The Precarious Precariat and the Garrison State

Jonah Raskin

November 21, 2024
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

If the Garrison State isn’t already here, it’s sure to be here very soon. Wait and watch and observe the arrival of a suped-up American political and economic system buttressed anew by the military. True, all eyes, or at least a great many of them across the US and around the world, have been focused on Washington D.C., the White House and Trump’s controversial appointees to cabinet positions.

But those eyes will soon shift to the 1,951-mile border that separates the US from Mexico and that’s said to be the busiest in the world. Millions cross it every year. Ever since Donald Trump’s arrival on the political scene, it has been one of the most hotly contested borders on the planet.

On Monday November 18, Trump confirmed that he intends to declare a national emergency and use U.S. troops to assist the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Sounds like neo-fascism to me. Immigrants are the scapegoats, the persecuted and members of the precariat.

Of course, the border along the Rio Grande has been a political hot spot ever since the so-called Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, when the U.S. invaded and occupied Mexico, and Mexico ceded to the US for $15 million a vast territory that now belongs to California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. It was one of the biggest land grabs in modern history. In three words, “Mexico was robbed.”

Now, one wonders how precisely and how exactly Donald Trump will make good on his campaign promise to deport millions of migrants who entered the US illegally. Will there be mass round-ups in the dead of night, concentration-camp-like detention centers with barbed wire and armed guards? Along with military operations that will violate human rights and civil liberties and that will send truck loads of Mexicans and other Latinos across the border to poverty, chaos, drug traffickers, violence, hunger and homelessness.

If one believes that Trump is a fascist that course of action seems inevitable. Or, will Trump make a last minute deal with Mexican authorities and with members of the Republican party and the supporters who elected him because they loved his lies, racist comments and real or manufactured hatred of immigrants.

It’s hard to imagine how Trump will execute his threat. After all, the US is dependent on Latino laborers who work in agriculture and in hotels and restaurants and who usually perform the jobs that whites refuse to do and at or below the minimum wage. A popular 2004 movie titled A Day Without a Mexican, imagined a California with no Mexican laborers. Not surprisingly, the whole economy collapses. Will capitalist America go along with the Garrison State? It might not have a say in the matter, and make no mistake about it we’ll all be impacted. The U.S. will resemble those military dictatorships around the world.

The movie fantasy of a day without a Mexican will likely become a reality. UC Berkeley Professor Stephanie L. Canizales knows that. The daughter of immigrants from El Salvador, as well as the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative and the author of the new book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, Canizales recently interviewed some of the many young people who entered the US without their parents and without legal documents that would prove they have a right to be here.

No sooner do they arrive then those teenage and twenty something migrants quickly fall into the social class at the bottom of the economic ladder where they do not have secure jobs, or secure living situations and who are in danger  every day of arrests, detentions and deportations. The class is known as the precariat and it’s among the most vulnerable demographic in the Garrison State.

Canizales was able to develop trusting relationships with the teens and the twenty something migrants because she grew up in L.A., knew the community and because her parents entered the US illegally, though they never talked about that experience when she was growing up. Perhaps they viewed it as something shameful, something to be hidden. Canizales had a smattering of Spanish when she began her interviews; she became increasingly fluent and learned the words and expressions the migrants used. She originally titled her book, “Without Parents and Without Papers.” She changed it to Sin Padres, Ni Papeles to honor the language that the Latino youth used.

“History tells us that mass round-ups and deportations rarely go well,” she told me. “It’s true that anti-immigrant racism is a powerful force, but can our society really function without undocumented labor? That’s not clear.” Canizales says that migrants who have legal documents now carry them on their persons all the time. Also, some of them attempt to be invisible and to blend into non-Latino communities of color, wear clothes that don’t make them stand out and drive vehicles that reduce their vulnerability.

“To blame Haitians and other immigrant groups for the economic woes Americans are facing is to be greatly misinformed,” she explained. Canizales says that for many of the Latino youth who enter theUS illegally the psychological and emotional burdens weigh on them as heavily as their economic burdens.

If they were French and had read the classics of existentialism they might say they feel alienated. But they’re children of the Catholic Church and Mexico’s labyrinth of social inequalities and injustices. At home they had their families close to them. In Los Angeles they’re sin padres and lonelier and more isolated than they imagined they would be.

“They say that they’re in perdition, a condition in which they inhabit a place of loss and damnation,” Canizales told me. “They feel like they’re drowning.” She added, “they want to undrown themselves, and to learn what they need to learn to survive in the place of perdition they inhabit. Many of them initially blame themselves for their condition. Then, when they meet others in their generation and in the same or in similar situations they’re released from feeling like failures and gain the energy to keep going.”  They heal themselves and their friends.

They’re like the 1930s Dust Bowl refugees in the US who faulted themselves for their precarious situations and who gradually learned that the system was responsible.

Woody Guthrie sang about the members of the precariat in his own day and age in his timeless song “Deportees” recorded first in 1948 : “some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,/ Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;/ Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,/ They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”

Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.

Free Trade’s Legacy of Grief for Families of the Disappeared in Mexico

Shaylih Muehlmann

November 21, 2024
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Cover art for the book Call the Mothers: Searching for Mexico’s Disappeared in the War on Drugs by Shaylih Muehlmann

In Mexico today, thousands of families are searching for loved ones who have disappeared amid the violence associated with “the war on drugs.” Although disappearances in Mexico trace back to the Cold War and the repression of guerrilla movements in the 1960s and 1970s, they have expanded in scale and taken on new dimensions in the neoliberal era. Trade agreements like NAFTA, intended promote economic growth, have inadvertently fueled drug-trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border, contributing to a crisis of violence that disproportionately impacts marginalized communities—those already vulnerable due to poverty and limited political power.

As I conducted research for my new book Call the Mothers, on women searching for their disappeared relatives in Mexico, I was struck by how deeply intertwined free trade policies and the crisis of disappearances have become. Trade agreements like NAFTA and its successor, USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement), created conditions that allowed criminal organizations to thrive—and ordinary people have paid the price.

While NAFTA was designed to open up economic opportunities and strengthen North American trade, it also created new channels that could be exploited by organized crime. By facilitating cross-border commerce and reducing trade barriers, NAFTA provided new routes for drug smuggling, allowing criminal organizations to expand their influence and power. As Mexico faced an increase in drug trafficking and criminal activity, the response from both Mexico and the United States leaned heavily toward militarization, with initiatives like the Mérida Initiative funneling resources into Mexico’s security forces to combat this surge.

Ironically, this militarized approach has only deepened the violence. Under pressure to secure the flow of trade and protect corporate interests, the militarized strategy quickly shifted from targeting drug cartels to influencing many aspects of life in Mexico, especially for the most vulnerable communities. Disappearances—a practice with a long history in Latin America during times of political repression—reemerged and took on new dimensions. Today, victims of disappearances are no longer limited to political activists or dissidents. They include a broad spectrum of individuals, from Indigenous people and migrants to professionals and human rights defenders. And the perpetrators include both organized crime and security forces.

Indigenous and rural communities, in particular, have suffered the impacts of this convergence between violence and free-trade policies, as neoliberal reforms made their lands and resources lucrative targets for exploitation by corporate interests and criminal enterprises alike. Amidst this violence and impunity, the line between state and non-state actors often blurs, as corruption and collusion between authorities and drug-trafficking organizations become pervasive. In this climate, disappearances have become tragically commonplace, with entire communities left vulnerable to both exploitation and violence.

As we mark the 30th anniversary of NAFTA, it’s important to ask: “What does free trade cost?” For the families of the disappeared in Mexico, the price has been incalculable—a legacy of violence, profound grief, and enduring impunity. In Call the Mothers, the stories of those navigating this devastating reality reveal how free trade’s promises have left too many families searching for justice and resolution.

This post was originally published on the University of California Press blog and is reprinted here with permission.

 COLD WAR 2.0

PRC Espionage: Are Chinese Americans Their Top Recruitment Targets?

by Patrick Eddington 

Posted onNovember  21, 2024

On November 1, 2018 then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the launch of the “China Initiative” – a whole-of-government effort ostensibly designed to thwart espionage and technology theft by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chinese American groups and activists immediately denounced the program as racially biased and its investigations improperly predicated, and in 2021 two studies provided them with ample proof that their allegations were correct.

The first was a study showing how rare it was for Chinese Americans to actually engage in espionage on behalf of the PRC. The second study chronicled the extremely high number of “China Initiative” cases that resulted in acquittals or dismissed cases. In late February 2022, the Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen announced the Department was ending the program, with Olsen telling a George Mason University crowd that he had “concluded that this initiative was not the right approach” to combatting PRC espionage and technology theft.

Three months later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued a report that dealt in part with the question of whether or not PRC intelligence organizations prioritized the recruitment of Chinese Americans for spying or tech theft. That report, which was mandated by Congress, made a categorical statement about PRC intelligence asset targeting and recruitment strategy:

“It is the IC’s assessment that while the PRC promotes the false narrative that individuals of Chinese descent owe some allegiance to the PRC, neither race nor ethnicity is the primary criterion utilized by the PRC’s intelligence services in their recruitment of intelligence assets.”

But is this true? A recent trove of documents released to the Cato Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request leaves the question of whether the PRC targets Chinese Americans as potential agents.

In the world of the American Intelligence Community (IC), the phrase “IC assessment” generally has a very specific meaning: that the conclusions offered in a given IC report were those of the 17 agencies that make up the IC and that the assessment was based on the evaluation of multiple sources of information, including information provided by human sources and “technical intelligence” (usually electronic communications, satellite imagery, or other technological means).

In fact, in April 2020, the Cato Institute filed a FOIA request with the ODNI seeking, among other things, “Any finish[ed] intelligence products regarding Chinese government intellectual property (IP) or technology theft efforts targeting American individuals, businesses or other organizations, including American universities and colleges.”

Thirteen months later, the ODNI responded by revealing that “…a record responsive to your request was located…” but the ODNI needed to be withheld for security reasons. Yet the ODNI cited a specific FOIA exemption (known as Exemption 5) that is often used to withhold information that may be embarrassing to the agency or department in question.

You can then imagine my surprise when I read the May 2022 ODNI report referenced above. Accordingly, in June 2022, I filed a new FOIA seeking the alleged IC assessment on PRC intelligence allegedly not prioritizing Chinese Americans for recruitment as spies.

Over two years later, the ODNI finally responded to the request, providing a series of emails that revealed the IC assessment cited in the May 2022 ODNI report did not, in fact, exist.

It was, according to the emails released to Cato, a conclusion reached through “an iterative process.” But there was no actual hard intelligence – human or technical – to back it up.

Interestingly, the ODNI email release originally sent to Cato was completely unredacted – their FOIA office had sent the unredacted versions by mistake. Two weeks later, they sent the redacted versions and asked that “…if you plan to disseminate the documents further, you consider using the attached versions.”

Cato has elected to partially honor that request by redacting the names, phone numbers, email addresses, and office/building identifiers on the original, unredacted versions the ODNI sent to us.

However, we are leaving unredacted the full text of the original emails and also posting the redacted versions so you can see for yourself how the ODNI FOIA office has attempted to withhold , via Exemption 5, information that confirms that the May 2022 ODNI report with the IC assessment claiming that PRC intelligence agents do not systematically target Chinese Americans for espionage recruitment does not in fact exist.

So, does that mean that Chinese Communist agents do, in fact, make a special effort to target Chinese Americans as spies or to help facilitate theft of critical, proprietary American technologies?

We don’t know.

What we do know is that in May 2021, the ODNI withheld from Cato on “national security” grounds an actual document dealing with that very question, then a year later published a Congressionally mandated report citing a nonexistent IC assessment claiming that the PRC does not put Chinese Americans at the top of their list of preferred spy candidates.

No matter how you look at it, this is not a “good news” story–not just for the ODNI, but for Chinese Americans working inside or outside of government who perhaps thought that the ODNI’s May 2022 report would finally take the “might-be-a-spy” target off their backs. And with Donald Trump’s return to the presidency on January 20, 2025, I would not be surprised if we see a return of the infamous prior Trump era Justice Department “China Initiative” racially-based “counterintelligence” program.

There’s no question that the Armed Services and Intelligence committees in the House and Senate that directed the production of the ODNI report discussed in this piece should hold public hearings on this issue. And the House and Senate Judiciary committees should investigate the misuse of FOIA exemptions to withhold from public release things federal agencies and departments don’t want you and I to know. It’s a flagrant subversion of the FOIA statute that needs to be punished and ended.

Former CIA analyst and ex-House senior policy advisor Patrick G. Eddington is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

ANTIWAR.COM

 

In 1649…

by Colin Todhunter / November 21st, 2024

This is an extract from the author’s new book Power Play: The Future of Food.

In the annals of agrarian history, one particular movement has left a profound impact on the collective imagination of food sovereignty advocates. The Diggers in 17th century England were led by the visionary Gerrard Winstanley. This radical group emerged during a period of intense social and political upheaval, offering a revolutionary perspective on land ownership and food production that continues to resonate with modern struggles for (food) justice.

The Diggers, also known as the True Levellers, arose in 1649, a time when England was reeling from the aftermath of civil war. Winstanley and his followers dared to imagine a different world. The group challenged the very foundations of the emerging capitalist system and the enclosure movement that was rapidly privatising previously common lands. But Winstanley’s vision was not merely theoretical.

On 1 April 1649, the Diggers began their most famous action, occupying St. George’s Hill in Surrey, where they established a commune, cultivating the land collectively and distributing food freely to all who needed it. This act of direct action was a powerful demonstration of their philosophy in practice.

As Winstanley declared:

“The earth was made to be a common treasury for all, not a private treasury for some.”

The Diggers, true to their name, began their movement by literally digging up unused common lands and planting crops. According to Professor Justin Champion, they planted “peas and carrots and pulses” and let their cows graze on the fields.

While the Diggers saw their actions as relatively harmless (Champion compares it to having an allotment), local property owners viewed it as a serious threat, likening it to “village terrorism”, according to Champion.

The local landowners called in troops to suppress these actions. Despite their relatively small numbers and short-lived experiments, which spread across parts of England, Champion suggests that the Diggers posed a significant ideological threat to the existing social order, challenging notions of private property and social hierarchy.

Winstanley declared:

“Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft”.

He added:

The Work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges-Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows. And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation.

The backlash from local landlords was systematic. The Diggers faced beatings and arson, forcing them to move from St George’s Hill to a second site in Cobham, until they were finally driven off the land entirely.

Writing in 1972 in his book The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill, a prominent historian of the English Civil War period, suggested that the Diggers’ influence was more widespread than just their most famous colony at St. George’s Hill. He argued that from Nottinghamshire and Northamptonshire to Gloucestershire and Kent, Digger influence spread all over southern and central England.

While the actual number of people involved in Digger experiments was relatively small (estimated at 100-200 people across England) and ended in 1651, their ideas spread more widely through pamphlets and word of mouth.

This widespread influence, as described by Hill, suggests that the Diggers’ ideas resonated with people across a significant portion of England, even if actual Digger colonies were few in number.

The Diggers were a radical, biblically inspired movement that practically implemented their beliefs about common ownership of land, provoking strong opposition from the established landowners despite their generally peaceful methods.

The St. George’s Hill experiment represented a radical alternative to the prevailing economic and social order. It was an early example of what we might today call a food sovereignty project, emphasising local control over food production and distribution.

In today’s era of industrial agriculture and corporate food systems, the Diggers’ ideas remain highly significant. Their resistance to the enclosure of common lands in the 17th century mirrors today’s struggles against corporate land grabs — and the colonising actions that underpin the likes of Bayer’s corporate jargon about the unlocking of ‘business growth’, ‘driving change management’, ‘driving market share’ and ‘creating business value’ — as well as the privatisation of seeds and genetic resources.

The consolidation of the global agri-food chain in the hands of a few powerful corporations represents a modern form of enclosure, concentrating control over food production and distribution in ways that would have been all too familiar to Winstanley and his followers.

The Diggers’ emphasis on local, community-controlled food production offers a stark alternative to the industrial agriculture model promoted by agribusiness giants and their allies in institutions like the World Bank and the WTO. Where the dominant paradigm prioritises large-scale monocultures, global supply chains and market-driven food security, the Diggers’ vision aligns more closely with concepts of food sovereignty and agroecology.

Food sovereignty, a concept developed by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, shares much with the Diggers’ philosophy. Both emphasise the right of communities to define their own food and agriculture systems.

The Diggers’ legacy can be seen in various contemporary movements challenging the corporate food regime. From La Via Campesina’s global struggle for peasant rights to local community garden initiatives and the work of the Agrarian Trust in the US (which provides good insight into the Diggers and their continued relevance in The Diggers Today: Enclosure, Manure and Resistance), we see echoes of the Diggers’ vision.

Modern projects to create community-owned farms, seed banks and food cooperatives can be seen as spiritual descendants of the Diggers’ movement, aiming to reclaim food production from corporate control and put it back in the hands of communities.

However, realising the Diggers’ vision in the current context faces significant obstacles.

The influence of agribusiness conglomerates over key institutions and policymaking bodies presents a formidable challenge. From the World Bank to national agriculture ministries, corporate interests often shape policies that prioritise industrial agriculture and global markets over local food systems. International trade agreements and memoranda of understanding, often negotiated with minimal public scrutiny, frequently benefit large agribusiness at the expense of small farmers and local food sovereignty.

Moreover, proponents of industrial agriculture often argue that it is the only way to feed the world. This narrative, however, ignores the environmental and social costs of this model, as well as the proven productivity of small-scale, agroecological farming methods.

The Diggers didn’t just theorise about an alternative society; they attempted to build it by taking direct action, occupying land and implementing their vision of communal agriculture.

The Diggers also understood that changing the food system required challenging broader power structures. Today’s food sovereignty movements similarly recognise the need for systemic change, addressing issues of land rights, trade policies and economic justice alongside agricultural practices.

In this era of corporate-dominated agriculture, the Diggers’ vision of a “common treasury for all” remains as radical and necessary as ever.

By reclaiming the commons, promoting agroecological practices and building food sovereignty, ordinary people can work towards a world where food is truly a common treasury for all.

The Diggers recognised that true freedom and equality could not be achieved without addressing the fundamental question of who controls the land and the means of production. This understanding is crucial in the current context, where corporate control over the food system extends from land, seeds and inputs to distribution and retail.

This vision also challenges us to rethink our relationship with the land and with each other. In a world increasingly dominated by individualism and market relations, the emphasis on communal ownership and collective labour offers a radical alternative.

The Diggers’ legacy challenges us to think beyond the confines of the prevailing food regime, to envision and create a world where food and land are not commodities to be bought and sold but common resources to be shared and stewarded for the benefit of all.

Their vision of a world where “the earth becomes a common treasury again” is not a quaint historical curiosity, but a vital and necessary alternative to the destructive practices of those who dominate the current food system.

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Colin Todhunter is an independent writer. Power Play: The Future of Food is the third book in a series of open-access ebooks on the global food system by the author (Global Research, 2024). Read it on Global Research (or here). Read other articles by Colin.

 

This Is How It Begins: The Deep State Wants to Terminate the Constitution

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / November 20th, 2024

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary.

—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

This is how it begins.

This is how it always begins, justified in the name of national security.

Mass roundups. Raids. Indefinite detentions in concentration camps. Martial law. The erosion of habeas corpus protections. The suspension of the Constitution, at least for select segments of the population. A hierarchy of rights, contingent on whether you belong to a favored political class.

This is what you can expect in the not-so-distant future.

Once you allow the government to overreach the restraints imposed  by the Constitution, no matter what that threat might be, it will be that much harder to restrain it again, no matter which party is at the helm.

We’ve seen this played out time and again.

Some years ago, for instance, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and deploy the National Guard “to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”[1]

In other words, they wanted the government to use the military to round up and lock up the unvaccinated in concentration camps.

That didn’t happen, but it so easily could have.

Now the script has been flipped, and it’s the soon-to-be Trump Administration promising to use the military to round up and lock up undesirables in concentration camps.

At this moment in time, those so-called “undesirables” are illegal immigrants, but given what we know about the government and its expansive definition of what constitutes a threat to its power, any one of us could be next up in the police state’s crosshairs.

Once you give the government a taste of that kind of power—to disregard the Constitution, even for a day; to use the military for domestic policing; to rely on mass deportations and concentration camps in order to sidestep due process procedures—it won’t be so easy to rein it in when it runs amok.

And it will run amok.

You don’t have to be an illegal immigrant or a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to be worried about what lies ahead. You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is why significant numbers of people are worried: because this is the slippery slope that starts with supposedly well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate.

We’ve already allowed the government to significantly undermine our constitutional republic.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be seduced by the false siren song of politicians promising safety in exchange for relinquished freedom. We placed our trust in political saviors and failed to ask questions to hold our representatives accountable to abiding by the Constitution. We looked the other way and made excuses while the government amassed an amazing amount of power over us, and backed up that power-grab with a terrifying amount of military might and weaponry, and got the courts to sanction their actions every step of the way. We chose to let partisan politics divide us and turn us into easy targets for the government’s oppression.

Consider for yourself.

We are in the grip of martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.

We are in the government’s crosshairs. The U.S. government continues to act as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence. Consequently, we 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.” With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by the government’s standing army of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later.

We are no longer safe in our homes. This present menace comes from the government’s army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized SWAT teams who are waging war on the last stronghold left to us as a free people: the sanctity of our homes.

We have no real freedom of speech. We are moving fast down a slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American who criticizes the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

We have no real privacy. We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

We are losing our right to bodily privacy and integrity. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws and forced breath-alcohol tests to forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials. The groundwork being laid is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.

We no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.

 We have no due process. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

We are no longer presumed innocent. The burden of proof has been reversed. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so. The government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database. Having already used surveillance technology to render the entire American populace potential suspects, DNA technology in the hands of government coupled with artificial intelligence will complete our transition to a suspect society in which we are all merely waiting to be matched up with a crime.

We have lost the right to be anonymous and move about freely.  At every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. Likewise, digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.

We no longer have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

We have no guardians of justice. The courts were established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the courts have become the guardians of the American police state in which we now live. As a result, sound judgment and justice have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests.

We have been saddled with a dictator for life. Secret, unchecked presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—now enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

We are one crisis or state of emergency away from having the Constitution terminated.

Mind you, the powers-that-be want the Constitution terminated.

They want us to be censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down.

They want our speech and activities monitored for any sign of “extremist” activity.

They want us to be estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us. They want taxation without representation. They want a government without the consent of the governed.

Connect the dots.

This was never about politics, populist movements, or making America great again.

This is what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by 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.

It’s what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

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 slippery slope begins in just this way, with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

The danger signs are everywhere.

ENDNOTE:

[1] Jenni Fink, “Utah Newspaper Pushes for National Guard to Block Unvaccinated From Socializing,” Newsweek (Jan. 17, 2022).
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John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.