By John & Nisha Whitehead
It is easy to be distracted right now by the bread and circus politics that have dominated the news headlines lately, but don’t be distracted.
Don’t be fooled, not even a little.
We’re being subjected to 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.
This way is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly-contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting, and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.
We are being ruled by a government of scoundrels, spies, thugs, thieves, gangsters, ruffians, rapists, extortionists, bounty hunters, battle-ready warriors and cold-blooded killers who communicate using a language of force and oppression.
The U.S. government now poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.
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.
No matter who has occupied the White House in recent years, the Deep State has succeeded in keeping the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats.
After all, as long as we’re busy fighting each other, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.
Unfortunately, what we are facing is tyranny in every form.
The facts speak for themselves.
We’re being robbed blind by a government of thieves. Americans no longer have any real protection against government agents empowered to seize private property at will. For instance, police agencies under the guise of asset forfeiture laws are taking Americans’ personal property based on little more than a suspicion of criminal activity and keeping it for their own profit and gain. In one case, police seized more than $17,000 in cash from two sisters who were trying to start a dog-breeding business. Despite finding no evidence of wrongdoing, police held on to the money for months.
We’re being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and cowards. When you’ve got government representatives who spend a large chunk of their work hours fundraising, being feted by lobbyists, shuffling through a lucrative revolving door between public service and lobbying, and making themselves available to anyone with enough money to secure access to a congressional office, you’re in the clutches of a corrupt oligarchy.
We’re being locked up by a government of greedy jailers. We have become a carceral state, spending three times more on our prisons than on our schools and imprisoning close to one-quarter of the world’s prisoners, despite the fact that crime remains relatively low and the U.S. makes up only five percent of the world’s population. The rise of over-criminalization and profit-driven private prisons provides even greater incentives for locking up American citizens for such non-violent “crimes” as having an overgrown lawn.
We’re being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms. The government, along with its corporate partners, is watching everything you do, reading everything you write, listening to everything you say, and monitoring everything you spend. Omnipresent surveillance is paving the way for government programs that profile citizens, document their behavior and attempt to predict what they might do in the future, whether it’s what they might buy, what politician they might support, or what kinds of crimes they might commit.
We’re being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers. It’s not just the police shootings of unarmed citizens that are worrisome. It’s the SWAT team raids gone wrong, more than 80,000 annually, that are leaving innocent citizens wounded, children terrorized and family pets killed. It’s the roadside strip searches, in some cases, cavity searches of men and women alike carried out in full view of the public, in pursuit of drugs that are never found.
We’re being forced to surrender our freedoms, and those of our children, to a government of extortionists, money-launderers and professional pirates. The American people have repeatedly been sold a bill of goods about how the government needs more money, more expansive powers, and more secrecy (secret courts, secret budgets, secret military campaigns, secret surveillance) in order to keep us safe. Not surprisingly, the primary ones to benefit from these government exercises in legal money laundering have been the corporations, lobbyists, and politicians who inflict them on a trusting public.
We’re being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: A standing army. The U.S. government is creating its own standing army of militarized police and teams of weaponized, federal bureaucrats. These civilian employees are being armed to the hilt with guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment; authorized to make arrests; and trained in military tactics. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.
Whatever else it may be, a danger, a menace, a threat, the U.S. government is certainly no friend to freedom.
You cannot have a republican form of government, nor a democratic one, for that matter, when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.
I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” and in its fictional counterpart “The Erik Blair Diaries,” we no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Rather, what we have is a government of wolves.
—The Rutherford Institute