Tag Archives: civil liberties

Israel’s Censorship: The Repression of Pro-Palestinian Voices

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By David Starr

Source: Covert Action

Besides the Israeli military’s mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza (the West Bank as well), there have been repressive measures by Israel to silence the dissent of pro-Palestinian voices. In a sane world, Israel would be sanctioned and deprived of U.S. military aid. Its right-wing leaders would be charged by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Unfortunately, the world has been insane at this time in human history.

The Israeli-Palestinian war is something unlike other wars in recent history. (Although the 2003 Iraq War is a close example.) The military actions of Israel in Gaza have ironically been, in intent, similar to Nazi Germany’s herding of Jews into the Warsaw ghetto and attempt to starve them. They haven’t yet tried to totally wipe them out because have killed over 30,000 and displaced tens of thousands more while subjecting them to humiliating and brutal living conditions for many years.

Worldwide, there have been the obvious protests against and condemnations of Israel. Voices emphasizing the need for a permanent cease-fire have been loud. But Israel, and its main accomplice, the United States, have not really been listening, or simply don’t care. There have been warnings from the Biden administration for Israel to be more careful, but the United States continues to supply Israel with weapons to use against Palestinians. Thus, Israel is merely getting a soft slap on the wrist in the face of its war crimes. 

Among the voices of dissent, the Middle East Studies Association wrote a letter for Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Police Commissioner, Yaacov Shavtai and various ministers and university rectors. The letter condemned Israel’s repression against Palestinian students in Israeli universities. This is censorship run amok.

The letter begins as follows:

“We write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express our deep and growing concern regarding the ongoing attacks against and restrictions on Palestinian citizens of Israel who are students at Israeli institutions. We call upon you in the strongest terms to put an end to what appears to be a targeted repression of freedom of expression and uphold your responsibility to ensure academic freedom.”

The letter further states that MESA previously contacted Israel about “aggressions against Palestinian students” after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. There is a statement that students have been the targets of intimidation and surveillance. Most importantly, MESA writes that these methods of repression have been going on since before October 7, in fact, for about seven decades. Censorship targets Palestinian students and professors for their criticism of Israel’s actions against Gaza and “their solidarity with the innocent people there.”

MESA cites a survey conducted by the Arab Student Movements Union, which represents Palestinian citizens of Israel who attend colleges and universities. The survey found that 85% of the students polled believed that their security was being threatened. Some 71% said that they are experiencing economic hardship because of the war. Because of this hardship, nearly half of the students considered dropping out of schools they attend and/or considered leaving Israel to pursue education elsewhere.

Further, the survey reveals that, after October 7, 2023, about 160 students have been disciplined for being supposed suspects supporting “terrorism.” Nineteen students have been arrested by the Israeli police because of being so-called terrorists and/or supporting a terrorist organization. But, “Typically, these students were expressing their solidarity with fellow Palestinians and with the children, women, and civilians in the Gaza Strip.”

Also, after October 7, “nine Palestinian students at the University of Haifa were suspended without a disciplinary hearing by the university’s rector, Gur Alroey, for sharing posts and stories on social media.” Alroey’s excuse was that they could cause “extreme situations” at the university. But the university reversed its position and agreed to mediation “with the students’ legal representation.” 

Jewish-Israeli students, however, ignored the ruling and called for the suspension of the nine students without due process. Going further, they protested against the nine students. The National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS) kept the harassment going, launching a campaign to “eradicate the support of terrorism on campuses.” NUIS, then, did not really use its influence to help provide security for all students. As a result, Palestinians were looked at as outcasts.

In an act of paranoia, universities published guides on how to use firearms. This resulted in a rise in the carrying of guns and rifles at universities. MESA’s letter asserted that “Academic institutions are expected to ensure that the campus climate is not hostile, that public discourse remains respectful, and that all students feel safe. Guns do not belong on university campuses.”

The letter added: “We condemn the circumvention of due process, as well as the prejudicial treatment of and broad incitement against Palestinians students,” portraying all of them as terrorists.

In conclusion, “We therefore call upon you to cease these targeted attacks on the higher education sector and ensure that Israeli campuses are safe for all their students and faculty, including those calling for an end to the war.”

Journalists have also been targets of Israeli aggression, but in a more direct fashion. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have gunned down journalists who have been reporting on the front lines of the war. According to Mohamed Mandour, writing for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), “Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.” Mandour writes that 25 journalists have been arrested, with the use of “numerous assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship.” He adds that 19 of the journalists were still in prison according to the CPJ’s records as of February 14, 2024.

There have been journalists who have lost family members as a result of Israel’s aggression. For example:

Photojournalist Yasser Qudih suffered the loss of eight family members when four missiles struck their house on November 13, 2023. The CPJ got this information from Reuters and The Guardian. The odds are certain that it was an attack by the IDF. But the group HonestReporting, which monitors the news for supposed anti-Israel bias, inaccuracy and other breaches of journalistic standards, raised questions that Qudih and his family members knew of the October 7 Hamas attack beforehand. This unsubstantiated accusation was rejected and HonestReporting withdrew it the next day.

But the word was out and Netanyahu took advantage of the falsehood. His office tweeted that photographers were complicit in committing “crimes against humanity.” Despite this falsehood, “Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz [said] they should be treated as terrorists. Qudih survived the attack.”

Of course, other attacks occurred, no doubt spurred on by Gantz’s ridiculous claim. Other journalists were either killed or survived attacks; sometimes their family members were killed. 

Mandour writes, “CPJ is investigating reports that more than 50 offices in Gaza were damaged, leaving many journalists with no safe place to do their jobs, as they also contend with extensive power and communication outages, food and water shortages, and sometimes have to flee with their families.” 

The high risks are obvious as journalists cover the war. The IDF and Israeli police have been barbaric in their treatment of them as they uncover truths and facts for world consumption, contrary to Israel’s attempts to hide truths and facts with bizarre and insane propaganda.

Israel is not the only entity trying to hide the realities of the war. As of this writing, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been considering adopting what amounts to censorship rules on the subjects of Israel and the war. While it has been gathering feedback on the move, there are doubts that Meta will change its mind.

There is a manufactured controversy on the use of the word, “Zionist.” Meta may have the intent to censor the word, along with other terminology that puts Israel in a bad light. Writing for The Intercept, Sam Biddle quotes Dani Noble, who is part of Jewish Voice for Peace: 

“As an anti-Zionist Jewish organization for Palestinian freedom, we are horrified to learn that Meta is considering expanding when they treat ‘Zionism’—a political ideology—as the same as ‘Jew/Jewish’—an ethno-religious identity.” Further, Noble said that such a policy shift “will result in shielding the Israeli government from accountability for its policies and actions that violate Palestinian human rights.”

Previously, the word Zionist was allowed as long as it was not associated with the words Jew and Jewish. Now, Meta moderators can be more stringent in deciding whether Zionist is allowed or if it is used to promote anti-Semitism. Thus, Meta has a long reach in deciding which comments are allowed when posting the “offending” word.

The moderating (or censoring) of the word Zionist is par for the course for hard-line Israel supporters. While there is an attempt to equate it with anti-Semitism, it really symbolizes  a religious form of ultra-nationalism, as evidenced by the right-wing Israeli government’s use of it, along with the right-wing settlers as they attempt to steal more Palestinian land. And one of the objectives on the part of Israeli fascists is to take more land to establish a “Greater Israel.” Thus, the attempt by the IDF to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, and the West Bank.

But there is a major irony here. Biddle writes, “much of the fiercest political activism against Israel’s war in Gaza has been organized by anti-Zionist Jews, while American evangelical Christian Zionists are some of Israel’s most hardcore supporters.” So, there are Jews who are not only anti-Zionist, but side with the Palestinians.

Biddle provides examples of hypothetical posts in quotes that could be censored by Meta: “Zionists are war criminals, just look at what’s happening in Gaza.” “I don’t like Zionists.” “No Zionists allowed at tonight’s meeting of the Progressive Student Association.” 

Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss tried to justify the change in his company’s rules. Biddle quotes him as saying, “We don’t allow people to attack others based on their protected characteristics, such as their nationality or religion. Enforcing this policy requires an understanding of how people use language to reference those characteristics. While the term Zionist refers to a person’s ideology, which is not a protected characteristic, it can also be used to refer to Jewish or Israeli people.”

Chambliss goes on to imply that the new rules are necessary because of tensions relating to the Middle East. But he admitted that the word Zionist is an ideology, not a religion. Besides, tensions are high already, with Israel’s military aggression in Gaza. It seems like Meta is harping on the word while there are more important things to attend to, like opposing the war, and coming to grips with about 29,000 Palestinian deaths. (And, yes, the 1,200 Israeli deaths need attention even though 55% of those killed were members of the IDF.)

Meta did contact 10 Arab, Muslim and pro-Palestinian organizations about the use of the word Zionist and how it could be used in a “dehumanizing way or violent way” if referring to Jews or Israelis, according to Guardian writers Johana Bhuiyan and Kari Paul. 

But Linda Sarsour, “the executive director of Muslim advocacy organization MPower Change, said Meta’s director of content policy stakeholder engagement, Peter Stern, provided few details about why the company was revisiting the policy now and how it would be implemented or enforced in a way that doesn’t stifle political expression.” Bhuiyan and Paul quoted Sarsour’s response: “If you already have a policy that’s addressing Zionism as a proxy, then why are we having this conversation? Why is there further consideration to expand this policy?”

Expanding the policy could censor those who post pro-Palestinian comments, as well as facts, in the guise of preventing anti-Semitism. Meta, however, has had a policy that allowed the word Zionist to be used as long there wasn’t an association with the words Jew and Jewish. As Sarsour asks, “Why is there further consideration to expand this policy?”

Censorship, threats, intimidation and even murder cannot stop the tidal wave of opposition worldwide to Israel’s war. In Israel itself, more people are speaking out and opposing the Netanyahu government. And events may lead to the downfall of the Israeli fascists. 

The Language of Force: How the Police State Muzzles Our Right to Speak Truth to Power

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“If the state could use [criminal] laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak without risking arrest is ‘one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation.’”—Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissenting, Nieves v. Bartlett (2019)

Tyrants don’t like people who speak truth to power.

Cue the rise of protest laws, which take the government’s intolerance for free speech to a whole new level and send the resounding message that resistance is futile.

In fact, ever since the Capitol protests on Jan. 6, 2021, state legislatures have introduced a broad array of these laws aimed at criminalizing protest activities.

There have been at least 205 proposed laws in 45 states aimed at curtailing the right to peacefully assemble and protest by expanding the definition of rioting, heightening penalties for existing offenses, or creating new crimes associated with assembly.

Weaponized by police, prosecutors, courts and legislatures, these protest laws, along with free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, and a host of other legalistic maladies have become a convenient means by which to punish individuals who refuse to be muzzled.

In Florida, for instance, legislators passed a “no-go” zone law making it punishable by up to 60 days in jail to remain within 25 feet of working police and other first responders after a warning.

Yet while the growing numbers of protest laws cropping up across the country are sold to the public as necessary to protect private property, public roads or national security, they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a thinly disguised plot to discourage anyone from challenging government authority at the expense of our First Amendment rights.

It doesn’t matter what the source of that discontent might be (police brutality, election outcomes, COVID-19 mandates, the environment, etc.): protest laws, free speech zones, no-go zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, etc., aim to muzzle every last one of us.

To be very clear, these legislative attempts to redefine and criminalize speech are a backdoor attempt to rewrite the Constitution and render the First Amendment’s robust safeguards null and void.

No matter how you package these laws, no matter how well-meaning they may sound, no matter how much you may disagree with the protesters or sympathize with the objects of the protest, these proposed laws are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent.

This is the painful lesson being imparted with every incident in which someone gets arrested and charged with any of the growing number of contempt charges (ranging from resisting arrest and interference to disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police order) that get trotted out anytime a citizen voices discontent with the government or challenges or even questions the authority of the powers-that-be.

These assaults on free speech are nothing new.

As Human Rights Watch points out, “Various states have long-tried to curtail the right to protest. They do so by legislating wide definitions of what constitutes an ‘unlawful assembly’ or a ‘riot’ as well as increasing punishments. They also allow police to use catch-all public offenses, such as trespassing, obstructing traffic, or disrupting the peace, as a pretext for ordering dispersals, using force, and making arrests. Finally, they make it easier for corporations and others to bring lawsuits against protest organizers.”

Journalists have come under particular fire for exercising their right to freedom of the press.

According to U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, the criminalization of routine journalism has become a means by which the government chills lawful First Amendment activity.

Journalists have been arrested or faced dubious charges for “publishing,” asking too many questions of public officials, being “rude” for reporting during a press conference, and being in the vicinity of public protests and demonstrations.

For instance, Steve Baker, a reporter for Blaze News, was charged with four misdemeanors, including trespassing and disorderly conduct charges, related to his sympathetic coverage of the Jan. 6 riots. Dan Heyman, a reporter for the Public News Service, was arrested for “aggressively” questioning Tom Price, then secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services during an encounter in the West Virginia State Capitol.

It’s gotten so bad that merely daring to question, challenge or hesitate when a cop issues an order can get you charged with resisting arrest or disorderly conduct.

For example, Deyshia Hargrave, a language arts teacher in Louisiana, was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and arrested for speaking out during a public comment period at a school board meeting.

Fane Lozman was arrested for alluding to government corruption during open comment time at a City Council meeting in Palm Beach County, Fla.

College professor Ersula Ore was slammed to the ground and arrested after she objected to the “disrespectful manner” shown by a campus cop who stopped her in the middle of the street and demanded that she show her ID.

Philadelphia lawyer Rebecca Musarra was arrested for exercising her right to remain silent and refusing to answer questions posed by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. (Note: she cooperated in every other way by providing license and registration, etc.)

Making matters worse, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Nieves v. Bartlett that protects police from lawsuits by persons arrested on bogus “contempt of cop” charges (ranging from resisting arrest and interference to disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police order) that result from lawful First Amendment activities (filming police, asking a question of police, refusing to speak with police).

These incidents reflect a growing awareness about the state of free speech in America: you may have distinct, protected rights on paper, but dare to exercise those rights, and you risk fines, arrests, injuries and even death.

Unfortunately, we have been circling this particular drain hole for some time now.

More than 50 years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas took issue with the idea that merely speaking to a government representative (a right enshrined in the First Amendment) could be perceived as unlawfully inconveniencing and annoying the police.

In a passionate defense of free speech, Douglas declared: 

Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet. The situation might have indicated that Colten’s techniques were ill-suited to the mission he was on, that diplomacy would have been more effective. But at the constitutional level speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive.

It’s a power-packed paragraph full of important truths that the powers-that-be would prefer we quickly forget: We the people are the sovereigns. We have the final word. We can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy. We need not stay docile and quiet. Our speech can be disruptive. It can invite dispute. It can be provocative and challenging. We do not have to bow submissively to authority or speak with reverence to government officials.

In theory, Douglas was right: “we the people” do have a constitutional right to talk back to the government.

In practice, however, we live in an age in which “we the people” are at the mercy of militarized, weaponized, immunized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

As such, those who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights during encounters with the police are increasingly finding that there is no such thing as freedom of speech.

Case in point: Tony Rupp, a lawyer in Buffalo, NY, found himself arrested and charged with violating the city’s noise ordinance after cursing at an SUV bearing down on pedestrians on a busy street at night with its lights off. Because that unmarked car was driven by a police officer, that’s all it took for Rupp to find himself subjected to malicious prosecution, First Amendment retaliation and wrongful arrest.

The case, as Jesse McKinley writes in The New York Times, is part of a growing debate over “how citizens can criticize public officials at a time of widespread reevaluation of the lengths and limits of free speech. That debate has raged everywhere from online forums and college campuses to protests over racial bias in law enforcement and the Israel-Hamas war. Book bans and other acts of government censorship have troubled some First Amendment experts. Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments about a pair of laws — in Florida and Texas — limiting the ability of social media companies such as Facebook to ban certain content from their platforms.”

Bottom line: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t resist.

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

Yet there can be no free speech for the citizenry when the government speaks in a language of force.

What is this language of force?

Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

Unfortunately, this is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who choose to exercise their First Amendment right to speak freely.

If we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws by voicing our opinions in public or on our clothing or before a legislative body, then we do not have free speech.

What we have instead is regulated, controlled, censored speech, and that’s a whole other ballgame.

Remember, the unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to challenge government agents, think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.

Americans are being brainwashed into believing that anyone who wears a government uniform—soldier, police officer, prison guard—must be obeyed without question.

Of course, the Constitution takes a far different position, but does anyone in the government even read, let alone abide by, the Constitution anymore?

The government does not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully. And it definitely does not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Yet by muzzling the citizenry, by removing the constitutional steam valves that allow people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world, the government is creating a climate in which violence becomes inevitable.

When there is no First Amendment steam valve, then frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.

As John F. Kennedy warned, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government is making violent revolution inevitable.

Rule by Criminals: When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth.”— Martin Luther King Jr.

When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.

In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”

The government’s list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing by the day.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is merely one of the most visible victims of the police state’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers.

Five years ago, on April 11, 2019, police arrested Assange for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among the leaked materials was gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while American air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.

There is nothing defensible about crimes such as these perpetrated by the government.

When any government becomes almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting—whether that evil takes the form of war, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity—that government has lost its claim to legitimacy.

These are hard words, but hard times require straight-talking.

It is easy to remain silent in the face of evil.

What is harder—what we lack today and so desperately need—are those with moral courage who will risk their freedoms and lives in order to speak out against evil in its many forms.

Throughout history, individuals or groups of individuals have risen up to challenge the injustices of their age. Nazi Germany had its Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The gulags of the Soviet Union were challenged by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. America had its color-coded system of racial segregation and warmongering called out for what it was, blatant discrimination and profiteering, by Martin Luther King Jr.

And then there was Jesus Christ, an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day—namely, the Roman Empire—but provided a blueprint for civil disobedience that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Indeed, it is fitting that we remember that Jesus Christ—the religious figure worshipped by Christians for his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection—paid the ultimate price for speaking out against the police state of his day.

A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus was a far cry from the watered-down, corporatized, simplified, gentrified, sissified vision of a meek creature holding a lamb that most modern churches peddle. In fact, he spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire.

Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day had all of the characteristics of a police state: secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state.

For all the accolades poured out upon Jesus, little is said about the harsh realities of the police state in which he lived and its similarities to modern-day America, and yet they are striking.

Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the increasingly militarized police forces across the country.

Widespread police presence. The Roman Empire used its military forces to maintain the “peace,” thereby establishing a police state that reached into all aspects of a citizen’s life. In this way, these military officers, used to address a broad range of routine problems and conflicts, enforced the will of the state. Today SWAT teams, comprised of local police and federal agents, are employed to carry out routine search warrants for minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud.

Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.

Perpetual wars and a military empire. Much like America today with its practice of policing the world, war and an over-arching militarist ethos provided the framework for the Roman Empire, which extended from the Italian peninsula to all over Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, extending into North Africa and Western Asia as well. In addition to significant foreign threats, wars were waged against inchoate, unstructured and socially inferior foes.

Martial law. Eventually, Rome established a permanent military dictatorship that left the citizens at the mercy of an unreachable and oppressive totalitarian regime. In the absence of resources to establish civic police forces, the Romans relied increasingly on the military to intervene in all matters of conflict or upheaval in provinces, from small-scale scuffles to large-scale revolts. Not unlike police forces today, with their martial law training drills on American soil, militarized weapons and “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset, the Roman soldier had “the exercise of lethal force at his fingertips” with the potential of wreaking havoc on normal citizens’ lives.

A nation of suspects. Just as the American Empire looks upon its citizens as suspects to be tracked, surveilled and controlled, the Roman Empire looked upon all potential insubordinates, from the common thief to a full-fledged insurrectionist, as threats to its power. The insurrectionist was seen as directly challenging the Emperor.  A “bandit,” or revolutionist, was seen as capable of overturning the empire, was always considered guilty and deserving of the most savage penalties, including capital punishment. Bandits were usually punished publicly and cruelly as a means of deterring others from challenging the power of the state.  Jesus’ execution was one such public punishment.

Acts of civil disobedience by insurrectionists. Much like the Roman Empire, the American Empire has exhibited zero tolerance for dissidents such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning who exposed the police state’s seedy underbelly. Jesus was also branded a political revolutionary starting with his attack on the money chargers and traders at the Jewish temple, an act of civil disobedience at the site of the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council.

Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers.  Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas. Acting as a government informant, Judas concocted a kiss as a secret identification marker, hinting that a level of deception and trickery must be used to obtain this seemingly “dangerous revolutionist’s” cooperation. 

Torture and capital punishment. In Jesus’ day, religious preachers, self-proclaimed prophets and nonviolent protesters were not summarily arrested and executed. Indeed, the high priests and Roman governors normally allowed a protest, particularly a small-scale one, to run its course. However, government authorities were quick to dispose of leaders and movements that appeared to threaten the Roman Empire. The charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious. To the Romans, any one of these charges was enough to merit death by crucifixion, which was usually reserved for slaves, non-Romans, radicals, revolutionaries and the worst criminals.

Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.” After Jesus is formally condemned by Pilate, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.”  The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry. After being ruthlessly whipped and mocked, Jesus was nailed to a cross.

Jesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state. Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.

Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics.

Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.

What a marked contrast to the advice being given to Americans by church leaders to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do.

Telling Americans to blindly obey the government or put their faith in politics and vote for a political savior flies in the face of everything for which Jesus lived and died.

Will we follow the path of least resistance—turning a blind eye to the evils of our age and marching in lockstep with the police state—or will we be transformed nonconformists “dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood”?

As Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us in a powerful sermon delivered 70 years ago, “This command not to conform comes … [from] Jesus Christ, the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of mankind.”

Ultimately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.

Technocensorship: When Corporations Serve As a Front for Government Censors

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. We must, therefore, be on our guard against extremists who urge us to adopt police state measures. Such persons advocate breaking down the guarantees of the Bill of Rights in order to get at the communists. They forget that if the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”—Harry S. Truman, Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States (August 8, 1950)

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

Unfortunately, the government has become an expert at disregarding constitutional roadblocks intended to protect the rights of the citizenry.

When these end-runs don’t suffice, the government hides behind the covert, clandestine, classified language of national security; or obfuscates, complicates, stymies, and bamboozles; or creates manufactured diversions to keep the citizenry in the dark; or works through private third parties not traditionally bound by the Constitution.

This last tactic is increasingly how the government gets away with butchering our freedoms, by having its corporate partners serve as a front for its nefarious deeds.

This is how the police state has managed to carry out an illegal secret dragnet surveillance program on the American people over the course of multiple presidential administrations.

Relying on a set of privacy loopholes, the White House (under Presidents Obama, Trump and now Biden) has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

The government used a similar playbook to get around the First Amendment, packaged as an effort to control the spread of speculative or false information in the name of national security.

As the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed, the Biden administration worked in tandem with social media companies to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

Restricting access to social media has become a popular means of internet censorship.

Dare to voice politically incorrect views in anything louder than a whisper on social media and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms. This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love is what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners.”

Social media censorship runs the gamut from content blocking, throttling, and filtering to lockouts, shutdowns, shadow banning and de-platforming.

In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the government.

Yet what those who typically champion the right of corporations to be free from government meddling get wrong about these cases is that there can be no free speech when corporations such as Facebook, Google or YouTube become a front for—or extensions of—government censors.

This is the very definition of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technocensorship is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal: to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

This authoritarian impulse to censor and silence “dangerous” speech masquerading as tolerance, civility and a concern for safety (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized and tyrannical.

You see, the government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court can see itself clear to recognizing that censorship by social media companies acting at the behest of the government runs afoul of the First Amendment.

Bottom line: either we believe in free speech or we don’t.

The answer to the political, legal and moral challenges of our day should always be more speech, not less.

Any individual or group—prominent or not—who is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

To ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers the government and its corporate operatives are allowed to claim now will eventually be used against the populace at large.

These social shunning tactics borrow heavily from the mind control tactics used by authoritarian cults as a means of controlling its members. As Dr. Steven Hassan writes in Psychology Today: “By ordering members to be cut off, they can no longer participate. Information and sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are stifled. Thought-stopping and use of loaded terms keep a person constrained into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing world. This controls members through fear and guilt.”

This mind control can take many forms, but the end result is an enslaved, compliant populace incapable of challenging tyranny.

As Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

The problem is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us, and we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean. The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

As Nat Hentoff, that inveterate champion of the First Amendment, once observed, “The quintessential difference between a free nation, as we profess to be, and a totalitarian state, is that here everyone, including a foe of democracy, has the right to speak his mind.”

What this means is championing the free speech rights of those with whom we might disagree.

That’s why James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely. He understood that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society.

The government has no tolerance for freedom or free speech of any kind that challenges its chokehold on power.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “disinformation,” “hate” or “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or speech transgression or other.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

Ultimately, the government’s war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is—is a war that is driven by a government fearful of its people.

As President John F. Kennedy observed, “[A] nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

The State of Our Nation No One’s Talking About: Tyranny Is Rising as Freedom Falls

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Day by day, tyranny is rising as freedom falls.

The U.S. military is being used to patrol subway stations and police the U.S.-Mexico border, supposedly in the name of national security.

The financial sector is being used to carry out broad surveillance of Americans’ private financial data, while the entertainment sector is being tapped to inform on video game enthusiasts with a penchant for violent, potentially extremist content, all in an alleged effort to uncover individuals subscribing to anti-government sentiments

Public and private venues are being equipped with sophisticated surveillance technologies, including biometric and facial recognition software, to track Americans wherever they go and whatever they do. Space satellites with powerful overhead surveillance cameras will render privacy null and void.

This is the state of our nation that no is talking about—not the politicians, not the courts, and not Congress: the government’s power grabs are growing bolder, while the rights of the citizenry continue to be trampled underfoot.

Hitler is hiding in the shadows, while the citizenry—the only ones powerful enough to stem the authoritarian tide that threatens to lay siege to our constitutional republic—remain easily distracted and conveniently diverted by political theatrics and news cycles that change every few days.

This sorry truth has persisted no matter which party has controlled Congress or the White House.  

These are dangerous times.

Yet while the presidential candidates talk at length about the dangers posed by the opposition party, the U.S. government still poses the gravest threat to our freedoms and way of life.

Police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power: these are just a few of the ways in which the police state continues to flex its muscles in a show of force intended to intimidate anyone still clinging to the antiquated notion that the government answers to “we the people.”

Consider for yourself the state of our nation:

Americans have little protection against police abuse. The police and other government agents have been generally empowered to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What is increasingly common, however, is the news that the officers involved in these incidents get off with little more than a slap on the hands.

Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state. If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies with their secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities.

Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty. We once operated under the assumption that you were innocent until proven guilty. Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. Indeed, the government—in cahoots with the corporate state—has erected the ultimate suspect society. In such an environment, we are all potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.

Americans no longer have a right to self-defense. While the courts continue to disagree over the exact nature of the rights protected by the Second Amendment, the government itself has made its position extremely clear. When it comes to gun rights in particular, and the rights of the citizenry overall, the U.S. government has adopted a “do what I say, not what I do” mindset. Nowhere is this double standard more evident than in the government’s attempts to arm itself to the teeth, all the while viewing as suspect anyone who dares to legally own a gun, let alone use one in self-defense. Indeed, while it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at, and killed.

Americans no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

Americans no longer have a say about what their children are exposed to in school. Incredibly, the government continues to insist that parents essentially forfeit their rights when they send their children to a public school. This growing tension over whether young people, especially those in the public schools, are essentially wards of the state, to do with as government officials deem appropriate, in defiance of the children’s constitutional rights and those of their parents, is at the heart of almost every debate over educational programming, school discipline, and the extent to which parents have any say over their children’s wellbeing in and out of school.

Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police forces. With local police agencies acquiring military-grade weaponry, training and equipment better suited for the battlefield, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts patrolled by a standing military army.

Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from abortion and euthanasia to forced blood draws, biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy. Despite the staggering number of revelations about government spying on Americans’ phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc., Congress, the president and the courts have done little to nothing to counteract these abuses. Instead, they seem determined to accustom us to life in this electronic concentration camp.

Americans no longer have a representative government. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered the age of authoritarianism, where all citizens are suspects, security trumps freedom, and so-called elected officials represent the interests of the corporate power elite. This topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. The U.S. Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the Supreme Court have become the architects of the American police state in which we now live, while the lower courts have appointed themselves courts of order, concerned primarily with advancing the government’s agenda, no matter how unjust or illegal.

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.

This steady slide towards tyranny, meted out by militarized local and federal police and legalistic bureaucrats, has been carried forward by each successive president over the past seventy-plus years regardless of their political affiliation.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

We are walking a dangerous path right now.

Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.

Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.

The pickle we find ourselves in speaks volumes about the nature of the government beast we have been saddled with and how it views the rights and sovereignty of “we the people.”

Now you don’t hear a lot about sovereignty anymore. Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.

In other words, in America, “we the people”— sovereign citizens—call the shots.

So when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.

That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?

In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.

We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests.

The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.”

Worst of all, “we the people” have become desensitized to this constant undermining of our freedoms.

How do we reconcile the Founders’ vision of the government as an entity whose only purpose is to serve the people with the police state’s insistence that the government is the supreme authority, that its power trumps that of the people themselves, and that it may exercise that power in any way it sees fit (that includes government agents crashing through doors, mass arrests, ethnic cleansing, racial profiling, indefinite detentions without due process, and internment camps)?

They cannot be reconciled. They are polar opposites.

We are fast approaching a moment of reckoning where we will be forced to choose between the vision of what America was intended to be (a model for self-governance where power is vested in the people) and the reality of what it has become (a police state where power is vested in the government).

We are repeating the mistakes of history—namely, allowing a totalitarian state to reign over us.

Former concentration camp inmate Hannah Arendt warned against this when she wrote:

“No matter what the specifically national tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination.”

So where does that leave us?

Aldous Huxley predicted that eventually the government would find a way of “making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

The answer? Get un-brainwashed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries,

Stop allowing yourself to be distracted and diverted.

Learn your rights.

Stand up for the founding principles.

Make your voice and your vote count for more than just political posturing.

Never cease to vociferously protest the erosion of your freedoms at the local and national level.

Most of all, do these things today.

The Global Deep State: A Fascist World Order Funded by the American Taxpayer

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The madmen are in power.”— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction.

That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.

The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.

Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”

The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

This financial tyranny persists whether it’s a Democrat or Republican at the helm.

At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.

What is going on?

The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.

This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.

It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.

All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.

Global Disease

The COVID-19 pandemic propelled us into a whole new global frontier in which those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.

Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.

This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.

“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

Global Surveillance

Spearheaded by the National Security Agency, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.

Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:

“The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”

Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).

Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.

Global War Profiteering

War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure,  spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

Global Policing

Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.

There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.

For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”

This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.

The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.

Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

Are you starting to get the picture now?

The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.

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 slope now, and things are moving fast.

Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.

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 U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State. It’s too busy selling us to the highest bidder.

Criminality in the White House: The Rise of the Political Psychopath

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”—Richard Nixon

Many years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”

The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.

There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.

Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.

Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyles, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”

In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

Incredibly, despite clear evidence of the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government, voters continue to elect psychopaths to positions of power and influence.

Indeed, a study from Southern Methodist University found that Washington, DC—our nation’s capital and the seat of power for our so-called representatives—ranks highest on the list of regions that are populated by psychopaths.

According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”

The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.

When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.

Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”

People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.

Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about ‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is ‘America.’”

The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”

We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.

Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.

Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp suggests that “one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy.”

But what does this really mean in practical terms?

It means holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff using every available means at our disposal: through investigative journalism (what used to be referred to as the Fourth Estate) that enlightens and informs, through whistleblower complaints that expose corruption, through lawsuits that challenge misconduct, and through protests and mass political action that remind the powers-that-be that “we the people” are the ones that call the shots.

Remember, education precedes action. Citizens need to the do the hard work of educating themselves about what the government is doing and how to hold it accountable. Don’t allow yourselves to exist exclusively in an echo chamber that is restricted to views with which you agree. Expose yourself to multiple media sources, independent and mainstream, and think for yourself.

For that matter, no matter what your political leanings might be, don’t allow your partisan bias to trump the principles that serve as the basis for our constitutional republic. As Beauchamp notes, “A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”

That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.

Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.

Yet if you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.

This much I know: we are not faceless numbers.

We are not cogs in the machine.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are not slaves.

We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.

The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.

Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be free, and until we can stand firm in the face of threats to our freedoms, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.

Apocalypse Now: The Government’s Use of Controlled Chaos to Maintain Power

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

Figure One: Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers…throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern. 

Figure Two: And this pattern is always the same? 

Figure One: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and it’s themselves. And all we need do is sit back…and watch…and let them destroy themselves. — “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Twilight Zone

Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it?

All the signs seem to point in this direction.

For years now, the government has been pushing us to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—has manifested itself in the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today.

Why is the Deep State engineering this societal madness? What’s in it for the government?

What is playing out before us is a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps the populace fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of standing united in defense of our freedoms.

It’s not conspiratorial.

It’s a power play.

Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, understood the dynamics behind this power play.

In the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Serling imagined a world in which the powers-that-be carry out a social experiment to see how long it would take before the members of a small American neighborhood, frightened by a sudden loss of electric power and caught up in fears of the unknown, will transform into an irrational mob and turn on each other.

It doesn’t take long at all.

Likewise, in Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind (produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s studio), unexplained crises lead to a technological blackout that leaves the populace disconnected, disoriented, isolated, suspicious, and under attack from mysterious ailments and each other.

As one of Leave the World’s characters speculates, the culprit behind the escalating catastrophes, which range from WiFi outages and mysterious health ailments to cities under siege from rogue forces, may be the result of a military campaign intended to destabilize a nation by forcing people to turn against each other.

It’s really not so far-flung a scenario when you consider some of the many ways the government already has the ability to manufacture crises in order to sow fear, fuel hysteria, destabilize the nation and institute martial law.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture health crises. Long before COVID-19 locked down the nation, the U.S. government was creating lethal viruses and unleashing them on an unsuspecting public.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture civil unrest and political upheaval. Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has been using agent provocateurs to infiltrate activist groups in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” them.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture economic instability. As the national debt continues to rise upwards of $34 trillion, with little attempt by federal agencies to curtail spending, it stands as the single-most pressing threat to the economy.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture environmental disasters. Deployed in 1947, Project Cirrus, an early precursor to HAARP, the government’s weather-altering agency, attempted to disable a hurricane as it was moving out to sea. Instead of weakening the storm, however, the government steered it straight into Georgia, resulting in millions of dollars in damaged properties.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture communications blackouts. Internet and cell phone kill switches enable the government to shut down communications at a moment’s notice. It’s a practice that has been used before in the U.S. In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels (reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone). In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked (again, same rationale). And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down (this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man).

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture terrorist attacks. Indeed, the FBI has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture propaganda aimed at mind control and psychological warfare. Not long ago, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation came in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military had been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users. Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda. In fact, the CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.

We must never forget that the government no longer exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, “we the people” are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, trap and control us.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms.

It’s telling that in Leave the World Behind, before disaster strikes, the main characters—on their way to a family vacation—are utterly oblivious, connected to their electronic devices and insulated from each other and the world around them. Adding to the disconnect, the family’s teen daughter, Rose, is fixated on binge-watching episodes of Friends, even as the world falls apart around them. As TV critic Jen Chaney explains, the sitcom’s presence in the story “underlines how human beings crave escapism at the expense of embracing the actual present, a different way of ‘leaving the world behind.’”

We’re in a similar escapist bubble, suffering from a “crisis of the now,” which keeps us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.

Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.

“Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man’s capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandists, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks.”

Yet in addition to being distracted by our electronic devices and diverted by bread-and-circus entertainment spectacles, we are also being polarized by political theater, which aims to keep us divided and at war with each other.

This is the underlying cautionary tale of Leave the World Behind and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”: we are being manipulated by forces beyond our control.

A popular meme circulating a while back described it this way:

“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?”

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 government has never stopped shaking the jar.