By John & Nisha Whitehead
And so it continues.
This entire fiasco, indicting Donald Trump for allegedly violating both the Espionage Act and obstructing justice by improperly handling classified records, is merely the latest in a never-ending series of distractions, distortions, and political theater, aimed at diverting the public’s attention from the sinister advances of the American Deep State.
Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, diverted, or mesmerized by the cheap theater tricks.
This indictment spectacle is Shakespearean in its scope: Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nothing is the key word here.
Despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, this situation is all just smoke and mirrors.
Mark my words: The government is as corrupt and self-serving as ever, dominated by two political factions that pretend to be at odds with each other, all the while moving in lockstep to maintain the status quo.
If you really want to talk about who’s guilty of treason, set your sights higher: Indict the government for overstepping its authority, abusing its power, disregarding the rule of law, and betraying the American people.
When we refer to the “rule of law,” that’s constitutional shorthand for the idea that everyone is treated the same under the law, everyone is held equally accountable to abiding by the law, and no one is given a free pass based on their politics, their connections, their wealth, their status, or any other bright-line test used to confer special treatment on the elite.
When the government and its agents no longer respect the rule of law, the Constitution, or believe that it applies to them, then the very contract on which this relationship is based becomes invalid.
This abuse of power has been going on for so long that it has become the norm, the U.S. Constitution be damned.
There are hundreds, make that thousands, of government bureaucrats who are getting away with murder (in many cases, literally) simply because the legislatures, courts, and the citizenry can’t be bothered to make them play by the rules of the Constitution.
Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.
For too long now, the American people have played politics with their principles and turned a blind eye to all manner of wrongdoing when it was politically expedient, allowing the government to wreak havoc with their freedoms and act in violation of the rule of law.
“We the people” are paying the price for it now.
We are paying the price every day that we allow the government to continue to wage its war on the American People, a war that is being fought on many fronts: With bullets and tasers, with surveillance cameras and license readers, with intimidation and propaganda, with court rulings and legislation, with the collusion of every bureaucrat who dances to the tune of corporate handouts while on the government’s payroll, and most effectively of all, with the complicity of the American people, who continue to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by their politics, distracted by their pastimes, and acclimated to a world in which government corruption is the norm.
It’s the nature of the beast: Power corrupts.
Worse, 19th-Century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.
Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial, schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Americans have no protection against police abuse.
Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state.
Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty.
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.
Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity.
Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy.
Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.
Americans no longer have a representative government.
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 has already 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.
Indictments, impeachments, and elections will not save us.
From Clinton to Bush, then Obama to Trump and now Biden, it’s as if we’re caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.
There can be no denying that the world is indeed a dangerous place, but it’s the government that poses the gravest threat to our freedoms and way of life, and no amount of politicking, parsing, or, pandering, will change that.
The Constitution doesn’t stand a chance against a federalized, globalized standing army protected by legislative, judicial, and executive, branches that are all on the same side.
I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” and in its fictional counterpart “The Erik Blair Diaries,” no matter what political views they subscribe to: Suffice it to say, they are not on our side nor the side of freedom.
That is the real betrayal.
—The Rutherford Institute