By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“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
Let me tell you about the state of our Nation: things are getting worse, not better.
Easily distracted by wall-to-wall news coverage of the latest crisis and conveniently diverted by news cycles that change every few days, Americans remain oblivious to the many governmental abuses that are still wreaking havoc on our freedoms: Police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil-asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, and bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power.
These are dangerous times for the United States and the world.
Yet although plenty may be heard about the dangers posed by Russia and COVID-19 in president Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, it’s still the U.S. government that poses the gravest threat to our freedoms and way of life.
Consider for yourself.
Americans have little protection against police abuse.
Americans are little more than pocketbooks to provide funds for the police state.
Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty.
Americans no longer have a right to self-defense.
Americans no longer have a right to private property.
Americans no longer have a say about what their children are exposed to in school.
Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police forces.
Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity.
Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy.
Americans no longer have a representative government.
Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.
I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms already has changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.
This steady slide towards tyranny, meted out by militarized local and federal police and legalistic bureaucrats, has been carried forward by each successive president over the past 70-plus years regardless of their political affiliation.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Big government has grown bigger, and the rights of the citizenry have grown smaller.
We are walking a dangerous path right now.
Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.
Yet, the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.
The pickle we find ourselves in speaks volumes about the nature of the government beast we have been saddled with and how it views the rights and sovereignty of “we the people.”
Now you don’t hear a lot about sovereignty anymore. Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.
In other words, in the United States, “we the people”, sovereign citizens, call the shots.
So when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.
That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?
In the 230-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.
We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are not wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests.
The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.”
Worst of all, “we the people” have become desensitized to this constant undermining of our freedoms.
We are fast approaching a moment of reckoning where we will be forced to choose between the vision of what the United States was intended to be, a model for self-governance where power is vested in the people, and the reality of what it has become, a police state where power is vested in the government.
So where does that leave us?
Aldous Huxley predicted that eventually the government would find a way of:
“…making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
The answer? Get un-brainwashed. Stop allowing yourself to be distracted and diverted.
Learn your rights. Stand up for the founding principles.
Make your voice and your vote count for more than just political posturing.
Never cease to vociferously protest the erosion of your freedoms at the local and national level.
Most of all, do these things today.
Ultimately, I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we need to shift the center of power back to “we the people.”
—The Rutherford Institute