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:

Public School Students Are the New Inmates in the American Police State

"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. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence."--Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes
In the American police state, you're either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).
- Monday, September 14, 2015

‘Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death’: The Loss of Our Freedoms in the Wake of 9/11

"Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse." ― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse. Since then, we have been terrorized, traumatized, and acclimated to life in the American Surveillance State.
- Tuesday, September 8, 2015

The Raping of America: Mile Markers on the Road to Fascism

"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."--Martin Luther King Jr.
There's an ill will blowing across the country. The economy is tanking. The people are directionless, and politics provides no answer. And like former regimes, the militarized police have stepped up to provide a façade of law and order manifested by an overt violence against the citizenry.
- Monday, August 24, 2015

We Are the Government: Tactics for Taking Down the Police State

We are the government."--John Lennon Saddled with a corporate media that marches in lockstep with the government, elected officials who dance to the tune of their corporate benefactors, and a court system that serves to maintain order rather than mete out justice, Americans often feel as if they have no voice, no authority and no recourse when it comes to holding government officials accountable and combatting rampant corruption and injustice.
- Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Drivers, Beware: The Costly, Deadly Dangers of Traffic Stops in the American Police State

"The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be appalled."--Herman Schwartz, The Nation
Trying to predict the outcome of any encounter with the police is a bit like playing Russian roulette: most of the time you will emerge relatively unscathed, although decidedly poorer and less secure about your rights, but there's always the chance that an encounter will turn deadly.
- Tuesday, July 28, 2015


Freedom or the Slaughterhouse? The American Police State from A to Z

“Who needs direct repression when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?”—Philosopher Slavoj Žižek
Despite the best efforts of some to sound the alarm, the nation is being locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.
- Tuesday, July 14, 2015


Prisons Without Walls: We’re All Inmates in the American Police State

"It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free--to be under no physical constraint and yet be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation wants him to think, feel and act. . . . To him the walls of his prison are invisible and he believes himself to be free."--Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World Revisited
"Free worlders" is prison slang for those who are not incarcerated behind prison walls. Supposedly, those fortunate souls live in the "free world." However, appearances can be deceiving.
- Monday, June 15, 2015



Militarization Is More Than Tanks and Rifles

"If we're training cops as soldiers, giving them equipment like soldiers, dressing them up as soldiers, when are they going to pick up the mentality of soldiers? If you look at the police department, their creed is to protect and to serve. A soldier's mission is to engage his enemy in close combat and kill him. Do we want police officers to have that mentality? Of course not." -- Arthur Rizer, former civilian police officer and member of the military
Talk about poor timing. Then again, perhaps it's brilliant timing.
- Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Turning America into a Battlefield: A Blueprint for Locking Down the Nation

A standing army--something that propelled the early colonists into revolution--strips the American people of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead?
- Monday, April 27, 2015

Battlefield America: The War on the American People

"A government which will turn its tanks upon its people, for any reason, is a government with a taste of blood and a thirst for power and must either be smartly rebuked, or blindly obeyed in deadly fear."--John Salter
- Monday, April 20, 2015


The Wolf Is Guarding the Hen House: The Government’s War on Cyberterrorism

"The game is rigged, the network is bugged, the government talks double-speak, the courts are complicit and there's nothing you can do about it." -- David Kravets, reporting for Wired
Nothing you write, say, text, tweet or share via phone or computer is private anymore. As constitutional law professor Garrett Epps points out, "Big Brother is watching.... Big Brother may be watching you right now, and you may never know. Since 9/11, our national life has changed forever. Surveillance is the new normal."
- Tuesday, March 17, 2015

How DNA Is Turning Us Into a Nation of Suspects

"The year is 2025. The population is 325 million, and the FBI has the DNA profiles of all of them. Unlike fingerprints, these profiles reveal vital medical information. The universal database arrived surreptitiously. First, the Department of Defense's repository of DNA samples from all military personnel, established to identify remains of soldiers missing from action, was given to the FBI. Then local police across the country shadowed individuals, collecting shed DNA for the databank. On the way, thousands of innocent people were imprisoned because they had the misfortune to have race-based crime genes in their DNA samples. Sadly, it did not have to be this way. If only we had passed laws against collecting and using shed DNA…." -- Professor David H. Kaye Every dystopian sci-fi film we've ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science, technology and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.
- Monday, March 9, 2015

Forced Blood Draws, DNA Collection and Biometric Scans: What Country Is This?

"The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be appalled." -- Herman Schwartz, The Nation Our freedoms -- especially the Fourth Amendment -- are being choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
- Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Creepy, Calculating and Controlling: All the Ways Big Brother Is Watching You

"You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." -- George Orwell, 1984
None of us are perfect. All of us bend the rules occasionally. Even before the age of overcriminalization, when the most upstanding citizen could be counted on to break at least three laws a day without knowing it, most of us have knowingly flouted the law from time to time.
- Monday, February 16, 2015

Why I’m Not Breaking Up with America This Valentine’s Day

“I love America and I hate it. I’m torn between the two. I have two conflicting visions of America. One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.”― Bono
Almost every week I get an email from an American expatriate living outside the country who commiserates about the deplorable state of our freedoms in the United States, expounds on his great fortune in living outside the continental U.S., and urges me to leave the country before all hell breaks loose and my wife and children are tortured, raped, brutalized and killed.
- Monday, February 9, 2015

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