This Is How
Tyranny Rises and Freedom Falls: The Experiment in
Freedom Is Failing
By John W.
Whitehead
October 17,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- It is easy to be distracted right now by the
circus politics that have dominated the news
headlines for the past year, but don’t be
distracted.
Don’t be
fooled, not even a little.
We’re being
subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the
magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on
the shell game in front of you while your wallet is
being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.
This is how
tyranny rises and freedom falls.
What
characterizes American government today is not so
much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly
contrived governance carried out behind the
entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain
of political theater. And what political theater it
is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of
sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.
We are
being ruled by a government of scoundrels, spies,
thugs, thieves, gangsters, ruffians, rapists,
extortionists, bounty hunters, battle-ready warriors
and cold-blooded killers who communicate using a
language of force and oppression.
The U.S.
government now poses the greatest threat to
our freedoms.
More than
terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than
gun violence and organized crime, even more than the
perceived threat posed by any single politician, the
U.S. government remains a greater menace to the
life, liberty and property of its citizens than any
of the so-called dangers from which the government
claims to protect us.
This has
been true of virtually every occupant of the White
House in recent years.
Unfortunately, nothing has changed for the better
since Donald Trump ascended to the Oval Office.
Indeed,
Trump may be the smartest move yet by the
powers-that-be to keep the citizenry divided and at
each other’s throats, because as long as we’re busy
fighting each other, we’ll never manage to present a
unified front against tyranny in any form.
The facts
speak for themselves.
We’re being robbed blind by a
government of thieves.
Americans no longer have any real
protection against government agents empowered to
seize private property at will. For instance, police
agencies under the guise of asset forfeiture laws
are taking Americans’ personal property based on
little more than a suspicion of criminal activity
and keeping it for their own profit and gain.
We’re being taken advantage of by a
government of scoundrels, idiots and cowards.
When you’ve got government representatives who spend
a large chunk of their work hours
fundraising, being
feted by lobbyists, shuffling through a
lucrative revolving door
between public service and lobbying, and making
themselves available to anyone with enough money to
secure
access to a congressional office,
you’re in the clutches of a
corrupt oligarchy.
We’re being locked up by a government
of greedy jailers.
We have become a
carceral state,
spending
three times more on our prisons
than on our schools and imprisoning close to a
quarter of the world’s prisoners,
despite the fact that crime is at an all-time low
and the U.S. makes up only 5% of the world’s
population. The rise of overcriminalization and
profit-driven private prisons provides even greater
incentives for locking up American citizens for such
non-violent “crimes” as having an
overgrown lawn.
We’re being spied on by a government
of Peeping Toms.
The government is watching
everything you do,
reading everything you write, listening to
everything you say, and monitoring everything you
spend. Omnipresent surveillance is paving the way
for government programs that profile citizens,
document their behavior and attempt to predict what
they might do in the future, whether it’s what they
might buy, what politician they might support, or
what kinds of crimes they might commit.
We’re being ravaged by a government
of ruffians, rapists and killers.
It’s not just the police
shootings of unarmed citizens
that are worrisome. It’s the
SWAT team raids gone wrong—more
than 80,000 annually—that
are leaving innocent citizens wounded, children
terrorized and family pets killed. It’s the
roadside strip searches—in
some cases, cavity searches of men and women alike
carried out in full view of the public—in pursuit of
drugs that are never found. It’s the potentially
lethal—and unwarranted—use
of so-called “nonlethal” weapons such as tasers on
children for
engaging in little more than childish behavior.
We’re being forced to surrender our
freedoms—and those of our children—to a government
of extortionists, money launderers and professional
pirates. Under the
guise of fighting its wars on terror, drugs and now
domestic extremism, the government has spent
billions in taxpayer dollars on endless wars that
have not ended terrorism but merely sown
the seeds of blowback, surveillance programs that
have caught few terrorists while subjecting
all Americans to a surveillance society, and
militarized police that have done little to
decrease crime while turning communities into
warzones.
We’re being held at gunpoint by a
government of soldiers: a standing army.
As if it weren’t enough
that the American military empire stretches around
the globe (and continues to leech much-needed
resources from the American economy), the U.S.
government is creating its own standing army of
militarized police and teams of weaponized
bureaucrats. These
civilian employees are being armed to the hilt
with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment;
trained in military tactics; and authorized to lock
the nation down under martial law.
Whatever
else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S.
government is certainly no friend to freedom.
As I
make clear in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American
People, you
cannot have a republican form of government—nor a
democratic one, for that matter—when the government
views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it
no longer operates for the benefit of the people,
when the people are no longer able to peacefully
reform their government, when government officials
cease to act like public servants, when elected
officials no longer represent the will of the
people, when the government routinely violates the
rights of the people and perpetrates more violence
against the citizenry than the criminal class, when
government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted
for, when the judiciary act as courts of order
rather than justice, and when the government is no
longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.
We won’t be
able to sustain this fiction much longer.
“Things
fall apart,” wrote W.B. Yeats in his dark,
forbidding poem “The Second Coming.” “The centre
cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
Surely some revelation is at hand.”
Wake up,
America, and break free of your chains.
Something
wicked this way comes.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead
is founder and president of The
Rutherford Institute.
His new book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks,
2015) is available online at www.amazon.com.
Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
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