At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences.

Comply or Die: The Only Truly Compliant Person in a Police State Is a Dead One

It’s time to bring all our troops home. It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date. It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.

Bring All the Troops Home | Freedom Under Fire with John W. Whitehead

Police now have the power to kill with immunity using remote-controlled robots. It’s only a matter of time before these killer robots become as common as SWAT teams.

Make Way for the Killer Robots: The Government Is Expanding Its Power to Kill

“We the people” should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.

Don’t Trust the Government with Your Privacy, Property or Your Freedoms

Every two minutes, a child is bought and sold for sex. Hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex, as many as 20 times per day. It is estimated that at least 100,000 to 500,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year.

Child Trafficking Has Become Big Business in America

Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness. These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.

Distract, Divide and Conquer: The Painful Truth About the State of Our Union

The United States has spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars. What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires: The Cost of the Nation’s Endless Wars

While much has been said about the dangers of police militarization, a warrior mindset that has police viewing the rest of the citizenry as enemy combatants, and law enforcement training that teaches cops to shoot first and ask questions later, little attention has been paid to the role that “roid rage,” triggered by anabolic steroid use and abuse by police, may contribute to the mounting numbers of cases involving police brutality.

Raging Bulls in Blue: The Deadly Toll of Warrior Policing on Steroids

We’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between bowing down in obedience to the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.

Don’t Bow Down to a Dictatorial Government. America Is a Prison Disguised as Paradise

This overbearing Nanny State despotism is what happens when government representatives adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

A Nanny State Idiocracy: When the Government Thinks It Knows Best

Dragnet geofence surveillance sweeps can and eventually will be used to target as a suspect every person in any given place at any given time and sweep them up into a never-ending virtual line-up in the hopes of matching a criminal to every crime.

First, They Spied on Protesters. Then Churches. You’re Next

Without our say-so and lacking any mandate, the point of view of the Constitution has been shifted from “we the people” to “we the government.” Our taxpayer-funded employees—our appointed servants—have stopped looking upon us as their superiors and started viewing as their inferiors.

Circle the Wagons: The Government Is On the Warpath

Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists … and the U.S. government.

We the Exploited: The U.S. Government Buys and Sells Its Citizens for Profit and Power

Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it? All the signs seem to point in this direction.

Apocalypse Now: The Government’s Use of Controlled Chaos to Maintain Power

There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians. Political psychopaths eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Criminality in the White House: The Rise of the Political Psychopath

Communications kill switches have become tyrannical tools of domination and oppression to stifle political dissent, shut down resistance, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, and keep the populace isolated, disconnected and in the dark, literally and figuratively.

Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent

According to the FBI, you may be an anti-government extremist if you’ve purchased a Bible or other religious materials; used terms like “MAGA” and “Trump”; shopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, or Bass Pro Shops; or purchased tickets to travel by bus, cars, or plane.

Watchlisted: You’re Probably Already on a Government Extremism List

The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong. Don’t believe it.

The White House's Secret Surveillance Program Breaks All the Laws

SWAT team raids have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned means of giving heavily armed police the green light to crash through doors in the middle of the night.

Who Pays the Price for Botched SWAT Team Raids? We Do

Forty years past the time that George Orwell envisioned the stomping boot of Big Brother, the police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state. 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

2024 Is the New 1984: Big Brother and the Rise of the Security Industrial Complex

Any presidential candidate who promises to be a dictator on day one, if elected, will be a dictator-in-chief for life. Then again, the president is already a dictator with permanent powers: imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional.

We’ve Already Got a Dictator-in-Chief: How Absolute Power Corrupted the President

COVID-19 was a test to see how little resistance the citizenry would offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security. “We the people” failed that test spectacularly. Four years later, we're still failing.

COVID-19 Tested Our Commitment to Freedom. Four Years Later, We’re Still Failing

President Trump’s flag burning fight is a constitutional bait-and-switch--a culture-war diversion to distract from the Deep State's authoritarian power grabs. 

Burning the Flag or Torching the Constitution: Only One Destroys Freedom

If Americans don’t learn how to get along—at the very least, agreeing to disagree and respecting each other’s right to subscribe to beliefs and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different—then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).

The Rutherford Institute

Institutionalizing Intolerance: Bullies Win, Freedom Suffers When We Can’t Agree to Disagree

As a result of the government’s profit-driven campaign to keep the nation “safe” from drugs, weapons and terrorism, students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but they are being punished with suspension, expulsion, and even arrest.

Welcome to Compliance 101: the police state’s primer in how to churn out compliant citizens and transform the nation’s school’s into quasi-prisons through the use of surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, strip searches and active shooter drills.

Criminalizing Childhood: School Safety Measures Aren’t Making the Schools Any Safer

We are approaching critical mass, the point at which all hell breaks loose. The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis. What makes the outlook so much bleaker is the utter ignorance of the American people—and those who represent them—about their freedoms, history, and how the government is supposed to operate.

A Crisis in the Making: Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them

We are in desperate need of a populace that can stand united against the government’s authoritarian tendencies. So disagree all you want about healthcare, abortion and immigration—hot-button issues that are guaranteed to stir up the masses, secure campaign contributions and turn political discourse into a circus free-for-all—but surely we can manage to stand united on certain principles that should be non-negotiable in the midst of the destructive, disrupting, diverting, discordant babble being beamed down at us by the powers-that-be? As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, we have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny go on for too long.

Monsters with Human Faces: The Tyranny of the Police State Disguised as Law-and-Order

What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including our own) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. Until now, the police state has been more circumspect in its power grabs, but this latest state of emergency has brought the beast out of the shadows. We are on a slippery slope to outright despotism. This road we are traveling is paved with lockdowns, SWAT team raids, mass surveillance and forced vaccinations. It is littered with the debris of our First and Fourth Amendment freedoms. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead warns in this week's podcast, this is what we have to look forward to in the months and years to come unless we can find some way to regain control over our runaway government.

The Slippery Slope to Despotism: Paved with Lockdowns, Raids and Forced Vaccinations

The system is rigged and the U.S. Supreme Court—the so-called “people’s court”—has exchanged its appointed role as a gatekeeper of justice for its new role as maintainer of the status quo, ensuring there will be little if no consequences for the cops who brutalize and no justice for the victims of police brutality. This is how unarmed Americans keep dying at the hands of militarized police. By refusing to accept any of the eight or so qualified immunity cases before it this term that strove to hold police accountable for official misconduct, the Supreme Court delivered a chilling reminder that in the American police state, ‘we the people’ are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.” As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, this is how qualified immunity keeps the police state in power.

The System Is Rigged: Qualified Immunity Is How the Police State Stays in Power

Merely growing a vegetable garden on your own property, or in a greenhouse on your property, or shopping at a gardening store for gardening supplies—incredibly enough—could set you up for a drug raid sanctioned by the courts. In this case, the make-work principle (translation: making work to keep the police state busy at taxpayer expense) is being used to justify sending police and expensive military helicopters likely equipped with sophisticated surveillance and thermal imaging devices on exploratory sorties every summer—again at taxpayer expense—in order to uncover illegal marijuana growing operations. Often, however, as constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead points out in this week's podcast, what these air and ground searches end up targeting are backyard gardeners growing tomato plants.

Attack of the Tomato Killers: The Police State’s War on Weed and Backyard Gardens

Things are falling apart. How much longer we can sustain the fiction that we live in a constitutional republic, I cannot say, but anarchy is being loosed upon the nation. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, we are witnessing the unraveling of the American dream one injustice at a time.

Something Wicked This Way Comes: Anarchy Is Being Loosed Upon the Nation

Freedom Under Fire with John Whitehead™, available free of charge, provides listeners and radio stations alike with insightful, relevant and provocative commentary on popular culture and constitutional issues.

Freedom Under Fire | The Rutherford Institute

Popular tracks