Freedom Under Fire | The Rutherford Institute

You think you’ve got rights? Think again. All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to dis...

The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one. Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later? What would Jesus’ life have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?

Santa’s got a new helper. No longer does the all-knowing, all-seeing, jolly Old St. Nick need to rely on antiquated elves on shelves and other seasonal snitches in order to know when you’re sleeping or awake, and if you’ve been naughty or nice. Thanks to the government’s almost limitless powers made possible by a domestic army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms, Santa can get real-...

How do present-day legal debates over bodily autonomy, privacy, vaccine mandates, the death penalty and abortion play into future discussions about singularity, artificial intelligence, cloning, and the privacy rights of the individual in the face of increasingly invasive, intrusive and unavoidable government technologies? Caught up in the heated debate over the legality of abortion, we’ve failed...

This has long since ceased to be a debate over how best to protect the populace at large against an unknown pandemic. Rather, it has become a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the right of individual sovereignty over one’s life, self and private property.

America is breaking down. This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, racism, classism, fascism, fear-mongering, political correctness, cultural sanitation, virtue signaling, a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing government corruption and brutality, a growing economic divide that has much of the population struggling to get by, and mi...

It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.​ ​This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.​ ​It’s just a matt...

Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete.

While it is easy to be distracted by political theater, distressed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and divided over authoritarian lockdowns and mandates, there are still darker forces afoot that cannot—should not—must not be ignored. Here’s a news flash from constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead: there are sexual predators on America’s police forces. Indeed, when it comes to sex trafficking—the buyi...

We are living in an age of mayhem, madness and monsters. Monsters with human faces walk among us. Many of them work for the U.S. government. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead warns in this week's podcast, what we are dealing with today is an authoritarian beast that has outgrown its chains and will not be restrained.

America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions. The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other. This plague on our nation is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live and the constantly shifting crises that k...

Although the Bill of Rights--the first ten amendments of the Constitution--was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned. Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, post-9/11 and in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs. We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law. I...

A federal COVID-19 vaccination strike force may soon be knocking on your door, especially if you live in a community with low vaccination rates. Will you let them in? More to the point, are you required to open the door?

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state. It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984. Yet what once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who will be forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.

For good or bad, COVID-19 has changed the way we navigate the world. It is also redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up. We have entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations. This powerful international cabal, the Global Deep State, is just as real as the...

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 consequ...

What started out a year ago 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. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead warns in this week's podcast, it remains to be seen whether our free...

Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps. With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week'...

Americans are not safe in their homes. Not anymore, at least. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting home invasions in order to pursue traffic violators, seize lawfully-o...

The government should not be in the business of killing its citizens. Nevertheless, as constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, 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...

It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act. This week's podcast from constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead

While the nation allows itself to be distracted by yet more bread-and-circus politics, the American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the gover...