Freedom Under Fire | The Rutherford Institute

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

“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.

In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public. With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds. Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the...

For anyone to advocate terminating or suspending the Constitution is tantamount to a declaration of war against the founding principles of our representative government and the rule of law. Then again, the Constitution has been on life support for years.

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.

There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when the very act of thinking for ourselves is not just outlawed but unthinkable. Where this leads is the stuff of dystopian nightmares: societies that value conformity and group-think over individuality; a populace so adept at self-censorship and compliance that they are capable only of obeying the government’s dictates without the ability to pa...

The future of this nation is being forged beyond the reach of our laws, elections and borders by techno-authoritarian powers with no regard for individuality, privacy or freedom.