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:

What’s in Store for Our Freedoms in 2016? More of Everything We Don’t Want

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."--George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. 1 In Harold Ramis' classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, TV weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) is forced to live the same day over and over again until he not only gains some insight into his life but changes his priorities.
- Tuesday, December 29, 2015



To France from a Post-9/11 America: Lessons We Learned Too Late

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."--Hermann Goering, German military commander and Hitler's designated successor
For those who remember when the first towers fell on 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Paris attacks.
- Monday, November 23, 2015

The Deep State: The Unelected Shadow Government Is Here to Stay

America's next president will inherit more than a bitterly divided nation teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe when he or she assumes office. He will also inherit a shadow government, one that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country.
- Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Fear of the Walking Dead: The American Police State Takes Aim

"Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, a vigilance so constant and unremitting that it's indistinguishable from the purest paranoia."-- Terrence Rafferty, New York Times The zombies are back. They are hungry. And they are lurking around every corner.
- Monday, October 26, 2015


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, October 12, 2015

'Minority Report' Is 40 Years Ahead of Schedule: The Fictional World Has Become Reality

"The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing is, we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us."--Director Steven Spielberg, Minority Report
- Monday, September 28, 2015

The Crisis of the Now: Distracted and Diverted from the Ever-Encroaching Police State

"When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility."--Author Neil Postman
Caught up in the spectacle of the forthcoming 2016 presidential elections, Americans (never very good when it comes to long-term memory) have not only largely forgotten last year's hullabaloo over militarized police, police shootings of unarmed citizens, asset forfeiture schemes, and government surveillance but are also generally foggy about everything that has happened since.
- Tuesday, September 22, 2015

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


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