By John & Nisha Whitehead “There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there?”— V for Vendetta A revolution can topple a tyrant without dismantling tyranny. An election can replace a president without curbing the powers of the presidency. A new political majority can inherit the instruments of repression
By John & Nisha Whitehead This time of year, there is no shortage of monsters to frighten us. Hollywood has given us vampires, zombies, mad scientists, masked killers, and creatures that emerge from the darkness to prey upon the unsuspecting. But perhaps the most frightening monster of all is the
By John & Nisha Whitehead There was a time when thinking for yourself was considered a virtue. These days, it can make you a political outcast. Question the Democrats, and you’re accused of being a Republican. Question the Republicans, and you’re branded a Democrat. Criticize Donald Trump, and you’re dismissed
By John & Nisha Whitehead The spectacle of public executions. Deadly military strikes on foreign countries. Innocent civilian lives lost to war. Aggressive ICE raids. Government officials accused of using their powers to intimidate political opponents. Public office increasingly entangled with private financial interests. Government leaders who glorify violence, spew
By John & Nisha Whitehead The era of small government is over. Anyone who tells you differently is selling you a lie. Case in point: Donald Trump promised to shrink the federal government. But what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force wasn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy
By John & Nisha Whitehead America, you got fooled. Again. For starters, the war on illegal immigration was never just about illegal immigration. If you fell for that, chances are you’re still falling for the government’s oldest trick: Manufacture a crisis, identify an enemy, frighten the public, declare an emergency,
By John & Nisha Whitehead “National security” has become the government’s all-purpose permission slip to behave badly. They have become the magic words that can make constitutional restraints disappear—especially when the courts defer to claims of national security. Call something a matter of national security and the normal rules start
By John & Nisha Whitehead What’s the point in celebrating the Constitution one day a year if we permit the government to violate it the other 364? September 17 marked the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, a document designed not merely to establish a government, but to
By John & Nisha Whitehead Twenty-five years after 9/11, one has to ask: Has the nightmare ever really ended? For a quarter-century, Americans have been governed by fear: Fear of terrorists and foreign enemies, fear of domestic extremists and political opponents, fear of the next attack, the next crisis, the
By John & Nisha Whitehead For years, we have been warning that the U.S. Supreme Court would not save us from the American police state. That warning has not grown less urgent. It has simply become more complicated. The danger today is not merely that courts will favor order and
By John & Nisha Whitehead What began publicly as Donald Trump’s lavish, taxpayer-funded vision of a gilded White House ballroom is now being justified by the administration—in and out of court—as a matter of national security. To president Trump, it seems, a ballroom by any other name is a bunker.
By John & Nisha Whitehead This is what comes of giving a lawless agency unlimited funds to build detention centers, terrorize communities, and act as a secret police force. Anything goes. Masked raids. Unmarked vehicles. Warrantless arrests. Racial profiling. Sweeping surveillance. Detention camps. Excessive force. Citizens dragged off the streets.
By John & Nisha Whitehead The National Guard was just the beginning. One year after president Donald Trump deployed military troops to the nation’s capital, we find ourselves navigating a posse comitatus presidency in which the visual trappings of martial law are the norm, not the exception. When Trump declared
By John & Nisha Whitehead What goes around comes around. That is the terrible law of blowback. When the United States bombs another country, threatens its government, kills its people, occupies its territory, or attempts to dictate its future, the consequences do not remain safely contained thousands of miles away.
By John & Nisha Whitehead We have been ambushed. We should be talking about the dangerous, destabilizing things being done to this country. We should be talking about the data centers spreading across the landscape, draining electricity and water, straining local infrastructure and expanding the technological machinery needed to track,
By John & Nisha Whitehead Having burned through billions of dollars and depleted critical munitions stockpiles, the Pentagon is running out of money. Our money. According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon is facing an urgent budget shortfall caused largely by the Iran war, with some critical funding accounts expected
By John & Nisha Whitehead While Americans remain transfixed by the political circus—cheering for their preferred party, jeering at the opposition, obsessing over every manufactured outrage and waiting for the next spectacle—the Surveillance State continues its steady march forward. The government is watching. It watches where you go, whom you
By John & Nisha Whitehead What exactly did Americans celebrate this Fourth of July? Two-hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all people possess inalienable rights, we now live under a government that increasingly behaves as though rights belong to the government to distribute, restrict and
By John & Nisha Whitehead This is a year of strange anniversaries. Two-hundred and fifty years ago, a band of revolutionaries declared their independence from a king. America’s founders rejected concentrated power. They denounced standing armies. They distrusted government secrecy. They risked their lives to escape a ruler who could
By John & Nisha Whitehead The American taxpayer has become the cleanup crew for the American Police State. We pay for the constitutional violations. We pay for the wars. We pay for the lawsuits, the settlements, the cover-ups, the damage control, the reconstruction, the overreach, the incompetence and the corruption.
