Freedom Under Fire | The Rutherford Institute

You think you’ve got rights? Think again. All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.

The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one. Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later? What would Jesus’ life have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?

Santa’s got a new helper. No longer does the all-knowing, all-seeing, jolly Old St. Nick need to rely on antiquated elves on shelves and other seasonal snitches in order to know when you’re sleeping or awake, and if you’ve been naughty or nice. Thanks to the government’s almost limitless powers made possible by a domestic army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms, Santa can get real-time reports on who’s been good or bad this year.

How do present-day legal debates over bodily autonomy, privacy, vaccine mandates, the death penalty and abortion play into future discussions about singularity, artificial intelligence, cloning, and the privacy rights of the individual in the face of increasingly invasive, intrusive and unavoidable government technologies? Caught up in the heated debate over the legality of abortion, we’ve failed to think about what’s coming next.

This has long since ceased to be a debate over how best to protect the populace at large against an unknown pandemic. Rather, it has become a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the right of individual sovereignty over one’s life, self and private property.

America is breaking down. This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, racism, classism, fascism, fear-mongering, political correctness, cultural sanitation, virtue signaling, a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing government corruption and brutality, a growing economic divide that has much of the population struggling to get by, and militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment)—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long.

It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.​ ​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 FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.​ ​It’s just a matter of time.

Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete.

While it is easy to be distracted by political theater, distressed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and divided over authoritarian lockdowns and mandates, there are still darker forces afoot that cannot—should not—must not be ignored. Here’s a news flash from constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead: there are sexual predators on America’s police forces. Indeed, when it comes to sex trafficking—the buying and selling of young girls, boys and women for sex—police have become both predators and pimps.

We are living in an age of mayhem, madness and monsters. Monsters with human faces walk among us. Many of them work for the U.S. government. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead warns in this week's podcast, what we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.

America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions. The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other. This plague on our nation is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live and the constantly shifting crises that keep the populace in a state of high alert. This is how free people allow tyrants to prevail

Although the Bill of Rights--the first ten amendments of the Constitution--was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned. Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, post-9/11 and in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s time to bring all our troops home. It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date. It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs. We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law. It is time to recalibrate the government.

A federal COVID-19 vaccination strike force may soon be knocking on your door, especially if you live in a community with low vaccination rates. Will you let them in? More to the point, are you required to open the door?

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state. It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984. Yet what once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who will be forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.

For good or bad, COVID-19 has changed the way we navigate the world. It is also redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up. We have entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations. This powerful international cabal, the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences.

What started out a year ago as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including our own) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead warns in this week's podcast, it remains to be seen whether our freedoms will survive the tyranny of the government’s heavy-handed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps. With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, this is what it means to live in a suspect society.

Americans are not safe in their homes. Not anymore, at least. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting home invasions in order to pursue traffic violators, seize lawfully-owned weapons, carry out knock-and-talk “chats” with homeowners in the dead of night, “prevent” individuals from harming themselves, provide emergency aid, intervene in the face of imminent danger, serve as community caretakers, chase down individuals suspected of committing misdemeanor crimes, and anything else they can get away with.

The government should not be in the business of killing its citizens. Nevertheless, as constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, 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.

It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act. This week's podcast from constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead

While the nation allows itself to be distracted by yet more bread-and-circus politics, the American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere. This week's podcast from constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead.

Child rape has become Big Business in America. Yet as constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, this is not a problem found only in big cities. It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead warns in this week's podcast, we are all about to become enemies of the state.

As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State’s tune.

This is what we have been reduced to: A violent mob. A nation on the brink of martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. And a Constitution in tatters. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, we are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once.

Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but as constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering.

The nation is being overtaken by an alien threat that invades bodies, alters minds, and transforms freedom-loving people into a mindless, compliant, conforming mob intolerant of anyone who dares to be different, let alone think for themselves. However, as constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead explains in this week's podcast, while Invasion of the Body Snatchers—the chilling 1956 film directed by Don Siegel—blames its woes on seed pods from outerspace, the seismic societal shift taking place in America owes less to biological warfare reliant on the COVID-19 virus than it does to psychological warfare disguised as a pandemic threat.

The COVID-19 pandemic with its veiled threat of forced vaccinations, contact tracing, and genetically encoded vaccines is propelling humanity at warp speed into a whole new frontier—a surveillance matrix—the likes of which we’ve only previously encountered in science fiction.

It’s time to end the government’s war on the American people, and that includes military veterans. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, more than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us. This threat is especially pronounced for America’s military veterans, especially that portion of the population that exercises their First Amendment right to speak out against government wrongdoing.

Nothing taking place on Election Day will alleviate the suffering of the American people. Unless we do something more than vote, the government as we have come to know it—corrupt, bloated and controlled by big-money corporations, lobbyists and special interest groups—will remain unchanged. And “we the people”—overtaxed, overpoliced, overburdened by big government, underrepresented by those who should speak for us and blissfully ignorant of the prison walls closing in on us—will continue to trudge along a path of misery. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, 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.

Things are falling apart. How much longer we can sustain the fiction that we live in a constitutional republic, I cannot say, but anarchy is being loosed upon the nation. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, we are witnessing the unraveling of the American dream one injustice at a time.

There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans. Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead points out in this week's podcast, it signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman. So why do we keep doing it over and over again?

This is not an election. This is a con game, a scam, a grift, a hustle, a bunko, a swindle, a flimflam, a gaffle, and a bamboozle. In this carefully choreographed scheme to strip the American citizenry of our power and our rights, “we the people” are nothing more than marks, suckers, stooges, mugs, rubes, or gulls. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, we are victims of the Deep State’s confidence game.

Republicans and Democrats alike fear that the other party will attempt to hijack this election. President Trump is convinced that mail-in ballots are a scam except in Florida, where it’s safe to vote by mail because of its “great Republican governor.” The FBI is worried about foreign hackers continuing to target and exploit vulnerabilities in the nation’s electoral system, sowing distrust about the parties, the process and the outcome. John W. Whitehead, on the other hand, is not overly worried. As he makes clear in this week's podcast, the voting booths have already been hijacked by a political elite comprised of Republicans and Democrats who are determined to retain power at all costs.

The U.S. Supreme Court will not save us. It doesn’t matter which party gets to pick the replacement to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The battle that is gearing up right now is yet more distraction and spin to keep us oblivious to the steady encroachment on our rights by the architects of the American Police State. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.

You can map the nearly 20-year journey from the 9/11 attacks to the COVID-19 pandemic by the freedoms we’ve lost along the way. The road we have been traveling has been littered with the wreckage of our once-vaunted liberties, especially those enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. The assaults on our freedoms that began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act laid the groundwork for the eradication of every vital constitutional safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse. The COVID-19 pandemic with its lockdowns, mask mandates, surveillance, snitch lines for Americans to report their fellow citizens for engaging in risky behavior, and veiled threats of forced vaccinations has merely provided the architects of the American police state with an opportunity to flex their muscles. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead points out in this week's podcast, these have become mile markers on the road to tyranny.

The history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts. To the police state, this COVID-19 pandemic has been a huge boon, like winning the biggest jackpot in the lottery. Certainly, it will prove to be a windfall for those who profit from government expenditures and expansions. Given the rate at which the government has been devising new ways to spend our money and establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems, this current crisis will most likely end up ushering in the largest expansion of government power since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead points out in this week's podcast, this is how the emergency state operates, after all.

Merely growing a vegetable garden on your own property, or in a greenhouse on your property, or shopping at a gardening store for gardening supplies—incredibly enough—could set you up for a drug raid sanctioned by the courts. In this case, the make-work principle (translation: making work to keep the police state busy at taxpayer expense) is being used to justify sending police and expensive military helicopters likely equipped with sophisticated surveillance and thermal imaging devices on exploratory sorties every summer—again at taxpayer expense—in order to uncover illegal marijuana growing operations. Often, however, as constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead points out in this week's podcast, what these air and ground searches end up targeting are backyard gardeners growing tomato plants.

It’s possible that the next president might be better, but then again, he or she could be far worse. Remember, presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today. If we are to return to a constitutional presidency, “we the people” must recalibrate the balance of power. The only thing that will save us now is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—answer to and are accountable to “we the people.”

There’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention. Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Without fail, what should be an exercise in how to peacefully disagree turns ugly the moment looting, vandalism, violence, intimidation tactics and rioting are introduced into the equation. Instead of restoring order, local police stand down. Tensions rise, violence escalates, and federal armies move in. Coincidence? I think not.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a convenient, traumatic, devastating distraction. While America continues to fixate on the drama-filled reality show scripted by the powers-that-be, directed from the nation’s capital, and played out in high definition across the country, the American Police State has moved steadily forward. Nothing has changed. The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead warns in this week's podcast, it’s time to get educated on what’s really going on. Thus, in the interest of liberty and truth, here’s an A-to-Z primer that spells out the grim realities of life in the American Police State.

We have become one nation under house arrest. You think we’re any different from the Kentucky couple fitted out with ankle monitoring bracelets and forced to quarantine at home? We’re not. Consider what happened to Elizabeth and Isaiah Linscott. Elizabeth took a precautionary diagnostic COVID-19 test before traveling to visit her parents and grandparents in Michigan. It came back positive: Elizabeth was asymptomatic for the novel coronavirus but had no symptoms. Her husband and infant daughter tested negative for the virus. Now in a country where freedom actually means something, the Linscotts would have the right to determine for themselves how to proceed responsibly, but in the American Police State, we’ve only got as much freedom as the government allows. That’s not saying much. Indeed, as constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, it’s a dangerous time for anyone who still clings to the idea that freedom means the right to think for yourself and act responsibly according to your best judgment.

This is a wake-up call. What is unfolding before our very eyes—with police agencies defying local governments in order to tap into the power of federal militarized troops in order to put down domestic unrest—could very quickly snowball into an act of aggression against the states, a coup by armed, militarized agents of the federal government. At a minimum, warns constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead in this week's podcast, this is an attack on the Tenth Amendment, which affirms the sovereignty of the states and the citizenry, and the right of the states to stand as a bulwark against overreach and power grabs by the federal government.

Seventy years after McCarthyism infected the nation with its vitriol, fear-mongering and knee-jerk intolerance, his totalitarian tactics are once again being deployed in a free-for-all attack by those on both the political Left and Right against anyone who, in daring to think for themselves, subscribes to ideas or beliefs that run counter to the government’s or mainstream thought. It doesn’t even seem to matter what the issue is anymore (racism, Confederate monuments, Donald Trump, COVID-19, etc.): modern-day activists are busily tearing down monuments, demonizing historic figures, boycotting corporations for perceived political transgressions, and using their bully pulpit to terrorize the rest of the country into kowtowing to their demands. All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably forward. This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead warns in this week's podcast, the silence is becoming deafening.

How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none? You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, this is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship. It works the same way every time.

Had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants. This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning. Just recently, in fact, Attorney General William Barr announced plans to target, track and surveil “anti-government extremists” and preemptively nip in the bud any “threats” to public safety and the rule of law. No doubt about it, concludes constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead in this week's podcast: America’s revolutionary founders would have been at the top of Barr’s list.