By John W. Whitehead
“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody
left with whom one can argue, to whom one can
present grievances, on whom the pressures of power
can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of
government in which everybody is deprived of
political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule
by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally
powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” ―
Hannah Arendt, On Violence
July 12, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - What exactly is going on?
Is this revolution? Is this anarchy? Is this a
spectacle engineered to distract us from the
machinations of the police state? Is this a sociological
means of re-setting our national equilibrium? Is this a
Machiavellian scheme designed to further polarize the
populace and undermine our efforts to stand unified
against government tyranny? Is this so-called populist
uprising actually a manufactured race war and
election-year referendum on who should occupy the White
House?
Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity
without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically
correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free
speech rights, the violent blowback after years of
government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is
overwhelming the rights of the individual, the
oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly
righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the
end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows
more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us
anywhere good.
Certainly it’s not leading to more freedom.
This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and
subdue a nation is succeeding.
It must be said: the Black Lives Matter protests have
not helped. Inadvertently or intentionally, these
protests—tinged with mob violence, rampant incivility,
intolerance, and an arrogant disdain for how an open
marketplace of ideas can advance freedom—have
politicized what should never have been politicized:
police brutality and the government’s ongoing assaults
on our freedoms.
For one brief moment in the wake of George Floyd’s
death, it seemed as if finally “we the people”
might put aside our differences long enough to stand
united in outrage over the government’s brutality.
That sliver of unity didn’t last.
We may be worse off now than we were before.
Suddenly, no one seems to be talking about any of the
egregious governmental abuses that are still wreaking
havoc on our freedoms: 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.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
How do you persuade a populace to embrace
totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in
which the government has all of the power and “we the
people” have none?
You persuade the people that the menace they face
(imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so
fearsome that the only way to surmount the
danger is by empowering the government to take all
necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing
government jackboots to trample all over the
Constitution.
This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade
a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a
dictatorship.
It works the same way every time.
The government’s overblown, extended wars on
terrorism, drugs, violence, illegal immigration, and
so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses
used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more
of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of
security.
Having allowed our fears to be codified and our
actions criminalized, we now find ourselves in a strange
new world where just about everything we do is
criminalized, even our ability to choose whether or not
to wear a mask in public during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Strangely enough, in the face of outright corruption
and incompetency on the part of our elected officials,
Americans in general remain relatively gullible, eager
to be persuaded that the government can solve the
problems that plague us, whether it be terrorism, an
economic depression, an environmental disaster, or a
global pandemic.
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. Yet having bought into the false
notion that the government does indeed know what’s best
for us and can ensure not only our safety but our
happiness and will take care of us from cradle to
grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes—we
have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and
turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that
cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.
The lesson is this: once a free people allows the
government inroads into their freedoms or uses those
same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it
quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.
Nor does it seem to matter whether it's a Democrat or
a Republican at the helm anymore. Indeed, the
bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now
seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian
government, whose priorities are to milk “we the people”
of our hard-earned money (by way of taxes, fines and
fees) and remain in control and in power.
Modern government in general—ranging from the
militarized police in SWAT team gear crashing through
our doors to the rash of innocent citizens being gunned
down by police to the invasive spying on everything we
do—is acting illogically, even psychopathically. (The
characteristics of a psychopath include a “lack of
remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial
charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to
take responsibility for one's actions, among others.”)
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, and then jails us if we dare step
out of line, punishes us unjustly without remorse, and
refuses 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.”
So where does that leave us?
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.
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).
This slide into totalitarianism—helped along by
overcriminalization, government surveillance,
militarized police, neighbors turning in neighbors,
privatized prisons, and forced labor camps, to name just
a few similarities—is tracking very closely with what
happened in Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s
rise to power.
We are walking a dangerous path right now.
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No matter who wins the presidential election come
November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the
American people.
Despite what is taught in school and the propaganda
that is peddled by the media, the 2020 presidential
election is not a populist election for a
representative. Rather, it’s a gathering of shareholders
to select the next CEO, a fact reinforced by the
nation’s
archaic electoral college system.
Anyone who believes that this election will bring
about any real change in how the American government
does business is either incredibly naïve, woefully
out-of-touch, or oblivious to the fact that as an
in-depth Princeton University study shows,
we now live in an oligarchy that is “of the rich, by
the rich and for the rich.”
When a country spends close to
$10 billion on elections to select what is, for all
intents and purposes, a glorified homecoming king or
queen to occupy the White House and fill other
government seats, while more than
40 million of its people live in poverty,
more than 40 million Americans are on unemployment,
more than
500,000 Americans are homeless, and analysts
forecast it will take
a decade to work our way out of the current
COVID-induced recession, that’s a country whose
priorities are out of step with the needs of its people.
Be warned, however: the Establishment—the Deep State
and its corporate partners that really run the show,
pull the strings and dictate the policies, no matter who
occupies the Oval Office—is not going to allow anyone to
take office who will unravel their power structures.
Those who have attempted to do so in the past have been
effectively put out of commission.
Voting sustains the illusion that we have a
democratic republic, but it is merely a dictatorship in
disguise, or what political scientists Martin Gilens and
Benjamin Page more accurately refer to as an “economic
élite domination.”
In such an environment, the economic elite
(lobbyists, corporations, monied special interest
groups) dictate national policy. As the Princeton
University oligarchy study indicates, our
elected officials, especially those in the nation’s
capital, represent the interests of the rich and
powerful rather than the average citizen. As such,
the citizenry has little if any impact on the policies
of government.
We have been saddled with a two-party system and
fooled into believing that there’s a difference between
the Republicans and Democrats, when in fact, the two
parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted,
both parties support endless war, engage in
out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic
rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought
and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own
power, and have a long record of expanding government
and shrinking liberty
We’re drowning under the weight of too much debt, too
many wars, too much power in the hands of a centralized
government run by a corporate elite, too many
militarized police, too many laws, too many lobbyists,
and generally too much bad news.
The powers-that-be want us to believe that our job as
citizens begins and ends on Election Day. They want us
to believe that we have no right to complain about the
state of the nation unless we’ve cast our vote one way
or the other. They want us to remain divided over
politics, hostile to those with whom we disagree
politically, and intolerant of anyone or anything whose
solutions to what ails this country differ from our own.
What they don’t want us talking about is the fact
that the government is corrupt, the system is rigged,
the politicians don’t represent us, the electoral
college is a joke, most of the candidates are frauds,
and, as I point out in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American People,
we as a nation 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, “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.”
As we once again find ourselves faced with the
prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the
people” have a decision to make: do we simply
participate in the collapse of the American republic as
it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we
take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for
government that is being fobbed off on us?
Never forget that the lesser of two evils is still
evil.
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
is available at
www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be
contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
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