Posts Tagged ‘politics’

The Politics of Fear: Laying the Groundwork for Fascism, American-Style

Posted: October 28, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”—Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist

America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.

The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.

Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.

This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live.

Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.

We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of conformists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government, fear of those on the Right, fear of those on the Left… The list goes on and on.

The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.

Fear makes people stupid.

Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.

Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail. 

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.

All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police and marauding SWAT teams.

America has already entered a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of their so-called “anti-government” views, and law-abiding Americans are having their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented, and their communications monitored.

These threats are not to be underestimated.

Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.

This language of fear has given rise to a politics of fear whose only aim is to distract and divide us. In this way, we have been discouraged from thinking analytically and believing that we have any part to play in solving the problems before us. Instead, we have been conditioned to point the finger at the other Person or vote for this Politician or support this Group, because they are the ones who will fix it. Except that they can’t and won’t fix the problems plaguing our communities.

Nevertheless, fear remains the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.

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

An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America. However, with crime at an all-time low, is such fear rational?

Statistics show that you are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack. You are 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane. You are 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack. You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack. You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocating in bed than from a terrorist attack. And you are 9 more times likely to choke to death in your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack.

Indeed, those living in the American police state are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. Thus, the government’s endless jabbering about terrorism amounts to little more than propaganda—the propaganda of fear—a tactic used to terrorize, cower and control the population.

In turn, the government’s stranglehold on power and extreme paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats has resulted in a populace that is increasingly viewed as the government’s enemies.

Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?

So far, these tactics—terrorizing the citizenry over the government’s paranoia and overblown fears while treating them like criminals—are working to transform the way “we the people” view ourselves and our role in this nation.

Indeed, fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

The American people have been reduced to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”

Sanchez continues:

I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…

I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…

Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.

As history makes clear, fear and government paranoia lead to fascist, totalitarian regimes.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.

The following, derived by from John T. Flynn’s 1944 treatise on fascism As We Go Marching are a few of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state:

  • The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).
  • The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.
  • The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.
  • The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
  • The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.
  • The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.
  • The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.
  • The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.
  • The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.
  • The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.

The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.

“Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized. Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect,” writes economist Jeffrey Tucker. “It’s incorrect to call fascism either right wing or left wing. It is both and neither… fascism does not seek to overthrow institutions like commercial establishments, family, religious centers, and civic traditions. It seeks to control them… it preserves most of what people hold dear but promises to improve economic, social, and cultural life through unifying their operations under government control.”

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.

We are at a critical crossroads in American history.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it has become the driving force behind the American police state.

All of which begs the question what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.

As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?

There is no easy answer, but one thing is true: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/msdcjkch

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. 

Brace Yourselves: A Tsunami Approaches

Posted: October 15, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security… And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”—Historian Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.

As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.

Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

The world has been down this road before, as historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free.

We are at our most vulnerable right now.

The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

We’re in a national state of denial, yet no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

No matter how often the team colors change, the playbook remains the same. The leopard does not change its spots.

Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that nothing has changed.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).

Consider for yourselves:

  • Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.
  • SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
  • The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.
  • Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.
  • For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
  • Censorship hasn’t stopped.
  • The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
  • Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
  • The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements.
  • The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers.
  • Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws.
  • The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.”
  • The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad.
  • The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
  • And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep.

So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past century, it will be just another lie.

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” historian Robert Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on.”

The German people backed Hitler because for the majority of them, life was good.

In a nutshell, life was good because their creature comforts remained undiminished, their bank accounts remained flush, and they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor.

Life is good in America, too.

Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Life is good in America as long as you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%. 

Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

So, please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to any one particular administration has not been paying attention.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/bdzkuxwr

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 Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom

Posted: August 20, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Neil Postman

What you smell is the stench of a dying republic.

Our dying republic.

We are trapped in a political matrix intended to sustain the illusion that we are citizens of a constitutional republic.

In reality, we are caught somewhere between a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

In other words, we’re allowed to bask in the illusion of freedom while we’re being stripped of the very rights intended to ensure that we can hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution.

We’re in trouble, folks.

This is no longer America, land of the free, where the government is of the people, by the people and for the people.

Rather, this is Amerika, where fascism, totalitarianism and militarism go hand in hand.

Freedom no longer means what it once did.

This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ commitment to the American experiment in freedom.

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

My friends, we’re being played for fools.

On paper, we may be technically free.

In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, but we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

Government surveillance, police abuse, SWAT team raids, economic instability, asset forfeiture schemes, pork barrel legislation, militarized police, drones, endless wars, private prisons, involuntary detentions, biometrics databases, free speech zones, etc.: these are mile markers on the road to a fascist state where citizens are treated like cattle, to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.

Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction.

The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.

The American kleptocracy has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.

Our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

Through every fault of our own—our apathy, our ignorance, our intolerance, our disinclination to do the hard work of holding government leaders accountable to the rule of law, our inclination to let politics trump longstanding constitutional principles—we have been reduced to this sorry state in which we are little more than shackled inmates in a prison operated for the profit of a corporate elite.

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

For there to be any hope of real change, we must change how we think about ourselves, our fellow human beings, freedom, society, and the government.

The following principles may help any budding freedom fighters in the struggle to liberate themselves and our society.

First, we must come to grips with the reality that the present system does not foster freedom. The government’s primary purpose is maintaining power and control. It’s an oligarchy composed of corporate giants wedded to government officials who benefit from the relationship. In other words, it is motivated by greed and exists to perpetuate itself.

Second, voting is no guarantee of liberty. Voting is a way to keep the citizenry pacified. That’s why the government places so much emphasis on the reassurance ritual of voting. It provides the illusion of participation while maintaining the status quo. As Jordan Michael Smith, writing for the Boston Globe, concludes about the American government, “There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.”

Third, question everything. Don’t assume anything the government does is for the good of the citizenry. As James Madison warned, “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.” Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Fourth, there is little hope for any true resistance if you are mindlessly connected to the electronic concentration camp. Remember, what you’re being electronically fed by those in power is meant to pacify, distract, and control you.

Fifth, be wise and realize that there is power in numbers. Networks, coalitions, and movements can accomplish much—especially if their objectives are focused, practical and nonviolent—and they are very much feared by government authorities.

Sixth, as always, change must start with “we the people.” I’ve always advised people to think nationally, but act locally. Yet it can be hard to make a difference locally when the local government is as deaf, dumb and blind to the needs of its constituents as the national government.

Seventh, local towns, cities and states can nullify or say “no” to federal laws that violate the rights and freedoms of the citizenry. When and if you see such federal laws passed, gather your coalition of citizens and demand that your local town council nullify such laws. If enough towns and cities across the country would speak truth to power in this way, we might see some positive movement from the federal governmental machine.

Clearly, it’s time to clean house at all levels of government.

We have been saddled with the wreckage of a government at all levels that no longer represents the citizenry, serves the citizenry, or is accountable to the citizenry.

“We the people” are not the masters anymore.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the federal government, state governments, or local governing bodies: at all ends of the spectrum and every point in between, a shift has taken place.

“We the people” are not being seen, heard or valued.

We no longer count for much of anything beyond an occasional electoral vote and as a source of income for the government’s ever-burgeoning financial needs.

Everything happening at the national level is playing out at the local level, as well: the violence, the militarization, the intolerance, the lopsided governance, and an uneasy awareness that the citizenry have no say in how their communities are being governed.

So, what’s the answer?

For starters, stop tolerating corruption, graft, intolerance, greed, incompetence, ineptitude, militarism, lawlessness, ignorance, brutality, deceit, collusion, corpulence, bureaucracy, immorality, depravity, censorship, cruelty, violence, mediocrity, and tyranny. These are the hallmarks of an institution that is rotten through and through.

Stop holding your nose in order to block out the stench of a rotting institution.

Stop letting the government and its agents treat you like a servant or a slave.

You’ve got rights. We’ve all got rights. This is our country. This is our government. No one can take it away from us unless we make it easy for them.

You’ve got a better chance of making your displeasure seen and felt and heard within your own community. But it will take perseverance and unity and a commitment to finding common ground with your fellow citizens.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re making it way too easy for the police state to take over.

So, stop being an accessory to the murder of the American republic.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yrh2anhu

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. 

Who Owns America? Oligarchs Have Bought Up the American Dream

Posted: August 13, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear… They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else… It’s called the American Dream, ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.”—George Carlin

Who owns America?

Is it the government? The politicians? The corporations? The foreign investors? The American people?

While the Deep State keeps the nation divided and distracted by a presidential election whose outcome is foregone (the police state’s stranglehold on power will ensure the continuation of endless wars and out-of-control spending, while disregarding the citizenry’s fundamental rights and the rule of law), America is literally being bought and sold right out from under us.

Consider the facts.

We’re losing more and more of our land every year to corporations and foreign interests. Foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land has increased by 66% since 2010. In 2021, it was reported that foreign investors owned approximately 40 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, which is more than the entire state of Iowa. By 2022 that number had grown to 43.4 million acres. The rate at which U.S. farmland is being bought up by foreign interests grew by 2.2 million acres per year from 2015 to 2021. The number of U.S. farm acres owned by foreign entities grew more than 8% (3.4 million acres) in 2022.

We’re losing more and more of our businesses every year to foreign corporations and interests. Although China owns a small fraction of foreign-owned U.S. land at 380,000 acres (less than the state of Rhode Island), Chinese companies and investors are also buying up major food companies, commercial and residential real estate, and other businesses. As RetailWire explains, “Currently, many brands started by early American pioneers now wave international flags. This revolution is a direct result of globalization.” The growing list of once-notable American brands that have been sold to foreign corporations includes: U.S. Steel (now Japanese-owned); General Electric (Chinese-owned); Budweiser (Belgium); Burger King (Canada); 7-Eleven (Japan); Jeep, Chrysler, and Dodge (Netherlands); and IBM (China).

We’re digging ourselves deeper and deeper into debt, both as a nation and as a populace. Basically, the U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card, spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford. The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is more than $34 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033. Foreign ownership makes up 29% of the U.S. debt held by the public. Of that amount, reports the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, “52 percent was held by private foreign investors while foreign governments held the remaining 48 percent.”

The Fourth Estate has been taken over by media conglomerates that prioritize profit over principle. Independent news agencies, which were supposed to act as bulwarks against government propaganda, have been subsumed by a global corporate takeover of newspapers, television and radio. Consequently, a handful of corporations now control most of the media industry and, thus, the information dished out to the public. Likewise, with Facebook and Google having appointed themselves the arbiters of disinformation, we now find ourselves grappling with new levels of corporate censorship by entities with a history of colluding with the government to keep the citizenry mindless, muzzled and in the dark.

Most critically of all, however, the U.S. government, long ago sold to the highest bidders, has become little more than a shell company, a front for corporate interests. Nowhere is this state of affairs more evident than in the manufactured spectacle that is the presidential election. As for members of Congress, long before they’re elected, they are trained to dance to the tune of their wealthy benefactors, so much so that they spend two-thirds of their time in office raising money. As Reuters reports, “It also means that lawmakers often spend more time listening to the concerns of the wealthy than anyone else.”

In the oligarchy that is the American police state, it clearly doesn’t matter who wins the White House, because they all work for the same boss: a Corporate State that has gone global.

So much for living the American dream.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

We’re being forced to shell out money for endless wars that are bleeding us dry; money for surveillance systems to track our movements; money to further militarize our already militarized police; money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts; money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply; and on and on.

This is no way of life.

It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.

There are a few things we can do (demand transparency, reject cronyism and graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over people), but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in fascism.

Unfortunately, we’ve become so invested in identity politics that label us based on our political leanings that we’ve lost sight of the one label that unites us: we’re all Americans.

The powers-that-be want us to adopt an “us versus them” mindset that keeps us powerless and divided. Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the only “us versus them” that matters is “we the people” against the Deep State.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/p5j3te46

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. 

American Theocracy: Politics Has Become Our National Religion

Posted: August 7, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“You shall have no other gods before me.”—The Ten Commandments

“Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.”—Donald Trump

Politics has become our national religion.

While those on the Left have feared a religious coup by evangelical Christians on the Right, the danger has come from an altogether different direction: our constitutional republic has given way to a theocracy structured around the worship of a political savior.

For all intents and purposes, politics has become America’s God.

Pay close attention to the political conventions for presidential candidates, and it becomes immediately evident that Americans have allowed themselves to be brainwashed into worshipping a political idol manufactured by the Deep State.

In a carefully choreographed scheme to strip the American citizenry of our power and our rights, “we the people” have become victims of the Deep State’s confidence game.

Every confidence game has six essential stages: 1) the foundation to lay the groundwork for the illusion; 2) the approach whereby the victim is contacted; 3) the build-up to make the victim feel like they’ve got a vested interest in the outcome; 4) the corroboration (aided by third-party conspirators) to legitimize that the scammers are, in fact, on the up-and-up; 5) the pay-off, in which the victim gets to experience some small early “wins”; and 6) the “hurrah”— a sudden manufactured crisis or change of events that creates a sense of urgency. 

In this particular con game, every candidate dangled before us as some form of political savior—including Donald Trump and Kamala Harris—is part of a long-running, elaborate scam intended to persuade us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we live in a constitutional republic.

In this way, the voters are the dupes, the candidates are the shills, and as usual, it’s the Deep State rigging the outcome.

Terrorist attacks, pandemics, economic uncertainty, national security threats, civil unrest: these are all manipulated crises that add to the sense of urgency and help us feel invested in the outcome of the various elections, but it doesn’t change much in the long term.

No matter who wins this election, we’ll all still be prisoners of the Deep State.

Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

When it comes to the power players that call the shots, there is no end to their voracious appetite for more: more money, more power, more control. Thus, since 9/11, the government’s answer to every problem has been more government and less freedom.

Yet despite what some may think, the Constitution is no magical incantation against government wrongdoing. Indeed, it’s only as effective as those who abide by it.

However, without courts willing to uphold the Constitution’s provisions when government officials disregard it and a citizenry knowledgeable enough to be outraged when those provisions are undermined, the Constitution provides little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like.

Unfortunately, the courts and the police have meshed in their thinking to such an extent that anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism.

Consequently, America no longer operates under a system of justice characterized by due process, an assumption of innocence, probable cause and clear prohibitions on government overreach and police abuse. Instead, our courts of justice have been transformed into courts of order, advocating for the government’s interests, rather than championing the rights of the citizenry, as enshrined in the Constitution.

The rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, once the map by which we navigated sometimes hostile government terrain, has been unceremoniously booted out of the runaway car that is the U.S. government by the Deep State.

What we are dealing with is a rogue government whose policies are dictated more by greed than need. Making matters worse, “we the people” have become so gullible, so easily distracted, and so out-of-touch that we have ignored the warning signs all around us in favor of political expediency in the form of electoral saviors.

Yet it’s not just Americans who have given themselves over to political gods, however.

Evangelical Christians, seduced by electoral promises of power and religious domination, have become yet another tool in the politician’s toolbox.

For instance, repeatedly conned into believing that Republican candidates from George W. Bush to Donald Trump will save the church, evangelical Christians have turned the ballot box into a referendum on morality. Yet in doing so, they have shown themselves to be as willing to support totalitarian tactics as those on the Left.

This was exactly what theologian Francis Schaeffer warned against: “We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way, ‘We should not wrap Christianity in our national flag.’”

Equating religion and politics, and allowing the ends to justify the means, only empowers tyrants and lays the groundwork for totalitarianism.

This way lies madness and the certain loss of our freedoms.

If you must vote, vote, but don’t make the mistake of consecrating the ballot box.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it doesn’t matter what religion a particular candidate claims to subscribe to: all politicians answer to their own higher power, which is the Deep State.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/2wxv2wdf

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 Right to Not Be Lied To: Making the Case for Truth in Politics

Posted: July 31, 2024 in Uncategorized
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Q: “How can you tell if a politician is lying?”
A: “When his lips are moving.”

“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.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The First Amendment assures us of a right to free speech.

It does not, unfortunately, explicitly assure us of a right to not be lied to by our government and its various officials. Any hope of holding government officials accountable for their lies rests with the political process, in the voting booths and through the impeachment process, which themselves have become so ineffective as to offer little real hope of transparency, accountability or reform.

We have been lied to so much, for so long, and on every subject, by government officials of every stripe that political lies have become our norm. It says something about the sorry state of our nation and the low bar we have set for those we elect to represent us.

However, although there are few consequences for government officials who lie to the public, the Deep State continues to wage war on those who challenge its lies, half-truths and obfuscations.

Case in point: Julian Assange.

Although the news of Assange’s plea deal was quickly overshadowed by the drama that is the 2024 presidential election (the WikiLeaks founder pled guilty to a “single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material in exchange for his release from a British prison”), his persecution at the hands of the Deep State was a warning shot over the bow for anyone who dares speak truth to power.

The Deep State has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on truth-tellers.

Activists, journalists and whistleblowers alike continue to be terrorized, traumatized, tortured and subjected to the fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics employed by the superpowers-that-be.

In an age of prosecutions for thought crimes, pre-crime deterrence programs, and government agencies that operate like organized crime syndicates, this is a new kind of tyranny being imposed on those who dare to expose the crimes of the Deep State, whose reach has gone global.

What happened to Assange was intended to send a message to anyone who dares to speak truth to power: don’t even consider it.

Some background: Assange, the founder of a website that published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources, was arrested on April 11, 2019, on charges of helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning access and leak more than 700,000 classified military documents that portray the U.S. government and its military as reckless, irresponsible and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among the leaked Manning material were the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).

The Collateral Murder leak included gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.

This is morally wrong.

It shouldn’t matter which nation is responsible for these atrocities: there is no defense for such evil perpetrated in the name of profit margins and war profiteering.

In true Orwellian fashion, however, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.

Following his April 2019 arrest, Assange was locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S.

Had he not taken the plea deal, he could have been sentenced to 175 years in prison.

“In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law,” declared Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture.

It’s not just Assange who was made to suffer, however.

Manning, who was jailed for seven years from 2010 to 2017 for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, was arrested in March 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury about Assange, placed in solitary confinement for almost a month, and then sentenced to remain in jail either until she agreed to testify or until the grand jury’s 18-month term expired.

Federal judge Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia also fined Manning $500 for every day she remained in custody after 30 days, and $1,000 for every day she remained in custody after 60 days, a chilling—and financially crippling—example of the government’s heavy-handed efforts to weaponize fines and jail terms as a means of forcing dissidents to fall in line.

This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.

Make no mistake: the government is waging war on journalists and whistleblowers for disclosing information relating to government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.

Yet while this targeted campaign—aided, abetted and advanced by the Deep State’s international alliances—unfolded during President Trump’s watch, it began with the Obama Administration’s decision to revive the antiquated, hundred-year-old Espionage Act, which was intended to punish government spies, and instead use it to prosecute government whistleblowers.

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration not only continued the Obama Administration’s attack on whistleblowers. It injected this war on truth-tellers and truth-seekers with steroids and let it loose on the First Amendment.

In May 2019, Trump’s Justice Department issued a sweeping new “superseding” secret indictment of Assange—hinged on the Espionage Act—that empowered the government to determine what counts as legitimate journalism and criminalize the rest, not to mention giving “the government license to criminally punish journalists it does not like, based on antipathy, vague standards, and subjective judgments.”

Noting that the indictment signaled grave dangers for freedom of the press in general, media lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr., warned, “The indictment would criminalize the encouragement of leaks of newsworthy classified information, criminalize the acceptance of such information, and criminalize publication of it.”

Boutrous continues:

“[I]t doesn’t matter whether you think Assange is a journalist, or whether WikiLeaks is a news organization. The theory that animates the indictment targets the very essence of journalistic activity: the gathering and dissemination of information that the government wants to keep secret. You don’t have to like Assange or endorse what he and WikiLeaks have done over the years to recognize that this indictment sets an ominous precedent and threatens basic First Amendment values…. With only modest tweaking, the very same theory could be invoked to prosecute journalists for the very same crimes being alleged against Assange, simply for doing their jobs of scrutinizing the government and reporting the news to the American people.”

We desperately need greater scrutiny and transparency, not less.

Indeed, transparency is one of those things the shadow government fears the most.

Why? Because it might arouse the distracted American populace to actually exercise their rights and resist the tyranny that is inexorably asphyxiating their freedoms.

This need to shed light on government actions—to make the obscure, least transparent reaches of government accessible and accountable—was a common theme for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who famously coined the phrase, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Writing in January 1884, Brandeis explained:

“Light is the only thing that can sweeten our political atmosphere—light thrown upon every detail of administration in the departments; light diffused through every policy; light blazed full upon every feature of legislation; light that can penetrate every recess or corner in which any intrigue might hide; light that will open up to view the innermost chambers of government, drive away all darkness from the treasury vaults; illuminate foreign correspondence; explore national dockyards; search out the obscurities of Indian affairs; display the workings of justice; exhibit the management of the army; play upon the sails of the navy; and follow the distribution of the mails.”

Of course, transparency is futile without a populace that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law.

For this reason, it is vital that citizens have the right to criticize the government without fear.

After all, we’re citizens, not subjects. For those who don’t fully understand the distinction between the two and why transparency is so vital to a healthy constitutional government, Manning explains it well:

“When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … I believe that when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship. There is a bright distinction between citizens, who have rights and privileges protected by the state, and subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.”

Manning goes on to suggest that the U.S. “needs legislation to protect the public’s right to free speech and a free press, to protect it from the actions of the executive branch and to promote the integrity and transparency of the US government.”

Technically, we’ve already got such legislation on the books: the First Amendment.

The First Amendment gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.

The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.

More than 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Washington Post Co. to block the Nixon Administration’s attempts to use claims of national security to prevent The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing secret Pentagon papers on how America went to war in Vietnam.

As Justice William O. Douglas remarked on the ruling, “The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

More than 50 years later, the people’s right to know about government misconduct continues to be pitted against the might of the Deep State.

Yet this isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.

Following the current downward trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” is relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

Eventually, we will all be potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government.

All of us are in danger.

Partisan politics have no place in this debate: Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.

We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are individuals such as Julian Assange who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

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

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yc4vwyh7

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. 

Engineering a Crisis: How Political Theater Helps the Deep State Stay in Power

Posted: July 22, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“The two ‘sides’ of mainstream politics are not fighting against one another, they’re only fighting against you. Their only job is to keep you clapping along with the two-handed puppet show as they rob you blind and tighten your chains while your gaze is fixed on the performance.”—Caitlin Johnstone

A failed assassination attempt on a presidential candidate. An incumbent president withdrawing his re-election bid at the 11th hour. A politicized judiciary that fails to hold the powers-that-be accountable to the rule of law. A world at war. A nation in turmoil.

This is what controlled chaos looks like.

This year’s election-year referendum on which corporate puppet should occupy the White House has quickly become a lesson in how the Deep State engineers a crisis to keep itself in power.

Don’t get so caught up in the performance that you lose sight of what’s real.

This endless series of diversions, distractions and political drama is the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

It’s the Reichstag Fire all over again.

It was February 1933, a month before national elections in Germany, and the Nazis weren’t expected to win. So they engineered a way to win: they began by infiltrating the police and granting police powers to their allies; then Hitler brought in stormtroopers to act as auxiliary police; by the time an arsonist (who claimed to be working for the Communists in the hopes of starting an armed revolt) set fire to the Reichstag, the German parliamentary building, the people were eager for a return to law and order.

That was all it took: Hitler used the attempted “coup” as an excuse to declare martial law and seize absolute power in Germany, establishing himself as a dictator with the support of the German people.

Fast forward to the present day, and what do we have? A discontented citizenry, a disconnected government, and a Deep State that wants to stay in power at all costs.

So what happens? Trump has a near miss, Biden bows out, and politics becomes exciting to the masses again.

It works the same in every age.

This is how the police state will win, no matter which candidate gets elected to the White House.

You know who will lose? Every last one of us.

After all, politics today is not about Republicans and Democrats.

Nor is it about abortion, healthcare, higher taxes, immigration, or any of the other buzzwords that have become campaign slogans for individuals who have mastered the art of telling Americans exactly what they want to hear.

Politics today is about one thing and one thing only: maintaining the status quo between the Controllers (the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the corporate elite) and the Controlled (the taxpayers).

Indeed, it really doesn’t matter what you call them—the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that no matter which party occupies the White House in 2025, the unelected bureaucracy that actually calls the shots will continue to do so.

In other words, no matter who wins this next presidential election, you can rest assured that the new boss will be the same as the old boss, and we—the permanent underclass in America—will continue to be forced to march in lockstep with the police state in all matters, public and private.

Consider the following a much-needed reality check, an antidote if you will, against an overdose of overhyped campaign announcements, lofty electoral promises and meaningless patriotic sentiments that land us right back in the same prison cell.

FACT: According to a scientific study by Princeton researchers, the United States of America is not the democracy that it purports to be, but rather an oligarchy, in which “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy.”

FACT: Despite the fact that the number of violent crimes in the country is down substantially, the lowest rate in sixty years, the number of Americans being jailed for nonviolent crimes such as driving with a suspended license continues to skyrocket.

FACT: Thanks to an overabundance of 4,500-plus federal crimes and 400,000-plus rules and regulations, it is estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. In fact, according to law professor John Baker, “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. That is not an exaggeration.”

FACT: Despite the fact that we have 38 million Americans living at or below the poverty line, 13 million children living in households without adequate access to food, and 1.2 million veterans relying on food stamps, enormous sums of taxpayer money continue to be doled out on wasteful programs that do little to improve the plight of those in need.

FACT: Since 2001 Americans have spent $93 million every hour for the total cost of the nation’s so-called war on terror. 

FACT: It is estimated that 5 million children in the United States have had at least one parent in prison, whether it be a local jail or a state or federal penitentiary, due to a wide range of factors ranging from overcriminalization and surprise raids at family homes to roadside traffic stops.

FACT: According to a Gallup poll, Americans place greater faith in the military and the police than in any of the three branches of government.

FACT: At least 400 to 500 innocent people are killed by police officers every year. Indeed, Americans are now eight times more likely to die in a police confrontation than they are to be killed by a terrorist. Americans are 110 times more likely to die of foodborne illness than in a terrorist attack. Police officers are more likely to be struck by lightning than be made financially liable for their wrongdoing.

FACT: On an average day in America, over 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams. Most of those SWAT team raids are for a mere warrant service. There has been a notable buildup in recent years of heavily armed SWAT teams within non-security-related federal agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Education Department.

FACT: For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government: the surveillance state. This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC. The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins. They have become one and the same entity. The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.

FACT: Everything we do will eventually be connected to the Internet. By 2030 it is estimated there will be 100 trillion sensor devices connecting human electronic devices (cell phones, laptops, etc.) to the Internet. Much, if not all, of our electronic devices will be connected to Google, which openly works with government intelligence agencies. Virtually everything we do now—no matter how innocent—is being collected by the spying American police state.

FACT: Americans know virtually nothing about their history or how their government works. In fact, according to a study by the National Constitution Center, 41 percent of Americans “are not aware that there are three branches of government, and 62 percent couldn’t name them; 33 percent couldn’t even name one.”

FACT: Only six out of every one hundred Americans know that they actually have a constitutional right to hold the government accountable for wrongdoing, as guaranteed by the right to petition clause of the First Amendment.

Perhaps the most troubling fact of all is this: we have handed over control of our government and our lives to faceless bureaucrats who view us as little more than cattle to be bred, branded, butchered and sold for profit.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if there is to be any hope of restoring our freedoms and reclaiming control over our government, it will rest not with the politicians but with the people themselves.

One thing is for sure: the reassurance ritual of voting is not going to advance freedom one iota.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3fw3c9yb

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 Time of Shame and Sorrow: When It Comes to Political Violence, We All Lose

Posted: July 15, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily—whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence—whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.”— Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)

There’s a subtext to this assassination attempt on former President Trump that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.

More than 50 years after John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, America has become a ticking time bomb of political violence in words and deeds.

Magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality, our politically polarizing culture of callousness, cruelty, meanness, ignorance, incivility, hatred, intolerance, indecency and injustice have only served to ratchet up the tension.

Consumed with back-biting, partisan politics, sniping, toxic hate, meanness and materialism, a culture of meanness has come to characterize many aspects of the nation’s governmental and social policies. “Meanness today is a state of mind,” writes professor Nicolaus Mills in his book The Triumph of Meanness, “the product of a culture of spite and cruelty that has had an enormous impact on us.”

This casual cruelty is made possible by a growing polarization within the populace that emphasizes what divides us—race, religion, economic status, sexuality, ancestry, politics, etc.—rather than what unites us: we are all Americans, and in a larger, more global sense, we are all human.

This is what writer Anna Quindlen refers to as “the politics of exclusion, what might be thought of as the cult of otherness… It divides the country as surely as the Mason-Dixon line once did. And it makes for mean-spirited and punitive politics and social policy.”

This is more than meanness, however.

We are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once.

This is what happens when ego, greed and power are allowed to take precedence over liberty, equality and justice.

This is the psychopathic mindset adopted by the architects of the Deep State, and it applies equally whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Beware, because this kind of psychopathology can spread like a virus among the populace.

As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”

People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”

By failing to actively take a stand for good, we become agents of evil. It’s not the person in charge who is solely to blame for the carnage. It’s the populace that looks away from the injustice, that empowers the totalitarian regime, that welcomes the building blocks of tyranny.

This realization hit me full-force a few years ago. I had stopped into a bookstore and was struck by all of the books on Hitler, everywhere I turned. Yet had there been no Hitler, there still would have been a Nazi regime. There still would have been gas chambers and concentration camps and a Holocaust.

Hitler wasn’t the architect of the Holocaust. He was merely the figurehead. Same goes for the American police state: had there been no Trump or Obama or Bush, there still would have been a police state. There still would have been police shootings and private prisons and endless wars and government pathocracy.

Why? Because “we the people” have paved the way for this tyranny to prevail.

By turning Hitler into a super-villain who singlehandedly terrorized the world—not so different from how Trump is often depicted—historians have given Hitler’s accomplices (the German government, the citizens that opted for security and order over liberty, the religious institutions that failed to speak out against evil, the individuals who followed orders even when it meant a death sentence for their fellow citizens) a free pass.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

None of us who remain silent and impassive in the face of evil, racism, extreme materialism, meanness, intolerance, cruelty, injustice and ignorance get a free pass.

Those among us who follow figureheads without question, who turn a blind eye to injustice and turn their backs on need, who march in lockstep with tyrants and bigots, who allow politics to trump principle, who give in to meanness and greed, and who fail to be outraged by the many wrongs being perpetrated in our midst, it is these individuals who must shoulder the blame when the darkness wins.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that,” Martin Luther King Jr. sermonized.

The darkness is winning.

It’s not just on the world stage we must worry about the darkness winning.

The darkness is winning in our communities. It’s winning in our homes, our neighborhoods, our churches and synagogues, and our government bodies. It’s winning in the hearts of men and women the world over who are embracing hatred over love. It’s winning in every new generation that is being raised to care only for themselves, without any sense of moral or civic duty to stand for freedom.

John F. Kennedy, killed by an assassin’s bullet five years before King would be similarly executed, spoke of a torch that had been “passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

Once again, a torch is being passed to a new generation, but this torch is setting the world on fire, burning down the foundations put in place by our ancestors, and igniting all of the ugliest sentiments in our hearts.

This fire is not liberating; it is destroying.

We are teaching our children all the wrong things: we are teaching them to hate, teaching them to worship false idols (materialism, celebrity, technology, politics), teaching them to prize vain pursuits and superficial ideals over kindness, goodness and depth.

We are on the wrong side of the revolution.

“If we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution,” advised King, “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.“

Freedom demands responsibility.

Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least, Americans.

JFK was killed in 1963 for daring to challenge the Deep State.

King was killed in 1968 for daring to challenge the military industrial complex.

Robert F. Kennedy offered these remarks to a polarized nation in the wake of King’s assassination:

“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization…filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort … to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love… What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

Two months later, RFK was also killed by an assassin’s bullet.

Fifty-plus years later, we’re still being terrorized by assassins’ bullets, but what these madmen are really trying to kill is that dream of a world in which all Americans “would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

We haven’t dared to dream that dream in such a long time.

But imagine…

Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to stand up—united—for freedom.

Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to speak out—with one voice—against injustice.

Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to push back—with the full force of our collective numbers—against government corruption and despotism.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, tyranny wouldn’t stand a chance.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/2twu3k76

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. 

Project Total Control: Everything Is a Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized

Posted: July 10, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“The biggest mistake I see is people waiting for A Big Sign that’ll tell them that things have gone too far. One Big Thing that police or lawmakers or the president/leaders will do that will cross the line. It’ll never come because they won’t cross it. They’ll move the line. That line you think you stand behind is shifting everyday with little actions, bills, legislations… That line will stop moving one day, & it’ll be too late… Every day, your sensitivity is being eroded by these willful atrocities. The envelope for what you’ll accept is being pushed. One day, all of these things will be your new normal.”—Nigerian writer Suyi Davies Okungbowa

The U.S. government is working to re-shape the country in the image of a totalitarian state.

This has remained true over the past 50-plus years no matter which political party held office.

This will remain true no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.

In the midst of the partisan furor over Project 2025, a 920-page roadmap for how to re-fashion the government to favor so-called conservative causes, both the Right and the Left have proven themselves woefully naive about the dangers posed by the power-hungry Deep State.

Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that both the Right and the Left and their various operatives are extensions of the Deep State, which continues to wage psychological warfare on the American people.

Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the government’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. For example, in 2022, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

“Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?” the psyops video posits. “Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”

This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens.”

Mind you, these psyops (psychological operations) campaigns aren’t only aimed at foreign enemies. The government has made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded.

This is what is referred to as “apple-pie propaganda.”

Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry in order to acclimate us to the Deep State’s totalitarian agenda.

Weaponizing violence in order to institute martial law. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.

Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.

Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Weaponizing entertainment. For the past century, the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office has provided Hollywood with equipment, personnel and technical expertise at taxpayer expense. In exchange, the military industrial complex has gotten a starring role in such blockbusters as Top Gun and its rebooted sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which translates to free advertising for the war hawks, recruitment of foot soldiers for the military empire, patriotic fervor by the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the nation’s endless wars, and Hollywood visionaries working to churn out dystopian thrillers that make the war machine appear relevant, heroic and necessary. As Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster who was appointed the head of the Office of War Information, observed, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”

Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

Weaponizing politics. The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Weaponizing genetics. Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Weaponizing the dystopian future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on 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 chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in undermining our freedoms.

The facts speak for themselves.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

What we have, 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 a government of wolves.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/24yph2j8

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 Supreme Court Makes the President a Dictator for Life

Posted: July 2, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”—Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissenting in Trump v. United States

The U.S. Supreme Court has made it official: the president of the United States can now literally get away with murder.

In a devastating 6-3 ruling in Trump v. United States that is equal parts politically short-sighted, self-servingly partisan, and utterly devoid of any pretense that the president is anything other than a dictator, the Supreme Court has validated what Richard Nixon once claimed: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

As Justice Sotomayor concluded in her powerful dissent:

“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done.”

The damage has indeed been done. Indubitably. Irrevocably. Unarguably.

Every American should be outraged, offended and afraid of what this ruling means for the future of our nation.

There can be no more pretending that we live in a constitutional republic. It’s all out in the open now. This is a dictatorship: Hitler has finally stepped out of the shadows.

The rule of law may have been on life support for a long time, but this ruling pulls the plug.

The facts of the case itself, which asks whether former president Donald Trump is immune from prosecution on charges that he attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, are less important than the ramifications of this ruling, which go so far as to dramatically expand the power of the presidency, rendering whoever occupies the Oval Office lawless and unaccountable.

This is exactly how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

In a textbook example of doublespeak, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Supreme Court’s six-person conservative majority, essentially declared that presidents are not above the law and then turned right around and ensured that president can do whatever they want in their official capacity without being held accountable or criminally liable.

As Roberts noted, “We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of presidential power requires that a former president have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute.”

Here’s the thing, however: this isn’t anything new. Not really.

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.

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 past presidents—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, 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 operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were passed from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden and will be passed along to the next president.

These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

These are the powers that continue to be passed along to each successive heir to the Oval Office, the Constitution be damned.

So you see, the Supreme Court didn’t make the president a dictator. It merely confirmed what we’ve been warning about all along: the president is already an imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional dictator with permanent powers.

Absolute power absolutely corrupted the presidency.

As for Trump, his concept of power, immunity and the presidency has always been troubling, self-serving and corrupt.

For instance, in 2016, Trump bragged, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?”

In 2019, Trump declared, “I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.”

And in 2023, Trump promised if he were reelected to only be a dictator on “day one.”

Any presidential candidate who promises to be a dictator on day one will be a dictator-in-chief for life. The government does not voluntarily relinquish those powers once it acquires, uses and inevitably abuses them.

As political science professor Gene Sharp warned, “Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.”

Which brings me back to the Supreme Court’s ruling on July 1, 2024, which was handed down mere days before the nation celebrates the anniversary of its declaration of independence from the heavy-handed tyranny of King George.

A document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who laid everything on the line, pledged it all—“our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—because they sought to free the American people from the reign of a dictatorial British emperor and believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free.

Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.

Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up when silence could not be tolerated. Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would remain secure for future generations.

The result: our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

Imagine the shock and outrage these 56 men would feel were they to discover that 248 years later, the government they had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic police state in which exercising one’s freedoms—at a minimum, merely questioning a government agent—is often viewed as a flagrant act of defiance.

In fact, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

Read the Declaration of Independence again, and ask yourself if the list of complaints tallied by Jefferson don’t bear a startling resemblance to the abuses “we the people” are suffering at the hands of the American police state.

In the 248 years since early Americans first declared and eventually won their independence from Great Britain, “we the people” have managed to work ourselves right back under the tyrant’s thumb.

Only this time, the tyrant is one of our own making. The abuses meted out by an imperial government and endured by the American people have not ended. They have merely evolved.

Given the fact that America is a relatively young nation, it hasn’t taken very long for an authoritarian regime to creep into power.

Unfortunately, the bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight.

It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.

The building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of—police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.—were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that does not mean we should give up or give in or tune out.

Folks, if ever there were a time to declare our independence from tyranny, it’s now.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/fk7jb787

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

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