Muh Constitution...
Source: The Rutherford Institute
Danger Within: The Government Is Turning America Into a Constitution-Free Zone
By John & Nisha Whitehead
May 10, 2023
“There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”—James Madison
How far would you really go to secure the nation’s borders in the so-called name of national security?
Would you give the government limitless amounts of money? Surround the entire country with concrete walls and barbed wire? Erect a high-tech, virtual wall of AI-powered surveillance cameras and drones that does a better job of imprisoning those within its boundaries than keeping intruders out? Empower border police to trample on the rights of anyone who crosses their path, including legal citizens?
Relinquish some of your freedoms in exchange for the elusive promise of non-porous borders? Submit to a national ID card that allows the government to target individuals and groups as it chooses in order to identify those who do not “belong”? Turn a blind eye to private prisons and detainment camps that profit off the forced labor of its detainees?
Would you turn your backs on every constitutional principle for which our founders fought and died in exchange for empty campaign promises of elusive safety by fast-talking politicians?
This is the devil’s bargain that the U.S. government demands of its people.
These devilish deals have been foisted upon “we the people” before.
Every decade or so, the government makes the case for expanding its wartime powers and curtailing the citizenry’s freedom—in the war on terrorism, war on drugs, war on communism, war on foreigners, war on extremism, war on dissidents, war on peace activists, war on anti-government speech, etc.—all for the sake of national security, of course, and as expected, the American people fall in line.
Increasingly, the government wants us to buy into the fiction that its war on illegal immigrants is so necessary for national security that we should be grateful when roving bands of border patrol agents, flexing their muscles far beyond the nation’s borders, exercise their right to disregard the Constitution at every turn.
Except these border patrol cops aren’t just disregarding the Constitution.
They’re trampling all over the Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits the government from carrying out egregious warrantless searches and seizures without probable cause.
As part of the government’s so-called crackdown on illegal immigration, drugs and trafficking, border patrol cops are expanding their reach, roaming further afield and subjecting greater numbers of Americans to warrantless searches, ID checkpoints, transportation checks, and even surveillance on private property far beyond the boundaries of the borderlands.
That so-called border, once a thin borderline, is now an ever-thickening band spreading deeper and deeper inside the country.
Consequently, nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, or 197.4 million people) now live within a 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.
As journalist Todd Miller explains, that expanding border region now extends “100 miles inland around the United States—along the 2,000-mile southern border, the 4,000-mile northern border and both coasts... This ‘border’ region now covers places where two-thirds of the US population (197.4 million people) live… The ‘border’ has by now devoured the full states of Maine and Florida and much of Michigan.”
So much for walking that golden ribbon of highway.
In this authoritarian reshaping of America, you’d better watch where you roam and ramble, because you could find yourself wandering into the government’s ever-expanding, Constitution-free zone where freedom is off-limits and government agents have all the power and “we the people” have none.
Miller continues:
“In these vast domains, Homeland Security authorities can institute roving patrols with broad, extra-constitutional powers backed by national security, immigration enforcement and drug interdiction mandates. There, the Border Patrol can set up traffic checkpoints and fly surveillance drones overhead with high-powered cameras and radar that can track your movements. Within twenty-five miles of the international boundary, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agents can enter a person’s private property without a warrant.”
These are definitely not Mayberry cops.
The CBP, with its more than 60,000 Customs and Border Protection employees, supplemented by the National Guard and the U.S. military, is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a national police force imbued with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies.
Just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to local police agencies in the form of grants to transform them into extensions of the military.
As Miller points out, the government has turned the nation’s expanding border regions into “a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance.”
In much the same way that police across the country have been schooled in the art of sidestepping the Constitution, border cops have also been drilled in the art of “anything goes” in the name of national security.
In fact, according to FOIA documents shared with The Intercept, border cops even have a checklist of “possible behaviors” that warrant overriding the Constitution and subjecting individuals—including American citizens—to stops, searches, seizures, interrogations and even arrests.
For instance, if you’re driving a vehicle that to a border cop looks unusual in some way, you can be stopped.
If your passengers look dirty or unusual, you can be stopped.
If you or your passengers avoid looking at a cop, you can be stopped.
If you or your passengers look too long at a cop, you can be stopped.
If you’re anywhere near a border (near being within 100 miles of a border, or in a city, or on a bus, or at an airport), you can be stopped and asked to prove you’re legally allowed to be in the country.
If you’re traveling on a public road that smugglers and other criminals may have traveled, you can be stopped.
If you’re not driving in the same direction as other cars, you can be stopped.
If you appear to be avoiding a police checkpoint, you can be stopped.
If your car appears to be weighed down, you can be stopped.
If your vehicle is from out of town, wherever that might be, you can be stopped.
If you’re driving a make of car that criminal-types have also driven, you can be stopped.
If your car appears to have been altered or modified, you can be stopped.
If the cargo area in your vehicle is covered, you can be stopped.
If you’re driving during a time of day or night that border cops find suspicious, you can be stopped.
If you’re driving when border cops are changing shifts, you can be stopped.
If you’re driving in a motorcade or with another vehicle, you can be stopped.
If your car appears dusty, you can be stopped.
If people with you are trying to avoid being seen, or exhibiting “unusual” behavior, you can be stopped.
If you slow down after seeing a cop, you can be stopped.
Are you starting to get the picture yet?
This isn’t about illegal immigrants and border crossings at all.
It’s a test to see how hard “we the people” will fight to hold onto what remains of our freedoms.
If this is a test, we’re failing abysmally.
Then again, we’ve been failing this particular test for a long time now.
Indeed, as journalist Hayes Brown concludes, the United States has a long, dubious history of putting national security before people’s freedoms.
Certainly, it took no time at all for us to forget Benjamin Franklin’s warning that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
It was 1798 when Americans, their fears stoked by rumblings of a Quasi-War with France, chose safety over liberty when they failed to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts, which criminalized anti-government speech, empowered the government to deport “dangerous” non-citizens and made it harder for immigrants to vote.
During the Civil War, Americans went along when Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus (the right to a speedy trial) and authorized government officials to spy on Americans’ mail.
During World War I, Americans took it in stride when President Woodrow Wilson and Congress adopted the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to interfere with the war effort and criminalized any speech critical of war.
By World War II, Americans were marching in lockstep with the government’s expanding war powers to imprison Japanese-American citizens in detainment camps, censor mail, and lay the groundwork for the future surveillance state.
Fast-forward to the Cold War’s Red Scares, the McCarthy era’s hearings on un-American activities, and the government’s surveillance of Civil Rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr.—all done in the name of national security.
By the time 9/11 rolled around, all George W. Bush had to do was claim the country was being invaded by terrorists, and the government was given greater powers to spy, search, detain and arrest American citizens in order to keep America safe.
The terrorist invasion never really happened, but the government kept its newly acquired police powers made possible by the nefarious USA Patriot Act.
Barack Obama continued Bush’s trend of undermining the Constitution, going so far as to give the military the power to strip Americans of their constitutional rights, label them extremists, and detain them indefinitely without trial, all in the name of keeping America safe.
Despite the fact that the breadth of the military’s power to detain American citizens violates not only U.S. law and the Constitution but also international laws, the government has refused to relinquish its detention powers made possible by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Then Donald Trump claimed the only way to keep America safe from dangerous immigrants was to build an expensive border wall, expand the reach of border patrol, and empower the military to “assist” with border control.
Now you have Joe Biden sending thousands of active-duty troops to the southern border in order to deal with what they anticipate could be more than 10,000 illegal crossings per day.
It’s a state of affairs perfectly timed to stir up, divide and distract the populace, while expanding the reach of the police state under our noses.
Once the government acquires—and uses—additional powers (to spy on its citizens, to carry out surveillance, to transform its police forces into extensions of the police, to seize taxpayer funds, to wage endless wars, to censor and silence dissidents, to identify potential troublemakers, to detain citizens without due process), it does not voluntarily relinquish them.
It’s time “we the people” put our house in order.
Just look at the mess we’re in right now: political theatrics that keep the populace distracted while the police state clamps down, an economy that is disintegrating before our eyes, a surveillance state that is gearing up for total control, an aging national infrastructure that is falling apart, an appalling lack of leaders with moral backbones and civic knowledge, and a government that grows more authoritarian with every passing day.
The looming problem is not so much that the U.S. is being invaded by hostile forces at the border, but rather that the U.S. Constitution is under assault from within by a power-hungry cabal at the highest levels of power.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government is now the greatest threat to our safety, and there’s no border wall big enough to protect us from these ruffians in our midst.
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
Source: earlking56
The Rise of the American Gestapo: Has It Already Happened?
By Klark Barnes
May 15, 2023
Looking at the present, with each passing day, I see a very probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades.
In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are/were willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, huge unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil, and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion…
I look at present members of the Establishment or people on its fringes who, in the name of Americanism, betray the interests of most Americans by fomenting militarism, applauding rat-race individualism, protecting undeserved privilege, or stirring up nationalistic and ethnic hatreds. I see pretended patriots who desecrate the American flag by waving it while waiving the law.
In Nazi Germany, the Gehieme Staatspolizei, or Gestapo, was literally the Homeland Police (Security). It was the MOTHERLAND in the USSR, the FATHERLAND in Nazi Germany, and now the HOMELAND in Nazi America! Homeland Security and the FBI are the American Gestapo.
In the months after Hitler took power, the SA and Gestapo agents went from door to door looking for Hitler’s enemies. Socialists, Communists, trade union leaders, and others who had spoken out against the Nazi Party were arrested, and some were killed. By the middle of 1933, the Nazi Party was the only political party, and nearly all organized opposition to the regime had been eliminated. Democracy was dead in Germany.
This will be the fate nowadays of gun owners, anti-vaccine advocates, freedom activists, self-sufficient people, and everyone against the current diabolical regime that got in place by stealing, lying, and cheating.
Many different groups, including the SA and SS, set up hundreds of makeshift “camps” in empty warehouses, factories, and other locations all over Germany where they held political opponents without trial and under conditions of great cruelty.
Quick Note: If the FEMA camps don’t ring you any bells…it should.
Do You Live Near Any Of These FEMA Camps? Christians, Gun Owners, Veterans, Tea Partiers, Homeschoolers, etc., Are The Targets In The New World Order
Despite the finger-pointing and outcries of dismay from those who are watching the government discard the rule of law at every turn, the question is not whether Joe Biden is the new Adolf Hitler, but whether the American Police State is the new Third Reich.
February 22, 1933, SS and SA become auxiliary police units
Less than a month after Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany, he calls on elements of the Nazi Party to act as auxiliary police. The SS, initially Hitler’s bodyguards, and the SA, the street fighters or Storm Troopers of the Nazi Party, now have official police power. This further increases the power of the Nazi Party in German society.
With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.
These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where the only law that counts comes in the form of heavy-handed, unilateral dictates from a supreme ruler who uses a secret police to control the populace.
I know you already guessed and you are right, that danger is now posed by the FBI, whose laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues, and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government; recruiting high school students to spy on and report fellow students who show signs of being future terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.
Consider the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police, and generally act as a law unto themselves—much like their Nazi cousins, the Gestapo—and then try to convince yourself that the United States is still a constitutional republic.
Just like the Gestapo, the FBI has vast resources, vast investigatory powers, and vast discretion to determine who is an enemy of the state.
Today, the FBI employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S., as well as 400 resident agencies in smaller towns, and more than 50 international offices. In addition to their “data campus,” which houses more than 96 million sets of fingerprints from across the United States and elsewhere, the FBI has also built a vast repository of “profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime.
All of this is made possible by the agency’s nearly unlimited resources (its minimum budget alone in fiscal year 2015 was $8.3 billion), the government’s vast arsenal of technology, the interconnectedness of government intelligence agencies, and information sharing through fusion centers—data collecting intelligence agencies spread throughout the country that constantly monitor communications (including those of American citizens), everything from internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails.
Much like the Gestapo spied on mail and phone calls, FBI agents have carte blanche access to the citizenry’s most personal information.
Much like the Gestapo’s sophisticated surveillance programs, the FBI’s spying capabilities can delve into Americans’ most intimate details (and allow local police to do so, as well).
In addition to technology (which is shared with police agencies) that allows them to listen in on phone calls, read emails and text messages, and monitor web activities, the FBI’s surveillance boasts an invasive collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls.
Much like the Gestapo’s power to render anyone an enemy of the state, the FBI has the power to label anyone a domestic terrorist.
As part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the nation’s de facto secret police force has begun using the terms “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. Moreover, the government continues to add to its growing list of characteristics that can be used to identify an individual (especially anyone who disagrees with the government) as a potential domestic terrorist. For instance, you might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you:
express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers)
subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation
exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership)
show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)
expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties
fear an economic collapse
buy gold and barter items (by the way, check SQ Metals for the best prices)
voice fears about Big Brother or big government
read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books
believe in a New World Order conspiracy
…and so on, this list is big
The FBI’s senators will continue with amendments to legislation, related or not, until they deliver to the FBI the power it wants.
Unfortunately, most Americans today, unlike their forebears, are too ignorant and uneducated to know the value of the privacy rights that our Founding Fathers put in the US Constitution. The imbeciles say nonsense such as: “I haven’t done anything wrong. I have nothing to fear.” God help the imbeciles.
If the American people were sufficiently sophisticated, they perhaps would wonder why such a large chunk of the US Senate would rather represent the FBI than the American people, their constituents who elected them to represent the people in the state, not a police power in Washington.
Why do you think there are so many US senators more responsive to the FBI’s desire for Gestapo police power than they are to the civil liberties embodied in the US Constitution?
Ways to connect
Telegram: @JoelWalbert
Email: thetruthaddict@tutanota.com
The Truth Addict Telegram channel
Hard Truth Soldier chat on Telegram
Mastodon: @thetruthaddict@noagendasocial.com
Session: 05e7fa1d9e7dcae8512eed0702531272de14a7f1e392591432551a336feb48357c
Odysee: TruthAddict
Donations (#Value4Value)
Buy Me a Coffee (One time donations as low as $1)
Bitcoin:
bc1qe8enf89g667dy890j2lnt637xqlt9wvc9f07un (on chain)
bc1qnqjdudgc0qr5yfrp826nxes8kljf9p07mwt3q3yjrd6gqwj0lqtswmy39s (lightning)
nemesis@getalby.com
joelw@fountain.fm
+wildviolet72C (PayNym)
Monero:
43E8i7Pzv1APDJJPEuNnQAV914RqzbNae15UKKurntVhbeTznmXr1P3GYzK9mMDnVR8C1fd8VRbzEf1iYuL3La3q7pcNmeN
