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On The Front Lines

John W. Whitehead to Speak to Senior Statesmen of Virginia on the Emerging American Police State and What 2014 Holds in Store for Our Freedoms

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — On Wednesday, January 8, 2014, constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead will appear before the Senior Statesmen of Virginia (SSV), an educational organization which enables seniors to identify and articulate their viewpoints on issues affecting all Virginians, to discuss the many ways in which our freedoms have been purposefully eroded over the past few years, and what the future of freedom might look like if we do not reverse these trends. Based upon material found in his new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (SelectBooks, 2013), Whitehead will illustrate a chilling portrait of a nation in the final stages of transformation into a police state, complete with surveillance cameras, drug-sniffing dogs, SWAT team raids, roadside strip searches, blood draws at DUI checkpoints, mosquito drones, tasers, privatized prisons, GPS tracking devices, zero tolerance policies, overcriminalization, and free speech zones. Whitehead’s book reveals the inner workings of an increasingly pervasive surveillance state, including the NSA’s program to track the communications of all Americans and map the daily activities of all people in the United States. Copies of Whitehead’s book will be available for purchase in advance at Barnes and Noble. A book signing will follow the event, which is free and open to the public. It will take place at the Senior Center at 1180 Pepsi Place in Charlottesville, VA.

A Government of Wolves has been hailed by those on the left and right of the political spectrum and at every point in between, for its masterful chronicling of America’s shift away from the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, which historically shielded us from government abuses. Drawing on his vast knowledge of history, culture, and law, Whitehead compellingly argues that fiction has now become fact. Indeed, with sci fi movies such as Minority Report, 1984, The Matrix, They Live, and V for Vendetta pointing the way, America has become that futuristic society of celluloid fantasies in which a passive, uninformed populace gives rise to an overbearing, out-of-control government. This is the future George Orwell warned against. This is the present that Whitehead cautions could become an endless nightmare from which there is no awakening unless we act now. As American historian and nationally syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff notes in his special introduction to A Government of Wolves: “We have been through some troubling times before in our nation’s history. There were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 . . . the Red Raids in the early 1920s . . . the Japanese internment camps of World War Two . . . What we have now may be more insidious. Indeed, I believe we are in a worse state now than ever before in this country. With the surveillance state closing in on us, we are fighting to keep our country free from our own government.”

John Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written, debated, and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law. A prominent leader in the national dialogue on civil liberties and human rights and a formidable champion of the Constitution, Whitehead’s concern for the persecuted and oppressed led him in 1982 to establish The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the defense of civil liberties and human rights. As nationally syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff observed about Whitehead: “John Whitehead is not only one of the nation’s most consistent and persistent civil libertarians. He is also a remarkably perceptive illustrator of our popular culture, its insights and dangers.”

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