Posts Tagged ‘Trump’

Nullifying the Constitution Won’t Make America Great Again

Posted: February 26, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with—its Constitution.”— Seven Days in May (1964)

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

This should be non-negotiable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing adds up.

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

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

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

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

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

What a waste of political capital.

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

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

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

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

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

So where does that leave us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mr27h7v4

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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

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

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

This is no small thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider for yourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re already enemies of the state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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

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

This has all the makings of a constitutional crisis.

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

Consider for yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This last point is not an oversight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how you prepare to lock down a nation.

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

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

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

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

It’s happening already.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us to the present moment.

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

This is as it should be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what’s the answer?

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

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

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

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

Source: https://tinyurl.com/bdcr9f54

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

Sleepwalking into Tyranny: How Power is Silently Being Seized

Posted: February 5, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“This is what militaries do during coups: you capture the major targets, with government buildings high on the list, and you take over communications and other systems.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian on fascism and authoritarian leaders

How something is done is just as important as why something is done.

To suggest that the ends justify the means is to launch oneself down a moral, ethical and legal rabbit hole that leaves us in a totalitarian bind.

We are already halfway down that road.

Whatever the justifications for discarding, even temporarily, the constitutional framework and protocols that have long served as the foundations for our republic (national security, an economic crisis, terrorists at the border, a global pandemic, etc.), none of them are worth the price we are being asked to pay—the rule of law—for what is amounting to a hostile takeover of the U.S. government by an oligarchic elite.

This is no longer a conversation about stolen elections, insurrections, or even the Deep State.

This has become a lesson in how quickly things can fall apart.

This is what all those years of partisan double standards and constitutional undermining and legislative sell-outs and judicial betrayals add up to: a coup by oligarchic forces intent on a hostile takeover.

The government’s past efforts to sidestep the rule of law pale in comparison to what is unfolding right now, which is nothing less than the complete dismantling of every last foundational principle for a representative government that answers to “we the people.”

This shock-and-awe blitz campaign of daily seizures, raids and overreaching executive orders is a deliberate attempt to keep us distracted and diverted while the government is remade in the image of an autocracy, one in which privacy, due process, the rule of law, free speech, and equality will all be contingent on whether you are worthy of the privilege of rights.

I have long insisted on the need to recalibrate the government, but this is not how one goes about it.

The issue is not whether the actions being taken by the Trump Administration are right or wrong—although there are many that are egregiously wrong and some that are long overdue—but whether the Executive Branch has the power to unilaterally override the Constitution.

If we allow this imperial coup to move forward without pushback or protest, we will be just as culpable as those signing the death warrant for our freedoms.

Power corrupts.

And absolute power corrupts absolutely.

However, it takes a culture of entitlement and a nation of compliant, willfully ignorant, politically divided citizens to provide the foundations of tyranny.

For too long now, America has played politics with its principles and allowed the president and his colleagues to act in violation of the rule of law.

“We the people” are paying the price for it now.

Since the early days of our republic, we have operated under the principle that no one is above the law.

As Thomas Paine observed in Common Sense, “In America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

Several years later, John Adams, seeking to reinforce this important principle, declared in the Massachusetts Constitution that they were seeking to establish “a government of laws and not of men.”

The history of our nation over the past 200-plus years has been the history of a people engaged in a constant struggle to maintain that tenuous balance between the rule of law—in our case, the United States Constitution—and the government leaders entrusted with protecting it, upholding it and abiding by it.

At various junctures, when that necessary balance has been thrown off by overreaching government bodies or overly ambitious individuals, we have found ourselves faced with a crisis of constitutional proportions.

Each time, we have taken the painful steps needed to restore our constitutional equilibrium.

That was then, this is now, and for too long now, we have failed to recognize and rectify the danger in allowing a single individual to declare himself the exception to the rule of law and assume the role of judge, jury, and executioner.

For all intents and purposes, we have become a nation ruled not by laws but by men, and fallible, imperfect men, at that.

We allowed Bush to overstep. We allowed Obama to overstep. We allowed Trump to overstep. We allowed Biden to overstep.

These power grabs by the Trump Administration, aided and abetted by Elon Musk, are more than an overstep, however.

All of us are in danger.

Those cheering the erection of migrant camps at Guantanamo, take heed: you could be next.

It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

Partisan politics have no place in what is unfolding now.

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

It’s just a matter of time.

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

The groundwork has already been laid.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s happened before.

As history shows, the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes.

One need only go back to the 1940s, when the federal government proclaimed that Japanese-Americans, labeled potential dissidents, could be put in concentration (a.k.a. internment) camps based only upon their ethnic origin, to see the lengths the federal government will go to in order to maintain “order” in the homeland.

The U.S. Supreme Court validated the detention program in Korematsu v. US (1944), concluding that the government’s need to ensure the safety of the country trumped personal liberties.

Although that Korematsu decision was never formally overturned, Chief Justice Roberts opined in Trump v. Hawaii (2018) that “the forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority.”

Roberts’ statements provide little assurance of safety in light of the government’s tendency to sidestep the rule of law when it suits its purposes. Pointing out that such blatantly illegal detentions could happen again—with the blessing of the courts—Justice Scalia once warned, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

We seem to be coming full circle on many fronts.

Consider that two decades ago we were debating whether non-citizens—for example, so-called enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay and Muslim-Americans rounded up in the wake of 9/11—were entitled to protections under the Constitution, specifically as they relate to indefinite detention.

Americans weren’t overly concerned about the rights of non-citizens then, nor do they seem all that concerned now. And yet in the near future we could well be the ones in the unenviable position of being targeted for indefinite detention by our own government.

Similarly, most Americans weren’t unduly concerned when the U.S. Supreme Court gave Arizona police officers the green light to stop, search and question anyone—ostensibly those fitting a particular racial profile—they suspect might be an illegal immigrant. More than a decade later, the cops largely have carte blanche authority to stop any individual, citizen and non-citizen alike, they suspect might be doing something illegal.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it will only be a matter of time before those brainwashed into believing that they have nothing to worry about learn the hard way that in a police state, it doesn’t matter who you are or how righteous you claim to be, because eventually, you will be lumped in with everyone else and everything you do will be “wrong” and suspect.

Martin Niemöller learned that particular lesson the hard way.

A German military officer turned theologian, Niemöller was an early supporter of Hitler’s rise to power. It was only when Hitler threatened to attack the churches that Niemöller openly opposed the regime. For his efforts, Niemöller was arrested, charged with activities against the government, fined, detained, and eventually interned in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945.

As Niemöller reportedly replied when asked by his cellmate why he ever supported the Nazi party:

“I find myself wondering about that too. I wonder about it as much as I regret it. Still, it is true that Hitler betrayed me… Hitler promised me on his word of honor, to protect the Church, and not to issue any anti-Church laws. He also agreed not to allow pogroms against the Jews… Hitler’s assurance satisfied me at the time…I am paying for that mistake now; and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.”

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mcta3fj3

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

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

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

That didn’t take long.

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

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

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

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

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

America, meet your latest dictator-in-chief.

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

The Deep State is counting on us to be distracted.

Don’t fall for it.

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

That’s the oldest trick in the book.

Whether the ends justify the means is never the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is all happening according to schedule.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As an investigative report by the Brennan Center explains:

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

We must recalibrate the balance of power.

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

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

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

As Justice Gorsuch recognized:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The leader’s name was Adolf Hitler.

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

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

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

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

When Rights Become Privileges: Is the Constitution Becoming Optional?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be warned.

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

It will not even be between Republicans and Democrats.

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

We’re almost at that point now.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It failed to do so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember you were warned, folks.

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

Source: https://tinyurl.com/y75szpkr

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

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

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

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

This Is How It Begins: The Deep State Wants to Terminate the Constitution

Posted: November 20, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

This is how it begins.

This is how it always begins, justified in the name of national security.

Mass roundups. Raids. Indefinite detentions in concentration camps. Martial law. The erosion of habeas corpus protections. The suspension of the Constitution, at least for select segments of the population. A hierarchy of rights, contingent on whether you belong to a favored political class.

This is what you can expect in the not-so-distant future.

Once you allow the government to overreach the restraints imposed  by the Constitution, no matter what that threat might be, it will be that much harder to restrain it again, no matter which party is at the helm.

We’ve seen this played out time and again.

Some years ago, for instance, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and deploy the National Guard “to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

In other words, they wanted the government to use the military to round up and lock up the unvaccinated in concentration camps.

That didn’t happen, but it so easily could have.

Now the script has been flipped, and it’s the soon-to-be Trump Administration promising to use the military to round up and lock up undesirables in concentration camps.

At this moment in time, those so-called “undesirables” are illegal immigrants, but given what we know about the government and its expansive definition of what constitutes a threat to its power, any one of us could be next up in the police state’s crosshairs.

Once you give the government a taste of that kind of power—to disregard the Constitution, even for a day; to use the military for domestic policing; to rely on mass deportations and concentration camps in order to sidestep due process procedures—it won’t be so easy to rein it in when it runs amok.   

And it will run amok.

You don’t have to be an illegal immigrant or a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to be worried about what lies ahead. You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is why significant numbers of people are worried: because this is the slippery slope that starts with supposedly well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate.

We’ve already allowed the government to significantly undermine our constitutional republic.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be seduced by the false siren song of politicians promising safety in exchange for relinquished freedom. We placed our trust in political saviors and failed to ask questions to hold our representatives accountable to abiding by the Constitution. We looked the other way and made excuses while the government amassed an amazing amount of power over us, and backed up that power-grab with a terrifying amount of military might and weaponry, and got the courts to sanction their actions every step of the way. We chose to let partisan politics divide us and turn us into easy targets for the government’s oppression.

Consider for yourself.

We are in the grip of martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.

We are in the government’s crosshairs. The U.S. government continues to act as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence. Consequently, we are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by the government’s standing army of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later.

We are no longer safe in our homes. This present menace comes from the government’s army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized SWAT teams who are waging war on the last stronghold left to us as a free people: the sanctity of our homes.

We have no real freedom of speech. We are moving fast down a slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American who criticizes the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

We have no real privacy. We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

We are losing our right to bodily privacy and integrity. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws and forced breath-alcohol tests to forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials. The groundwork being laid is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.

We no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.

We have no due process. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

We are no longer presumed innocent. The burden of proof has been reversed. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so. The government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database. Having already used surveillance technology to render the entire American populace potential suspects, DNA technology in the hands of government coupled with artificial intelligence will complete our transition to a suspect society in which we are all merely waiting to be matched up with a crime.

We have lost the right to be anonymous and move about freely.  At every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. Likewise, digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.

We no longer have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

We have no guardians of justice. The courts were established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the courts have become the guardians of the American police state in which we now live. As a result, sound judgment and justice have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests.

We have been saddled with a dictator for life. Secret, unchecked 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—now enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

We are one crisis or state of emergency away from having the Constitution terminated.

Mind you, the powers-that-be want the Constitution terminated.

They want us to be censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down.

They want our speech and activities monitored for any sign of “extremist” activity.

They want us to be estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us. They want taxation without representation. They want a government without the consent of the governed.

Connect the dots.

This was never about politics, populist movements, or making America great again.

This is what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by 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.

It’s what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

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 slippery slope begins in just this way, with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

The danger signs are everywhere.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/4drhf55z

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 Danger Is Real: The Deep State’s Plot to Destabilize the Nation Is Working

Posted: October 21, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” — H. L. Mencken

If the three-ring circus that is the looming presidential election proves anything, it is that the Deep State’s plot to destabilize the nation is working.

The danger is real.

Caught up in the heavily dramatized electoral showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Americans have become oblivious to the multitude of ways in which the government is goosestepping all over our freedoms on a daily basis.

Especially alarming is the extent to which those on both sides are allowing themselves to be gaslighted by both Trump and Harris about critical issues of the day, selectively choosing to hear only what they want to hear when it casts the opposition in a negative light.

This is true whether you’re talking about immigration and border control, health care, national security, the nation’s endless wars, protections for free speech, or the militarization of the U.S. government.

For starters, there’s the free speech double standard, what my good friend Nat Hentoff used to refer to as the “free speech for me but not for thee” phenomenon in which the First Amendment’s protections only apply to those with whom we might agree.

Despite her claims to being a champion for the rule of law, which in our case is the U.S. Constitution, Harris isn’t averse to policing so-called “hate” speech. In this, Harris is not unlike those on both the Right and the Left who continue to express a distaste for unregulated, free speech online, especially when it comes to speech with which they might disagree.

Then there’s Trump, never a fan of free speech protections for his critics, who has been particularly vocal about his desire to see the military vanquish “radical left lunatics,” which he has dubbed “the enemy from within.”

If it were only about muzzling free speech activities, that would be concerning enough.

But Trump’s enthusiasm for using the military to target domestic enemies of the state should send off warning bells, especially coinciding as it does with the Department of Defense’s recent re-issuance of Directive 5240.01, which empowers the military to assist law enforcement “in situations where a confrontation between civilian law enforcement and civilian individuals or groups is reasonably anticipated.”

This is what martial law looks like—a government of force that relies on the military to enforce its authority—and it’s exactly what America’s founders feared, which is why they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

Responding to concerns that the military would be used for domestic policing, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, which makes it a crime for the government to use the military to carry out arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other activities normally handled by a civilian police force.

The increasing militarization of the police, the use of sophisticated weaponry against Americans and the government’s increasing tendency to employ military personnel domestically have all but eviscerated historic prohibitions such as the Posse Comitatus Act.

Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

Unfortunately, most Americans seem relatively untroubled by the fact that our constitutional republic is being transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

The seeds of chaos that have been sown in recent years are all part of the Deep State’s plans to usher in martial law.

Observe for yourself what has been happening right before our eyes.

Domestic terrorism fueled by government entrapment schemes. Civil unrest stoked to dangerous levels by polarizing political rhetoric. A growing intolerance for dissent that challenges the government’s power grabs. Police brutality tacitly encouraged by the executive branch, conveniently overlooked by the legislatures, and granted qualified immunity by the courts. A weakening economy exacerbated by government schemes that favor none but a select few. Heightened foreign tensions and blowback due to the military industrial complex’s profit-driven quest to police and occupy the globe.

This is no conspiracy theory.

There’s trouble brewing, and the government is masterminding a response using the military.

Just take a look at “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

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

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

The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030, but the future is here ahead of schedule.

We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.

By waging endless wars abroad, by bringing the instruments of war home, by transforming police into extensions of the military, by turning a free society into a suspect society, by treating American citizens like enemy combatants, by discouraging and criminalizing a free exchange of ideas, by making violence its calling card through SWAT team raids and militarized police, by fomenting division and strife among the citizenry, by acclimating the citizenry to the sights and sounds of war, and by generally making peaceful revolution all but impossible, the government has engineered an environment in which domestic violence is becoming almost inevitable.

The danger signs are screaming out a message

The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.

According to the Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. government is grooming its 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, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—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.

And then comes the kicker.

Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

Drain the swamps.

Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?

Ah yes.

Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans.

Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.”

And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting?

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

They are “threats.”

They are the “enemy.”

They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

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

If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.

Suddenly it all begins to make sense.

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 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.

The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls.

Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that there is nothing they can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

Before long, no one will even notice the floundering economy, the blowback arising from military occupations abroad, the police shootings, the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and all of the other mounting concerns.

It’s happening already.

The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

Few seem to care about the government’s endless wars abroad that leave communities shattered, families devastated and our national security at greater risk of blowback.

The Deep State’s tactics are working.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helm military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and  Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned about the government’s nefarious schemes to lock down the nation.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.

And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Just think about it for a minute: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars.

Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.

Did I say Machiavellian? This is downright evil.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

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.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

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

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

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

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

It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by Deep State propaganda.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/9vv4x3yw

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. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

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. 

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