OPINION:
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.
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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.”
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.
We’ve already allowed the government to undermine our constitutional republic significantly.
Consider for yourself.
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.
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.
We have no real privacy. We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies, and techno-warriors.
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 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 we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism.
We have no guardians of justice. 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.
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.
In other words, we are one crisis or state of emergency away from having the Constitution terminated.
The danger signs are everywhere.
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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books “The Erik Blair Diaries” and “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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