“Every
day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How
can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my
own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”—Philip Roth, novelist
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, no matter how tempting it seems to just take a peek.
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.
Our
nation of sheep has, as was foretold, given rise to a government of wolves.
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. Battlefield America: T...
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.
As American satirist H.L.
Mencken predicted almost a century ago:
“All
the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre —
the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual
vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is
perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner
soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the
land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be
adorned by a downright moron.”
In other words, nothing has
changed, folks.
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. In one case, police seized $53,000 from the manager of a Christian rock
band that was touring and raising money for an orphanage in
Thailand. Despite finding no evidence of wrongdoing, police kept the money.
Homeowners are losing their homes over nonpayment of taxes (for as little as $400 owed) and municipal
bills such as water or sewer fees that amount to a fraction of what they have
invested in their homes. And then there’s the Drug Enforcement Agency, which
has been searching train and airline passengers and pocketing their cash, without ever charging
them with a crime.
We’re
being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and cowards. Mencken
calculated that “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels;
two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.”
By and large, Americans seem to agree. 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. Mind you, these same
elected officials rarely read the legislation they’re
enacting, nor do they seem capable of enacting much legislation that actually
helps the plight of the American citizen. More often than not, the legislation
lands the citizenry in worse straits.
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. As the Boston Review points
out, “America’s contemporary system of policing, courts, imprisonment, and
parole … makes money through asset forfeiture,
lucrative public contracts from private service providers, and by directly
extracting revenue and unpaid labor from populations of color and the poor. In
states and municipalities throughout the country, the criminal justice system
defrays costs by forcing prisoners and their families to pay for punishment. It
also allows private service providers to charge outrageous fees for everyday
needs such as telephone calls. As a result people facing even minor criminal
charges can easily find themselves trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of
debt, criminalization, and incarceration.”
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. The
impact of this far-reaching surveillance, according to Psychology Today,
is “reduced trust, increased conformity, and even diminished
civic participation.” As technology analyst Jillian C. York
concludes, “Mass surveillance without due process—whether undertaken by the
government of Bahrain, Russia, the US, or anywhere in between—threatens to
stifle and smother that dissent, leaving in its wake a populace cowed by fear.”
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 “mouthing
off to a police officer. For trying to run from the principal’s office. For, at
the age of 12, getting into a fight with another girl.”
We’re
being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a
government of extortionists, money launderers and professional pirates. The
American people have repeatedly been sold a bill of goods about how the
government needs more money, more expansive powers, and more secrecy (secret
courts, secret budgets, secret military campaigns, secret surveillance) in
order to keep us safe. 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. Not surprisingly, the primary ones to benefit from these government
exercises in legal money laundering have been the corporations, lobbyists and
politicians who inflict them on a trusting public.
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; authorized to make arrests; and
trained in military tactics. Among the agencies being supplied with
night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones,
assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and
Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security
Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education
Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an
assortment of public universities. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic
(non-military) government civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than
U.S. Marines. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the government’s arsenal, the
transformation of local police into extensions of the military, and the speed
with which the nation could be locked down under martial law depending on the
circumstances.
Whatever else it may be—a
danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly no friend to
freedom.
To
our detriment, the criminal class that Mark Twain mockingly referred to as Congress has since
expanded to include every government agency that feeds off the carcass of our
once-constitutional republic.
The
government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse
the American people have to hold the government accountable or express their
displeasure with the government is through voting, which is no real recourse at
all. A Government of Wolves...
Consider it: the penalties
for civil disobedience, whistleblowing and rebellion are severe. If you refuse
to pay taxes for government programs you believe to be immoral or illegal, you
will go to jail. If you attempt to overthrow the government—or any agency
thereof—because you believe it has overstepped its reach, you will go to jail.
If you attempt to blow the whistle on government misconduct, you will go to
jail. In some circumstances, if you even attempt to approach your elected
representative to voice your discontent, you can be arrested and jailed.
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.
For too long, the American
people have obeyed the government’s dictates, no matter now unjust.
We have paid its taxes,
penalties and fines, no matter how outrageous. We have tolerated its
indignities, insults and abuses, no matter how egregious. We have turned a
blind eye to its indiscretions and incompetence, no matter how imprudent. We
have held our silence in the face of its lawlessness, licentiousness and
corruption, no matter how illicit.
Oh how we have suffered.
How long we will continue to
suffer depends on how much we’re willing to give up for the sake of freedom.
It
may well be that Professor Morris Berman is correct: perhaps we are entering
into the dark ages that signify the final phase of the American Empire. “It seems
to me,” writes Berman, “that the people do get the government they deserve, and even
beyond that, the government who they are, so to speak. In that
regard, we might consider, as an extreme version of this… that Hitler was as
much an expression of the German people at that point in time as he was a
departure from them.”
For the moment, the American
people seem content to sit back and watch the reality TV programming that
passes for politics today. It’s the modern-day equivalent of bread and
circuses, a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize,
propagandize and control a population.
As French philosopher Etienne
de La Boétie observed half a millennium ago:
“Plays,
farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other
such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery,
the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these
practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their
subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes
and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively,
but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright
picture books.”
The bait towards slavery. The
price of liberty. The instruments of tyranny.
Yes, that sounds about right.
“We the people” have learned
only too well how to be slaves. Worse, we have come to enjoy our voluntary
servitude, which masquerades as citizenship.
Unfortunately,
as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, 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 [send him mail] is founder and president
of The
Rutherford Institute. He is the author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police
State and The Change Manifesto (Sourcebooks).
Copyright
© 2017 The
Rutherford Institute
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