Posts Tagged ‘politics’

Beyond the Law: What It Means to Weaponize the Government

Posted: March 19, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“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
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“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. 

The Deep State’s War on Truth—Waged with Doublespeak, Delusion and Propaganda

Posted: March 5, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” — George Orwell

The Deep State’s war on truth is being waged with doubletalk, delusion and propaganda.

Through deliberate manipulation of language—what George Orwell called “doublespeak”—Donald Trump has provided cover for the Deep State’s continued grip on power.

While promising to drain the swamp, his administration has instead relied on contradictory policies, misinformation, and propaganda to further entrench the very system he claims to oppose. Although the Trump administration is merely the latest frontman for the Deep State’s efforts to maintain its stranglehold on power, we are approaching a tipping point beyond which there may be no turning back to freedom as we have known it.

This is how “we the people” remain on the losing end of this devil’s bargain that is life in the American police state.

What we desperately need is a reality check, and that starts by disconnecting from the Deep State’s propaganda-riddled, manipulated alternative reality about the state of our nation.

While President Trump, well versed in the “art of the deal,” appears to be saying all the right things about peace, corruption, graft, wasteful spending, free speech, equality, bloated bureaucracy, national security, etc., his administration’s actions tell a far different story about his priorities and his loyalties, which remain self-serving, imperial, flagrantly unconstitutional and intended to keep the Deep State in power.

As always, actions speak louder than words.

When the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are still missing from the White House’s website, that oversight—or deliberate omission—speaks volumes.

Any government that can’t be bothered to include the Constitution among its priorities, or include it anywhere on its administration’s website, is not a government that can be trusted to abide by the Constitution.

Then again, trust has little to do with it.

The Constitution is a contract between the people and the government. What we have been experiencing over the course of both Republican and Democratic presidencies, is a breach of contract. Where the Trump administration differs from those that have come before it is in its willingness to go rogue in defiance of Congress, the courts and the rule of law.

You don’t wage a “common sense” revolution by discarding the Constitution. That way lies dictatorship.

Remember, how you do something is just as important as why you do it.

So, what’s really going on?

As a populace, we have become so desensitized to political lies, especially Trump’s barrage of lies, that we shrug them off and move on. But in doing so, we act as enablers for what hides beneath those lies.

Make no mistake: the Deep State—the real Deep State, not the decoy version of it that Trump trots out to justify dismantling our constitutional republic—hides behind that rhetoric.

As journalist Shawn McCreesh explains, “In order to remake the government, President Trump and his administration are remaking the language used to describe the government. An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched. In its place is a new vocabulary, honed by the president and echoed by his many imitators in the capital. It is a vocabulary containing many curious uses of doublespeak.”

Doublespeak, as media scholar Edward S. Herman defines it, is characterized by “the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.”

The term is derived from George Orwell’s 1984, in which “doublethink” and “Newspeak” are used to manipulate the masses into going along with the government’s agenda.

In true Orwellian fashion, Trump has mastered the art of doublespeak.

For example, McCreesh points to “one presidential order titled ‘Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ [that] calls for weaponizing the federal government against itself. Another titled ‘Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling’ demands that ‘patriotic education’ be taught to children… Even as the president signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,’ he signed other orders policing language.”

Consider some of Trump’s other uses of alternative facts, misdirection and misnomers to advance the Deep State’s agenda.

In true doublespeak fashion, Trump’s path to peace leads to more war. At the same time that he’s threatening to halt military aid to Ukraine in the name of securing peace with Russia, Trump’s administration is sending $4 billion in weapons and ammunition to Israel so it can continue to wage war on Gaza.

Trump’s path to nationalism by way of isolationism is in fact empire building. At the same time that Trump is declaring himself a nationalist, breaking ranks with America’s allies, withdrawing from international accords, and ceding ground to authoritarian regimes such as Russia, he is also declaring his intent to lay claim to foreign lands such as Gaza, Greenland and Canada as part of a global power grab.

Trump’s path to saving money is spending money. At the same time that Trump claims to be shining a spotlight on wasteful spending in the hopes of balancing the budget, he is also as guilty of spending—and wasting—taxpayer dollars at an alarming rate. At the same that he’s empowering Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to drastically reduce the federal workforce in a bid to save money, he is pushing tax cuts that would add $5-10 trillion to the 10-year deficit. As Reuters reports, DOGE’s savings claims are thus far “unverifiable and its calculations have been riddled with errors and corrections.”

Trump’s path to law and order is allowing the police to act lawlessly. At the same time that the Trump administration is advocating for impose harsher penalties and increased prison sentences, even for nonviolent crimes, Trump is dismantling government policies aimed at holding police accountable for official misconduct.

Trump’s path to efficiency is giving rise to even greater inefficiency. Likening DOGE to a chainsaw hacking away at a bloated bureaucracy, Musk has been wiping out whole segments of the federal workforce, agency by agency, with little thought to what programs might suffer as a result or how to keep the government functioning. As CNN reports, “There have been a lot of reports of federal workers being fired then quickly rehired once agencies realized people with critical skills had been let go…for example: Those managing the US nuclear arsenal, and those working at USDA on the response to the bird flu outbreak.”

Trump’s path to economic triumph is spelling economic disaster. Trump continues to forge ahead with his imposition of tariffs on America’s major trading partners despite warnings from economists and the business sector alike that tariffs will hurt, rather than help, the economy and could lead to a recession and a spike in inflation.

Trump’s path to draining the swamp is letting the swamp run the show. Building on the same patterns he exhibited during his first term, when Trump populated his administration with individuals engaged in a pattern of wasteful and extravagant spending on themselves at the taxpayers’ expense, Trump is once again prioritizing personal profit over the American people.

Trump’s path to free speech is censorship. At the same time that Trump claims to be liberating conservative speech from the muzzling power of political correctness, he is embarking on a massive crackdown on lawful First Amendment activities that would criminalize protest activities and punish individuals and groups advocating for policies that contradict White House executive orders.

Trump’s path to transparency is replacing watchdogs with yes-men and loyalists. At the same time that Trump claims to be bringing transparency back to government, his administration is methodically dismantling all of the systemic checks intended to protect whistleblowers and serve as bulwarks against government corruption.

Trump’s path to ending cancel culture is more cancel culture. At the same time that Trump has declared war against left-leaning, politically correct “wokeness,” he is replacing it with a right-leaning cancel culture that aims to do exactly what the left was accused of doing: renaming public spaces, erasing offensive parts of history, and silencing the opposition.  

When you set aside the mountain of contradictory policies and propaganda that have become hallmarks of Trump’s time in office, a grim picture emerges: Trump’s efforts to make America great again are really just a variation on one theme, which is keeping the Deep State in power at the expense of our freedoms.

Indeed, George Orwell’s fictional 1984 could increasingly be mistaken for the Trump Administration’s instruction manual on how to remake the government in the dystopian image of Oceania, the authoritarian regime run by Big Brother.

While America’s founders envisioned a separation of powers held in check by three coequal branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) as the means of thwarting abuse by any one branch, Orwell’s Oceania has four branches of government (the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty) that work together to maintain Big Brother’s chokehold on power.

As Orwell explains, “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

According to Orwell, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

Thus, the Ministry of Peace is tasked with waging perpetual war in order to keep the government in power. The Ministry of Love is tasked with meting out torture and punishment in order to brainwash the populace into loving Big Brother. The Ministry of Plenty is tasked with maintaining a state of perpetual poverty, scarcity and financial shortages, the rationale being that an impoverished populace is easier to control. And the Ministry of Truth is tasked with disseminating propaganda and rewriting history and language in order to keep the citizens compliant.

The key to this last undertaking, maintaining a chokehold on power, is what Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels referred to as the “big lie.”

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” stated Goebbels. “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism, came to the same conclusion:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

This is how that slippery slope to authoritarianism begins, with lies that masquerade as truths and a populace disinclined to think for themselves.

Which brings us back to the tactics being deployed by the Trump administration.

Conformity, compliance and group think are necessary ingredients for tyrants to succeed.

Yet as historian Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic, “We are not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems, and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules.”

The answer, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is that we must re-learn what it means to think for ourselves.

Pay attention. Question everything. Dare to be different. Don’t follow the mob. Don’t let yourself become numb to the world around you. Be compassionate. Be humane. Most of all, don’t allow yourselves to become so desensitized to Trump’s brand of politics that you tolerate behavior in government officials that you would never tolerate from your own children (lying, bullying, name-calling, greed, etc.).

When all is said and done, Trump’s path to putting America First is really about putting Trump first and leaving Americans in bondage to the Deep State.

In Orwell’s world, the state maintained power through deception.

In Trump’s America, doublespeak remains the Deep State’s most powerful weapon—one that thrives as long as the public fails to recognize it for what it is—and Trump is proving to be its most effective mouthpiece.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/y9pbu645

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
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“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. 

The Deep State Wins Again: All the Ways ‘We the People’ Keep Losing Our Freedoms

Posted: February 20, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore. Mr. President, it’s too much.’”—Donald Trump

Almost one month into the Trump presidency, and the Constitution and the entire section on the various branches of government and how they work together are still missing from the White House website.

This is no small thing.

This omission, deliberate or inadvertent, speaks volumes about the priorities of this current administration. It also explains a lot about the legal mindset that is driving the Trump train, which continues to push forward with a theory of unitary executive power.

You know what is not driving the Trump government? Any sense that it is bound by the rule of law, i.e, the U.S. Constitution. As Trump recently declared, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Then again, Trump has never made any pretense of his aspirations to rule as a strongman. As the Washington Post reports:

In 2017, he claimed “an absolute right to do what I want with the Justice Department.” In 2019, he claimed that Article II of the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” In 2020, he said he could override state and local public health orders related to the coronavirus pandemic by saying: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total.” In 2022, he said that purported voter fraud in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” In 2023, he mused that he would be a dictator, but only on Day One of his presidency. And a year ago, he argued that presidents should have total immunity from criminal prosecution, even for “EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE.’ ”

Listen, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.

Then again, maybe the majority of Americans just don’t care about the Constitution anymore.

Maybe, as journalist Zeynep Tufekci suggests, Americans want an authoritarian leader who embraces an “ends-justify-the-means leadership style.”

Maybe all they care about are the “endless wins” that the Trump administration never ceases to claim for itself, but if we’re being brutally honest about the state of the country, “we the people” are on a solid losing streak.

While the team colors and the police state’s outward allegiances may have changed, from a constitutional perspective, we’re still losing in all the ways that matter, and the Deep State is still winning.

Indeed, far from protecting our freedoms, the Trump administration is taking the Deep State’s unconstitutional disregard for civil liberties to new extremes.

When you step away from the polarizing rhetoric and government spin long enough to look at the many ways in which the American police state is continuing to lockdown our freedoms, you’ll notice that not much has changed for the better.

Has the Trump administration put an end to the police state’s use of surveillance on the American people? Has it scaled back the deployment of military forces domestically in violation of Posse Comitatus? Has it ceased the government’s war on cash? Has it stepped back from the NDAA’s threat of indefinite detentions? Has it de-militarized the police? Has it kicked the oligarchs out of the government’s inner circle? Has it been transparent and accountable in all of its dealings?

The answer to all of those questions is a resounding “no.”

Rather than minimizing the power of the police state, the Trump administration appears to be doubling down on its commitment to police state tactics of fear, intimidation and brutality.

Consider for yourselves.

Free speech is still being undermined. The First Amendment prohibits the government from suppressing free speech activities by the public, the media, protesters, religious individuals, or by restricting the right of the people to assemble and associate with one another, yet we no longer have any real freedom of speech. We are moving fast down a slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American who criticizes the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association. Although President Trump issued an executive order denouncing government censorship, primarily for speech with which he agrees, his administration has ostensibly engaged in a campaign of intimidation and coercion against news organizations that dare to disagree with or criticize his administration, as well as whistleblowers. Likewise, under the guise of fighting politically correct DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies and cancel culture, the Trump administration is engaging in its own campaign to cancel out expressive activities and content of which it disapproves, including anti-war protests.

We’re still being subjected to expansive surveillance. All of the monitoring tools and weapons in the government’s surveillance arsenal that are being used to identify, track and target those on the Trump’s administration’s enemies list—facial recognition, biometrics, license plate readers, fusion centers, cell phone location tracking, etc.—can and will be used against the American people. AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude. Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer. With every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

The government’s police powers are still being weaponized. With Trump claiming the power to target anyone or any group he perceives as a “threat,” i.e., an “enemy from within,” anyone who disagrees with the government could be placed on a government watch list. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.

Government whistleblowers are still being persecuted. While claiming to be rooting out inefficiency, the Trump administration has been methodically dismantling all of the agencies charged with acting as nonpartisan watchdogs of government corruption.

Americans are still being treated as suspects. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides. Having launched a precrime program during his first administration, the Trump administration would have no qualms about using AI predictive and surveillance technologies to classify, segregate and flag the populace.

We’re still unofficially under martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics. With Trump having pledged to deploy the military domestically to work in conjunction with local police to address domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants, the American homeland is increasingly being transformed into a battlefield.

We’re still being flagged based on our viewpoints, activities and associations. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

Police shootings of unarmed citizens will continue. In the wake of Trump’s decision to reverse and revoke many of the policies intended to implement police reform and discourage police misconduct and stem the time of police brutality, we can expect the use of excessive force by police to continue unabated.

We still don’t have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

We still have an imperial president. Although President Trump has made no secret of his authoritarian impulses, he is not the first president to rule by fiat through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements. These unchecked powers enable all sitting president to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

In other words, the seeds of chaos are still being sown, and it’s the U.S. government that will reap the harvest.

My friends, if this is winning, I can’t imagine what losing will look like, but it won’t be pretty.

All of this dismantling of government agencies, weakening of the economy, and fomenting of civil unrest feeds right back into the Deep State’s plot to destabilize the nation.

Remember that Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command which anticipated that all hell would break loose by 2030?

That’s barely five short years away now, but we’re being moved steadily in that direction.

According to “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” the U.S. military plans to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

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

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.

We’re already enemies of the state.

You want to bring about real change? Start by wresting back control of our government from the oligarchs, technocrats and Deep State operatives who are still running the show.

Reject the propaganda and the polarizing rhetoric and the “us vs. them” tactics that reduce the mass power of the populace to warring, powerless factions.

Find common ground with your fellow citizens and push back against the government’s brutality, inhumanity, greed, corruption and power grabs.

Be dangerous in the best way possible: by thinking for yourself, by refusing to be silenced, by choosing sensible solutions over political expediency and bureaucracy.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the solution to what ails this country is really not that complicated: decency, compassion, common sense, generosity balanced by fiscal responsibility, fairness, a commitment to freedom principles, and a firm rejection of the craven, partisan politics of the Beltway elites who have laid the groundwork for the Deep State’s ongoing authoritarian coup d’etat.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/4bpah8sw

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.

A Constitutional Crisis: Can the Rule of Law Survive This Presidency?

Posted: February 12, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

This has all the makings of a constitutional crisis.

According to law professor Amanda Frost, “a constitutional crisis occurs when one branch of government, usually the executive, ‘blatantly, flagrantly and regularly exceeds its constitutional authority — and the other branches are either unable or unwilling to stop it.’”

Consider for yourself.

The president has gone rogue, doubling down on his belief that “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

The vice president believes the president should be a law unto himself, i.e., unaccountable to the other branches of the government.

The Republican-controlled Congress appears to be deaf, dumb and blind to the Executive Branch’s blatantly unconstitutional overreaches.

The courts, which have in recent years largely rubberstamped the government’s power grabs, are ill-prepared to rein in a sitting president who is determined to do whatever he wants, the Constitution be damned.

In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court preemptively gave future presidents the green light to engage in all manner of criminal activities when it ruled 6-3 that presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution, provided the lawbreaking is related to their official duties.

Meanwhile, the Constitution is still missing from the White House’s website.

This last point is not an oversight.

Rather, it speaks volumes about the priorities of the current presidential administration, which operates as if the rule of law does not apply to itself.

Indeed, while President Trump’s predecessors paid lip service to the rule of law while sidestepping it at every opportunity, Trump has been unapologetic about his intentions to set aside whatever legal, moral or political barricades stand in the way of his end goals.

Rule by fiat—when presidents attempt to unilaterally impose their will through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements—is an offense to the Constitution.

It was offensive when Biden did it. It was offensive when Obama did it. And it is just as offensive when Trump does it.

Already, Trump has signed more executive orders in his first month than any other president in their first 100 days.

This is not a sign of strength and leadership. This is a red flag.

In bypassing Congress in order to carry out his ambitious agenda to “make America safe again,” “make America affordable and energy dominant again,” “drain the swamp,” and “bring back American values,” the Trump Administration risks transforming the executive branch into something akin to the very entities it often criticizes: an overreaching surveillance state, a nanny state that dictates individual choices, and a police state that prioritizes compliance over freedom.

It is particularly telling that while Trump and his Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are pledging to lay off huge swaths of federal employees and replace the workforce with artificial intelligence, the police state’s martial law apparatus will remain largely untouched.

This is how you prepare to lock down a nation.

This danger transcends party lines and tests the resilience of our constitutional framework. 

How far will “we the people” allow the Executive Branch to continue to expand its power at the expense of established legal principles and the rule of law?

As much as past occupants of the White House and Congress would like us to believe otherwise, winning an election is not a populist mandate for one-party rule.

This way lies totalitarianism, by way of authoritarianism, and those who insist it can’t happen here need to pay better attention.

It’s happening already.

The following are 15 benchmarks of a totalitarian regime, according to Benjamin Carlson, a former editor at The Atlantic.  

  1. Media is controlled.
  2. Dissent is equated to violence.
  3. Legal system is co-opted by the state.
  4. Power is exerted to prevent dissent.
  5. State police are directed to protect the regime, not the people.
  6. Financial, legal, and civil rights are contingent on compliance.
  7. There is a mass conformity of behaviors and beliefs.
  8. Power is concentrated in an inner ring of people and institutions.
  9. Semi-organized violence is permitted.
  10. Propaganda targets enemies of the state.
  11. Whole classes of people are scapegoated and singled out for persecution.
  12. Extra-legal action against internal enemies is condoned.
  13. Unpredictable and harsh enforcement is used against unfavored classes.
  14. The language of the constitution serves as a facade for the exercise of power.
  15. And all private and public levers of power are used to enforce adherence to state orthodoxy.

To guard against these pitfalls, we must start by understanding the rule of law, and how it functions within our system of checks and balances.

The rule of law is the principle that everyone, including the government—and the president—must obey the law, which is embodied in the U.S. Constitution.

In a nutshell, the Constitution is the social contract—the people’s contract with the government—which outlines our expectations about the role of the government and its limits, a system of checks and balances dependent on a separation of powers, and the rights of the citizenry.

America’s founders established a system of checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in any single branch. To this end, the Constitution establishes three separate but equal branches of government: the legislative branch, which makes the law; the executive branch, which enforces the law; and the judicial branch, which interprets the law.

As constitutional scholar Linda Monk explains, “Within the separation of powers, each of the three branches of government has ‘checks and balances’ over the other two. For instance, Congress makes the laws, but the President can veto them, and the Supreme Court can declare them unconstitutional. The President enforces the law, but Congress must approve executive appointments and the Supreme Court rules whether executive action is constitutional. The Supreme Court can strike down actions by both the legislative and executive branches, but the President nominates Supreme Court justices, and the Senate confirms or denies their nominations.”

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat, nowhere in the Constitution is the president granted unilateral authority to act outside these established checks and balances, no matter how well-meaning his intentions might be or how worthy the goals (a balanced budget, safety, economic prosperity, etc.).

Writing for The Washington Post, Alan Charles Raul, general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, warns that not only is Trump acting extra-constitutionally, i.e., beyond the scope of the Constitution, but he lays out the case for why DOGE itself is unconstitutional:

“The protocols of the Constitution do not permit statutorily mandated agencies and programs to be transformed — or reorganized out of existence — without congressional authorization… The radical reorganization now underway is not just footfaulting over procedural lines; it is shattering the fundamental checks and balances of our constitutional order. The DOGE process, if that is what it is, mocks two basic tenets of our government: that we are nation of laws, not men and that it is Congress which controls spending and passes legislation. The president must faithfully execute Congress’s laws and manage the executive agencies consistent with the Constitution and lawmakers’ appropriations — not by any divine right or absolute power… [T]here is no reading of the Constitution that allows any president to claim that a political mandate, or a political promise made, obviates or supersedes the role for Congress… Even under the most aggressive view of the president’s ‘unitary executive’ control over the entire executive branch and independent agencies, it is Congress’s sole authority to appropriate and legislate for our entire government… [I]n the end, the president is constitutionally stuck with the policies for the federal government that Congress enacts and appropriates. No one man in America is the law — not even a Trump or an Elon Musk.”

Allowing the president to bypass established legal procedures in order to prioritize his own power over adherence to the rule of law ultimately undermines the principles of a constitutional government.

Which brings us to the present moment.

With Congress on the sidelines, the momentum is building for a constitutional showdown between the White House and the judiciary.

This is as it should be.

The job of the courts is to maintain the rule of law and serve as the referees in the power struggle between the President and Congress. That delicate balance between the three branches of government was intended to serve as a bulwark against tyranny and a deterrent to any who would overreach.

So for anyone, especially someone who has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, to suggest that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power” constitutes either an appalling admission of civic illiteracy or a bold-faced attempt to sidestep accountability.

When all is said and done, however, it is supposed to be “we the people” who hold the real power—not the president, not Congress, and not the courts. As the Tenth Amendment proclaims, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The government’s purpose is to serve the people, not the other way around.

Those first three words of the preamble to the Constitution say it all:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

This is not a monarchy with an imperial ruler. It is not a theocracy with a religious order. It is not a banana republic policed by a junta. It is not a crime syndicate with a mob boss. Nor is it a democracy with mob rule.

So, what’s the answer?

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, America’s founders were very clear about what to do when the government oversteps.

Bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution, advised Thomas Jefferson.

Take alarm at the first experiment on your freedoms, cautioned James Madison.

And if government leaders attempt to abuse their powers and usurp the rights of the people, get rid of them, warned the Declaration of Independence.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/bdcr9f54

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 Constitution Has Gone AWOL: From Presidential Power Grabs to Martial Law

Posted: January 23, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”—Justice Neil Gorsuch

That didn’t take long.

Within days of Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights disappeared from the White House’s website.

While the Trump Administration insists the removal of these foundational documents will eventually be restored to the site, the timing and symbolism of their removal is hard to ignore. Especially in light of the flurry of executive orders issued by President Trump as a means of bypassing the very rule of law those documents were intended to ensure.

Already, Trump has unilaterally declared two national states of emergency, announced his intention to disregard the 14th Amendment’s assurance of birthright citizenship, established two new government agencies, and pushed for an expansion of the death penalty.

So much for the Founders’ efforts to guard against this kind of concentrated, absolute power by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches to ensure that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government.

Mind you, Trump is not unique in his use of executive orders to bypass Congress and unilaterally impose his will upon the nation, but it is indicative of the fact that he, like his predecessors, will continue to serve as an imperial president, using executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

America, meet your latest dictator-in-chief.

Be warned: what is happening right now is political theater. Allow yourself to be distracted by it, and you will miss the real power play afoot: the expansion of unaccountable presidential power that exposes us to constitutional peril.

The Deep State is counting on us to be distracted.

Don’t fall for it.

We must be particularly leery when political promises to fix everything that is wrong with the nation are dependent on presidential power grabs and manufactured crises.

That’s the oldest trick in the book.

Whether the ends justify the means is never the point.

It is especially when the ends seem to justify the means that one must tread with particular caution.

That’s how we landed in this mess in the first place.

Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

As a result, we have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.

That indefinite state of crisis has remained constant, no matter which party has controlled Congress and the White House.

The seeds of this present madness were sown almost two decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.”

Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20) provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president.

It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be: civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

They have all become fair game to a government that continues to quietly assemble, test and deploy emergency powers a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution and can be activated at a moment’s notice.

We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

While these are powers the police state has been working to make permanent, they barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has unilaterally claimed for itself without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

As David C. Unger, observes in The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs:

“For seven decades we have been yielding our most basic liberties to a secretive, unaccountable emergency state – a vast but increasingly misdirected complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs that so define our present world that we forget that there was ever a different America. … Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

This is all happening according to schedule.

The civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters,” the government’s reliance on the armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems, the implicit declaration of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security: the powers-that-be have been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now.

As we have witnessed in recent years, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.

Yet according to documents obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.

Remember, these powers do not expire at the end of a president’s term. They remain on the books, just waiting to be used or abused by the next political demagogue.

So, too, every action taken by the current occupant of the White House and his predecessors to weaken the system of checks and balances, sidestep the rule of law, and expand the power of the executive branch of government makes us that much more vulnerable to those who would abuse those powers in the future.

Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents (Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.) have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.

The Executive Branch’s willingness to circumvent the Constitution by leaning heavily on the president’s so-called emergency powers constitutes a gross perversion of what limited power the Constitution affords the president.

As law professor William P. Marshall explains, “every extraordinary use of power by one President expands the availability of executive branch power for use by future Presidents.” Moreover, it doesn’t even matter whether other presidents have chosen not to take advantage of any particular power, because “it is a President’s action in using power, rather than forsaking its use, that has the precedential significance.”

In other words, each successive president continues to add to his office’s list of extraordinary orders and directives, expanding the reach and power of the presidency and granting him- or herself near dictatorial powers.

All of the imperial powers amassed by Obama, Bush, Trump, Biden and now Trump again—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects (including American citizens) indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to wage wars without congressional authorization, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to establish a standing army on American soil, to operate a shadow government, to declare national emergencies for any manipulated reason, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—have become a permanent part of the president’s toolbox of terror.

This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.

As an investigative report by the Brennan Center explains:

“There are currently 41 declared national emergencies, most of which have been in place for more than a decade… Some of the emergency powers Congress has made available to the president are so breathtaking in their vastness that they would make an autocrat do a spit take. Presidents can use emergency declarations to shut down communications infrastructure, freeze private assets without judicial process, control domestic transportation, or even suspend the prohibition on government testing of chemical and biological agents on unwitting human subjects.”

We must recalibrate the balance of power.

For starters, Congress should put an end to the use of presidential executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements as a means of getting around Congress and the courts.

At a minimum, as The Washington Post suggests, “all emergency declarations [s]hould expire automatically after three or six months, whereupon Congress would need to vote upon any proposed extension. It is time for both parties to recognize that governing via endless crises — even when they are employed to implement broadly popular policies that win plaudits from key political constituencies — subverts our system of constitutional government.”

We’ve got to start making both the president and the police state play by the rules of the Constitution.

As Justice Gorsuch recognized:

“Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat. A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes. We may even cheer on those who ask us to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.”

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history.

For example, over 90 years ago, the citizens of another democratic world power elected a leader who promised to protect them from all dangers. In return for this protection, and under the auspice of fighting terrorism, he was given absolute power.

This leader went to great lengths to make his rise to power appear both legal and necessary, masterfully manipulating much of the citizenry and their government leaders.

Unnerved by threats of domestic terrorism and foreign invaders, the people had little idea that the domestic turmoil of the times—such as street rioting and the fear of Communism taking over the country—was staged by the leader in an effort to create fear and later capitalize on it. In the ensuing months, this charismatic leader ushered in a series of legislative measures that suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus rights and empowered him as a dictator.

On March 23, 1933, the nation’s legislative body passed the Enabling Act, formally referred to as the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation,” which appeared benign and allowed the leader to pass laws by decree in times of emergency.

What it succeeded in doing, however, was ensuring that the leader became a law unto himself.

The leader’s name was Adolf Hitler.

The rest, as they say, is history. Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, history has a way of repeating itself.

Hitler’s rise to power should serve as a stark lesson to always be leery of granting any government leader sweeping powers.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3xtduj5u

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. 

Welcome to 2025: Where Your Freedoms Go to Die

Posted: January 9, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”—Montesquieu, Enlightenment philosopher

Wondering what to expect from the government in 2025?

So far, it looks like it will be more of the same ill-advised, costly, greedy, taxpayer-funded, dunderheaded power grabs, saber-rattling, graft, corruption, and make-works programming that leaves us no better off than where we started.

Indeed, we’ve been down this road so many times before that there should be no surprise when, no matter who occupies the White House, we find ourselves subjected to more of the same when it comes to the erosion of civil liberties and the increasing power of the government and its corporate partners-in-crime.

Digital prisons. Unceasingly, the government and its corporate partners are pushing for a national digital ID system. Local police agencies have already been given access to facial recognition software and databases containing billions of images, the precursor to a digital ID. Eventually, a digital ID will be required to gain access to all aspects of life: government, work, travel, healthcare, financial services, shopping, etc. Before long, biometrics (iris scans, face print, voice, DNA, etc.), will become the de facto digital ID.

Precrime. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies are being used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating is being done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. AI predictive tools are being deployed in almost every area of life.

Mandatory quarantines. Building on precedents established during the COVID-19 pandemic, government agents may be empowered to indefinitely detain anyone they suspect of posing a medical risk to others without providing an explanation, subject them to medical tests without their consent, and carry out such detentions and quarantines without any kind of due process or judicial review.

Mental health assessments by non-medical personnel. As a result of a nationwide push to train a broad spectrum of so-called gatekeepers in mental health first-aid training, more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported by non-medical personnel and detained for having mental health issues.

Tracking chips for citizens. Momentum is building for corporations and the government alike to be able to track the populace, whether through the use of RFID chips embedded in a national ID card, microscopic chips embedded in one’s skin, or tags in retail products.

Military involvement domestically. The future, according to a Pentagon training video, will be militaristic, dystopian and far from friendly to freedom. Indeed, all signs point to the battlefield of the future being the American home front. Anticipating this, the government plans to have the military work in conjunction with local police to quell civil unrest domestically.

Government censorship of anything it classifies as disinformation. In the government’s ongoing assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—government and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Threat assessments. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

War on cash. The government and its corporate partners are engaged in a concerted campaign to shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal.

Expansive surveillance. AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude. Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer. With every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

Militarized police. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are moving into the next phase of the transformation, turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.

Police shootings of unarmed citizens. Owing in large part to the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, not a week goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by police imbued with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the communities in which they serve. Police brutality and the use of excessive force continues unabated.

False flags and terrorist attacks. Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party is in power: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

Endless wars to keep America’s military’s empire employed. The military and security industrial complexes that have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that will continue to profit the most from America’s expanding military empire abroad and here at home.

Erosions of private property. Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

Overcriminalization. The government has increasingly adopted the authoritarian notion that it knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives. Overregulation and overcriminalization have been pushed to such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair.

Strip searches and the denigration of bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Individuals—men and women alike—continue to be subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops.

Censorship. First Amendment activities are being pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

Taxation Without Any Real Representation. As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. With Big Business and Big Government having fused into a corporate state, the president and his state counterparts—the governors—have become little more than CEOs of the Corporate State, which day by day is assuming more government control over our lives. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives.

Clearly, the year 2025 presents a crossroads: we can passively accept the ongoing erosion of our freedoms, or we can rise to the challenge and defend the principles that have made America great.

History has shown that even in the darkest of times, the flame of liberty can never be truly extinguished.

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 choice is ours.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/bdhsttmh

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 Deep State’s Triumph: 2024 and the Erosion of Liberty

Posted: December 31, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“Everyday the future looks a little bit darker.” ― Alan Moore, Watchmen

We have become a nation adrift in a sea of government overreach, abuse and corruption.

The following is a sobering account of the challenges we faced in 2024, which were marked by the government’s never-ending power grabs and relentless assaults on our civil liberties.

2024 saw a continued rise in government overreach and abuse of power. The militarization of police forces continued unabated, with local departments increasingly resembling extensions of the military. Schools, meant to be places of learning and growth, became more prison-like with the implementation of “safety” measures that criminalize minor infractions and create an environment of fear. The right to private property was further eroded, with the government increasingly empowered to seize assets under various pretexts. The plight of the homeless worsened, with cities criminalizing homelessness and implementing policies designed to make their lives even more difficult. Military veterans, once hailed as heroes, were increasingly treated with suspicion and subjected to surveillance.

On almost every front this year, the government overreached and abused its powers.

With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, we were reminded that in the eyes of the government and its corporate accomplices, “we the people” possess no rights except for that which the Deep State grants on an as-needed basis.

Surveillance eroded what little privacy we have left. The Surveillance State grew even more pervasive. Facial recognition technology expanded into new areas of our lives, with vast amounts of our biometric data collected, often without our knowledge or consent, eroding our anonymity and enabling unprecedented tracking of our movements. Data breaches continued to expose the vulnerability of our personal information.

Free speech continued to be under attack. Protest laws, free speech zones, and other restrictions made it more difficult for citizens to exercise their First Amendment rights. Social media companies, often in collusion with the government, engaged in censorship of viewpoints they deemed unacceptable. This online censorship creates an echo chamber and limits the free flow of information.

The influence of the Deep State and the military-industrial complex continued to grow. Endless wars abroad drained the nation’s resources while doing little to make Americans safer. The military-industrial complex’s grip on almost every aspect of American life tightened.

The government failed to protect our lives, liberty and happiness. The predators of the police state wreaked havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government didn’t listen to the citizenry, refused to abide by the Constitution, and treated the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers shot unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—were armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies were allowed to fleece taxpayers. Government technicians spied on our emails and phone calls. And government contractors made a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

The president became more imperial. Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill. The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability. The presidency itself has become an imperial one with permanent powers.

The cost of endless wars drove the nation deeper into debt. Policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad hasn’t made America—or the rest of the world—any safer, but it has made the military industrial complex rich at taxpayer expense.

The courts failed to uphold justice. Time and time again, the Supreme Court failed to right the wrongs being meted out by the American police state. A review of critical court rulings over the past decade or so, including some ominous ones by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order and protecting the ruling class and government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

Mass shootings claimed more lives. Mass shootings have taken place at churches, in nightclubs, on college campuses, on military bases, in elementary schools, in government offices, and at concerts. In almost every instance, you can connect the dots back to the military-industrial complex, which continues to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.

The rich got richer, and the poor went to jail. Not content to expand the police state’s power to search, strip, seize, raid, steal from, arrest and jail Americans for any infraction, no matter how insignificant, the courts continued their practice of jailing individuals who are unable to pay the hefty fines imposed by the American police state. These debtors’ prisons play right into the hands of those who make a profit by jailing Americans.  This is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” It is fast becoming a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations,” and its rise to power is predicated on shackling the American taxpayer to a debtors’ prison guarded by a phalanx of politicians, bureaucrats and militarized police with no hope of parole and no chance for escape.

Police became even more militarized and weaponized. Despite concerns about the government’s steady transformation of local police into a standing military army, local police agencies continued to acquire weaponry, training and equipment suited for the battlefield. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.

Schools turned into prisons. So-called school “safety” policies, which run the gamut from zero tolerance policies that punish all infractions harshly to surveillance cameras, metal detectors, random searches, drug-sniffing dogs, school-wide lockdowns, active-shooter drills and militarized police officers, turned schools into prisons and young people into prisoners.

The government waged a renewed war on private property. The battle to protect our private property has become the final constitutional frontier, the last holdout against our freedoms being usurped. We no longer have any real property rights. That house you live in, the car you drive, the small (or not so small) acreage of land that has been passed down through your family or that you scrimped and saved to acquire, whatever money you manage to keep in your bank account after the government and its cronies have taken their first and second and third cut…none of it is safe from the government’s greedy grasp. At no point do you ever have any real ownership in anything other than the clothes on your back. Everything else can be seized by the government under one pretext or another (civil asset forfeiture, unpaid taxes, eminent domain, public interest, etc.).

The plight of the nation’s homeless worsened. In communities across the country, legislators adopted a variety of methods (parking meters, zoning regulations, tickets, and even robots) to discourage the homeless from squatting, loitering and panhandling. One of the most common—and least discussed—practices: homeless relocation programs that bus the homeless outside city limits.

The government waged war on military veterans. The government has done a pitiful job of respecting the freedoms of military veterans and caring for their needs once out of uniform. The plight of veterans today is America’s badge of shame, with large numbers of veterans impoverished, unemployed, traumatized mentally and physically, struggling with depression, suicide, and marital stress, homeless, subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics and hospitals, left to molder while their paperwork piles up within Veterans Administration offices, and increasingly treated like criminals— targeted for surveillance, censorship, threatened with incarceration or involuntary commitment, labeled as extremists and/or mentally ill, and stripped of their Second Amendment rights—for daring to speak out against government misconduct.

In sum, 2024 was a disheartening year for those who cherish freedom.

Yet no matter who sits in the White House, politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair.

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 are at our most vulnerable right now: the gravest threat facing us as a nation in 2025 is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/5b7a84ud

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 Rights Become Privileges: Is the Constitution Becoming Optional?

Posted: December 9, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country is a ‘Bill of Temporary Privileges.’ And if you read the news, even badly, you know that the list gets shorter and shorter.”—George Carlin

Disguising its power grabs in the self-righteous fervor of national security, the Deep State has mastered the art of the bait-and-switch.

It works like this: first, the government foments fear about some crisis or threat to national security, then they capitalize on it by seizing greater power and using those powers against the American people.

We’ve seen this play out over and over again.

The government used its so-called War on Terror to transform itself into a police state.

Then the police state used its War on COVID-19 to claim lockdown powers.

All indications are that the government’s promised War on Illegal Immigration will be yet another sleight of hand that allows the powers-that-be to engage in greater power grabs while weakening the Constitution.

Therein lies the danger of the government’s growing addiction to power.

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 healthy again—inevitably, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

The slippery slope that starts with illegal immigration has all the makings of a thinly veiled plot to empower the government to become the arbiter of who is deserving of rights and who isn’t.

That quickly, we could find ourselves navigating a world in which the rights enshrined in the Constitution for all persons living in the United States are transformed into privileges enjoyed only by those whom the government chooses to recognize as legitimate.

By persuading the public that non-citizens, particularly illegal immigrants, do not enjoy the same inalienable rights as law-abiding citizens (a fact refuted by the Constitution and every credible legal scholar in the country), the Deep State is leading us down a road in which all rights are transitory.

This is how you establish a hierarchy of rights, contingent on whether you belong to a favored political class.

Be warned.

At such a time as the government is emboldened to flip that switch and appoint itself the ultimate authority on which protected class of individuals gets to enjoy the rights enshrined within the Constitution, the dividing line will not be between legal citizens and illegal immigrants.

It will not even be between Republicans and Democrats.

Rather, the purpose of that line of demarcation will be to distinguish the compliant, obedient, subservient vassal of the American police state (the so-called Loyalists) from everyone else.

We’re almost at that point now.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

Here are some of the inherent dangers in allowing the government to become the arbiter of who is deserving of rights:

It leads to the erosion of universal rights. The Bill of Rights was designed to protect the fundamental rights of all persons within the United States, regardless of their citizenship status, race, religion, or any other factor. When the government starts making distinctions about who is entitled to these rights, it undermines the universality that makes them so powerful. This creates a slippery slope where rights become privileges, subject to the whims of those in power.

It gives rise to authoritarianism. History is replete with examples of governments that consolidated power by first stripping away the rights of marginalized groups. Once the principle of universal rights is breached, it becomes easier to target other groups deemed “undesirable” or “unworthy.” This paves the way for authoritarianism, where the government dictates who enjoys freedom and who does not.

It creates a two-tiered society. A hierarchy of rights inevitably leads to a two-tiered society, where some individuals enjoy full protection under the law while others are relegated to second-class status. This fosters resentment, division, and social unrest. It also creates a vulnerable population that can be easily exploited and abused.

It undermines the rule of law. The rule of law is a fundamental principle of a just society. It means that everyone is subject to the same laws and that no one is above the law. When the government selectively applies the law based on arbitrary criteria, it undermines the rule of law and erodes trust in the legal system.

It chills free speech and dissent, i.e., the right to criticize the government. When people fear that their rights are contingent on their political views or social status, they are less likely to speak out against injustice or challenge the government. This chilling effect on dissent stifles free speech and creates a climate of fear and conformity.

It contributes to the loss of moral authority. A nation that claims to champion liberty and justice for all loses its moral authority when it denies those principles to certain groups within its borders. This undermines its standing in the world and diminishes its ability to promote human rights abroad.

Remember, the erosion of inalienable rights often starts subtly, with the government chipping away at the edges of those rights for specific groups.

The pattern is subtle at first, with government officials exploiting fear and prejudice in order to target groups that are already marginalized or perceived as “outsiders.” Incrementally, the net is cast wider and wider, so that by the time the injustice is widespread enough to inspire outrage in the greater populace, it’s too late to resist.

Historic examples abound of how the government has manufactured a blatantly unjust hierarchy of rights in order to diminish certain segments of society. These run the gamut from slavery and the persecution of Native Americans to the Japanese internment camps and segregation.

More recently, we’ve seen this tactic deployed in order to justify policies that run afoul of the Constitution, ranging from immigration policies and mass surveillance programs to SWAT team raids, voting rights, and the erosion of due process.

Clearly, Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all, a warning issued in response to the threat posed by Nazi Germany’s fascist regime, still applies.

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

This is how the slippery slope to all-out persecution starts.

It doesn’t help that growing numbers of American citizens barely know their rights. Consider that only 5% of the U.S. adults surveyed could correctly name all five rights in the First Amendment, 20% could not correctly name any, and less than one in 10 Americans know they have a right to petition the government.

Such civic illiteracy lays the groundwork for all manner of tyrannies to follow. After all, how can you defend your rights if you don’t know what those rights are?

Then again, civic illiteracy among government officials, who are entrusted with upholding and protecting the Constitution, doesn’t appear to be much better.

It was ten years ago on December 15, National Bill of Rights Day, that the U.S. Supreme Court in its 8-1 ruling in Heien v. State of North Carolina gave police in America one more ready excuse to routinely violate the laws of the land, this time under the guise of ignorance.

The Heien case, which started with an improper traffic stop based on a police officer’s ignorance of the law and ended with an unlawful search, seizure and arrest, was supposed to ensure that ignorance of the law did not become a ready excuse for government officials to routinely violate the law.

It failed to do so.

In failing to enforce the Constitution, the Court gave police the go-ahead to justify a laundry list of misconduct, from police shootings of unarmed citizens to SWAT team raids, roadside strip searches, and the tasering of vulnerable individuals with paltry excuses such as “they looked suspicious” and “she wouldn’t obey our orders.”

Ignorance of the law has become an all-too-convenient cover for all manner of abuses by government officials who should know better.

I’m not sure which is worse: government officials who know nothing about the laws they have sworn to uphold, support and defend, or a constitutionally illiterate citizenry so clueless about their rights that they don’t even know when those rights are being violated.

This much I do know, however: for anyone to advocate terminating or suspending the Constitution is tantamount to a declaration of war against the founding principles of our representative government and the rule of law.

If there is one point on which there should be no political parsing, no legal jockeying, and no disagreement, it is this.

Then again, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, one could well make the case that the Constitution has already been terminated after years on life support, given the extent to which the safeguards enshrined in the Bill of Rights—adopted 233 years ago as a means of protecting the people against government overreach and abuse—have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

History provides chilling examples of how quickly rights can vanish, even in a nation such as ours founded on the principles of freedom. As George Carlin astutely observed:

“If you think you do have rights, next time you’re at the computer, get on the internet, go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, I want you to type in ‘Japanese Americans 1942’ and you’ll find out all about your precious … rights. In 1942, there were 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing, law-abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That’s all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had: ‘right this way’ into the internment camps. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took them away. And rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away.”

Remember you were warned, folks.

At the point that rights become privileges, then the Constitution and the government’s adherence to the rule of law will become optional.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/y75szpkr

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. 

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