the regime dislikes.”—Robert Reich

Imagine this: you’re rounded up in the dead of night by government agents, arrested and sent to a detention center. The arresting agents don’t identify themselves, nor do they provide any documentation indicating why you are being detained. Nevertheless, without your family or friends knowing that you have been taken hostage, without anyone knowing where you are being transported or why, and without any opportunity to defend yourself or proclaim your innocence, you are flown out of the country to a foreign prison in a police state where you will have no rights whatsoever.

There can be no understating the danger.

The war on due process is here.

No trials. No hearings. No rights. Just indefinite detention and secret deportations.

This is the fate that awaits every one of us, not just immigrants (legal or otherwise), if the government’s war on the Constitution remains unchecked.

As historian Timothy Snyder warns, “If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”

More than two decades after the U.S. government in its post-9/11 frenzy transported individuals, some of whom had not been charged let alone convicted of a crime, to CIA black sites (secret detention centers located outside the U.S. authorized to torture detainees) as a means of sidestepping legal protocols, the Trump Administration is using extraordinary rendition to make those on its so-called “enemies list” disappear.

The first round of arrests and deportations to a mega-prison in El Salvador supposedly targeted members of the infamous Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here,” declared U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett. “Y’all could have put me up on Saturday and thrown me on a plane, thinking I’m a member of Tren de Aragua and giving me no chance to protest it and say somehow it’s a violation of presidential war powers.”

Carried out with little evidence and without court hearings or due process, these roundups reportedly may also have swept up individuals with no apparent connection to gang activity apart from common tattoos (firearms, trains, dice, roses, tigers and jaguars) and other circumstantial evidence.

In a particularly Kafkaesque explanation for why some of the Venezuelan migrants who have no criminal records were targeted for arrest and deportation, government lawyers argued in court that their lack of a criminal record is in itself cause for concern.

In other words, the government is prepared to preemptively arrest and make people disappear, without any regard for legal protocols or due process, based solely on the president’s claim that they could at some point in the future pose a threat to national security.

This takes pre-crime and preemptive arrests to a whole new sinister level of potential abuses.

Are you starting to sense how quickly this could go off the rails?

This is how democracies collapse. This is how rights disappear overnight.

As lawyers challenging the government’s overreach warned, “If the President can designate any group as enemy aliens under the Act, and that designation is unreviewable, then there is no limit on who can be sent to a Salvadoran prison, or any limit on how long they will remain there. At present, the Salvadoran President is saying these men will be there at least a year and that this imprisonment is ‘renewable.’”

Also among those in danger of being made to disappear without any legal record or due process are individuals who have not been charged with or convicted of any crimes.

The most egregious of these incidents involve college students, scientists and doctors, all of them legal permanent residents of the U.S. who, while never having been charged with a crime, are accused of threatening national security by taking part in anti-war protests over the growing death toll in Gaza as a result of the Israeli-Hamas war, or sympathizing with the Palestinians, or being associated with someone who might sympathize with the Palestinians.

When merely exercising one’s right to criticize the government in word, deed or thought is equated to an act of domestic terrorism, we are all in trouble.

Whether those being rounded up and deported have done anything criminally wrong is not the point. That’s what the courts and the Constitution are for: to ensure that justice is served through due process and the right of the accused to have their day in court.

It’s not always a perfect system, but it is better than the alternative, which is outright tyranny.

The mass arrests and roundups thus far have been so haphazard that there is a very real likelihood that innocent individuals have also been swept up and deported.

American citizens could very well be next in line for this kind of treatment.

Native Americans, who are also American citizens, have reported being subjected to racial profiling by ICE agents and targeted because of their race or skin color.

Another American citizen detained and questioned by ICE during an immigration raid of a workplace in New Jersey is a military veteran who “suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned.”

As Foreign Policy magazine warns, “The American people must be clear-eyed about the prison system to which their government is sending deported migrants—which, in the worst-case scenario, could one day hold U.S. citizens, too. Although U.S. law prohibits the deportation of U.S. citizens, the Trump administration has shown a repeated proclivity to flout the rules and ignore judicial orders.”

Indeed, it appears that President Trump is borrowing heavily from the lockdown script used by Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvadora, another police state characterized by arbitrary detentions, systemic violations, brutality, and censorship, which has been under a permanent state of emergency since 2022.

Yet as Amnesty International warns, “‘Security’ at the expense of human rights,” increased militarization, and armed repression coupled with “efforts by state agents to stigmatise human rights organisations and the free press and to thwart their efforts, has fostered a climate of fear and intimidation that stifles civil society and spurs self-censorship.”

Under Bukele, who used a war on gang violence as the pretext for seizing power, constitutional rights have been suspended, with attorneys general fired, judges replaced by loyalists, the legislative and judicial branches coalesced under one party, presidential term limits set aside, innocent individuals swept up in mass arrests, Bitcoin declared legal currency, and friendly overtures made to Russia and China.

Sounds unnervingly familiar, doesn’t it?

This is the danger of allowing any president to use expansive wartime powers to bypass the Constitution’s prohibitions against government overreach and abuse: suddenly, everything that challenges the government’s authority becomes a national security threat and every dispute a national emergency.

Through his use of executive orders, proclamations and so-called national emergencies, President Trump has essentially declared war on the rule of law.

Make no mistake: while immigrants, illegal and legal alike, have largely been the first victims of the Trump administration’s efforts to circumvent the Constitution in order to make them disappear, it’s our very freedoms that are being made to disappear.

At the heart of these freedoms is the right of habeas corpus.

Translated as “you should have the body,” habeas corpus is a legal action by which those imprisoned unlawfully can seek relief from their imprisonment.

Derived from English common law, habeas corpus first appeared in the Magna Carta of 1215 and is the oldest human right in the history of English-speaking civilization. The doctrine of habeas corpus stems from the requirement that a government must either charge a person or let him go free.

Without habeas corpus, other rights become vulnerable to executive overreach.

The Framers of the Constitution, having experienced first-hand what it was like to be labeled enemy combatants, imprisoned indefinitely and not given the opportunity to appear before an impartial judge, were acutely aware of the potential for government tyranny. Thus, they enshrined the writ in Article I, Section IX, of the Constitution, rather than the Bill of Rights, underscoring its fundamental importance as a safeguard against arbitrary detention and ensuring its protection at the federal level.

It has all been downhill since then.

History has shown us the dangers of unchecked executive power. Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War led to mass arrests without trial, setting a dangerous precedent.

Decades later, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II demonstrated how easily fear can be weaponized to justify the imprisonment of innocent people.

Each time habeas corpus has been weakened, it has taken years—sometimes generations—for justice to be restored, if ever.

We cannot afford to repeat these mistakes.

While the Constitution allows the writ of habeas corpus to be suspended in cases of rebellion or invasion when public safety is imperiled, the Trump Administration’s efforts to keep the nation in a permanent state of emergency in order to justify its power grabs leaves “we the people” subject to the kinds of arbitrary mass round-ups, arrests and deportations that have been favored by despots and dictators.

This is usually where the self-righteous defenders of Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional tactics insist that the protections of the Constitution only apply to U.S. citizens.

They are wrong.

At a minimum, as the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed, the rights enshrined in the first ten amendments to the Constitution apply to all people in the United States, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. Those rights include free speech, peaceful protest and criticism of the government, assembly, religious freedom, equal protection under the law, due process, legal representation, privacy, among others.

Then again, what good are rights if the government doesn’t respect them?

What good are rights if the president is empowered to nullify them whenever he wants?

For that matter, what good is a government that betrays its own citizens?

When not even citizenship is protection against the abuses of an authoritarian regime, it’s time to do what our forefathers did when they finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested: revolt against the tyrant’s fetters.

History has shown us that when governments operate without checks and balances, tyranny follows. The question is not whether mass arrests and indefinite detentions could be expanded to American citizens—it’s how long before they are.

If we allow the erosion of due process, if we accept that a president can unilaterally decide who is a threat without oversight, then we have already lost the freedoms that define us as a nation.

This is not just about immigrants.

It’s about every American who values liberty over unchecked power.

We must demand accountability. We must challenge policies that violate constitutional protections. We must support organizations fighting for civil liberties, educate ourselves on our rights, and refuse to be silenced by fear. Because when the government starts making people disappear, the only way to stop it is by making our voices impossible to ignore.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, freedom does not die in a single act of repression—it dies when the people surrender their rights in exchange for false security.

History will judge how we respond. We must act before it’s too late.

The Constitution can’t protect us if we don’t protect it.

The time to resist is now. Otherwise, if we don’t stand up for freedom while we still can, we may not get another chance.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/bdz4un3v

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. 

Beyond the Law: What It Means to Weaponize the Government

Posted: March 19, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

“This is war.”—President Trump

President Trump’s declaration of war as a justification for using wartime powers to sidestep constitutional protections is indeed a war, but it is a war waged by the president against dissent, against due process, and against the very foundations of our constitutional republic.

This is what it means to weaponize the government.

When the government turns its power against its own people—through surveillance, retaliation, censorship, and intimidation—it ceases to serve the public and instead becomes a weapon of oppression.

According to the Political Dictionary:

“The term ‘weaponize’ refers to the strategic manipulation or transformation of information, institutions, or social issues into tools for gaining political advantage. This could involve exploiting existing laws, harnessing social media algorithms for disinformation campaigns, or turning otherwise neutral or benign elements of governance into divisive issues for the purpose of delegitimizing opponents or rallying a base.”

Time and again, leaders have stretched—or outright shattered—the limits of power, weaponizing government power through unjust laws, surveillance, or outright suppression.

Each power grab is a step toward the erosion of liberty.

John Adams used the Alien and Sedition Acts to prosecute journalists and political opponents.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, allowing the military to detain individuals without trail and suppressing Confederate sympathizers and political dissenters.

Under Woodrow Wilson, the Espionage and Sedition Acts were used to crack down on anti-war activists, socialists, and labor organizers, including Eugene V. Debs, who spoke out against World War I.

Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that led to the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, based on suspicions of disloyalty, despite little to no evidence.

Richard Nixon harnessed the power of the FBI, CIA, and IRS, to harass, spy on and sabotage his political opponents and perceived enemies.

Spanning numerous presidential administrations, from FDR to Nixon, the FBI’s covert intelligence program COINTELPRO was used to infiltrate, discredit and disrupt civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and other political dissidents.

In a bid to fight so-called disinformation, Biden pressured social media companies to censor and suppress individuals expressing views perceived as conspiratorial or extremist, especially as they related to COVID-19.

And then there’s Donald Trump, who is setting new records for how far he’s willing to go to retaliate against his perceived enemies and sidestep the rule of law.

Indeed, Ken Hughes, an investigative journalist who spent two decades listening to Richard Nixon’s Secret White House Tapes, has concluded that Nixon’s abuses of presidential power—which included weaponizing the government to “sabotage Vietnam peace talks to damage the Democrats’ 1968 presidential campaign, to time his withdrawal from Vietnam to help his 1972 reelection campaign, and to spring former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa from prison in return for the union’s political support”—pale beside Trump’s abuses.

Trump, who once vowed to end government overreach and the weaponization of the federal government, now openly uses its full force against his critics, dismantling democratic norms, consolidating power in ways that defy the Constitution, and directing an all-out weaponization of the federal government against his perceived enemies, which translates to anyone who dares to oppose him.

If Trump were just a petty blowhard, that would be one thing.

Unfortunately, having populated his administration with individuals more loyal to him than to the Constitution, Trump is getting drunk on power.

The danger is not so much Trump as it is his enablers-to-abuse, the many minions within his administration and beyond who are eager to carry out unlawful orders, defy the courts, ignore Congress’ mandate, trample rights, and butcher the Constitution, all in the so-called name of putting America first.

If this keeps up, America, once looked upon as a bastion of freedom and economic opportunity, will be the last place anyone ever thinks of when they hear the words freedom, justice and equality.

Every action taken by the Trump administration in defiance of the rule of law—whether or not that action is motivated by a legitimate concern for national security—pushes us that much closer to the complete dismantling of our constitutional republic.

Don’t be so carried away by fear-inducing tales of rapists and foreign invaders and corruption that you let the government get away with murder… the painful execution of our rights.

That way lies tyranny.

You can see the pattern forming already.

When anti-war protesters are made to disappear—snatched up late at night by plain-clothes men who refuse to identify themselves and then transported thousands of miles away, to a private prison in a state more favorable to dubious detentions—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

When Venezuelan migrants are rounded up and deported out of the country, heads shaven and in chains, without any due process—without being identified, without being charged formally with a crime, without getting a chance to plead their innocence against those charges and, if found guilty, then convicted—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

When major law firms are barred from interacting with federal agencies or entering federal buildings—an outright attempt to chill First Amendment activity and hamstring businesses that challenge government overreach—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

When huge swaths of our nation’s history (including the Constitution and Bill of Rights) are being erased from websites, government buildings, archives, educational curriculum—in the so-called name of combatting discrimination—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

When Trump administration sycophants from the vice president on down are openly deriding and defying the courts while proclaiming the imperial supremacy of their exalted leader, we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

When the president of the United States threatens other nations militarily, talks openly about seizing foreign lands, stirs up international tensions, and rattles the war drums, we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

Trump, adept at twisting facts and spinning lies, is working hard to insist that these end-runs around the rule of law are for our safety.

Don’t believe him. Words are cheap.

More importantly, don’t trust him. Bind him down with the chains of the Constitution.

The only real protection we have against tyranny is the rule of law, provided that you have a populace and a system of government that holds the rule of law as inviolable.

That is our real power: the extent to which we hold fast to the Constitution and demand that the government and its agents do so, as well.

The moment that we relent in that commitment—the moment that we look the other way and let first a few encroachments slide, then ever more and more—is the moment that the Constitution loses its power to protect us against tyranny.

That is what is unfolding right now.

This is the devil’s bargain that we are being asked to enter into with Trump: empty promises and a one-way street to a dictatorship in exchange for our freedoms.

Watch out.

When any politician claims to be saving you money by imposing tariffs that ramp up inflation and cutting government programs aimed at educating the masses, feeding the hungry, and helping the poor, disabled and elderly, all the while spending taxpayer money on his own lavish lifestyle and self-serving government programs, you’d better beware. Your hard-earned dollars will be next in line to be seized, spent and squandered.

When any politician suggests that you relinquish your freedoms—of speech, assembly, due process, association, etc.—in exchange for promises of greater security, you’d better beware. Your freedoms will be next on the chopping block.

When any politician persuades you to look the other way while innocent individuals are rounded up alongside suspected criminals just because they look a certain way or talk a certain way or belong to a particular demographic, you’d better beware. Your right to due process will be next.

When any politician comes up with a vast array of reasons why he doesn’t need to obey court rulings—because they were issued verbally, because his power trumps that of the courts, because he doesn’t need to follow the law outside America’s borders—you’d better beware. This shifty reasoning for breaking the law could be used against you next.

There can be no doubt about the nature of what is taking place right now.

This is war.

President Trump’s justification for defying the courts and doing whatever he wants in pursuit of his political agenda (arresting protesters, carrying out mass arrests and deportations, muzzling critics, seizing funds, dismantling agencies, usurping congressional powers) is that “this is war.”

Here’s the thing, though: Trump may be using his war powers as commander-in-chief to bypass the Constitution at every turn, but the only war being waged is a war against the Constitution and the rule of law and the American people.

Congress, which has the sole power to declare war under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, has yet to do so. And still Trump is using the emergency wartime powers of the presidency to sidestep accountability and due process.

In ruling after ruling, the courts, which have the judicial power to rein in overreach and misconduct, are repeatedly declaring unconstitutional the Trump administration’s steady dismantling of the government and refusal to stay within the purview of his official powers. And still Trump is unilaterally hacking away at the very foundations of our system of government.

If the president refuses to be held accountable, if he insists that his power is supreme, if he abuses the power of his office to wreak havoc and revenge, if he reduces our republic to rubble and tramples over the Constitution and disregards the rule of law, he is aligning himself with every despot, dictator and tyrant to have walked the earth.

We’ve been here before. We know how this story ends.

It takes time and effort and a willingness on the part of “we the people” to look beyond our differences and stand united in opposition to oppression, but when we do that, freedom prevails in the end.

Next year will be the 250th anniversary of the birth of this country, when America’s founders declared their independence from King George’s tyranny. What’s just as important, however, is what came before that: the small steps of rebellion, resistance and outrage that said, “enough is enough.”

What we are now experiencing is a civil war, devised and instigated in part by the Deep State.

The objective: compliance and control.

The strategy: destabilize the economy, polarize the populace, escalate racial and political tensions, intensify the use of violence, and then, when all hell breaks loose, clamp down on the nation for the good of the people and the security of the nation.

The outcome for this particular conflict is already foregone: the Deep State wins.

The Deep State wins by ensuring that we are censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down. It wins by monitoring our speech and activities for any sign of “extremist” activity. It wins by ensuring that we are estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us. It wins by saddling us with taxation without representation and a government without the consent of the governed.

It wins by terminating the Constitution (or rewriting the Constitution).

So where does that leave us?

“We” may have contributed to our downfall through our inaction and gullibility, but we are also the only hope for a free future.

After all, the Constitution begins with those three beautiful words, “We the people.”

Those three words were intended as a reminder to future generations that there is no government without us: our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

When we forget that, when we allow the “Me” of a self-absorbed, narcissistic, politically polarizing culture to override our civic duties as citizens to collectively stand up to tyranny and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution, that is when tyranny rises and freedom falls

Remember, there is power in numbers.

Not the kinds of numbers that Trump likes to spout about landslide victories and electoral mandates, but the most powerful numbers of all: the sheer, overwhelming mass of humanity that is “we the people” of these United States of America.

If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests with us.

Ultimately, that’s what the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution is all about: it affirms that “we the people” have all the power, and what powers we do not explicitly give to the federal government or the states, we retain. We may appoint government representatives to act in our stead, but we never relinquish that power altogether.

That’s where Trump and his Deep State handlers get it wrong. Speaking through him and his administration, they claim that this dismantling of the federal government is a bid to return power to local communities and state governments, but it’s not their government to dismantle, nor is it their power to return.

We are the government, and we are the power, and it’s time “we the people” reminded the government and its henchmen of that important fact.

The power still lies with us.

We must resist every attempt to erode our freedoms, demand accountability, and uphold the Constitution—before it’s too late.

It’s time to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

Nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the Constitution.

Flood your representatives’ phone lines, inboxes and townhall meetings with your discontent.

Protest everything that tramples on the Constitution.

Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree.

Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc.

Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it.

If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it.

Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it. That’s their job: make them do it.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/2r86htbz

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. 

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

Posted: March 12, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

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

You can’t have it both ways.

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

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

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

There’s always a boomerang effect.

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

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

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

This is how it begins.

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

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

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

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

We are all at risk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mahmoud is the test case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve seen this before.

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

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

It’s just a matter of time.

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

The groundwork has already been laid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are walking a dangerous path right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the moment these acts of aggression becomes the new normal, authoritarianism won’t be a distant threat; it will be reality.

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

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

Nullifying the Constitution Won’t Make America Great Again

Posted: February 26, 2025 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

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

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

This should be non-negotiable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing adds up.

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

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

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

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

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

What a waste of political capital.

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

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

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

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

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

So where does that leave us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mr27h7v4

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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. 

Older Entries