On The Front Lines
NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ Weekend Edition Spotlights Constitutional Attorney John W. Whitehead, Author of ‘A Government of Wolves’
WASHINGTON, DC —National Public Radio’s All Things Considered weekend edition will feature constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead discussing his work as president and founder of The Rutherford Institute, his new book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (SelectBooks, 2013), and the overall state of freedom and civil liberties in America. Check your local listings for times this weekend.
A Government of Wolves is now available for purchase online at Amazon.com.
NPR’s feature on Whitehead coincides with the release of A Government of Wolves, which paints 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. It is being hailed by those at all points along the political spectrum for its masterful chronicling of America’s shift away from the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution. 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.”
