OPINION:
Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.
While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.
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Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.
Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.
And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.
We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.
As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized, and content to view each other — rather than the government — as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.
So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.
Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity, and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.
This is how evil wins.
This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.
This is how good, generally decent people — having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps — fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.
The world has been down this road before. We are at our most vulnerable right now.
The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.
We’re in a national state of denial, yet no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
No matter how often the team colors change, the playbook remains the same. The leopard does not change its spots.
Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that nothing has changed.
The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.
In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).
Consider for yourselves:
- Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.
- SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
- The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.
- Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.
- For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
- Censorship hasn’t stopped.
- The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
- Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
- The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements.
- Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws.
- The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.”
- The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad.
- The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
- And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep.
So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past century, it will be just another lie.
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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books “The Erik Blair Diaries” and “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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