By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
We are living in an age of mayhem, madness, and monsters.
Monsters with human faces walk among us. Many of them work for the U.S. government.
What we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.
Through its acts of power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny, the government has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, disease, drug-trafficking, sex-trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations, or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering, and servitude on humanity.
We have let the government’s evil-doing and abuses go on for too long.
We have bought into the illusion and refused to grasp the truth.
We’re being fed a series of carefully-contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America, privileged, progressive and free, is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing; pandemic lockdowns (both mental and physical), real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation; and so-called freedom, such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.
The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers, disease).
They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.
They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert, and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: The moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused, and discarded.
As the Bearded Man warns in John Carpenter’s film They Live: “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”
In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live, which was released more than 30 years ago, and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age or Carpenter’s other dystopian films.
Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic, bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government. Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In They Live, two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace, blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives, has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: Control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: A bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “marry and reproduce.” Magazine racks scream “consume” and “obey.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “this is your god.”
When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: No independent thought, conform, submit, stay asleep, buy, watch television, no imagination, and do not question authority.
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.
A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that easily can be controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.
Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
So where does that leave us?
The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.
Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.
When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hyno-transmitter in They Live, he delivers a wake-up call for freedom.
The real battle between freedom and tyranny is taking place right in front of our eyes, if we would only open them.
I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the real battle for control of this Nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.
All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.
—The Rutherford Institute