John Whitehead

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Ignorance Is No Excuse For Wrongdoing, Unless You’re A Cop

“[I]f the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib, if they can ‘seize’ and ‘search’ him in their discretion, we enter a new regime.”—U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, dissenting in Terry v. Ohio (1968)

John Whitehead
By John Whitehead

New Jersey State Police trooper Chris Pastor works with his police dog, Odin, as they search for evidence on a vehicle during a training exercise at the New Jersey Department of Public Works, Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2013. (Photo: Julio Cortez/AP) With Orwellian irony, the U.S. Supreme Court chose December 15, National Bill of Rights Day to deliver

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We Are The Enemy: Is This The Lesson Of Ferguson?

Ferguson matters because it provides us with a foretaste of what is to come. It is the shot across the bow, so to speak, a warning that this is how we will all be treated if we do not tread cautiously in challenging the police state, and it won’t matter whether we’re black or white, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat.

John Whitehead
By John Whitehead
Police officers stand by as buildings are set on fire after the announcement of the grand jury decision, Nov. 24, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo.

If you dress police officers up as soldiers and you put them in military vehicles and you give them military weapons, they adopt a warrior mentality. We fight wars against enemies, and the enemies are the people who live in our cities—particularly in communities of color.—Thomas Nolan, criminology professor and former police officer Should police

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Are ‘We the People’ Useful Idiots In The Digital Age?

In an Orwellian age where war equals peace, surveillance equals safety, and tolerance equals intolerance of uncomfortable truths and politically incorrect ideas, “we the people” have gotten very good at walking freely into the slaughterhouse.

John Whitehead
By John Whitehead

Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was “useful idiots” and it applied to a good many people who should have known better. I now propose a new, analogous term more

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Hollow Justice And Courts Of Order In An Age Of Government-Sanctioned Tyranny

“The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people.”—Justice William O. Douglas

John Whitehead
By John Whitehead
courts

Justice in America makes less sense with each passing day. A Michigan couple that has been raising chickens in their backyard as a source of healthy food for their family could get up to 90 days in jail for violating a local ban on backyard hens. A Kentucky prison guard who was charged with 25 counts of sexual abuse against female inmates,

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Should We Just Follow Orders? Rules of Engagement for Resisting the Police State

“Let your motto be resistance! resistance! Resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance.”—Abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet

John Whitehead
By John Whitehead

The perils of resisting the police state grow more costly with each passing day, especially if you hope to escape with your life and property intact. The thing you must remember is that we’ve entered an age of militarized police in which we’re no longer viewed as civilians but as enemy combatants. Take, for example, Mary Elizabeth VandenBerg who

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An Unbearable And Choking Hell: The Loss Of Our Freedom In The Wake Of 9/11

“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”—Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN.

John Whitehead
By John Whitehead
9/11

What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state. What began with the

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Resistance Is Futile: The Violent Cost Of Challenging The American Police State

If you don’t want to get probed, poked, pinched, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, arrested, shot, or killed, don’t say, do or even suggest anything that even hints of noncompliance.

John Whitehead
By John Whitehead
Police Militarization Congress

Police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.”—Kristian Williams, activist and author If

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