By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
Disgruntled mobs. Martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. A Constitution in tatters.
Between the riots, lockdowns, political theater, and COVID-19 mandates, 2021 was one for the history books.
In our ongoing pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, here were some of the stumbling blocks that kept us fettered:
• Riots, martial law, and the Deep State’s coup. A simmering pot of political tensions boiled over January 6, 2021, when protesters stormed the Capitol because the jailer of their choice didn’t get chosen to knock heads for another four years. It took no time at all for the Nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned. The subsequent military occupation of the nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next was little more than martial law disguised as national security.
• The imperial president. All of the imperial powers amassed by Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, to kill American citizens without due process, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability, were inherited by Joe Biden, the Nation’s 46th president.
• The Surveillance State. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on, and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued, and targeted.
• Digital tyranny. In response to the events of Jan.6, 2021 the tech giants meted out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship that ran the gamut of lock outs, suspensions and even deletions of social media accounts. It signaled a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech.
• A new war on terror. “Domestic terrorism” became the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties. Biden’s pledge to wage war on so-called political extremism ushered in what Glenn Greenwald has described as “a wave of new domestic police powers,” the ramifications of which are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
• Government violence. The death penalty may have been abolished in Virginia in 2021, but government-sanctioned murder and mayhem continued unabated, with the U.S. government acting as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that already had 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.
• Culture wars. Political correctness gave way to a more insidious form of group think and mob rule which, coupled with government and corporate censors and a cancel culture determined not to offend certain viewpoints, was all too willing to eradicate views that do not conform. Critical race theory moved to the forefront of the culture wars.
• Home invasions. Government agents routinely violated the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime used surveillance technology to invade homes: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices.
• Bodily integrity. Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called emergency state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property interest in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic health-care.
• COVID-19. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the Nation (and the world) became yet another means by which world governments (including our own) expanded their powers, abused their authority, and further oppressed their constituents.
• Financial tyranny. The national debt exceeded $29 trillion. Meanwhile, the government continued to spend taxpayer money it didn’t have on programs it couldn’t afford; businesses shuttered for lack of customers, resources and employees; and consumers continued to encounter global supply chain shortages (and skyrocketing prices) on everything from computer chips and cars to construction materials.
• Global Deep State. Owing in large part to the government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, the U.S. entered into a new world order, a global world order, made up of international government agencies and corporations. Fascism became a global menace.
• Twenty years of crises. Every crisis, manufactured or otherwise, since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years from 9/11 to COVID-19 has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which never has been seen.
• The state of our Nation. There may have been a new guy in charge this year, but for the most part, nothing changed. The Nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the Nation away from its freedom foundation. Over the past year, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans found themselves repeatedly subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering.
• In other words, 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 more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
—The Rutherford Institute