WhatFinger


John W. Whitehead

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book The Freedom Wars (TRI Press) is available online at amazon.com. The Rutherford Institute is available at rutherford.org

Most Recent Articles by John W. Whitehead:

Technocensorship: When Corporations Serve As a Front for Government Censors

    “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.”
    Harry S. Truman

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.

- Thursday, February 29, 2024



Terror by Night: Who Pays the Price for Botched SWAT Team Raids? We Do

Sometimes ten seconds is all the warning you get.

Sometimes you don’t get a warning before all hell breaks loose.

Imagine it, if you will: It’s the middle of the night. Your neighborhood is in darkness. Your household is asleep. Suddenly, you’re awakened by a loud noise.

Barely ten seconds later, someone or an army of someones has crashed through your front door.

The intruders are in your home.

- Thursday, February 1, 2024


Break the Cycle: In 2024, Say No to the Government’s Cruelty, Brutality and Abuse

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”—Edmund Burke

Folks, it’s time to break the cycle of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government for way too long.

Here’s just a small sampling of what we suffered through in 2023.

- Saturday, December 30, 2023

Born in a Police State: The Deep State’s Persecution of Its Most Vulnerable Citizens

The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.

- Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Bah Humbug: The Police State Wants Us To Be a Nation of Snowflakes

    “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
    Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

What a year.

It feels as if government Grinches and corporate Scrooges have been working overtime to drain every last drop of joy, kindness and liberty from the world.

- Wednesday, December 6, 2023

The White House Goes Rogue: Secret Surveillance Program Breaks All the Laws

    “We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.”William O. Douglas, dissenting in Osborn v. United States (1966)

The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

- Thursday, November 30, 2023

What If the Constitution No Longer Applied? Freedom’s Greatest Hour of Danger Is Now

    “What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the government was the reason we don’t have a Constitution anymore? What if freedom’s greatest hour of danger is now?”—Andrew P. Napolitano

We are approaching critical mass, the point at which all hell breaks loose.

The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

- Saturday, November 25, 2023

The U.S. Government Buys and Sells Its Citizens for Profit and Power

Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists.

But don’t be fooled into thinking the government is protecting you.

To the contrary, the U.S. government is selling us (or rather, our data) to the highest bidders.

- Friday, November 17, 2023

Stop Drinking the Political Kool-Aid, America: Voting Will Not Save Us

“We’ve got to face it. Politics have entered a new stage, the television stage. Instead of long-winded public debates, the people want capsule slogans—‘Time for a change’—‘The mess in Washington’—‘More bang for a buck’—punch lines and glamour.” A Face in the Crowd (1957)

We are one year out from the 2024 presidential election and as usual, the American people remain eager to be persuaded that a new president in the White House can solve the problems that plague us.

Yet what is being staged is not an election.

- Thursday, November 9, 2023

This Is Not Freedom, America: The Profit Incentives Driving the American Police State

Pay no heed to the circus politics coming out of Washington DC. It’s just more of the same grandstanding by tone-deaf politicians oblivious to the plight of the citizenry.

Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted by the competing news headlines cataloging the antics of the ruling classes. While they are full of sound and fury, they are utterly lacking in substance.

Tune out the blaring noise of meaningless babble. It is intended to drown out the very real menace of a government which is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population.

- Friday, October 6, 2023

We the Targeted: How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics

Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.

The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.

- Saturday, September 2, 2023

We’re All Suspects in a DNA Lineup, Waiting to be Matched with a Crime

“Make no mistake about it…your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”—Justice Antonin Scalia dissenting in Maryland v. King

Be warned: the DNA detectives are on the prowl.

Whatever skeletons may be lurking on your family tree or in your closet, whatever crimes you may have committed, whatever associations you may have with those on the government’s most wanted lists: the police state is determined to ferret them out.

- Tuesday, August 22, 2023

From Press Room Raids to Indictments, Anything Goes When the Government Piles On

“When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules. Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.”—Mike Thomas, sports editor

What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of football: it’s called the pile on, a brutal, frenzied, desperate play to seize control and gain power while crushing the opposition.

- Wednesday, August 16, 2023

Indoctrination, Intimidation & Intolerance: What Passes for Education Today

“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

This is what it means to go back-to-school in America today.

Instead of being taught the three R’s of education (reading, writing and arithmetic), young people are being drilled in the three I’s of life in the American police state: indoctrination, intimidation and intolerance.

- Sunday, August 13, 2023

Technocensorship: The Government’s War on So-Called Dangerous Ideas

What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.

Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.

- Thursday, August 3, 2023

Whether You Live in a Small Town or a Big City, the Government Is Still Out to Get You

“I can’t remember what all Frank had fighting in the jar that day, but I can remember other bug fights we staged later on: one stag beetle against a hundred red ants, one centipede against three spiders, red ants against black ants. They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar. And that's what Frank was doing, shaking, shaking the jar.”— Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

There’s a meme that circulated on social media a while back that perfectly sums up the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today:


- Thursday, July 27, 2023

A Week in the Life of the American Police State

If you've been caught up in the circus that is the presidential election, you've likely missed the latest news about all the ways in which the government continues to erode our freedoms, undermine our sovereignty, abuse our trust, invade our homes, invade our privacy, destroy our property, hijack our bank accounts, and generally render itself above the law.
- Monday, June 20, 2016

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