“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)

“GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.”—President Donald Trump (September 2026)

Days before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, President Trump flooded his Truth Social account with AI-generated fantasies of himself commanding armies of giant, red-eyed robots.

In one, Trump strides through a darkened Washington surrounded by robotic soldiers beneath the words, “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.” Another declares, “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.” A third depicts Trump seated on a mechanical throne, surrounded by an army of robots and the presidential seal, beneath the warning: “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.”

Twenty-five years after 9/11, one has to ask: has the nightmare ever really ended?

For a quarter-century, Americans have been governed by fear: fear of terrorists and foreign enemies, fear of domestic extremists and political opponents, fear of the next attack, the next crisis, the next emergency.

That fear has given us endless war, mass surveillance, militarized police, secret courts, indefinite detention, government watchlists, domestic military deployments and an imperial presidency armed with powers that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.

Now the man entrusted with the imperial powers of the modern-day presidency is publicly imagining himself enthroned over robotic armies, raining destruction on his enemies and promising nightmares.

The imagery may be unhinged from reality, but the powers of the presidency are not.

Neither are the questions raised by Trump’s increasingly unhinged public behavior about whether any president—especially one armed with the accumulated powers of the post-9/11 national-security state—is mentally and temperamentally fit to wield them.

That is where America’s two great anniversaries of 2026 collide.

On July 4, America celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, born from a revolt against King George III and a system in which too much power rested in the hands of one ruler. At its heart was the radical proposition that government derives its just powers from the consent of the people.

On September 11, we mark 25 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, shattered the nation’s sense of security, and set in motion a massive expansion of presidential, military and national-security power.

America began by rebelling against a king.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we have created a presidency with increasingly king-like powers.

And now we must confront an uncomfortable question the Founders understood all too well: what happens when immense power is placed in the hands of someone whose fitness to wield it is itself in question?

To understand how we arrived at this dangerous moment, we have to go back to the moment when fear gave the government permission to begin dismantling the restraints on its power.

That trail leads inevitably back to 9/11.

A quarter-century later, serious questions and suspicions persist about what government officials knew before the attacks, what warnings were ignored, whether more could have been done to prevent them, and whether the American people have ever been given the full story of 9/11.

Those questions deserve scrutiny, but they should not obscure what we know happened next.

Whatever the truth about what the government knew before 9/11, there can be little dispute about what the government did afterward. It used the attacks and the fear they generated to radically expand its powers over the American people.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the “war on terror” has become a war without end, the emergency has become permanent, the surveillance state has become omnipresent, the police have become militarized, and the presidency has accumulated powers that would have horrified the revolutionaries of 1776.

This is the bitter irony of America at 250.

We declared our independence from a government that subjected its people to standing armies, arbitrary searches, taxation without meaningful representation and the dictates of a ruler who considered himself above the law.

Yet over the course of the past 25 years, in the name of national security, we have resurrected many of those same evils and wrapped them in the American flag.

What did 25 years of surrendering liberty in exchange for security actually buy us?

Not peace. Not security. Not fiscal stability. Not a less intrusive government.

Instead, we got the Patriot Act and mass surveillance; secret courts and government watchlists; indefinite detention and torture; militarized police; endless wars and trillions in debt; and a presidency increasingly untethered from Congress, the courts and constitutional restraint.

And still the government insists it needs more power to keep us safe.

That is the trap.

Twenty-five years later, the emergency never ended—it became the government.

The USA Patriot Act, rushed through Congress just 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights. It dramatically expanded the government’s powers, weakened safeguards against government overreach, and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance of the American people.

What was sold to us as a temporary response to terrorism became the foundation for something much larger.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer.

Every president since has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 national-security state. Every president has found new ways to use it. And almost none of the powers claimed in the name of emergency have ever been willingly surrendered.

George W. Bush gave us the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, torture, indefinite detention and preemptive war. Barack Obama expanded the drone wars, normalized targeted killings and presided over an increasingly sophisticated surveillance apparatus. Successive administrations embraced secret watchlists, warrantless data collection and sweeping executive authority.

Donald Trump did not create this machinery.

He inherited it.

What makes this moment so dangerous is his willingness to use that machinery aggressively, openly and with little patience for the constitutional restraints that are supposed to prevent presidents from becoming kings.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the return to preemptive war.

Not content to wage war against Afghanistan after 9/11, the United States invaded Iraq under a preemptive war doctrine that embraced striking threats before they were fully formed.

The consequences were catastrophic: lives lost, trillions squandered, regions destabilized, terrorist movements radicalized, and the constitutional power to decide when the nation goes to war steadily transferred from Congress to the president.

Twenty-five years after 9/11 plunged the United States into a cycle of preemptive war, blowback and permanent emergency, President Trump has launched another preemptive war against Iran without a declaration of war by Congress.

The circle is complete.

9/11 gave us the War on Terror. The War on Terror gave us permanent emergency. Permanent emergency gave us the imperial presidency. And the imperial presidency has given us another war.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: preemptive strikes do not make us safer. They create more enemies, more instability and more blowback.

War has become the permanent business of the American empire.

The military-industrial complex profits. Defense contractors prosper. Politicians posture. Presidents accumulate power.

The American people get the bill.

The post-9/11 wars have cost trillions, killed or displaced millions, and scarred generations of servicemen and women. Every new conflict creates the justification for still more military spending, secrecy, emergency powers and government control.

War abroad has a way of coming home.

After 9/11, the government embraced torture in the name of national security. Abu Ghraib demonstrated what happens when human beings are reduced to enemy combatants and government agents are told the normal rules no longer apply.

That battlefield mindset did not remain overseas.

Local police departments acquired armored vehicles, military weapons, tactical gear and battlefield training. SWAT teams became routine instruments of law enforcement. Military surveillance tools became tools for monitoring ordinary Americans.

Today, ICE increasingly operates like a domestic paramilitary force, carrying out raids, detentions and enforcement operations under a cloak of secrecy and impunity while being equipped with ever more aggressive technologies, from robot dogs to electric shock weapons.

National Guard troops are being normalized as a domestic law-enforcement presence, further eroding the barrier between military and civilian government that laws such as the Posse Comitatus Act were intended to preserve.

The language changed, too.

Citizens became “suspects.” Communities became “threat environments.” Protesters became potential extremists. The homeland became a battlefield.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: the tactics and weapons of war, once deployed abroad, will eventually be used against the citizenry at home.

This is precisely what the Founders feared. James Madison warned that “the means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

We ignored him.

The result is a country in which the dividing line between soldier and police officer, battlefield and neighborhood, foreign enemy and domestic suspect has become dangerously blurred.

The same vicious cycle has played out with surveillance.

The Patriot Act normalized mass surveillance. Technology has since made the machinery exponentially more powerful.

Today, government agencies no longer need someone following you in an unmarked car to create detailed records of where Americans travel, whom they visit and how they live. Your phone tells them. Your car tells them. FLOCK license plate readers tell them. Facial recognition cameras tell them. Your purchases, internet searches, social-media activity, location history and digital communications fill in the rest.

Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not eliminate terrorism. It will create a watched, tracked and increasingly submissive society.

Yet the deeper problem is that we stopped insisting that government obey the same laws it imposes on us. Once “national security” became an acceptable excuse for warrantless surveillance, torture, indefinite detention, secret courts and undeclared wars, the exception began swallowing the rule.

Congress surrendered authority. Presidents seized it. Courts deferred. The public became accustomed to government officials acting first and answering questions later.

Now we see the consequences everywhere.

The Supreme Court increasingly arrives too late to stop executive abuses before the damage is done, if it intervenes at all. The president bulldozes through legal and constitutional restraints, creates a crisis or a spectacle, and leaves Congress, the courts and the American people to deal with the wreckage.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: if we stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it will respect will be the ones it can use against us.

This failure transcends political parties.

Republicans cheered executive power under Republican presidents. Democrats cheered it under Democratic presidents. Then both sides expressed shock when those powers were turned against them.

Powers do not remain partisan.

Surveillance powers created to catch terrorists are used against Americans. Emergency powers become tools of ordinary government. Military powers migrate into domestic policing. Executive powers tolerated under one president become precedents for the next.

And once government acquires a weapon, it rarely gives it back.

Trump is merely the latest president to demonstrate the danger of giving any one person such enormous power. He has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 state and shown how readily it can be turned to the purposes of an increasingly imperial presidency.

We are not merely repeating the mistakes of the past 25 years. We have institutionalized them.

A national-security apparatus powerful enough to track a terrorist can track a political opponent. A president empowered to wage war without Congress can invoke “national security” to bypass constitutional limits at home. A military normalized on American streets can be turned against Americans.

The police state does not care which party controls it.

And therein lies the madness of giving any president such enormous power.

The Founders did not assume that every president would be wise, rational, restrained or benevolent. They divided power precisely because human beings cannot be trusted with too much of it.

A free people cannot make their liberties dependent upon the judgment, temperament or sanity of a single ruler.

Yet for 25 years, under presidents of both parties, we have systematically weakened those restraints while strengthening the presidency.

Now the reckoning has arrived.

Trump’s fitness to exercise the immense powers of his office cannot be separated from the larger question of why any president should possess so much unilateral power in the first place.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: the more power we give the presidency, the more dangerous the presidency becomes when the person occupying it proves unwilling—or unable—to exercise that power with restraint.

That brings us back to the nightmare.

Fear has always been the fuel of the police state.

Keep people frightened enough, divided enough and distrustful enough of one another, and they will beg the government to protect them—even when the price of that protection is their freedom.

That bargain has defined post-9/11 America.

Benjamin Franklin famously warned against trading essential liberty for temporary safety.

We made the trade anyway.

The government seized our freedoms, but the assurance of safety never materialized. Instead, the emergencies multiplied: Terrorism. War. Pandemic. Immigration. Crime. Civil unrest. Political extremism.

Each crisis becomes another justification for government power. Each new power establishes another precedent. Each precedent becomes another weapon waiting for the next president to wield it.

That is what makes the convergence of these two anniversaries so important.

The Declaration of Independence was an indictment of a despot who obstructed the laws, manipulated institutions, maintained standing armies among the people, placed military power above civilian authority and repeatedly violated the rights of those he governed.

Two hundred and fifty years later, those grievances sound uncomfortably familiar.

The uniforms have changed. The technology has changed. The vocabulary has changed. The greed for money and power have not.

Nor have the duties of the citizenry to oppose such tyranny.

If constitutional government is to survive, Congress must reclaim the powers it has surrendered. The courts must stop treating “national security” as a magic phrase capable of making constitutional violations disappear. The machinery of mass surveillance must be dismantled. Domestic militarization must be rolled back. Emergency powers must be temporary, narrow and subject to meaningful oversight.

And the American people must stop allowing fear to dictate the boundaries of their freedom.

Twenty-five years ago, Osama bin Laden predicted that the American government would lead its own people into “an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

Bin Laden did not defeat America. He did not destroy the Constitution.

We are doing that ourselves.

Every time we accept another surveillance program because we’re afraid, the Fourth Amendment dies a little more. Every time we tolerate another war because we’re told it will make us safe, constitutional restraints on war-making die a little more. Every time Congress surrenders power and the courts defer to “national security,” the rule of law dies a little more. Every time we allow the government to turn another American community into a battlefield, the barrier between military force and civilian government dies a little more.

Every time we shrug and tell ourselves that the latest encroachment on liberty is temporary, necessary or would only be used against someone else, the Constitution dies a little more.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how freedom dies in a country that still calls itself free.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the question is no longer whether terrorism poses the greatest threat to our freedoms. The question is whether the American Police State itself has become the greater threat.

America has spent 250 years proclaiming its freedom and the past 25 years building the machinery with which to extinguish it.

Two anniversaries. One reckoning.

America must decide what it intends to be: a republic governed by the rule of law or an empire governed by permanent war, permanent surveillance and permanent emergency.

We cannot be both.

The choice we make will determine nothing less than the survival of the American experiment in freedom.

WC: 2650

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

For years, we have been warning that the U.S. Supreme Court would not save us from the American police state.

That warning has not grown less urgent. It has simply become more complicated.

The danger today is not merely that courts will favor order and procedure over freedom. It is that by the time justice makes an appearance, it will arrive so narrowly, so procedurally and so late that the government will already have prevailed.

Consider the fight over President Trump’s massive $400 million White House ballroom.

Lower courts found serious reason to doubt Trump’s claim to unilateral authority to tear down the historic East Wing and proceed with the project without congressional approval, and they ordered above-ground construction halted.

Those orders were stayed while the administration appealed.

Construction continued.

Then the administration argued that the project had progressed so far that stopping it had become impractical.

On August 31, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, allowed the construction to continue—not because it determined that Trump had acted legally, but because the majority concluded that the preservationists challenging the project likely lacked legal standing to sue.

The Supreme Court expressly declined to decide whether the project itself was lawful.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joining the Court’s three liberal justices in dissent, warned that allowing the project to proceed was “no victory for the separation of powers.”

Therein lies the problem with justice in the age of the American police state: by the time the courts finally decide whether government officials have overstepped their constitutional authority, the deed may already be done, the right already violated and the damage already inflicted.

The building is already gone. The troops are already deployed. The surveillance system is already operating. The people are already detained. The agency is already dismantled. The data is already collected. The war is already underway.

And whatever constitutional principle eventually emerges from the litigation arrives too late to undo the damage.

At what point will “We the People” be told that we, too, lack standing to object to the destruction of our republic?

The Founders built safeguards into the constitutional system to guard against any one branch of government becoming all-powerful: If the president overreaches, Congress is supposed to stop him. If Congress fails to do its duty, the courts are supposed to intervene. If a lower court gets it wrong, the Supreme Court will set things right.

That is how the system is supposed to work.

But constitutional rights are only as meaningful as the remedies available when government violates them, and increasingly those remedies come with strings attached: You must have standing. Your case must not be moot. You must prove that you were personally and directly harmed. You must sue the right government official in the right court at the right time. You must survive questions of jurisdiction, immunity, procedure and remedy before anyone ever reaches the underlying question of whether the government had the constitutional authority to act in the first place.

Lawyers understand these distinctions.

People whose rights are being violated experience these distinctions differently. To them, it can feel like having the courthouse doors shut in their faces.

This is not to say that standing, jurisdiction and other limits on judicial power are meaningless technicalities. They are part of a constitutional system intended to keep courts from becoming roving commissions empowered to settle every political disagreement.

The judiciary is not supposed to govern the country.

Neither is the president.

That is the whole point of dividing government power among three separate, coequal branches.

Our constitutional system depends upon each branch restraining the others.

Yet when Congress refuses to assert its authority, the Executive Branch overreaches and the courts intervene only after increasingly difficult procedural hurdles have been cleared, the balance of power begins to collapse.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

The White House ballroom is not an isolated dispute. It is a particularly visible example of government by fait accompli.

This has become Trump’s go-to method for sidestepping the rule of law: delay, deflect, deny, and run out the clock until he can claim it’s too late to put things back the way they were.

Governments have relied on this tactic for years, but Trump has turned it into a governing philosophy: Act. Escalate. Delay. Appeal. Keep going. And force everyone else to catch up.

The result is a constitutional system increasingly incapable of preventing government misconduct before the harm occurs.

That distinction matters.

A court ruling issued years after the fact may establish an important principle. It may vindicate someone whose rights were violated. It may even prevent the government from repeating exactly the same conduct in exactly the same way.

But it cannot always undo the harms the government has already inflicted.

You cannot un-deport someone after the government has wrongly removed them from the country. You cannot un-search a home. You cannot un-collect a person’s DNA. You cannot make a surveillance database forget where someone traveled. You cannot restore privacy once the government has mapped a person’s movements.

You cannot restore months someone wrongly spent behind bars. You cannot restore a destroyed building. You cannot give back the life of someone killed by government agents.

You cannot un-launch a war.

In such cases, justice delayed is not merely justice denied. Justice delayed can become justice rendered irrelevant.

This is the problem when courts that were established to serve as Courts of Justice too often function like Courts of Order—more concerned with preserving government authority and institutional stability than with safeguarding the rights of the people.

This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court.

When presented with difficult constitutional questions, the Court too often ducks, remains silent or speaks to the narrowest possible concern. It refuses cases whose underlying constitutional questions desperately need answers. It invokes doctrines of standing, immunity, jurisdiction and procedure that can prevent injured Americans from ever receiving a ruling on the merits of what government did to them.

Too often, the benefit of the doubt goes to the government and the powers of the police state, but the danger has evolved. It now extends far beyond police searches, excessive force and qualified immunity.

We have entered an age in which the government can act far faster than the constitutional mechanisms designed to restrain it.

Recent Supreme Court cases illustrate how complicated—and dangerous—this problem has become.

Consider President Trump’s sweeping tariff schemes.

Trump imposed massive tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, claiming that an emergency statute enacted by Congress decades earlier gave the president authority to effectively rewrite American trade policy.

Businesses paid the tariffs. Consumers absorbed higher costs. Supply chains shifted. Investment decisions were made. Foreign governments retaliated. And while the legal challenges worked their way through the courts, the tariffs remained in effect.

The administration itself warned the Supreme Court that delay could result in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs being collected and international economic arrangements becoming increasingly difficult to unwind.

Eventually, in February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that the president did not have the authority he claimed to impose tariffs under that particular statute.

That was an important victory for the separation of powers, but consider what had already happened by the time the Court drew the constitutional line: The money had been collected. The prices had changed. The businesses had adapted. The trade relationships had shifted.

And what was Trump’s response? He responded by turning to different statutory authority in an effort to impose similar punitive tariffs.

When you’re dealing with entities with no regard for the rule of law, an arrogant belief that the laws do not apply to them, and a determination to find other routes to accomplish substantially the same thing, the damage cannot simply be erased by a judicial opinion.

Immigration enforcement presents the same problem in even starker terms.

Under the Trump administration, immigrants have repeatedly found themselves detained, transferred and deported while courts were still trying to determine what process the Constitution required.

While litigation over Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act made its way through the courts, dozens of detainees were flown out of the United States and sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador before they had received meaningful opportunities to challenge the government’s claims against them.

Other immigrants were subjected to a policy allowing the government to deport them rapidly to third countries—not necessarily their countries of origin—with little notice and no meaningful opportunity to explain why they might face persecution, torture or death there.

Eventually, in some cases, justice has prevailed, but due process that arrives after deportation is not much process at all.

You cannot meaningfully exercise the right to be heard after the government has already put you on a plane. You cannot easily restore a person to their family, community, job or legal position after they have been expelled from the country. And you cannot pretend that a later judicial declaration fully repairs the harm.

This is government by fait accompli in its most brutal form: Act first. Force the individual to fight for review. Appeal every adverse ruling. Keep the machinery moving. And rely on the fact that by the time the courts finally determine what the Constitution requires, the government may already have accomplished what it set out to do.

Even victories for constitutional limits can therefore arrive with an asterisk.

This is tyranny by technicality.

The Court may eventually say the president exceeded his authority.  It may eventually recognize that a search implicates the Fourth Amendment.  It may eventually insist that immigrants receive due process. But the tariff may already have been paid. The data may already have been collected. The immigrant may already have been deported. The institution may already have been dismantled.

The injury comes first. The remedy comes later. Sometimes much later.

Consider the Court’s ruling this summer in Chatrie v. United States, involving the government's use of a geofence warrant to obtain location information about every cellphone found within a particular area surrounding a crime scene.

The Court rightly recognized that accessing this vast trove of location information constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. That was an important victory for privacy, but even there, the Court stopped short of finally determining whether the government's search was constitutional, sending the case back for further proceedings.

Meanwhile, the search happened seven years ago. The data was collected. The defendant was identified, prosecuted and convicted. The constitutional answer came later. Much later.

This is the pattern.

Surveillance outruns the Fourth Amendment. Immigration enforcement outruns due process. Military deployments outrun congressional oversight. Executive orders outrun legislation. Presidential action outruns judicial review.

By the time the constitutional system catches up, the government has often already changed the facts on the ground.

Yet what good are rights when the courts intervene only after the damage has been done?

And what good is Congress when its members abandon their constitutional duty to check the Executive Branch and instead vote along party lines to rubberstamp whatever their side chooses to do?

The courts were never intended to be the first and only line of defense against an overreaching president.

Congress is supposed to act before the damage is done. It controls the purse. It writes the laws. It conducts oversight. It can compel testimony, investigate abuses, restrict appropriations and refuse to give the executive branch powers it has no business possessing.

Yet increasingly, members of Congress behave as though their constitutional responsibility begins and ends with supporting or opposing whichever party controls the White House.

That is abdication of the worst kind.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly responded to questions about controversial actions by the Trump administration by pleading ignorance, insisting he does not know enough to comment, has not looked into the matter, has not been following it, or regards it as outside his area of responsibility.

That kind of excuse should be unacceptable from any member of Congress, regardless of party.

“I don’t know.” “I haven’t looked into it.” “That’s not my area.” Those may be acceptable answers from an ordinary citizen. They are not acceptable answers from the people elected to Congress to safeguard the constitutional balance of power.

Members of Congress do not get to declare government abuse outside their “wheelhouse.”

Their wheelhouse is the Constitution. Their job is oversight.

Their responsibility is to “We the People.”

If members of Congress cannot be bothered to know how government power is being used, to investigate credible abuses, to challenge unconstitutional actions or to defend the rights of the people they represent, then they are not doing the job they were elected to do.

If they cannot be bothered to fulfill that responsibility, voters should find representatives who will.

While Congress looks away and the courts deliberate, the machinery of the police state keeps expanding.

Automated license plate readers such as those operated by Flock Safety have proliferated across the country, creating vast networks capable of documenting where millions of Americans travel.

For years, these systems were sold as efficient tools for fighting crime.

Only now, after the infrastructure has become widespread, are politicians and communities across the political spectrum beginning to ask harder questions about who can access the information, how broadly it can be shared, how long it can be stored and how easily a system built for one purpose can be used for another.

The backlash is welcome, but it is also late.

The cameras are already there. The databases already exist. The information has already been collected. Once surveillance becomes normalized, promises of restraint are poor substitutes for enforceable constitutional limits.

The same is true of immigration enforcement.

ICE raids intensify. Detention centers expand. Federal agents operate with increasingly militarized equipment and tactics. Case in point: ICE is buying thousands of electric-shock gloves capable of delivering painful electrical pulses and moving to acquire robot dogs equipped with cameras and sensors for enforcement operations.

Each new weapon, technology and detention facility increases the government's capacity to act before meaningful oversight ever occurs.

None of this happens in a constitutional vacuum.

Congress funds it. Congress authorizes it. Congress can investigate it, restrain it, condition the money and demand accountability.

Too often, Congress does none of those things.

The same congressional unwillingness to act has allowed Trump to treat the National Guard as a presidential domestic police force, deploying troops into American cities amid protests, immigration operations and claims of public disorder.

No matter the reason, the precedent should alarm anyone who understands why the Founders feared standing armies and concentrated executive power.

A president should not be able to normalize military deployments against civilian populations simply because Congress prefers not to pick a fight with the White House.

Yet again, the government acts first. Congress watches. The courts deliberate. The precedent takes hold.

Government power has a way of outliving the emergency, administration or political coalition that first demanded it.

Today’s crime-fighting database becomes tomorrow’s immigration-enforcement tool. Today’s immigration-enforcement tool becomes tomorrow’s political surveillance system. Today’s Republican police-state power becomes tomorrow’s Democratic police-state power, and back again.

The names change. The machinery remains.

This is not merely a Trump problem.

That point cannot be emphasized strongly enough.

Donald Trump is exploiting weaknesses in the constitutional system with an aggressiveness few presidents have matched, but every president has benefited from powers accumulated by his predecessors.

George W. Bush expanded the surveillance state and the war presidency in the aftermath of 9/11. Barack Obama inherited those powers and enlarged many of them. Donald Trump inherited them. Joe Biden inherited them. Trump inherited them again.

This is how presidential power grows: amassed by each administration and passed on to the next. Very little of it disappears when administrations change.

This is why partisan celebrations of executive power are so shortsighted. Give your president the authority to bypass Congress, surveil Americans, invoke emergency powers, deploy military forces, punish political enemies or govern by unilateral decree and you have also given that authority to the president you fear most.

The Constitution does not contain a partisan exception—neither should the courts.

Then again, the Supreme Court was never intended to serve as the sole guardian of liberty. Nor could nine justices possibly carry that burden.

A free society cannot outsource the defense of freedom to judges. Neither should Americans deceive themselves into believing that the judiciary will rescue the republic for them.

The Framers divided governmental power precisely because liberty was supposed to depend upon competing institutions checking one another, elected officials respecting constitutional limits, juries resisting injustice, states asserting their sovereignty and citizens refusing to tolerate government abuses.

When all of those safeguards fail, there is very little nine people in black robes can do to save a republic that has already surrendered its constitutional instincts.

That does not excuse the courts.

Far from it.

Judges have an obligation to enforce the Constitution even when doing so inconveniences the government. Especially then.

The Supreme Court should be skeptical whenever government invokes national security, emergency, law and order or administrative convenience as excuses for sidestepping constitutional limits. It should provide meaningful remedies when government violates fundamental rights.

It should not permit constitutional protections to become hollow promises that disappear behind doctrines of immunity, standing and procedure. But neither should Americans deceive themselves into believing that salvation will arrive by judicial decree.

Separation of powers is one of the primary mechanisms by which the Constitution protects ordinary people from arbitrary government. Congress controls spending and legislation. The president executes the laws. The courts decide actual cases and controversies.

Each branch is supposed to keep the others within constitutional bounds. When Congress becomes an appendage of the president rather than a check on him, executive power grows. When courts decline to decide whether that power is lawful until the damage is irreversible, executive power grows again.

Eventually, the exception becomes the precedent. The emergency becomes normal. The temporary measure becomes permanent. The surveillance network becomes infrastructure. The military deployment becomes routine. The executive shortcut becomes another tool in the presidential arsenal.

And “We the People” discover that having rights in theory is very different from possessing the means to defend them in practice.

The Constitution is filled with prohibitions against government. Government shall not abridge freedom of speech. Government shall not conduct unreasonable searches and seizures. Government shall not deprive people of life, liberty or property without due process of law.

Those protections matter only if someone is willing and able to enforce them.

Otherwise, they are words on paper.

This is why we must stop looking to Washington for saviors.

Neither the president, nor Congress, nor the Supreme Court will preserve liberty unless the American people insist upon it.

That means challenging government abuses before they become permanent. It means opposing unconstitutional power even when it is exercised by politicians we support. It means refusing to allow emergency powers to become ordinary powers. It means demanding that Congress act as a separate branch of government rather than a presidential cheering section. And it means insisting that courts provide meaningful constitutional remedies while there is still something left to remedy.

Above all, it means remembering that constitutional government depends upon a citizenry unwilling to surrender its freedoms for promises of security, efficiency, prosperity or political advantage.

The courts cannot restore a constitutional republic after every other safeguard has been dismantled. They cannot undo every government action after the damage has been done. They cannot give back every freedom surrendered in the name of an emergency.

And they cannot protect a people who have forgotten that the Constitution was never intended to be self-enforcing.

The Supreme Court will not save us.

So perhaps the question raised by the White House ballroom is not merely who has legal standing to challenge a president.

The more fundamental question is this: who has standing to save the republic? We do.

And as we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if “We the People” refuse to exercise that standing, no matter who sits in the Oval Office or controls Congress—if we fail to use every opportunity to challenge government overreach in order to save the republic—no court in the land will be able to save us from what comes next.

WC: 3433

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.“—Theodore Roosevelt

What began publicly as Donald Trump’s lavish, taxpayer-funded vision of a gilded White House ballroom is now being justified by the administration—in and out of court—as a matter of national security.

To President Trump, it seems, a ballroom by any other name is a bunker.

And what a bunker it is.

Court documents indicate the massive subterranean military complex being constructed five stories beneath the White House grounds will include bomb shelters, a hospital, “top secret military structures and equipment, military-grade venting, a single integrated air conditioning and heating system, sniper nests and a drone port on top.”

Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff, has explicitly invoked “continuity-of-government interests“ in defending the ballroom/bunker project, arguing that the reinforced underground military installation is necessary to ensure uninterrupted presidential command during an attack or global crisis.

The White House, however, already has a bunker built for precisely this purpose.

According to former officials, a nuclear-hardened facility buried more than 60 feet underground was secretly completed during the Obama administration. It can reportedly shelter dozens of officials for weeks and provide the president and senior officials with a secure command center during an extreme national-security crisis.

Which raises an obvious question: if the White House already has a nuclear-hardened Continuity of Government bunker, why does it need another one?

What threat justifies a new five-story military complex beneath the People’s House—one large enough to include bomb shelters, a hospital, military infrastructure, sniper positions and drone facilities? And if this is really about national security, why has so much of the project been wrapped around a ballroom that the administration initially presented as something quite different?

It is telling that they are building it at breakneck speed.

According to court filings, hundreds of workers have been laboring around the clock, 20 hours a day, seven days a week, to push the project forward as quickly as possible.

The message seems clear: get far enough along, fast enough, and it becomes that much harder for Congress, the courts or some future administration to undo what has already been built.

There is a lesson in that, and it speaks to much more than a ballroom or a bunker.

That is how the architecture of authoritarian government becomes permanent: Build the surveillance system. Build the detention centers. Expand the raids. Normalize executive rule by decree. Weaken the courts. Sideline Congress. Militarize the machinery of enforcement. Then hand it all to the next administration.

The faces change. The powers remain.

So much of what Trump is using today was inherited from presidents before him. So much of what he is building now will remain available to presidents after him.

That is the deeper problem with the Bunker State.

It is not merely about where government officials go when disaster strikes.

It is about the mindset of a government that increasingly treats preservation of its own power as the highest form of national security.

There is a grim irony in watching Washington spend enormous sums fortifying itself against catastrophe while government itself lurches from crisis to crisis and foreign conflict to economic disruption. Again and again, the pattern is the same: create or exploit the crisis, invoke extraordinary powers to manage it, insulate those in power from the consequences, and leave the public to absorb the cost.

That is the bunker mentality in practice.

And Continuity of Government gives it a blueprint to follow.

Continuity of Government planning, or COG, was devised during the Cold War to ensure that the federal government could survive a Soviet nuclear attack. If Washington were destroyed, surviving officials would disperse to secure locations, maintain command and eventually reconstitute constitutional government.

The goal, at least in theory, was survival long enough to restore constitutional order.

But 9/11 changed the equation.

Nearly twenty-five years later, we are still living with the consequences.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did more than kill nearly 3,000 people. They gave Washington the crisis it needed to dramatically expand emergency powers, surveillance and the national-security state.

COG was part of that transformation.

What had been designed for doomsday became part of everyday government. The bunkers at Raven Rock and Mount Weather were part of the plan to keep Washington functioning even if Washington itself could no longer function.

The government has spent billions making certain that it can survive almost anything. But survival of the government is not the same as preservation of the republic.

Presidents, agencies, military commands, intelligence operations and critical records can all be relocated so that the machinery of government can keep functioning underground.

But what about the Constitution?

That is the question all of this elaborate government survival planning never answers satisfactorily. Who guarantees that Congress remains meaningful, the courts independent, elections intact, emergency powers temporary and the rights of the people protected?

Those questions matter because COG is no longer merely about bunkers.

It is part of a much larger emergency state—a government that has learned to govern through crisis, fear and claims of necessity.

After 9/11 came the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, secret courts, watchlists, military detention and a vastly expanded national-security state. COVID showed how quickly emergency orders could intrude on movement, assembly, commerce and ordinary constitutional processes in the name of public safety.

Wars have expanded executive power. Border emergencies have expanded executive power. Civil unrest has expanded executive power. Public-health emergencies have expanded executive power.

The emergencies change. The response does not: government claims extraordinary powers, and the extraordinary gradually becomes ordinary.

This is the real danger of a government accustomed to governing by emergency: the trigger does not have to be Armageddon. It can be terrorism, a cyberattack, a pandemic, civil disorder or some broadly defined threat to national security. It merely has to be a crisis serious enough for those in power to declare that ordinary rules can no longer apply.

The most dangerous words in government are often some variation of: this is an emergency.

That is when temporary measures become precedents, precedents become policies, and policies become permanent powers.

This is how the police state grows—incrementally, across administrations and parties.

Every president inherits the emergency powers, secret directives, surveillance machinery, militarized forces and weaponry assembled by his predecessors. Every president adds something to the arsenal. And every president leaves the next occupant of the White House more powerful than the one before.

Trump inherited Obama’s powers. Obama inherited Bush’s. Bush inherited those accumulated before him. And whoever follows Trump will inherit everything Trump leaves behind.

That is the lesson of the modern police state: presidents are temporary. The powers they leave behind are not.

Trump did not invent the Bunker State. He inherited it—and he is expanding it while further erasing the lines between presidential power, personal power and the national interest.

The government beneath Trump was built over decades, with the complicity of presidents, Congresses and courts that repeatedly allowed extraordinary powers to become permanent.

And behind it all sits another government—a shadow government—that elections rarely disturb.

More than a decade ago, we warned that America effectively had two shadow governments: Continuity of Government, the emergency government waiting in the wings for catastrophe, and the Deep State, the permanent government that carries on regardless of who occupies the White House.

Today, it’s hard to tell them apart.

One operates in the background. The other waits for the so-called emergency. But both run on the same machinery.

The Deep State supplies the permanent personnel and institutions. The surveillance state supplies the intelligence. The militarized police state supplies the enforcement. The presidency supplies the command authority. Continuity of Government supplies the emergency architecture. And the bunker supplies the headquarters.

Under ordinary circumstances, these systems may appear to operate separately.

Under emergency conditions, they can become one.

That is how the permanent state becomes the emergency state. And that is when Continuity of Government becomes Continuity of Tyranny.

The issue is not whether government officials have somewhere safe to go during an attack. The issue is what kind of government emerges afterwards.

A constitutional republic depends on divided power, public accountability and limits that cannot disappear whenever a president invokes emergency.

A bunker government is built on a very different logic. Command must continue. Government must survive. Constitutional restraints become negotiable.

That is the bunker mindset.

And increasingly, we do not need an actual bunker to see it at work.

We see it whenever presidents bypass Congress in the name of necessity, whenever surveillance expands in the name of security, and whenever courts are treated as obstacles rather than constitutional checks.

The bunker mentality begins long before anyone goes underground. It begins the moment government decides its own power matters more than constitutional restraint.

That is why the central question is not simply whether the federal government will survive the next catastrophe.

It almost certainly will.

The government has spent decades and untold billions making certain of that.

The more important question is whether constitutional government survives with it.

Will Congress retain meaningful authority? Will the courts continue functioning independently? Will elections remain meaningful? Will habeas corpus remain intact?

Or will the next emergency merely provide the justification for suspending restraints that have already been weakened in practice?

These are not questions for some distant doomsday.

They are questions for right now.

A government that already possesses mass surveillance, militarized police, detention powers, biometric tracking, drones and facial recognition does not need to invent the machinery of authoritarian control during an emergency.

It already has it.

All an emergency does is change the rules governing how freely that machinery can be used.

That is why the government’s obsession with Continuity of Government should concern anyone who cares about continuity of constitutional government.

A bunker can preserve a president—it cannot preserve a republic. A military command center can ensure continuity of power—it cannot ensure continuity of liberty.

Stanley Kubrick depicted the grotesque logic behind government survival in Dr. Strangelove more than 60 years ago.

As political and military leaders push the world toward nuclear annihilation, Dr. Strangelove proposes retreating into a government bunker, where officials, military leaders and other carefully selected survivors can wait out the radioactive fallout and eventually emerge to rebuild civilization in their own image. The people being saved, naturally, include many of the same people who helped create the catastrophe.

Kubrick’s black comedy bears an unnerving resemblance to current events.

The unsettling question is the same: when catastrophe comes, will the government preserve constitutional government—or merely preserve itself?

A constitutional government is defined by the limits placed on those who govern.

Serious government requires presidents who respect the limits of office, a Congress that exercises its authority, courts willing to restrain power, military force subordinate to constitutional authority, and citizens who understand that liberty depends on keeping power restrained.

The Founders understood this better than most.

They did not design the Constitution on the assumption that those who govern would always be wise, honorable or restrained. They assumed the opposite. They understood that power attracts ambition, that ambition seeks more power, and that government must therefore be divided, checked and bound down by law.

Thomas Jefferson put it bluntly: “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Those chains are already being weakened.

Presidents declare emergencies. Presidents wage wars without meaningful congressional restraint. Presidents deploy military forces. Presidents conduct surveillance. Presidents issue decrees carrying the force of law. Presidents inherit extraordinary powers from their predecessors and add still more for whoever comes next.

Meanwhile, as we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the unelected machinery of government carries on.

This is what happens when a constitutional republic adopts a bunker mindset: government survival becomes the priority, and constitutional survival becomes an afterthought.

That is backwards.

The government exists to preserve liberty. Liberty does not exist to preserve the government.

If constitutional government cannot survive above ground, in ordinary times, when the courts are open, Congress is sitting and elections are still being held, there is little reason to believe it will somehow be resurrected underground in the wake of a national catastrophe.

What deserves continuity is not merely the federal bureaucracy.

What deserves continuity is the Constitution. The separation of powers. The rule of law. Representative government. Due process. Habeas corpus. The rights of the people.

That is what must survive.

And if we cannot preserve those things now—before the sirens sound, before the government retreats underground, before some president invokes the next great emergency—then no bunker, however deep, however secure and however lavishly equipped, will save the republic.

Because the Constitution cannot survive in a bunker underground if we have already allowed it to die above ground.

WC: 2171

The First Amendment protects more than spoken or written words. Signs, flags, crosses, banners, artwork, holiday displays and other symbols can communicate religious, political, philosophical and cultural ideas—and when private citizens display them on their own property, that expression generally receives strong constitutional protection.

Yet property owners, businesses, churches and community organizations routinely encounter government restrictions on what they may display. Some disputes arise from legitimate concerns involving structural safety, traffic visibility, lighting, height or placement. Local governments may address those concerns through reasonable, content-neutral rules. What government may not do is use zoning ordinances, sign codes, permitting requirements or administrative discretion to favor approved messages while suppressing religious, political or controversial viewpoints.

For more than four decades, The Rutherford Institute has defended individuals and organizations across the ideological and religious spectrum whose expressive rights have been threatened by government regulation. Institute attorneys have intervened when a Virginia church faced criminal prosecution over pro-life signs while favored banners were permitted; when Florida business owners were ordered to remove a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag while government flags remained allowed; and when local officials attempted to prevent an interfaith spiritual organization from establishing a retreat center on private land.

Although the messages and beliefs in these cases differed, the constitutional principle remained the same: government generally may not decide which ideas are worthy of public display. It may not permit favored flags while banning political ones, allow secular or commercial banners while burdening religious messages, or suppress lawful expression merely because officials or members of the public find it offensive or disagreeable. At the same time, constitutional rights do not exempt property owners from legitimate building codes and safety requirements. A city may require permits, engineering plans or inspections for substantial structures and may enforce neutral rules concerning structural stability, setbacks, lighting, maintenance and traffic visibility. The critical question is whether those requirements are genuinely related to safety and land use, applied equally regardless of the message, and no more burdensome than necessary.

To help citizens, property owners and public officials navigate these questions, The Rutherford Institute has issued a new Constitutional Q&A, “The Right to Display First Amendment Messages on Private Property.” The Q&A addresses the constitutional protections afforded signs, flags, religious symbols, artwork and other expressive displays; the limits of local sign and zoning regulations; content and viewpoint discrimination; permit and indemnification requirements; religious land-use protections; and practical steps property owners and government officials can take to resolve disputes without unnecessary fines, censorship or litigation.

Whether a message is communicated through a cross, a flag, a banner or a work of art, the principle remains the same: public safety and individual liberty should not be treated as mutually exclusive, and government does not get to decide which lawful beliefs are worthy of being seen.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

This feature looks at why the Founders understood the jury as a safeguard against tyranny, why twelve jurors matter, and how the erosion of jury rights fits into a broader pattern of diminishing constitutional protections.

POWER AND THE CONSTITUTION: June 2026 

The Jury Box Is Shrinking—and So Are Your Constitutional Protections: Minor v. Florida

Most Americans assume that if they are ever charged with a serious crime, they will be judged by a jury of twelve fellow citizens. That is how the right to trial by jury has been understood for most of American history.

But that protection has been shrinking, like so many of the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Minor v. Florida—a case challenging Florida’s practice of allowing criminal defendants to be tried by juries of only six people instead of twelve—may sound like a technical detail. It is not.

The jury system was designed to stand between the individual and the immense power of the government. More jurors mean broader community representation, longer deliberations, greater scrutiny of the evidence, and stronger protection against wrongful convictions.

Smaller juries do the opposite.

At a time when Americans are facing expanding surveillance powers, militarized policing, politicized prosecutions, and growing government authority at every level, constitutional safeguards should be strengthened—not weakened.

The Sixth Amendment exists because the Founders understood a dangerous truth: governments are not always trustworthy when power goes unchecked.

The jury box was meant to be one of the last lines of defense.

The Case: Six Jurors Instead of Twelve

In Minor v. Florida, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal challenging Florida’s use of six-person juries in serious criminal cases. As a result, the Court left intact a state system in which defendants facing criminal charges can be tried by juries of only six people instead of the traditional twelve-member jury long understood to be required by the Sixth Amendment.

The Rutherford Institute and the ACLU urged the Supreme Court to hear the case, arguing in an amicus brief that the Founders understood the word “jury” to mean twelve members when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified—and that allowing states to reduce that number undermines both the integrity of the justice system and the constitutional rights of the accused.

“At a time when prosecutors already hold enormous power over the lives and liberties of ordinary Americans, shrinking juries means fewer voices, less deliberation, and fewer safeguards against malicious prosecutions and government abuse,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The Constitution was designed to restrain the government—not make wrongful convictions easier.”

Florida is one of the few states that still allows smaller criminal juries. As Justice Neil Gorsuch has observed, “only 6 states…tolerate smaller panels [than twelve jurors]—and it is difficult to reconcile their outlying practices with the Constitution.”

What the Sixth Amendment Was Meant to Protect

The Sixth Amendment guarantees that “[i]n all criminal prosecutions,” the accused shall enjoy the right to trial by jury.

The question in Minor was whether that constitutional guarantee can be satisfied by six jurors—or whether the word “jury,” as understood at the Founding, meant what it had long meant under English and American common law: twelve members.

The historical record, as set out in the amicus brief, is clear.

“The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right to trial by jury,” the brief explains. “That guarantee carries with it the Founding-era understanding that the jury—‘the great bulwark of [our] civil and political liberties’—must have twelve members to convict the criminally accused.”

Under English common law, a jury was a body of twelve. A group smaller or larger than twelve could not deliver a valid verdict. That same understanding carried over into American law when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified. As the brief notes, early American courts and legal authorities repeatedly understood the constitutional term “jury” to carry its common-law meaning: twelve members.

This was not a minor procedural preference. It was part of the constitutional architecture of liberty.

As the brief points out, the Supreme Court itself has repeatedly recognized this historical understanding. In Ramos v. Louisiana, the Court reaffirmed that a defendant has a constitutional right to demand that his liberty not be taken except by the “unanimous verdict of a jury of twelve persons.” More recently, in Erlinger v. United States, the Court again recognized that a criminal defendant must be convicted by the “unanimous suffrage of twelve of his equals and neighbours.”

Yet for decades, defendants in a small minority of states have been denied that full protection when their liberty is at stake. The Rutherford Institute and the ACLU warned that this practice “never would have passed muster at our nation’s Founding.”

Why Twelve Jurors Matter

The number matters because juries are not merely bodies that deliver verdicts. They are constitutional checks on government power.

A twelve-member jury is more likely to represent the community, include diverse viewpoints, resist groupthink, and force the government to meet its burden before taking away a person’s liberty.

A smaller jury narrows that protection.

As Justice Gorsuch has warned in a prior dissent addressing this same issue, “a mountain of evidence suggests that, both at the time of the Amendment’s adoption and for most of our Nation’s history, the right to a trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant a trial before 12 members of the community—nothing less.”

The concern is not merely historical.

Empirical research cited in the case indicates that smaller juries are less likely to reflect diverse viewpoints, more likely to overlook dissenting opinions, and more likely to favor the prosecution. By contrast, twelve-member juries deliberate longer, recall evidence more accurately, and provide stronger safeguards against wrongful convictions and government overreach.

In other words, reducing juries makes it easier for the government to convict.

That should concern every American, especially now.

The Jury as a Barrier Against Tyranny

At common law and at the Founding, the jury right was understood as a guard against tyranny and a guarantor of liberty. John Adams described representative government and trial by jury as “the heart and lungs” of liberty, and Joseph Story described the jury as a “great bulwark” of civil and political liberties.

More than a century ago, G. K. Chesterton made much the same point in his essay “The Twelve Men,” reflecting on his own experience as a juror. Chesterton understood the jury not as an inconvenience to professional justice but as one of its safeguards. Questions of guilt and innocence, he argued, are too important to be left solely to trained experts; they require the judgment of ordinary people who bring conscience, common sense, and human sympathy into the courtroom.

That is the point too often lost in modern criminal justice debates.

The jury exists because the government cannot be trusted to police itself. It exists because prosecutors, judges, police, and politicians should not have unchecked power over the life and liberty of the individual. It exists because, before the state can imprison a person, it must answer not merely to officials in power but to the people themselves.

A jury of twelve does more than weigh evidence. It forces the government to persuade a cross-section of the community. It gives dissenting voices more room to be heard. It creates a stronger barrier against corruption, bias, political pressure, wrongful prosecution, and abuse.

As the amicus brief explains, “the greater number provides greater opportunities for dissenters to put the government to its proof.”

That is not a technicality.

That is the constitutional design.

Constitutional Rights Are Rarely Lost All at Once

The danger in cases like Minor is that they can be made to sound small: Six jurors instead of twelve. A procedural adjustment. A matter of efficiency. A question for the states.

But constitutional rights are rarely destroyed overnight. More often, they are chipped away piece by piece, exception by exception, shortcut by shortcut, until the protection that once existed becomes little more than a formality.

Today it may be smaller juries.

Tomorrow it could be weaker due process protections, broader surveillance powers, expanded police authority, more aggressive prosecutions, or fewer barriers standing between ordinary citizens and the machinery of the state.

That same concern runs through other cases in which courts remove key questions from the people and place them in the hands of judges.

In Green v. Tanner—another case the Supreme Court refused to hear—the issue was not the size of the jury but whether a jury should decide the reasonableness of a police officer’s conduct in mistakenly shooting an innocent person, rather than having a judge decide the issue as a matter of law and dismiss the lawsuit against the officer without a trial.

The constitutional concern is similar: when juries are sidelined, the public loses one of its most important means of holding government officials accountable.

That is why the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Minor v. Florida matters.

It leaves unresolved a serious constitutional question about whether states may continue to dilute one of the oldest and most important protections in the Bill of Rights. It also allows the government to keep benefiting from a criminal justice system that already gives prosecutors enormous leverage over the accused.

At a time when public distrust in the fairness of the criminal justice system is growing, weakening the jury system only deepens the danger.

The Last Line of Defense

The Founders did not give us the jury trial as a symbolic ritual. They gave it to us as a safeguard against tyranny. They understood that liberty depends on barriers—barriers between the individual and the state, between accusation and punishment, between government power and personal freedom.

The jury box was meant to be one of those barriers.

When that barrier shrinks, government power grows.

This case was never just about the number six versus twelve. It was about whether constitutional safeguards meant to restrain government power will continue to be treated as essential protections—or inconvenient obstacles.

The Rutherford Institute joined with the ACLU in urging the Supreme Court to hear Minor v. Florida because the erosion of constitutional rights cannot be ignored simply because it happens gradually.

From warrantless surveillance and militarized policing to free speech crackdowns and the erosion of due process, The Rutherford Institute continues fighting to preserve the constitutional barriers standing between the individual and the state.

Because once those barriers fall, all that remains is government power—and whatever rights the government decides to leave intact.

____

The Rutherford Institute remains committed to defending constitutional limits, preserving due process, and ensuring that no government agency or administration—regardless of political affiliation—operates above the law.

____

Power and the Constitution is The Rutherford Institute’s ongoing series examining how the actions of government—no matter who holds office—measure up against the limits set by the U.S. Constitution.

May 14, 2026 • Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Sixth Amendment Challenge to Stop Erosion of the Right to Trial by Jury

See how TRI fought back.

The Rutherford Institute’s 2025 Annual Report documents a year in which constitutional freedoms faced some of the greatest assaults in modern American history. In 2025, the federal government expanded executive power, deployed the National Guard into civilian communities, intensified surveillance partnerships with Big Tech, targeted political dissent, and advanced policies that erode due process, privacy, and free expression.

Against this backdrop, TRI remained steadfast in its mission: to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

This report chronicles TRI’s major litigation, advocacy efforts, investigations, and public education initiatives—from challenging speech-based detentions and predictive policing to exposing thought-crime policies, financial deplatforming, religious discrimination, and government coverups.

Read the full report to see how TRI is defending liberty in an age of unchecked power.

2025 Annual Report: Protecting Liberty in a Year of Unchecked Government Power

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether President Trump exceeded his constitutional authority by unilaterally imposing tariffs under broad “national security” powers.

While it may sound like an economic dispute, this case strikes at the heart of our constitutional order.

Under the Constitution, only Congress—the branch closest to the people—has the power to impose taxes and tariffs. Yet for decades, presidents from both parties have relied on vague emergency statutes to expand executive control over trade, budgets, and national security with little oversight.

The Framers debated this very issue during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Having just thrown off a monarchy that ruled by decree, they vested the taxing and spending powers firmly in Congress—the branch most accountable to the people. As James Madison later wrote in The Federalist No. 58, “This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.” It was meant to ensure that no president could spend—or tax—the nation into submission without the consent of its citizens’ representatives.

Whether it’s tariffs, surveillance, or the use of military force, every such expansion edges us closer to government by fiat—the very form of rule the Founders warned against.

The question before the Court is bigger than tariffs: it’s whether the limits on presidential power still mean what they say.

Cases: Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (Tariffs), Trump v. V.O.S. Selections

Stay up-to-speed on The Rutherford Institute’s ongoing work to sound the alarm over threats to our freedoms, restore the balance of power, and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution: https://www.rutherford.org/signup

Power and the Constitution is The Rutherford Institute’s ongoing series examining how the actions of government—no matter who holds office—measure up against the limits set by the U.S. Constitution.

The Rutherford Institute is sounding a renewed warning against efforts by the government to amass extensive, sensitive private information about individual citizens and their households through its mandatory American Community Survey (ACS). Rutherford Institute attorneys have also formally lodged concerns over a proposal by the U.S. Census Bureau to expand the already exhaustive, invasive ongoing monthly survey to include questions about each household member’s sex assigned at birth, current gender (including transgender, nonbinary, or others), and sexual orientation.

For individuals alarmed by the U.S. Census Bureau’s efforts to collect and track private information about the citizenry, their home life and personal habits, The Rutherford Institute has made its updated “Constitutional Q&A: American Community Survey” guidelines available at www.rutherford.org. The Institute has also provided a form letter of complaint for lodging objections to the ACS with the Census Bureau.

“In an age when the government has significant technological resources at its disposal to not only carry out warrantless surveillance on American citizens but also to harvest and mine that data for its own dubious purposes, whether it be crime-mapping or profiling based on race or religion, the potential for abuse is grave,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Any attempt by the government to encroach upon the citizenry’s privacy rights or establish a system by which the populace can be targeted, tracked and singled out must be met with extreme caution. The American Community Survey qualifies as a government program whose purpose, while seemingly benign, raises significant constitutional concerns.”

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a highly invasive, ongoing monthly survey issued by the U.S. Census Bureau to collect detailed housing and socioeconomic data from about 3.5 million households each year. The ACS requires recipients to provide the government with extensive and sensitive information about each and every person in their household, including their work schedules, their physical disabilities and limitations, the number of automobiles kept at the residence, and their access to phone-service and the internet. The information collected by the ACS is not anonymous: the survey is to contain the name, age, sex, race, and home address of each person at the residence, along with the phone number of the person who fills out the form. There are so many questions on the ACS that it is estimated the average household will have to take 40 minutes to answer the questions. When people do not respond online or by mail, the Census Bureau repeatedly sends field representatives to their homes at unannounced times to harass and interview them until they answer the survey. People have reported that field representatives remained outside their houses for hours while waiting for them to arrive home or come out, have walked around their homes, and have talked to minor children when parents were away. The questions on the ACS are so invasive that many initially think the survey is a phishing scam to steal their personal information. Institute attorneys warn that the data collected and amassed by the Census Bureau through the ACS would be a goldmine for criminals.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, one has to ask: has the nightmare ever really ended?

For a quarter-century, Americans have been governed by fear: fear of terrorists and foreign enemies, fear of domestic extremists and political opponents, fear of the next attack, the next crisis, the next emergency.

That fear has given us endless war, mass surveillance, militarized police, secret courts, indefinite detention, government watchlists, domestic military deployments and an imperial presidency armed with powers that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.

Now the man entrusted with the imperial powers of the modern-day presidency is publicly imagining himself enthroned over robotic armies, raining destruction on his enemies and promising nightmares.

The imagery may be unhinged from reality, but the powers of the presidency are not.

Neither are the questions raised by Trump’s increasingly unhinged public behavior about whether any president—especially one armed with the accumulated powers of the post-9/11 national-security state—is mentally and temperamentally fit to wield them.

That is where America’s two great anniversaries of 2026 collide.

On July 4, America celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, born from a revolt against King George III and a system in which too much power rested in the hands of one ruler. At its heart was the radical proposition that government derives its just powers from the consent of the people.

On September 11, we mark 25 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, shattered the nation’s sense of security, and set in motion a massive expansion of presidential, military and national-security power.

America began by rebelling against a king.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we have created a presidency with increasingly king-like powers.

And now we must confront an uncomfortable question the Founders understood all too well: what happens when immense power is placed in the hands of someone whose fitness to wield it is itself in question?

To understand how we arrived at this dangerous moment, we have to go back to the moment when fear gave the government permission to begin dismantling the restraints on its power.

That trail leads inevitably back to 9/11.

A quarter-century later, serious questions and suspicions persist about what government officials knew before the attacks, what warnings were ignored, whether more could have been done to prevent them, and whether the American people have ever been given the full story of 9/11.

Those questions deserve scrutiny, but they should not obscure what we know happened next.

Whatever the truth about what the government knew before 9/11, there can be little dispute about what the government did afterward. It used the attacks and the fear they generated to radically expand its powers over the American people.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the “war on terror” has become a war without end, the emergency has become permanent, the surveillance state has become omnipresent, the police have become militarized, and the presidency has accumulated powers that would have horrified the revolutionaries of 1776.

This is the bitter irony of America at 250.

We declared our independence from a government that subjected its people to standing armies, arbitrary searches, taxation without meaningful representation and the dictates of a ruler who considered himself above the law.

Yet over the course of the past 25 years, in the name of national security, we have resurrected many of those same evils and wrapped them in the American flag.

What did 25 years of surrendering liberty in exchange for security actually buy us?

Not peace. Not security. Not fiscal stability. Not a less intrusive government.

Instead, we got the Patriot Act and mass surveillance; secret courts and government watchlists; indefinite detention and torture; militarized police; endless wars and trillions in debt; and a presidency increasingly untethered from Congress, the courts and constitutional restraint.

And still the government insists it needs more power to keep us safe.

That is the trap.

Twenty-five years later, the emergency never ended—it became the government.

Every president since has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 national-security state. Every president has found new ways to use it. And almost none of the powers claimed in the name of emergency have ever been willingly surrendered.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the return to preemptive war.

Twenty-five years after 9/11 plunged the United States into a cycle of preemptive war, blowback and permanent emergency, President Trump has launched another preemptive war against Iran without a declaration of war by Congress.

The circle is complete.

9/11 gave us the War on Terror. The War on Terror gave us permanent emergency. Permanent emergency gave us the imperial presidency. And the imperial presidency has given us another war.

But war abroad has a way of coming home.

The result is a country in which the dividing line between soldier and police officer, battlefield and neighborhood, foreign enemy and domestic suspect has become dangerously blurred.

The same vicious cycle has played out with surveillance.

Once the government acquires a weapon, it rarely gives it back.

Twenty-five years ago, Osama bin Laden predicted that the American government would lead its own people into “an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

Bin Laden did not defeat America. He did not destroy the Constitution.

We are doing that ourselves.

Every time we accept another surveillance program because we’re afraid, the Fourth Amendment dies a little more. Every time we tolerate another war because we’re told it will make us safe, constitutional restraints on war-making die a little more. Every time Congress surrenders power and the courts defer to “national security,” the rule of law dies a little more. Every time we allow the government to turn another American community into a battlefield, the barrier between military force and civilian government dies a little more.

Every time we shrug and tell ourselves that the latest encroachment on liberty is temporary, necessary or would only be used against someone else, the Constitution dies a little more.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how freedom dies in a country that still calls itself free.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the question is no longer whether terrorism poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.

The question is whether the American Police State itself has become the greater threat.

WC: 1053

For years, we have been warning that the U.S. Supreme Court would not save us from the American police state.

That warning has not grown less urgent. It has simply become more complicated.

The danger today is not merely that courts will favor order and procedure over freedom. It is that by the time justice makes an appearance, it will arrive so narrowly, so procedurally and so late that the government will already have prevailed.

Consider the fight over President Trump’s massive $400 million White House ballroom.

Lower courts found serious reason to doubt Trump’s claim to unilateral authority to tear down the historic East Wing and proceed with the project without congressional approval, and they ordered above-ground construction halted.

Those orders were stayed while the administration appealed.

Construction continued.

Then the administration argued that the project had progressed so far that stopping it had become impractical.

On August 31, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, allowed the construction to continue—not because it determined that Trump had acted legally, but because the majority concluded that the preservationists challenging the project likely lacked legal standing to sue.

Therein lies the problem with justice in the age of the American police state: by the time the courts finally decide whether government officials have overstepped their constitutional authority, the deed may already be done, the right already violated and the damage already inflicted. And whatever constitutional principle eventually emerges from the litigation arrives too late to undo the damage.

At what point will “We the People” be told that we, too, lack standing to object to the destruction of our republic?

The Founders built safeguards into the constitutional system to guard against any one branch of government becoming all-powerful: If the president overreaches, Congress is supposed to stop him. If Congress fails to do its duty, the courts are supposed to intervene. If a lower court gets it wrong, the Supreme Court will set things right.

That is how the system is supposed to work.

But constitutional rights are only as meaningful as the remedies available when government violates them, and increasingly those remedies come with strings attached: You must have standing. Your case must not be moot. You must prove that you were personally and directly harmed. You must sue the right government official in the right court at the right time. You must survive questions of jurisdiction, immunity, procedure and remedy before anyone ever reaches the underlying question of whether the government had the constitutional authority to act in the first place.

This is not to say that standing, jurisdiction and other limits on judicial power are meaningless technicalities. But when technicalities are all that stand between us and tyranny, we’re in trouble.

Our constitutional system depends upon three separate, coequal branches of government restraining the others.

Yet when Congress refuses to assert its authority, the Executive Branch overreaches and the courts intervene only after increasingly difficult procedural hurdles have been cleared, the balance of power begins to collapse.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

The White House ballroom is not an isolated dispute. It is a particularly visible example of government by fait accompli.

This has become Trump’s go-to method for sidestepping the rule of law: delay, deflect, deny, and run out the clock until he can claim it’s too late to put things back the way they were.

Governments have relied on this tactic for years, but Trump has turned it into a governing philosophy. The result is a constitutional system increasingly incapable of preventing government misconduct before the harm occurs.

That distinction matters.

A court ruling issued years after the fact may establish an important principle. It may vindicate someone whose rights were violated. It may even prevent the government from repeating exactly the same conduct in exactly the same way.

But it cannot always undo the harms the government has already inflicted.

You cannot un-deport someone after the government has wrongly removed them from the country. You cannot un-search a home. You cannot un-collect a person’s DNA. You cannot make a surveillance database forget where someone traveled. You cannot restore privacy once the government has mapped a person’s movements.

You cannot restore months someone wrongly spent behind bars. You cannot restore a destroyed building. You cannot give back the life of someone killed by government agents.

You cannot un-launch a war.

In such cases, justice delayed is not merely justice denied. Justice delayed can become justice rendered irrelevant.

This is the problem when courts that were established to serve as Courts of Justice too often function like Courts of Order—more concerned with preserving government authority and institutional stability than with safeguarding the rights of the people.

This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court. When presented with difficult constitutional questions, the Court too often ducks, remains silent or speaks to the narrowest possible concern.

Too often, the benefit of the doubt goes to the government and the powers of the police state, but the danger now extends far beyond police searches, excessive force and qualified immunity.

Even victories for constitutional limits arrive with an asterisk.

This is tyranny by technicality.

Yet the courts were never intended to be the first and only line of defense against an overreaching president.

Congress is supposed to act before the damage is done. Unfortunately, members of Congress behave as though their constitutional responsibility begins and ends with supporting or opposing whichever party controls the White House.

That is abdication of the worst kind.

This is why we must stop looking to Washington for saviors.

Neither the president, nor Congress, nor the Supreme Court will preserve liberty unless the American people insist upon it.

That means challenging government abuses before they become permanent. It means opposing unconstitutional power even when it is exercised by politicians we support. It means refusing to allow emergency powers to become ordinary powers. It means demanding that Congress act as a separate branch of government rather than a presidential cheering section. And it means insisting that courts provide meaningful constitutional remedies while there is still something left to remedy.

Above all, as we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it means remembering that constitutional government depends upon a citizenry unwilling to surrender its freedoms for promises of security, efficiency, prosperity or political advantage.

Who has standing to save the republic? We do.

WC: 1090

RICHMOND, Va — In a victory for religious liberty, a federal appeals court has upheld restrictions on ICE raids at certain houses of worship, recognizing that the threat of immigration enforcement can itself burden religious exercise by driving worshippers away and forcing faith communities to alter their religious practices.

The unanimous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends v. DHS affirmed a preliminary injunction requiring the Department of Homeland Security to abide by its previous safeguards when conducting immigration enforcement actions at or near the plaintiffs’ houses of worship. The Fourth Circuit found that the faith communities are likely to succeed on their claim under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The Rutherford Institute, in conjunction with Harvard Law School’s Religious Freedom Clinic, argued that allowing ICE and Border Patrol agents unilateral discretion to conduct raids inside houses of worship threatens First Amendment protections and violates RFRA by chilling the free exercise of religion.

“Churches, synagogues, temples and mosques should be places where individuals can gather to worship without having to fear the menace of the police state,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The government does not have to outlaw a religion or padlock the church doors to undermine religious freedom. Sometimes all it takes is making people afraid to walk through them. When the threat of armed government agents causes people to stay home, churches to lock their doors, and faith communities to change how they worship, the chilling effect is real. This ruling recognizes that religious liberty cannot flourish under a cloud of government intimidation.”

For decades, federal immigration agencies limited enforcement actions at or near houses of worship. That changed during President Trump’s second term when, in January 2025, DHS rescinded those protections and replaced them with a policy largely allowing immigration officers to rely on their discretion in deciding whether to conduct enforcement operations at sensitive locations. In affirming the injunction, the Fourth Circuit pointed to DHS’s own announcement that “[c]riminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” concluding that DHS “has made clear that it intends to target houses of worship in future immigration enforcement actions.” The court further found that the 2025 policy “implicates direct, coercive interactions between government agents and churchgoers.”

The challenge was brought by Quaker, Cooperative Baptist, and Sikh faith communities whose religious practices emphasize communal worship and welcoming others, including immigrants. Evidence showed that the threat of ICE enforcement contributed to declining attendance, fear among worshippers, and changes in religious practice. One Baptist congregation reported a 66 percent drop in attendance at its English-as-a-Second-Language classes, while other congregations reported locking their doors or becoming reluctant to invite immigrants to worship. The district court issued a preliminary injunction requiring DHS to adhere to its prior safeguards at or near the plaintiffs' houses of worship, which the Fourth Circuit has now affirmed.

The Fourth Circuit rejected the government's argument that these harms were too speculative, finding declining attendance to be a “predictable effect” of DHS's policy and concluding that the resulting disruption of communal worship was sufficient to establish a likely substantial burden under RFRA. The injunction applies only to the plaintiffs' houses of worship and requires DHS to abide by its previous safeguards, including generally obtaining prior agency approval for enforcement actions unless exigent circumstances exist.

Joshua C. McDaniel, Parker W. Knight III, Kathryn F. Mahoney, and Steven W. Burnett with Harvard Law School’s Religious Freedom Clinic advanced the arguments in the amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

What began publicly as Donald Trump’s lavish, taxpayer-funded vision of a gilded White House ballroom is now being justified by the administration—in and out of court—as a matter of national security.

To President Trump, it seems, a ballroom by any other name is a bunker.

And what a bunker it is.

Court documents indicate the massive subterranean military complex being constructed five stories beneath the White House grounds will include bomb shelters, a hospital, “top secret military structures and equipment, military-grade venting, a single integrated air conditioning and heating system, sniper nests and a drone port on top.”

Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff, has explicitly invoked “continuity-of-government interests“ in defending the ballroom/bunker project, arguing that the reinforced underground military installation is necessary to ensure uninterrupted presidential command during an attack or global crisis.

It is telling that they are building it at breakneck speed.

The message seems clear: get far enough along, fast enough, and it becomes that much harder for Congress, the courts or some future administration to undo what has already been built.

There is a lesson in that, and it speaks to much more than a ballroom or a bunker.

That is how the architecture of authoritarian government becomes permanent: Build the surveillance system. Build the detention centers. Expand the raids. Normalize executive rule by decree. Weaken the courts. Sideline Congress. Militarize the machinery of enforcement. Then hand it all to the next administration.

The faces change. The powers remain.

So much of what Trump is using today was inherited from presidents before him. So much of what he is building now will remain available to presidents after him.

That is the deeper problem with the Bunker State.

It is not merely about where government officials go when disaster strikes.

It is about the mindset of a government that increasingly treats preservation of its own power as the highest form of national security.

That is the bunker mentality in practice.

And Continuity of Government gives it a blueprint to follow.

Continuity of Government planning, or COG, was devised during the Cold War to ensure that the federal government could survive a Soviet nuclear attack. If Washington were destroyed, surviving officials would disperse to secure locations, maintain command and eventually reconstitute constitutional government.

The goal, at least in theory, was survival long enough to restore constitutional order.

But 9/11 changed the equation.

Nearly twenty-five years later, we are still living with the consequences.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did more than kill nearly 3,000 people. They gave Washington the crisis it needed to dramatically expand emergency powers, surveillance and the national-security state.

COG was part of that transformation.

The government has spent billions making certain that it can survive almost anything. But survival of the government is not the same as preservation of the republic.

Presidents, agencies, military commands, intelligence operations and critical records can all be relocated so that the machinery of government can keep functioning underground.

But what about the Constitution?

That is the question all of this elaborate government survival planning never answers satisfactorily. Who guarantees that Congress remains meaningful, the courts independent, elections intact, emergency powers temporary and the rights of the people protected?

Those questions matter because COG is no longer merely about bunkers.

It is part of a much larger emergency state—a government that has learned to govern through crisis, fear and claims of necessity.

The emergencies change. The response does not: government claims extraordinary powers, and the extraordinary gradually becomes ordinary.

This is the real danger of a government accustomed to governing by emergency: the trigger does not have to be Armageddon. It can be terrorism, a cyberattack, a pandemic, civil disorder or some broadly defined threat to national security. It merely has to be a crisis serious enough for those in power to declare that ordinary rules can no longer apply.

The most dangerous words in government are often some variation of: this is an emergency.

That is when temporary measures become precedents, precedents become policies, and policies become permanent powers.

Trump did not invent the Bunker State. He inherited it—and he is expanding it while further erasing the lines between presidential power, personal power and the national interest.

The government beneath Trump was built over decades, with the complicity of presidents, Congresses and courts that repeatedly allowed extraordinary powers to become permanent.

And behind it all sits another government—a shadow government—that elections rarely disturb.

More than a decade ago, we warned that America effectively had two shadow governments: Continuity of Government, the emergency government waiting in the wings for catastrophe, and the Deep State, the permanent government that carries on regardless of who occupies the White House.

Today, it’s hard to tell them apart.

Under ordinary circumstances, these systems may appear to operate separately.

Under emergency conditions, they can become one.

That is how the permanent state becomes the emergency state. And that is when Continuity of Government becomes Continuity of Tyranny.

A government that already possesses mass surveillance, militarized police, detention powers, biometric tracking, drones and facial recognition does not need to invent the machinery of authoritarian control during an emergency.

It already has it.

All an emergency does is change the rules governing how freely that machinery can be used.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, when a constitutional republic adopts a bunker mindset, government survival becomes the priority, and constitutional survival becomes an afterthought.

If constitutional government cannot survive above ground, in ordinary times, when the courts are open, Congress is sitting and elections are still being held, there is little reason to believe it will somehow be resurrected underground in the wake of a national catastrophe.

What deserves continuity is not merely the federal bureaucracy.

What deserves continuity is the Constitution. The separation of powers. The rule of law. Representative government. Due process. Habeas corpus. The rights of the people.

That is what must survive.

And if we cannot preserve those things now—before the sirens sound, before the government retreats underground, before some president invokes the next great emergency—then no bunker, however deep, however secure and however lavishly equipped, will save the republic.

Because the Constitution cannot survive in a bunker underground if we have already allowed it to die above ground.

WC: 1065

“Electric shock has long been a common method of inflicting torture or other forms of ill-treatment worldwide. While electric shocks are sometimes inflicted using makeshift equipment—for instance, car batteries, mains wires or cattle prods—a wide variety of electric shock devices are specifically designed for and marketed to law enforcement.”—Amnesty International

This is what comes of giving a lawless agency unlimited funds to build detention centers, terrorize communities, and act as a secret police force.

Anything goes.

Masked raids. Unmarked vehicles. Warrantless arrests. Racial profiling. Sweeping surveillance. Detention camps. Excessive force. Citizens dragged off the streets. Protesters targeted. Congressional oversight obstructed. Government agents operating behind masks while refusing to identify themselves or explain the authority under which they act.

Now add electric shock gloves to the arsenal.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to spend as much as $20 million to equip its agents with thousands of gloves capable of delivering painful electric shocks through direct contact with a person’s skin.

The devices are called G.L.O.V.E.s—Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters—and the government has dressed them up in the predictably sanitized language of the police state as “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”

Don’t be fooled by the benign-sounding euphemisms.

These are pain-compliance weapons.

ICE agents wearing the gloves will be able to touch a person’s exposed skin and deliver an electric shock intended to compel obedience.

White House border czar Tom Homan has been remarkably candid about the purpose: “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not.”

There is that word again: compliance.

It has become one of the most dangerous words in the vocabulary of the American police state.

Increasingly, government agents are being taught—and the public conditioned to accept—that refusal to immediately comply with a government agent’s command is sufficient justification for force.

Question an officer. Hesitate. Pull away. Protest. Demand to know why you are being detained. Refuse to surrender your phone. Attempt to record an arrest. Insist on your constitutional rights. Fail to obey quickly enough.

The government’s answer is increasingly the same: comply or die—comply or suffer the consequences.

Now those consequences may come through the touch of a gloved hand.

The Trump administration insists that these shock gloves offer ICE agents a less lethal alternative to guns, tasers and pepper spray. Certainly, if the choice were truly between an electric shock and a bullet, the less lethal option would be preferable.

But that is not the real choice confronting us.

The question is whether an agency with ICE’s record of abuse, secrecy and constitutional violations should be entrusted with yet another tool that makes it easier to inflict pain in order to force submission.

The problem is not merely the weapon. The problem is who will be wearing it.

ICE has already demonstrated what happens when government agents are empowered to treat noncompliance as a threat.

A recent ACLU review of more than 1,200 immigration-enforcement incidents documented hundreds of instances in which agents pushed, shoved, tackled or pinned people, along with dozens of incidents involving tactics capable of restricting breathing. Chemical agents were deployed hundreds of times. The incidents included U.S. citizens caught up in immigration operations and families confronted by armed and masked agents.

Inside ICE detention facilities, the record is equally disturbing.

Internal ICE documents reviewed by The Washington Post revealed 1,460 reported use-of-force incidents between January 2024 and February 2026. During the first year of Trump’s second term, detention staff used force 37 percent more often than during the preceding year, while the number of detainees subjected to force increased 54 percent.

In some cases, detainees were asking for food, water, medical attention or their personal belongings. In others, they were protesting the conditions under which they were being confined.

One group at a Georgia detention center was pepper-sprayed after refusing to return to their cells while complaining that they had not received medical care.

The official justification was chillingly familiar: to “gain compliance and control.”

That is precisely why ICE’s new shock gloves should concern anyone who cares about civil liberties.

Less lethal does not mean less abusive.

Indeed, the danger with so-called less-lethal weapons is that because they are perceived as safer than firearms, government agents may become more willing to use them in circumstances that would never justify deadly force.

A gun is obviously a weapon.

A baton is obviously a weapon.

A taser is obviously a weapon.

An electrified glove can look like an ordinary piece of equipment until the moment an agent lays a hand on you.

The shock ends when contact ends. The devices reportedly do not incapacitate a person in the way a taser can, and supporters emphasize that they generally do not leave burns or obvious contact marks.

That is supposed to reassure us. It should do the opposite.

Any government technology capable of inflicting intense pain while potentially leaving little visible evidence of its use demands extraordinarily strict controls, transparency and accountability.

ICE has demonstrated little reason to believe those safeguards will exist.

When accountability disappears, anything goes.

This is an agency whose detention centers remain largely closed to public scrutiny, whose internal reports have obscured or omitted serious uses of force, and whose agents have repeatedly operated in ways that make meaningful public accountability difficult.

Even members of Congress attempting to exercise their constitutional oversight responsibilities have been blocked from entering ICE facilities.

Meanwhile, ICE has built an expansive surveillance dragnet incorporating facial recognition, license plate readers, cellphone tracking and massive databases capable of locating and monitoring people across the country.

Put all of these pieces together and the picture should disturb Americans regardless of their views on immigration.

Masked agents. Hidden identities. Mass surveillance. Unmarked vehicles. Expansive arrest powers. Mass detention. Weak oversight. Billions of dollars in new funding. And now the ability to deliver electric shocks at the touch of a hand.

This is no longer merely an immigration enforcement bureaucracy.

It is the architecture of a national police force.

And increasingly, ICE is being positioned to serve the role that secret police forces have historically served in authoritarian systems: operating with extraordinary powers, obscured identities, limited accountability, and a broad mandate to identify, track, detain and remove people whom the government has designated as undesirable.

This does not mean America has suddenly become Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or some other totalitarian regime. History rarely repeats itself so neatly.

What history does teach, however, is that authoritarian governments do not begin with death camps and firing squads.

They begin by normalizing powers that once would have been considered intolerable.

They begin by identifying a population that can be stripped of rights with minimal political consequences. They begin by convincing citizens that extraordinary government powers are necessary because the people being targeted are dangerous, criminal, foreign or undeserving. They begin by making government agents harder to identify and harder to hold accountable. They begin by expanding detention. They begin by expanding surveillance. They begin by lowering the threshold for the use of force.

And they teach the public that obedience is the price of safety.

ICE is serving as the prototype for what a much broader system of authoritarian enforcement could look like.

Immigrants may be the government’s primary targets today. They will not necessarily be the only targets tomorrow.

The constitutional danger has never depended on whether one sympathizes with the first people subjected to government abuse. The question is whether we allow the government to acquire powers that can eventually be turned against anyone.

Once the government normalizes masked federal agents carrying out warrantless sweeps, what prevents those tactics from being used in the name of fighting drugs? Or terrorism? Or political extremism? Or civil unrest? Or public health emergencies? Or whatever crisis comes next?

Once the government builds massive databases capable of tracking people’s movements and associations, those systems do not disappear when immigration enforcement changes. Once detention infrastructure is built, it can be repurposed. Once federal agencies are allowed to operate outside meaningful oversight, restoring those restraints becomes extraordinarily difficult.

Once Americans accept the principle that government agents may inflict pain merely to secure “compliance,” the Constitution has already lost critical ground.

And once anything goes in the name of immigration enforcement, there is little to prevent those same powers from being repurposed in the name of the next crisis.

This is why the debate over ICE’s electric shock gloves cannot be reduced to a technical discussion about whether one weapon is safer than another.

The gloves are merely the latest manifestation of a far more dangerous philosophy of government.

It is the philosophy that says government knows best. That government commands must be obeyed. That government agents should be feared rather than questioned. That constitutional rights become negotiable whenever officials invoke public safety. That accountability is an inconvenience. And that force is an acceptable substitute for consent.

This is precisely the mentality the Constitution was intended to restrain.

The Fourth Amendment does not say obey first and challenge the government later.

The First Amendment does not protect only speech that government agents find agreeable.

The Fifth Amendment does not permit government to dispense with due process because officials have decided someone probably does not belong here.

And the Constitution contains no exception allowing government agents to punish people simply because they fail to show sufficient deference.

Yet that is the direction in which the American police state continues to move.

We are told not to worry because the weapons are “less lethal.” We are told not to worry because the raids target immigrants. We are told not to worry because the surveillance is necessary. We are told not to worry because the detention centers are temporary. We are told not to worry because good people who follow the law have nothing to fear.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we have heard all of this before.

Every expansion of government power comes wrapped in assurances that it will be used sparingly, responsibly and only against people who deserve it.

Then the definition of who deserves it expands.

Government power does not police itself. Neither will ICE.

The gloves are off.

The question now is how much more power Americans are willing to place in the government’s hands before we finally recognize what is being built around us.

WC: 1737

This is what comes of giving a lawless agency unlimited funds to build detention centers, terrorize communities, and act as a secret police force.

Anything goes.

Masked raids. Unmarked vehicles. Warrantless arrests. Racial profiling. Sweeping surveillance. Detention camps. Excessive force. Citizens dragged off the streets. Protesters targeted. Congressional oversight obstructed.

Now add electric shock gloves to the arsenal.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to spend as much as $20 million to equip its agents with thousands of gloves capable of delivering painful electric shocks through direct contact with a person’s skin.

The devices are called G.L.O.V.E.s—Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters—and the government has dressed them up in the predictably sanitized language of the police state as “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”

Don’t be fooled by the benign-sounding euphemisms.

These are pain-compliance weapons.

ICE agents wearing the gloves will be able to touch a person’s exposed skin and deliver an electric shock intended to compel obedience.

White House border czar Tom Homan has been remarkably candid about the purpose: “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not.”

There is that word again: compliance.

It has become one of the most dangerous words in the vocabulary of the American police state.

Increasingly, government agents are being taught—and the public conditioned to accept—that refusal to immediately comply with a government agent’s command is sufficient justification for force.

Question an officer. Hesitate. Pull away. Protest. Demand to know why you are being detained. Refuse to surrender your phone. Attempt to record an arrest. Insist on your constitutional rights. Fail to obey quickly enough.

The government’s answer is increasingly the same: comply or die—comply or suffer the consequences.

Now those consequences may come through the touch of a gloved hand.

The Trump administration insists that these shock gloves offer ICE agents a less lethal alternative to guns, tasers and pepper spray. But that is not the real choice confronting us.

The question is whether an agency with ICE’s record of abuse, secrecy and constitutional violations should be entrusted with yet another tool that makes it easier to inflict pain in order to force submission.

The problem is not merely the weapon. The problem is who will be wearing it.

This is an agency whose detention centers remain largely closed to public scrutiny, whose internal reports have obscured or omitted serious uses of force, and whose agents have repeatedly operated in ways that make meaningful public accountability difficult.

Meanwhile, ICE has built an expansive surveillance dragnet incorporating facial recognition, license plate readers, cellphone tracking and massive databases capable of locating and monitoring people across the country.

Put all of these pieces together and the picture should disturb Americans regardless of their views on immigration.

This is no longer merely an immigration enforcement bureaucracy.

It is the architecture of a national police force.

And increasingly, ICE is being positioned to serve the role that secret police forces have historically served in authoritarian systems: operating with extraordinary powers, obscured identities, limited accountability, and a broad mandate to identify, track, detain and remove people whom the government has designated as undesirable.

History teaches that authoritarian governments do not begin with death camps and firing squads.

They begin by normalizing powers that once would have been considered intolerable.

They begin by identifying a population that can be stripped of rights with minimal political consequences. They begin by convincing citizens that extraordinary government powers are necessary because the people being targeted are dangerous, criminal, foreign or undeserving. They begin by making government agents harder to identify and harder to hold accountable. They begin by expanding detention. They begin by expanding surveillance. They begin by lowering the threshold for the use of force.

And they teach the public that obedience is the price of safety.

ICE is serving as the prototype for what a much broader system of authoritarian enforcement could look like.

Immigrants may be the government’s primary targets today. They will not necessarily be the only targets tomorrow.

The constitutional danger has never depended on whether one sympathizes with the first people subjected to government abuse. The question is whether we allow the government to acquire powers that can eventually be turned against anyone.

Once the government normalizes masked federal agents carrying out warrantless sweeps, what prevents those tactics from being used in the name of fighting drugs? Or terrorism? Or political extremism? Or civil unrest? Or public health emergencies? Or whatever crisis comes next?

Once the government builds massive databases capable of tracking people’s movements and associations, those systems do not disappear when immigration enforcement changes. Once detention infrastructure is built, it can be repurposed. Once federal agencies are allowed to operate outside meaningful oversight, restoring those restraints becomes extraordinarily difficult.

Once Americans accept the principle that government agents may inflict pain merely to secure “compliance,” the Constitution has already lost critical ground.

And once anything goes in the name of immigration enforcement, there is little to prevent those same powers from being repurposed in the name of the next crisis.

ICE’s electric shock gloves are merely the latest manifestation of a far more dangerous philosophy that says government knows best. That government commands must be obeyed. That government agents should be feared rather than questioned. That constitutional rights become negotiable whenever officials invoke public safety. That accountability is an inconvenience. And that force is an acceptable substitute for consent.

This is precisely the mentality the Constitution was intended to restrain.

The Fourth Amendment does not say obey first and challenge the government later.

The First Amendment does not protect only speech that government agents find agreeable.

The Fifth Amendment does not permit government to dispense with due process because officials have decided someone probably does not belong here.

And the Constitution contains no exception allowing government agents to punish people simply because they fail to show sufficient deference.

Yet that is the direction in which the American police state continues to move.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, every expansion of government power comes wrapped in assurances that it will be used sparingly, responsibly and only against people who deserve it.

Then the definition of who deserves it expands.

Government power does not police itself. Neither will ICE.

The gloves are off.

The question now is how much more power Americans are willing to place in the government’s hands before we finally recognize what is being built around us.

WC: 1086

BOSTON, Mass. — The government cannot use arrests, detention and the threat of deportation to frighten people into silence for expressing political views it disfavors.

That is the warning being sounded by civil liberties groups as Trump administration officials appeal a federal judge’s finding that they violated the First Amendment by deliberately seeking “to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble” through highly publicized deportation actions against lawful U.S. residents such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk. The government has justified its actions by invoking a rarely used provision of immigration law allowing the Secretary of State to seek the removal of noncitizens deemed harmful to U.S. foreign policy interests.

The Rutherford Institute joined a coalition of civil liberties organizations led by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) in filing an amicus brief opposing the government’s appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in AAUP v. Rubio. The coalition argues that the First Amendment prohibits the government from discriminating against noncitizens based on their viewpoints or using deportation to punish constitutionally protected speech. The Institute also joined a similar amicus brief led by the Cato Institute in The Stanford Daily v. Rubio, which raises similar concerns over government efforts that have caused noncitizens to self-censor out of fear that their political speech could result in detention or deportation.

“The power to deport cannot be allowed to become a weapon of political censorship,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Arrest a few people for speaking out, make examples of them, and you don’t have to arrest everyone else. Fear will do the censoring for you. The First Amendment exists precisely to prevent government officials from deciding which political viewpoints may safely be expressed. Once government is permitted to punish people for their political beliefs, no one’s speech is safe.”

A group of academic organizations with noncitizen members sued officials in the Trump administration, alleging that the administration’s public statements and deportation actions caused their members to censor themselves out of fear that they would be targeted like Khalil and Öztürk. In effect, the government did not have to arrest or deport every dissenting speaker because its treatment of a few was enough to make others afraid to speak.

Following a trial, U.S. District Judge William G. Young—who was nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1985—found that administration officials had intentionally sought “to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence.” The court also pointed to the manner in which the arrests were carried out—including arrests by masked agents, sometimes on the street without prior notice, followed by transportation across the country for detention—as evidence of the chilling effect. Judge Young found that “the manner and method of their execution was adopted, or at least approved of . . . in part intentionally to chill the speech of other” similarly situated speakers.

Rejecting explanations for ICE agents wearing masks as “disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable,” the judge concluded that “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence.” The court found that Trump administration officials had misused “the sweeping powers of their respective offices” to “strike fear into” noncitizens and curb lawful pro-Palestinian speech. Calling the case “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court,” Judge Young warned that if a federal agency such as the Department of Homeland Security can be weaponized to suppress the free speech rights of “a small, hapless group of non-citizens in our midst,” other agencies can likewise be weaponized against “the President's ever growing list of ‘enemies’ or opponents he ‘hates.’” As Judge Young observed, “the only constitutional rights upon which we can depend are those we extend to the weakest . . . among us.”

In pushing back against the Trump administration’s efforts to overturn Judge Young’s ruling, the civil liberties coalition argues that the administration’s actions echo episodes in American history in which immigration powers were used to suppress political dissent and resemble practices in countries such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, where governments punish speech critical of those in power.

Conor T. Fitzpatrick and others with FIRE advanced the arguments in the AAUP v. Rubio amicus brief. Thomas A. Berry, Dan Greenberg, and Samuel Rutzick with the Cato Institute, as well as EmilyRose Johns, advanced the arguments in The Stanford Daily v. Rubio amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military. National Guard, but our military.”—President Trump

The National Guard was just the beginning.

One year after President Trump deployed military troops to the nation’s capital, we find ourselves navigating a posse comitatus presidency in which the visual trappings of martial law are the norm, not the exception.

The Founders warned against standing armies on American soil, fearing that the military might someday be used not to defend the people but to control them. They understood something Americans are being encouraged to forget: soldiers and police serve fundamentally different purposes.

When the president sends troops to police domestic unrest that civilian authorities are capable of handling, he crosses a dangerous constitutional line.

When soldiers are stationed indefinitely on American streets, assisting police operations, patrolling subway stations, tourist attractions, neighborhoods and parks, that line becomes even harder to see.

When troops become so commonplace that they are used for everything from snow removal and medical emergencies to groundskeeping and beautification projects, something more insidious happens.

Military occupation begins to look normal.

And when the president uses that military presence as a demonstration of his personal power over the nation’s capital, the warning embedded in the Posse Comitatus Act becomes impossible to ignore.

The military is not supposed to be the president’s national police force.

Yet that is increasingly what Donald Trump is turning it into.

One year ago, when Trump declared a supposed “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., called in the National Guard, unleashed federal law enforcement throughout the city and temporarily seized control of the Metropolitan Police Department, we warned that the police state had found a new playbook: martial law, one city at a time.

The emergency is long over.

The troops never left.

Now the Pentagon says the National Guard deployment can remain in Washington until January 20, 2029—the final day of Trump’s presidency—unless Trump himself decides to terminate it sooner.

That is not an emergency response.

That is a standing military presence.

The government expects American taxpayers to spend another $1.4 billion maintaining it.

What began in August 2025 as an extraordinary response to a supposedly “extraordinary” crime crisis has become part of the architecture of everyday government.

Thousands of military personnel have remained deployed in the capital. Armed Guard members patrol streets, Metro stations, parks and tourist attractions. They have supported arrest operations. They have responded to medical calls. They have shoveled snow. They have removed trash and weeds and participated in “beautification” projects.

During the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations, their numbers swelled to roughly 5,000.

Now the Trump administration is making plans to build “apartment-style lodging units” for the troops stationed in DC at a cost of $292 million to the taxpayer.

That is in addition to the $1 billion Trump wants for White House security upgrades, including a new ballroom topped by a proposed “droneport” that he has envisioned as a rooftop staging ground for military trucks, personnel and battlefield weaponry.

The symbolism is hard to miss.

Temporary deployments do not usually require hundreds of millions of dollars in permanent-style housing, any more than constitutional government requires turning the White House into a military outpost.

This is how emergency power grabs become entrenched and permanent.

First the government identifies a crisis. Then it claims extraordinary powers to confront that crisis. Then the crisis ends. And the extraordinary powers and government overreach remain.

A year ago, the Trump administration insisted that military force was necessary to restore law and order to Washington, even though violent crime was at its lowest level in 30 years.

Today, crime continues to decline, yet there is apparently no circumstance under which the government considers the mission accomplished.

That tells you everything you need to know.

The deployment was never merely about crime. It was about establishing a precedent.

That precedent says the president can put troops on American streets, keep them there after the purported emergency has passed, assign them ever-expanding civilian functions and eventually turn their presence into such an ordinary feature of daily life that Americans stop asking why soldiers are patrolling their neighborhoods in the first place.

That is precisely the danger the Posse Comitatus Act was intended to guard against.

Enacted in 1878, the Act embodies one of the oldest principles of constitutional government: except where Congress or the Constitution specifically authorizes it, the military should not be used to execute civilian law.

There is good reason for that prohibition.

Police are supposed to protect civil order while operating within a constitutional system built around warrants, probable cause, due process, civilian accountability and limits on force. The military is trained to identify threats, take territory, defeat enemies and obey a chain of command.

Confuse those roles and eventually citizens become enemy combatants, neighborhoods become occupied territory, and political dissent becomes a security threat.

We do not have to speculate about where this leads.

We have already begun to see it.

When Trump federalized California National Guard troops and deployed Marines to Los Angeles during protests against immigration raids in 2025, a federal judge subsequently ruled that the administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using military personnel to carry out civilian law-enforcement functions.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer warned that the administration appeared intent on creating something the Constitution was never meant to tolerate: a national police force with the president effectively serving as its chief.

That description increasingly fits the Trump presidency.

Trump is not merely claiming authority as commander-in-chief over America’s military. He is increasingly behaving as though being commander-in-chief makes him commander-in-chief of the American people.

It is a profound, constitutional difference.

A president governs citizens. A commander commands troops. A police chief directs law enforcement. A king commands subjects.

The danger begins when one man starts behaving as though all four offices belong to him.

That mindset is increasingly visible not only in the administration’s policies but in Trump’s carefully cultivated image of presidential power.

Throughout history, authoritarian rulers have understood the propaganda value of martial imagery. Mussolini surrounded himself with Blackshirts and military pageantry. Hitler’s meticulously staged uniforms, rallies and parades projected total command over the German state. Stalin and Mao enveloped themselves in the imagery of military power and revolutionary force.

The message was unmistakable: I am not merely your political leader. I am your protector, your commander and your law.

Trump has increasingly embraced his own digital version of that authoritarian theater.

Just days ago, he circulated an AI-generated image depicting himself in an elaborate military uniform alongside Generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur, laden with decorations and medals he never earned for military service he never performed.

It would be tempting to dismiss such images as narcissistic internet trolling.

That would be a mistake.

Propaganda matters because it tells people how power wishes to be seen. Trump’s increasingly martial self-portraits complement a presidency that repeatedly treats domestic political problems as military problems, political opponents as enemies, immigrants as invaders, protesters as insurgents, cities as territory to be liberated, and federal force as the preferred instrument for imposing order.

The message is not subtle.

This is how Trump sees presidential power: Not merely as persuasion. Not merely as leadership. Not merely as authority derived from the consent of the governed. But as authoritarian power backed by military force.

The National Guard deployment in Washington is the physical embodiment of that worldview.

Armed soldiers are stationed around the monuments. They guard the perimeter of the Reflecting Pool. They patrol the National Mall. They appear at Metro stations, tourist sites and public parks.

Their presence is no longer presented as extraordinary. That is precisely the problem.

A free people should never become accustomed to soldiers policing their streets. Once that sight becomes ordinary, the constitutional barrier separating military power from civilian government has already begun to collapse.

And Washington is the ideal laboratory for normalizing it.

Because the District of Columbia is not a state, its residents lack many of the political and constitutional defenses available elsewhere. The president exercises direct control over the D.C. National Guard, while Congress retains enormous power over the city’s local government.

That makes Washington uniquely vulnerable. It also makes it uniquely useful as a testing ground.

What can be normalized in the capital today can be demanded elsewhere tomorrow.

Indeed, we have already seen repeated attempts to expand the model beyond Washington: federalized National Guard troops in Los Angeles, attempted Guard deployments elsewhere, federal agents sent into cities, immigration enforcement increasingly carried out with military equipment and rhetoric, and presidential threats to “liberate” jurisdictions whose elected leaders resist federal policy.

Not every deployment has survived judicial scrutiny.

That is encouraging, but it is not reassuring enough.

The real danger is larger than whether any particular deployment is eventually blocked by a court. The danger is that the country is being conditioned to accept the premise behind all of them: that whenever the president declares a city dangerous, disorderly, disobedient or insufficiently cooperative, military force is an appropriate instrument of domestic government.

That premise should frighten conservatives and liberals alike.

This is not fundamentally a question of whether you trust Donald Trump. It is whether you trust any president with a standing military force at his disposal for domestic political purposes.

The Constitution was not written on the assumption that good people would always hold power. It was written because power attracts abuse.

Every authority surrendered to Trump becomes an authority available to his successors. Every emergency power normalized now becomes part of the presidential toolbox later. Every constitutional boundary ignored because the “right” president is violating it becomes one less boundary available when the “wrong” president takes office.

This is how republics lose their safeguards: Not always through dramatic coups. Not always through tanks surrounding the legislature.

Sometimes it happens more quietly: One deployment. One emergency. One executive order. One city. One exception at a time.

Last year, we warned that the police state had developed a new playbook: martial law, one city at a time.

A year later, the greater danger is that Americans are getting used to it.

The troops are still there. The emergency is gone.

The president has extended their presence through the end of his term.

And the sight of soldiers performing civilian functions in the nation’s capital is slowly being transformed from an extraordinary exercise of government power into just another part of the scenery.

As we have warned repeatedly in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is how constitutional lines disappear—not because someone formally erases them, but because enough people stop noticing when they are crossed.

The Founders feared standing armies because they understood that military power and political liberty exist in constant tension.

The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that same hard-earned wisdom.

Soldiers defend the country. Police enforce the law. Presidents execute the laws within constitutional limits.

Citizens are not troops. Cities are not battlefields. Political opponents are not enemy combatants. And the president is not the American people’s commander-in-chief. He is commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

That distinction may be one of the few things standing between a constitutional republic and a police state presidency.

We had better remember it before the exception becomes the rule—and the troops never go home.

WC: 1903

The National Guard was just the beginning.

One year after President Trump deployed military troops to the nation’s capital, we find ourselves navigating a posse comitatus presidency in which the visual trappings of martial law are the norm, not the exception.

When Trump declared a supposed “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., called in the National Guard, unleashed federal law enforcement throughout the city and temporarily seized control of the Metropolitan Police Department, we warned that the police state had found a new playbook: martial law, one city at a time.

The emergency is long over.

The troops never left.

Now the Pentagon says the National Guard deployment can remain in Washington until January 20, 2029—the final day of Trump’s presidency—unless Trump himself decides to terminate it sooner.

That is not an emergency response.

That is a standing military presence.

The government expects American taxpayers to spend another $1.4 billion maintaining it.

What began in August 2025 as an extraordinary response to a supposedly “extraordinary” crime crisis has become part of the architecture of everyday government.

Thousands of military personnel have remained deployed in the capital. Armed Guard members patrol streets, Metro stations, parks and tourist attractions. They have supported arrest operations. They have responded to medical calls. They have shoveled snow. They have removed trash and weeds and participated in “beautification” projects.

During the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations, their numbers swelled to roughly 5,000.

Now the Trump administration is making plans to build “apartment-style lodging units” for the troops stationed in DC at a cost of $292 million to the taxpayer.

That is in addition to the $1 billion Trump wants for White House security upgrades, including a new ballroom topped by a proposed “droneport” that he has envisioned as a rooftop staging ground for military trucks, personnel and battlefield weaponry.

The symbolism is hard to miss.

This is how emergency power grabs become entrenched and permanent.

We do not have to speculate about where this leads.

We have already begun to see it.

When Trump federalized California National Guard troops and deployed Marines to Los Angeles during protests against immigration raids in 2025, a federal judge subsequently ruled that the administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using military personnel to carry out civilian law-enforcement functions.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer warned that the administration appeared intent on creating something the Constitution was never meant to tolerate: a national police force with the president effectively serving as its chief.

That description increasingly fits the Trump presidency.

Trump is not merely claiming authority as commander-in-chief over America’s military. He is increasingly behaving as though being commander-in-chief makes him commander-in-chief of the American people.

It is a profound, constitutional difference.

A president governs citizens. A commander commands troops. A police chief directs law enforcement. A king commands subjects.

The danger begins when one man starts behaving as though all four offices belong to him.

Trump has increasingly embraced his own digital version of that authoritarian theater.

Just days ago, he circulated an AI-generated image depicting himself in an elaborate military uniform alongside Generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur, laden with decorations and medals he never earned for military service he never performed.

It would be tempting to dismiss such images as narcissistic internet trolling.

That would be a mistake.

This is how Trump sees presidential power: as authoritarian power backed by military force.

The National Guard deployment in Washington is the physical embodiment of that worldview.

Armed soldiers are stationed around the monuments. They guard the perimeter of the Reflecting Pool. They patrol the National Mall. They appear at Metro stations, tourist sites and public parks.

Their presence is no longer presented as extraordinary. That is precisely the problem.

A free people should never become accustomed to soldiers policing their streets. Once that sight becomes ordinary, the constitutional barrier separating military power from civilian government has already begun to collapse.

And Washington is the ideal laboratory as a testing ground.

What can be normalized in the capital today can be demanded elsewhere tomorrow.

Indeed, we have already seen repeated attempts to expand the model beyond Washington: federalized National Guard troops in Los Angeles, attempted Guard deployments elsewhere, federal agents sent into cities, immigration enforcement increasingly carried out with military equipment and rhetoric, and presidential threats to “liberate” jurisdictions whose elected leaders resist federal policy.

Not every deployment has survived judicial scrutiny.

That is encouraging, but the real danger is larger than whether any particular deployment is eventually blocked by a court. The danger is that the country is being conditioned to accept the premise behind all of them: that whenever the president declares a city dangerous, disorderly, disobedient or insufficiently cooperative, military force is an appropriate instrument of domestic government.

That premise should frighten conservatives and liberals alike.

This is not fundamentally a question of whether you trust Donald Trump. It is whether you trust any president with a standing military force at his disposal for domestic political purposes.

The Constitution was not written on the assumption that good people would always hold power. It was written because power attracts abuse.

Every authority surrendered to Trump becomes an authority available to his successors. Every emergency power normalized now becomes part of the presidential toolbox later. Every constitutional boundary ignored because the “right” president is violating it becomes one less boundary available when the “wrong” president takes office.

This is how republics lose their safeguards: One deployment. One emergency. One executive order. One city. One exception at a time.

As we have warned repeatedly in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is how constitutional lines disappear—not because someone formally erases them, but because enough people stop noticing when they are crossed.

The Founders feared standing armies because they understood that military power and political liberty exist in constant tension.

The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that same hard-earned wisdom.

Soldiers defend the country. Police enforce the law. Presidents execute the laws within constitutional limits.

Citizens are not troops. Cities are not battlefields. Political opponents are not enemy combatants. And the president is not the American people’s commander-in-chief. He is commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

That distinction may be one of the few things standing between a constitutional republic and a police state presidency.

We had better remember it before the exception becomes the rule—and the troops never go home.

WC: 1076

PORT ST JOE, Fla. — The Rutherford Institute is urging the City of Port St. Joe, Fla., to work with a local business owner to find a prompt, practical resolution to a dispute involving a proposed 18-foot cross display on private property.

Drawing on more than four decades of experience helping citizens and public officials resolve disputes involving religious expression, free speech, land-use regulations and public safety, Institute attorneys offered recommendations aimed at balancing the legitimate interests of both sides: the City’s responsibility to enforce reasonable structural and public-safety requirements and the property owner’s First Amendment right to engage in religious expression on private property.

The Institute weighed in as a concerned civil liberties organization seeking a reasonable resolution that respects the legitimate interests of both sides.

As part of its continuing effort to educate the public and government officials about the constitutional protections afforded expressive displays on private property, the Institute has also issued a Constitutional Q&A, “The Right to Display First Amendment Messages on Private Property.”

“The First Amendment is not reserved for government-approved messages,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “It protects the right to express religious, political and philosophical beliefs across the spectrum. Government may enforce legitimate, neutral safety rules, but it cannot favor some viewpoints, diminish others or make protected expression unnecessarily difficult.”

For more than four decades, The Rutherford Institute has defended individuals and organizations seeking to display a broad range of religious, political and philosophical messages on their own property or in places otherwise open to expression.

• In Harrisonburg, Va., the Institute intervened after city zoning officials threatened a church with criminal prosecution over pro-life signs displayed on church property. City ordinances permitted certain governmental, corporate, civic and holiday banners while prohibiting the church’s messages.
• In Ocala, Fla., Rutherford Institute attorneys defended sporting-goods store owners who were ordered to remove a Gadsden flag bearing the words “Don’t Tread on Me” while governmental flags remained permitted.
• The Institute also challenged Grayson County, Va., after local officials denied approval for an interfaith spiritual organization to establish a retreat center on privately owned land.

The Institute’s work has also included defending the right to display Christmas symbols and other religious messages. Its longstanding guidance emphasizes that private religious expression may not be excluded merely because it is religious and that privately sponsored displays in public forums generally must be treated according to the same reasonable rules that apply to comparable secular displays.

Although the First Amendment generally protects signs, flags, symbols, artwork and other expressive displays on private property, those rights are not absolute. Local governments may enforce reasonable, content-neutral rules addressing matters such as structural safety, size, height, lighting, setbacks and placement. However, those regulations may not favor certain messages, exempt government-approved topics or viewpoints while prohibiting others, or impose unnecessary burdens because officials object to a display’s religious or political meaning.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.” — Chalmers Johnson

What goes around comes around.

That is the terrible law of blowback.

When the United States bombs another country, threatens its government, kills its people, occupies its territory or attempts to dictate its future, the consequences do not remain safely contained thousands of miles away.

They come home.

They come home in flag-draped coffins and shattered military families. They come home in retaliatory attacks on American bases and embassies. They come home through terrorist plots, cyber sabotage, disrupted shipping lanes, higher energy prices, depleted weapons stockpiles, and trillions of dollars in debt.

They come home through hacked water systems, vulnerable power grids, heightened domestic surveillance, militarized police and government demands that the American people surrender still more freedom in exchange for the promise of protection from dangers the government itself helped create.

This is blowback.

Blowback isn’t just about war. It’s about the consequences of the rash, heedless and heartless decisions made every day by the actors of the American police state—and the fact that it is “we the people” who will be paying the price for those terrible decisions for years to come.

President Trump’s war with Iran is only the latest reminder that no government can bomb, threaten and police the world indefinitely without eventually bringing the consequences home.

For months, the Trump administration has lurched between war and threatened war, massive bombing campaigns and aborted strikes, demands for surrender and claims that peace is imminent.

There appears to be no coherent plan for ending the conflict.

There is, however, a mounting bill—and it will be paid in American lives, American dollars, American security and American freedom.

This is what happens when a government appoints itself judge, jury, executioner and police officer to the world.

The government creates enemies faster than it can kill them.

It destabilizes one country, then uses the resulting chaos to justify intervening in another. It bombs in the name of peace, occupies in the name of freedom, surveils in the name of security, and retaliates against retaliation in an endless cycle of violence that serves the war machine while leaving ordinary people everywhere less safe.

We have seen this before.

Every president promises that the next military intervention will be limited, targeted, necessary and decisive. Every president promises that overwhelming force will restore order. Every president assures us that the experts know what they are doing.

Yet the wars continue, the enemies multiply, the costs rise, the Constitution contracts, and the American people are left to cope with the consequences.

The blowback from Trump’s wars may not look like the blowback from wars of the past.

Retaliation may not arrive in the form of a missile—it may arrive through a computer terminal connected to a small-town water plant.

In recent days, hackers reportedly targeted water and wastewater systems in at least seven states. More than 30 community water systems in Minnesota were attacked, while additional systems in Michigan were compromised. Pumps were disrupted. Remote-control systems were accessed. Some communities temporarily lost normal operations.

Officials reported no contamination and no resulting threat to public health.

We were fortunate this time. But what happens next time?

Although Iran is suspected of plotting attacks on water and energy infrastructure nationwide, the Trump administration has rejected suggestions that the recent cyberattacks were retaliation for the war.

Whether or not Iran is behind these cyberattacks, the warning could not be clearer: in an age of networked infrastructure, the battlefield is everywhere.

It is the water treatment plant. The electrical grid. The hospital. The bank. The airport. The communications network. The family car. The phone in your pocket.

That is the danger of pouring America’s resources into policing the globe while neglecting the systems on which ordinary Americans depend at home and leaving the homeland dangerously exposed.

That imbalance is no accident. It is the inevitable consequence of empire.

American troops remain stationed across the world, operating from a sprawling network of foreign bases and carrying out missions that most Americans never hear about, much less debate or authorize.

As of June 2025, roughly 170,000 active-duty American military personnel were stationed around the globe, along with tens of thousands of reservists and civilian Defense Department employees.

Even those figures may understate the true scope of America’s overseas military presence, given the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.”

The official explanations change with every administration.

We are told that the troops are protecting democracy, preserving stability, defending freedom, securing vital interests, deterring aggression or preventing the next attack.

In practice, the United States intervenes in one country after another, guards foreign oil supplies and shipping routes, protects corporate interests, arms favored regimes, topples disfavored governments and leaves American taxpayers responsible for the cost.

This is not national defense. It is empire.

And empire always generates blowback.

Every country bombed, every government threatened, every civilian population terrorized, and every community reduced to rubble creates new grievances, new enemies and new reasons for retaliation.

That retaliation does not always come from another army.

It comes through terrorist cells. It comes through lone actors radicalized by images of dead children and destroyed cities. It comes through hackers probing water systems, electrical grids, hospitals, banks, transportation networks and communications systems.

It comes through attacks on American troops, embassies, ships and businesses.

It comes through oil shocks, disrupted trade routes, depleted military stockpiles, emergency appropriations, and still more national debt.

Blowback carries a staggering price tag—and the war profiteers are not the ones expected to pay it. The American people are.

War spending is bankrupting America.

The United States maintains a global network of foreign bases, overseas installations, weapons systems, intelligence operations and permanent deployments that costs taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars year after year.

That is before the government launches another war.

Once the bombing begins, the costs multiply.

Missiles must be replaced. Weapons stockpiles must be replenished. Damaged ships must be repaired. Troops must be deployed. Contractors must be paid. Foreign governments must be subsidized. Emergency spending bills must be rushed through Congress.

The military-industrial complex profits from every deployment, every missile launched, every weapon depleted and every new enemy created.

Meanwhile, the politicians claim there is never enough money to secure vulnerable water systems, modernize the electrical grid, repair collapsing infrastructure, provide affordable health care, or protect communities from disasters here at home.

This is the economic face of blowback: the government spends trillions of dollars making enemies abroad, then pleads poverty when asked to protect the American people from the consequences.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it does not have on a military empire it cannot afford while leaving the country it is supposed to defend dangerously exposed.

But those staggering costs tell only part of the story, because the Pentagon repeatedly cannot account for the money it is allotted.

Decades of failed audits, missing funds, contractor overcharges, waste and outright profiteering have transformed war into one of the most lucrative forms of government welfare ever devised.

That corruption is not merely wasteful—it is deadly.

Every dollar squandered on an overpriced weapons system or lost in the Pentagon’s accounting maze is a dollar unavailable to safeguard a water plant, secure a hospital network, strengthen the electrical grid or rebuild a community devastated by disaster.

The consequences are not merely financial.

Decades of bombing, occupation, drone killings, regime change and support for brutal governments have also fueled rage against the United States.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bombing was blowback. The Fort Hood shooting was blowback.

To recognize this as blowback is not to excuse terrorism.

There is no justification for murdering innocent people. Yet neither can we pretend that terrorist attacks emerge from a historical or political vacuum. The perpetrators were responsible for their crimes, but in each instance, American wars and foreign policy formed part of the grievance used to justify violence.

Refusing to acknowledge that connection does not make Americans safer. It merely ensures that the cycle continues.

And the cycle does not end with retaliation.

Every new threat becomes a justification for more surveillance, more secrecy, more military equipment, more emergency authority and fewer constitutional restraints.

Indeed, the most dangerous blowback may be the government’s ongoing efforts to turn America into a battlefield—militarizing the police and treating the American people like suspects and enemy combatants.

The government creates the danger abroad, then uses the danger it created to demand more power at home.

James Madison warned that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Perpetual war, Madison understood, gives birth to armies, debts, taxes and instruments of domination. It concentrates power in the hands of the few while forcing the many to submit, sacrifice and pay.

More than a century later, President Dwight Eisenhower echoed Madison’s warning, observing that the machinery built to wage those perpetual wars had become a danger in its own right. He called it the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex—an influence capable of endangering our liberties and democratic processes.

Eisenhower understood that a permanent war machine must continually invent new missions, new threats and new enemies in order to justify its existence.

We failed to heed his warning.

Just as dangerous as a government capable of waging war without end is a government determined to ensure that no one responsible will ever be called to account.

The United States insists on the power to police the world, punish foreign leaders, bomb foreign countries and dictate the rules of international conduct.

Yet when those same rules threaten to be applied to American officials or their allies, the government rejects the authority of international courts, sanctions their judges and attempts to cripple their ability to investigate alleged war crimes.

The double standard could not be clearer.

The American government claims the right to sit in judgment over the world while refusing to be judged for its own actions.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, a nation that abandons the rule of law abroad will eventually find that the rule of law has little power to restrain its government at home.

This, too, is blowback: unchecked power, diminished freedom and a government that ceases to serve its people.

More than half a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. warned where this cycle of hatred, retaliation and unchecked power would lead. In his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered at Riverside Church in New York, King declared:

“We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate… We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace … and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”

There can be no confusion about the path President Trump has chosen: empire over republic, violence over peace, and personal glory over the lives and liberties of the American people.

WC: 1956

What goes around comes around.

That is the terrible law of blowback.

When the United States bombs another country, threatens its government, kills its people, occupies its territory or attempts to dictate its future, the consequences do not remain safely contained thousands of miles away.

They come home.

They come home in flag-draped coffins and shattered military families. They come home in retaliatory attacks on American bases and embassies. They come home through terrorist plots, cyber sabotage, disrupted shipping lanes, higher energy prices, depleted weapons stockpiles, and trillions of dollars in debt.

They come home through hacked water systems, vulnerable power grids, heightened domestic surveillance, militarized police and government demands that the American people surrender still more freedom in exchange for the promise of protection from dangers the government itself helped create.

This is blowback.

Blowback isn’t just about war. It’s about the consequences of the rash, heedless and heartless decisions made every day by the actors of the American police state—and the fact that it is “we the people” who will be paying the price for those terrible decisions for years to come.

President Trump’s war with Iran is only the latest reminder that no government can bomb, threaten and police the world indefinitely without eventually bringing the consequences home.

For months, the Trump administration has lurched between war and threatened war, massive bombing campaigns and aborted strikes, demands for surrender and claims that peace is imminent.

There appears to be no coherent plan for ending the conflict.

There is, however, a mounting bill—and it will be paid in American lives, American dollars, American security and American freedom.

This is what happens when a government appoints itself judge, jury, executioner and police officer to the world.

The government creates enemies faster than it can kill them.

It destabilizes one country, then uses the resulting chaos to justify intervening in another. It bombs in the name of peace, occupies in the name of freedom, surveils in the name of security, and retaliates against retaliation in an endless cycle of violence that serves the war machine while leaving ordinary people everywhere less safe.

We have seen this before.

Every president promises that the next military intervention will be limited, targeted, necessary and decisive. Every president promises that overwhelming force will restore order. Every president assures us that the experts know what they are doing.

Yet the wars continue, the enemies multiply, the costs rise, the Constitution contracts, and the American people are left to cope with the consequences.

The blowback from Trump’s wars may not look like the blowback from wars of the past.

Retaliation may not arrive in the form of a missile—it may arrive through a computer terminal connected to a small-town water plant.

In recent days, hackers reportedly targeted water and wastewater systems in at least seven states. More than 30 community water systems in Minnesota were attacked, while additional systems in Michigan were compromised. Pumps were disrupted. Remote-control systems were accessed. Some communities temporarily lost normal operations.

Officials reported no contamination and no resulting threat to public health.

We were fortunate this time. But what happens next time?

Although Iran is suspected of plotting attacks on water and energy infrastructure nationwide, the Trump administration has rejected suggestions that the recent cyberattacks were retaliation for the war.

Whether or not Iran is behind these cyberattacks, the warning could not be clearer: in an age of networked infrastructure, the battlefield is everywhere.

It is the water treatment plant. The electrical grid. The hospital. The bank. The airport. The communications network. The family car. The phone in your pocket.

That is the danger of pouring America’s resources into policing the globe while neglecting the systems on which ordinary Americans depend at home and leaving the homeland dangerously exposed.

Every country bombed, every government threatened, every civilian population terrorized, and every community reduced to rubble creates new grievances, new enemies and new reasons for retaliation.

That retaliation does not always come from another army.

It comes through terrorist cells. It comes through lone actors radicalized by images of dead children and destroyed cities. It comes through hackers probing water systems, electrical grids, hospitals, banks, transportation networks and communications systems.

It comes through attacks on American troops, embassies, ships and businesses.

It comes through oil shocks, disrupted trade routes, depleted military stockpiles, emergency appropriations, and still more national debt.

Blowback carries a staggering price tag—and the war profiteers are not the ones expected to pay it. The American people are.

War spending is bankrupting America.

The military-industrial complex profits from every deployment, every missile launched, every weapon depleted and every new enemy created.

Meanwhile, the politicians claim there is never enough money to secure vulnerable water systems, modernize the electrical grid, repair collapsing infrastructure, provide affordable health care, or protect communities from disasters here at home.

This is the economic face of blowback: the government spends trillions of dollars making enemies abroad, then pleads poverty when asked to protect the American people from the consequences.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it does not have on a military empire it cannot afford while leaving the country it is supposed to defend dangerously exposed.

The consequences are not merely financial.

Decades of bombing, occupation, drone killings, regime change and support for brutal governments have also fueled rage against the United States.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bombing was blowback. The Fort Hood shooting was blowback.

Every new threat becomes a justification to turn America into a battlefield—militarizing the police and treating the American people like suspects and enemy combatants—while paving the way for more surveillance, more secrecy, more military equipment, more emergency authority and fewer constitutional restraints.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, a nation that abandons the rule of law abroad will eventually find that the rule of law has little power to restrain its government at home.

This, too, is blowback: unchecked power, diminished freedom and a government that ceases to serve its people.

WC: 1030

LOUISA, Va. — For centuries, churches have cared for “the least of these” by feeding the hungry, clothing the poor and sheltering those with nowhere else to go. For many congregations, doing so is an expression of faith protected by the First Amendment. Yet government officials are increasingly passing laws that make it harder for the homeless to survive in public spaces—while regulating, restricting or even penalizing churches, religious charities and nonprofits that attempt to help.

Although the government has a legitimate role in protecting public health and safety and may enforce reasonable building and fire regulations, The Rutherford Institute warns that when zoning requirements become so burdensome that churches are discouraged from carrying out their religious mission, government crosses an important constitutional line. When temperatures fall below freezing, that constitutional line can become the difference between someone finding shelter and someone spending the night in life-threatening cold.

“We’ve seen a disturbing national push to criminalize homelessness and penalize those who try to help, but compassion should not require a permit,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Churches and other religious institutions should not have to choose between obeying God and complying with unnecessary government paperwork before offering someone a warm place to sleep on a freezing night.”

Across the country, government officials are increasingly responding to homelessness not by encouraging private acts of charity, but by regulating, displacing or criminalizing homeless people and burdening the churches, charities and volunteers willing to help them.

By requiring churches to obtain government approval before answering their religious calling, Rutherford Institute attorneys warn that Louisa County risks aligning itself with that troubling national trend. The proposed zoning amendment being considered by the Louisa County Board of Supervisors would classify “humanitarian shelters” as facilities providing temporary shelter and basic services without leases or occupancy agreements. Property owners—including churches—would then be required to secure a conditional use permit by meeting multiple operational requirements before they can answer God’s call to help the less fortunate by opening their doors to homeless men, women and families on cold winter nights.

Rutherford Institute attorneys warn that requiring churches to obtain government permission before offering temporary shelter to those in need creates a chilling effect and could place unconstitutional roadblocks in the way of churches exercising their First Amendment rights.

In a letter to the Louisa County Board of Supervisors, Institute attorneys explained that churches already appear to be permitted under the County’s existing ordinances to provide temporary overnight shelter without obtaining a conditional use permit (CUP). The County’s definition of religious assembly allows churches to operate day cares and day care centers that may provide care, protection and guidance to adults for less than a full 24-hour period. The Institute is therefore asking the Board to at least clarify that churches and other organizations already permitted to provide such care do not need an additional CUP when individuals are sheltered temporarily and do not remain continuously for a full 24-hour period.

Constitutional and statutory protections require governments to accommodate religious exercise (i.e., provide religious practices with “favored treatment,” as the U.S. Supreme Court has stated)—not burden it. Yet Institute attorneys warn that imposing a land use or zoning regulation which substantially burdens a person’s or organization’s religious exercise could violate laws like the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) and the Virginia Religious Freedom Restoration Act even if it is a neutral rule which is generally applicable to all.

Last year, The Rutherford Institute wrote to the Louisa County Planning Commission, which approved the proposed ordinance and sent it to the Board of Supervisors. In outlining three major concerns with the proposed amendment, the Institute is calling on Louisa County to revise the proposed ordinance to explicitly recognize that “religious assembly” use encompasses temporary humanitarian shelter, and to not require a CUP for churches operating within that scope. At stake, the Institute argues, is not merely a zoning dispute, but whether churches remain free to answer suffering with shelter without first seeking the government's permission.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert… It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”—Martin Luther King Jr.

We have been ambushed.

We should be talking about the dangerous, destabilizing things being done to this country.

We should be talking about the data centers spreading across the landscape, draining electricity and water, straining local infrastructure and expanding the technological machinery needed to track, profile and control the population.

We should be talking about the government’s growing network of detention centers and its family-separation policies, which have resulted in an estimated 145,000 American children experiencing the detention of at least one parent—including more than 22,000 U.S.-citizen children whose entire household of co-resident parents has been detained.

We should be talking about license-plate readers, facial recognition, government databases and artificial intelligence capable of turning our movements and associations into a digital dossier on every person in America.

We should be talking about masked government agents, endless war, disappearing constitutional safeguards and an imperial presidency accountable to no one.

Instead, we are trapped in a vicious loop of nonsense, mania, political demagoguery and manufactured spectacle while the country goes to hell in a handbasket.

Every day—sometimes every hour—brings another outrage, another threat, another vulgar display of power, another self-glorifying meme, another political provocation and another distraction demanding our attention.

Before we can fully comprehend one assault on the Republic, another takes its place.

That is not merely the chaos surrounding this government.

It is one of the ways this government maintains power.

Keep the public angry, exhausted, frightened and distracted. Force everyone to chase the latest outrage. Crowd out serious scrutiny with political theater. Then push past another constitutional boundary while no one is able to keep track of what has already been lost.

This is how every crisis appears fleeting and every constitutional violation merely the latest controversy in an endless political spectacle.

Taken together, however, these are not isolated events.

They are tests.

Donald Trump is not defending the Constitution. He is testing how much of it he can violate before anyone stops him.

He is testing whether a president can wage war without Congress. He is testing whether federal power can be turned into personal power. He is testing whether dissent can be punished without formally outlawing speech. He is testing whether masked government agents can operate as a secret police force beyond public scrutiny and constitutional accountability. He is testing whether the government can watch, track and profile everyone without meaningful limits. He is testing whether the Twenty-Second Amendment, which limits a president to two terms in office, means what it says.

Most of all, he is testing how much abuse the American people will tolerate before exhaustion, fear, distraction and partisan loyalty wear down their willingness to resist.

That is the real constitutional crisis confronting America.

Trump has turned constitutional government into a continuous test of submission: He pushes beyond a boundary and waits. Will Congress resist? Will the courts intervene? Will government officials refuse? Will the public object? Or will everyone retreat, rationalize, delay and adjust?

If no one stops him, the violation becomes precedent. Then he pushes farther.

This is how a republic is dismantled—not necessarily through one dramatic declaration of dictatorship, but through a succession of constitutional violations that go unanswered long enough to become the new normal.

The administration’s approach to war offers a revealing glimpse into the instincts driving much of its conduct.

Asked about Iran’s promise to retaliate according to the principle of “an eye for an eye,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that Trump’s policy is “a head for an eye.”

Not proportionality. Not restraint. Vengeance to the maximum.

The impulse behind that doctrine—to retaliate when challenged, punish when criticized, escalate when restrained and push harder when the law says no—is not confined to the battlefield. It runs through the administration’s approach to political opponents, dissent, immigration enforcement, executive power and constitutional limits.

“A head for an eye” may be Trump’s philosophy of war, but it is also a warning about the kind of government that philosophy produces. The result is a government at war not only with foreign enemies but with dissent, privacy, due process, constitutional limits—and ultimately with the American people.

Meanwhile, as the administration tests how much damage it can inflict and how many boundaries it can cross without consequences, the public is being overwhelmed by a relentless barrage of noise, spectacle and manufactured outrage.

And the costs of the government’s recklessness continue to mount.

The war with Iran continues to consume lives, military resources and tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Critical munitions are reportedly running low. Military commanders are being forced to make difficult decisions about which weapons must be preserved. American service members have been killed and hundreds more injured. Disruptions to global oil supplies threaten higher prices, shortages and further economic instability.

Yet even as the administration demands billions more to replenish the weapons expended in its war, it is preparing to end a Medicare subsidy program that has helped hold down prescription-drug-plan premiums for millions of older Americans.

The government can find billions for bombs but tells senior citizens to brace for higher costs. It can also spend public money on enormous banners bearing Trump’s face and regilding statues while ordinary Americans struggle to afford food, medicine, housing and fuel.

The sums spent on banners and gilded statues may be small compared with the cost of war, but their symbolism is impossible to miss. They reveal the priorities of a government that increasingly treats public money as a fund for war, political propaganda, personal glorification and imperial spectacle.

Meanwhile, Trump golfs, circulates self-aggrandizing artificial-intelligence memes, demands praise and continues to treat the presidency as though it were a personal brand rather than a constitutional trust.

This is what government without constitutional limits looks like: war without accountability, policing without transparency, surveillance without warrants, propaganda without shame and power without restraint.

America does not need another political slogan. It does not need to be made great again, stronger again, feared again, richer again or more powerful again.

America needs to be made free again.

Free from a government that tracks everywhere we go, treats dissent as dangerous, wages war without accountability, polices communities like occupied territory and insists that constitutional rights must yield whenever those in power invoke national security.

The question is no longer whether the Constitution is welcome in America. The question is whether the government still considers the Constitution binding at all.

By all indications, the answer is no.

Trump’s war with Iran is testing whether a president can bypass Congress, wage war on his own authority and force the country to absorb the consequences afterward.

So far, the answer appears to be yes.

The Constitution gives Congress—not the president—the power to decide whether the country goes to war. Yet each time Congress funds an unauthorized war rather than stopping it, presidential lawlessness becomes more firmly entrenched. Each time the courts decline to intervene, executive war-making becomes harder to challenge. Each time the public becomes distracted by the latest spectacle, another constitutional boundary disappears.

The theatrical and costly rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War may be the most truthful thing about the Trump administration.

It is a government organized around war: war abroad, war at the border, war in the streets, war on dissent, war on privacy, war on poverty’s victims and war on anyone who refuses to fall in line. Every crisis has become an excuse to expand government power. Every enemy becomes a reason to weaken constitutional protections. Every emergency becomes permanent.

Trump is also testing whether federal power can be transformed into personal power.

The Constitution requires presidents to faithfully execute the laws. Trump demands that government officials faithfully execute his will. He has surrounded himself with loyalists, purged or sidelined officials who might resist him, treated independent oversight as insubordination and demonized critics as enemies.

The danger is not merely that Trump possesses enormous executive power. It is that the government increasingly treats loyalty to Trump as interchangeable with loyalty to the country.

That is how constitutional government gives way to personal rule.

Public servants cease to ask whether an order is lawful and begin asking whether it pleases the president. Agencies cease to serve the public and begin protecting the ruler. Independent oversight becomes sabotage. Disagreement becomes disloyalty. Resistance becomes treason.

Trump did not create the imperial presidency or the American police state. He inherited them.

Republican and Democratic administrations spent decades building the machinery he now commands: emergency powers, mass surveillance, militarized policing, executive war-making, government secrecy and a sprawling bureaucracy accustomed to operating beyond meaningful accountability.

Each administration inherited dangerous powers from the one before it. Each promised that those powers would be used responsibly. Each left the government more powerful and the people less free.

Trump’s particular danger is that he has seized this machinery, expanded it, personalized it and stripped away much of the pretense that it exists for anything other than power and control.

He is testing whether dissent can be punished without formally outlawing speech.

The First Amendment remains on paper. Americans are still legally permitted to criticize the government. Yet the administration does not need to repeal the First Amendment if it can make exercising those rights sufficiently dangerous. It can investigate critics, threaten opponents, pressure universities and law firms, target protesters, intimidate journalists and brand dissenters as enemies of the state. It can exploit the vast surveillance apparatus already in place to identify who attends a protest, visits a controversial website, associates with an unpopular group or travels to a politically sensitive location.

This is where the test of dissent merges with the test of surveillance.

The government no longer needs to assign an officer to follow you.

Your phone, your car, your face, your purchases and your digital associations do the reporting for it. License-plate readers, facial recognition, geofence searches, social-media monitoring and artificial intelligence can assemble detailed profiles of people never suspected of a crime.

The danger is no longer simply that the government can watch everyone. It is that an administration demanding personal loyalty possesses the machinery to identify, track, intimidate and retaliate against those who refuse to submit.

Speech does not have to be formally outlawed when people can be frightened into silence.

Trump is also testing whether federal agents can operate beyond constitutional and public accountability.

Immigration enforcement has become the proving ground for this authoritarian model of policing. Yet government powers do not remain confined to their original targets. Once the government claims the power to hide agents’ identities, conduct militarized raids, track people through vast databases and detain them without meaningful due process, those powers will eventually be turned on others.

Today, the target may be an undocumented immigrant. Tomorrow, it may be a protester, journalist, gun owner, government critic, parent, medical patient, religious minority or anyone whose movements and beliefs trigger an algorithmic warning.

The test is whether Americans will accept government lawlessness when it is directed at people they have been taught to fear or despise.

If they do, the precedent will be waiting when the government chooses its next enemy.

Finally, Trump is testing whether the Twenty-Second Amendment means what it says.

The Constitution could hardly be clearer: no person may be elected president more than twice. Yet Trump continues to flirt with the possibility of remaining in power beyond two terms, while allies float amendments and theories for circumventing the prohibition.

These provocations are often dismissed as jokes, trolling or political theater.

That is a mistake.

Authoritarians rarely begin by announcing that they intend to dismantle constitutional government. They float an idea, repeat it until it sounds less shocking, ridicule those who take it seriously and wait for the public to grow accustomed to the possibility.

Trump is testing whether an explicit constitutional prohibition can be weakened through repetition, rationalization and partisan loyalty.

There is another test underway that may determine whether any of these constitutional restraints survive: will Trump accept an election that threatens his hold on power?

Trump has a habit of giving away his intentions.

He has mastered the art of accusing others of what he is doing, has already done or may be preparing to do. He accuses others of weaponizing government while turning federal power against his critics. He accuses others of corruption while treating public office as an instrument of personal enrichment and political reward. He accuses others of censorship while seeking to punish speech he dislikes. He accuses others of lawlessness while treating the Constitution as something to evade whenever it obstructs him.

So when Trump repeatedly warns that elections are being “rigged” or “stolen,” we should pay close attention.

The question is not merely whether he is repeating old grievances about 2020. The question is what those accusations are conditioning the country to accept in 2026.

Are they preparing supporters to reject results that cost Republicans control of Congress? Are they laying the groundwork for federal intervention in elections traditionally administered by the states or for emergency actions carried out in the name of “election integrity”?

These are not far-fetched concerns.

Trump has an enormous personal stake in the midterm elections. A Congress controlled by his opponents could investigate his administration, expose abuses, block his agenda, cut off funding and begin impeachment proceedings.

That makes the coming election another constitutional test.

Will the president respect the right of the people to withdraw their political support? Or will he once again insist that any election he does not control must have been stolen?

Trump has spent years teaching his followers to believe that only two election outcomes are possible: either he wins, or someone cheated.

That is not faith in democracy. It is a warning that democratic government will be tolerated only as long as it produces the ruler’s preferred result.

He will keep testing until someone stops him.

Unfortunately, Congress has largely abandoned its duty to check presidential power. The courts increasingly allow constitutional controversies to be resolved through delays, procedural maneuvers and doctrines that shield government officials from accountability. Federal agencies resist transparency, police investigate themselves, and private contractors help the government evade constitutional limits.

And the American people are encouraged to treat every abuse as a partisan question rather than a constitutional one.

That is the trap.

The police state survives because Americans have been conditioned to oppose tyranny only when the other party is responsible for it.

Republicans defend executive power when a Republican occupies the White House. Democrats defend it when a Democrat is president. Both parties promise reform. Neither dismantles the machinery.

This is why merely replacing one president with another will not make America free again.

Freedom cannot depend on finding a benevolent ruler.

The Constitution was not written on the assumption that good people would always hold power. It was written because power corrupts, government officials lie, institutions protect themselves and rulers invariably insist that whatever they do is necessary.

Yet constitutional limits are not self-enforcing. Congress must defend its powers. The courts must issue rulings the government cannot evade or ignore. Public officials must refuse unlawful commands. Journalists must expose abuses rather than become consumed by spectacle. The people must withdraw their consent from leaders who treat the Constitution as a dare.

Otherwise, the Constitution becomes little more than a catalogue of restrictions the president has learned he can violate without consequence.

That is the larger pattern obscured by the hourly barrage of outrage, mania and political theater.

Cross a line.

Wait.

If Congress hesitates, the courts delay, officials comply and the public moves on, the line was never real.

Then cross another.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, constitutional limits mean nothing when the institutions entrusted with enforcing them refuse to act.

The greatest danger is not that Trump keeps testing the limits.

It is that the institutions entrusted with enforcing those limits keep failing the test.

WC: 2721

We have been ambushed.

We should be talking about the dangerous, destabilizing things being done to this country.

We should be talking about the data centers spreading across the landscape, draining electricity and water, straining local infrastructure and expanding the technological machinery needed to track, profile and control the population.

We should be talking about the government’s growing network of detention centers and its family-separation policies, which have resulted in an estimated 145,000 American children experiencing the detention of at least one parent—including more than 22,000 U.S.-citizen children whose entire household of co-resident parents has been detained.

We should be talking about license-plate readers, facial recognition, government databases and artificial intelligence capable of turning our movements and associations into a digital dossier on every person in America.

We should be talking about masked government agents, endless war, disappearing constitutional safeguards and an imperial presidency accountable to no one.

Instead, we are trapped in a vicious loop of nonsense, mania, political demagoguery and manufactured spectacle while the country goes to hell in a handbasket.

Every day—sometimes every hour—brings another outrage, another threat, another vulgar display of power, another self-glorifying meme, another political provocation and another distraction demanding our attention.

Before we can fully comprehend one assault on the Republic, another takes its place.

That is not merely the chaos surrounding this government.

It is one of the ways this government maintains power.

Keep the public angry, exhausted, frightened and distracted. Force everyone to chase the latest outrage. Crowd out serious scrutiny with political theater. Then push past another constitutional boundary while no one is able to keep track of what has already been lost.

This is how every crisis appears fleeting and every constitutional violation merely the latest controversy in an endless political spectacle.

Taken together, however, these are not isolated events.

They are tests.

Donald Trump is not defending the Constitution. He is testing how much of it he can violate before anyone stops him.

He is testing whether a president can wage war without Congress. He is testing whether federal power can be turned into personal power. He is testing whether dissent can be punished without formally outlawing speech. He is testing whether masked government agents can operate as a secret police force beyond public scrutiny and constitutional accountability. He is testing whether the government can watch, track and profile everyone without meaningful limits. He is testing whether the Twenty-Second Amendment, which limits a president to two terms in office, means what it says.

Most of all, he is testing how much abuse the American people will tolerate before exhaustion, fear, distraction and partisan loyalty wear down their willingness to resist.

That is the real constitutional crisis confronting America.

Trump has turned constitutional government into a continuous test of submission: He pushes beyond a boundary and waits. Will Congress resist? Will the courts intervene? Will government officials refuse? Will the public object? Or will everyone retreat, rationalize, delay and adjust?

If no one stops him, the violation becomes precedent. Then he pushes farther.

This is how a republic is dismantled—not necessarily through one dramatic declaration of dictatorship, but through a succession of constitutional violations that go unanswered long enough to become the new normal.

The administration’s approach to war offers a revealing glimpse into the instincts driving much of its conduct.

Asked about Iran’s promise to retaliate according to the principle of “an eye for an eye,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that Trump’s policy is “a head for an eye.”

Not proportionality. Not restraint. Vengeance to the maximum.

The impulse behind that doctrine—to retaliate when challenged, punish when criticized, escalate when restrained and push harder when the law says no—is not confined to the battlefield. It runs through the administration’s approach to political opponents, dissent, immigration enforcement, executive power and constitutional limits.

“A head for an eye” may be Trump’s philosophy of war, but it is also a warning about the kind of government that philosophy produces. The result is a government at war not only with foreign enemies but with dissent, privacy, due process, constitutional limits—and ultimately with the American people.

Meanwhile, as the administration tests how much damage it can inflict and how many boundaries it can cross without consequences, the public is being overwhelmed by a relentless barrage of noise, spectacle and manufactured outrage.

And the costs of the government’s recklessness continue to mount.

The war with Iran continues to consume lives, military resources and tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Critical munitions are reportedly running low. Military commanders are being forced to make difficult decisions about which weapons must be preserved. American service members have been killed and hundreds more injured. Disruptions to global oil supplies threaten higher prices, shortages and further economic instability.

Yet even as the administration demands billions more to replenish the weapons expended in its war, it is preparing to end a Medicare subsidy program that has helped hold down prescription-drug-plan premiums for millions of older Americans.

The government can find billions for bombs but tells senior citizens to brace for higher costs. It can also spend public money on enormous banners bearing Trump’s face and regilding statues while ordinary Americans struggle to afford food, medicine, housing and fuel.

This is what government without constitutional limits looks like: war without accountability, policing without transparency, surveillance without warrants, propaganda without shame and power without restraint.

The question is no longer whether the Constitution is welcome in America. The question is whether the government still considers the Constitution binding at all.

By all indications, the answer is no.

Trump will keep testing the limits of the Constitution until someone stops him.

Unfortunately, Congress has largely abandoned its duty to check presidential power. The courts increasingly allow constitutional controversies to be resolved through delays, procedural maneuvers and doctrines that shield government officials from accountability. Federal agencies resist transparency, police investigate themselves, and private contractors help the government evade constitutional limits.

And the American people are encouraged to treat every abuse as a partisan question rather than a constitutional one.

That is the trap.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, constitutional limits mean nothing when the institutions entrusted with enforcing them refuse to act.

The greatest danger is not that Trump keeps testing the limits.

It is that the institutions entrusted with enforcing those limits keep failing the test.

WC: 1080

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the Trump administration weakens the few remaining mechanisms for independently investigating government misconduct, a police-shooting case left undisturbed by the U.S. Supreme Court warns that lawful firearm possession could be transformed from a constitutional right into grounds for being shot by police without warning.

In Green v. Tanner, judges—not a jury—decided that a police officer acted reasonably in shooting an armed, off-duty officer outside his own home, despite disputed evidence about what the shooting officer saw and whether the victim appeared to pose a threat. The appeals court relied on the sweeping proposition that no constitutional or statutory right prevents an officer from using deadly force when faced with “an apparently loaded weapon.” In appealing to the Supreme Court, The Rutherford Institute, Cato Institute, Law Enforcement Action Partnership and the Southern Center for Human Rights warned that the ruling threatens the Second Amendment right to bear arms, the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable force, and the Seventh Amendment right to have disputed facts decided by a jury.

“Lawfully possessing a firearm cannot be turned into a death warrant,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Yet with the Trump administration dismantling the few mechanisms left for holding government officials accountable—independent investigations, public transparency, civil rights lawsuits and jury trials—the police state is increasingly being allowed to police itself. When government agents use deadly force, their own agencies control the evidence, their own lawyers defend them, and judges prevent juries from deciding whether the agent’s conduct was reasonable, accountability becomes an illusion.”

The case arose after Milton Green, a 15-year veteran of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, was shot by another officer during a pursuit near Green’s home. Green, who was off duty, drew his firearm after an armed suspect ran through his yard. According to Green, his gun was pointed toward the ground and he displayed his police badge. A detective recognized Green and repeatedly warned the surrounding officers not to shoot. Nevertheless, another officer shot Green, later claiming that he mistook him for the fleeing suspect and his badge for a gun. The shooting permanently injured Green and ended his police career.

Green filed a civil rights lawsuit, arguing that a jury should decide whether the officer’s claimed mistake was reasonable because the facts were disputed and the officer admitted that he did not see the badge in Green’s hand. Green never received a jury trial. The district court dismissed the case before trial, and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed, concluding that the use of deadly force was objectively reasonable. The coalition warned that if the apparent presence of a firearm permits deadly force as a matter of law, lawful gun ownership itself may be transformed from a protected constitutional right into grounds for being shot without warning. The danger extends beyond one police shooting. The ruling dismantles key safeguards and leaves government officials in control of every stage of the process: using force, controlling the evidence, defending the conduct and deciding whether the official account will ever be tested before a jury.

Matthew P. Cavedon and Alexander M. Xenos of Cato Institute advanced the arguments in the Green v. Tanner amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“If you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on Earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.”— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

Having burned through billions of dollars and depleted critical munitions stockpiles, the Pentagon is running out of money.

Our money.

According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon is facing an urgent budget shortfall caused largely by the Iran war, with some critical funding accounts expected to run dry within weeks. Training, maintenance and other military priorities are reportedly being squeezed as the government struggles to sustain Trump’s escalating conflict.

Once again, the government is looking to the American people for a taxpayer-funded bailout—this time to the tune of $67 billion.

Nor is the $67 billion emergency infusion the end of it.

Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget calls for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in national-defense spending—a staggering increase that would pour still more money into a military apparatus that cannot account honestly for the costs of its current war, maintain its existing priorities, or keep from returning to taxpayers for another bailout.

The problem is not simply how much the war machine consumes. It is how little accountability accompanies that spending.

The government can launch a war, exhaust military resources, conceal its full costs, and return to Congress for billions more without anyone responsible being required to admit error, change course, or answer for the lives lost.

That is becoming a familiar pattern under Donald Trump.

He makes the decisions—others absorb the consequences.

He launches the war—the troops make the sacrifices, and taxpayers inherit the bill.

The Iran war is not merely another example of government waste, although the cost is already staggering. The war has already cost an estimated $80 to $100 billion, not counting its long-term economic impact, future veteran expenses, or the cost of repairing damaged military bases. Analysts estimate that the broader toll on American households could eventually reach as much as $1,000 per household.

Yet the true cost cannot be measured in dollars alone.

American service members are dying in a war Trump started without meaningful congressional authorization, without a credible plan for ending it, and without an honest accounting of what it will cost.

The Pentagon is draining resources from training, maintenance and weapons programs to keep the conflict going. Congress is being asked to supply billions more. And the American people—already struggling under the weight of debt, inflation and economic uncertainty—are expected to pay without question.

This is government without accountability.

It is also the Trump business model applied to government: take the risks, claim the credit, transfer the losses and leave someone else to clean up the wreckage.

Trump has spent a lifetime marketing himself as a brilliant businessman, yet his record is littered with bankruptcies, defaults, failed ventures and losses shifted onto others.

In private business, a failed venture can be abandoned and its consequences transferred.

A president’s failures are not so easily contained, yet Trump continues to govern as though America were merely another disposable business venture.

And when Trump’s own decisions cost American lives, deplete military stockpiles and burn through billions of taxpayer dollars, the bill never finds its way to him.

It finds its way to us.

Yet the contrast between those who make these decisions and those forced to live with them could hardly be more stark.

While American service members are being returned home in flag-draped coffins, Trump moves from golf courses to galas to grand spectacles.

While the Pentagon scrambles to find the money and munitions, Trump lavishes attention on the trappings of power, from gilded alterations to the people’s house to extravagant ceremonial projects.

While ordinary Americans struggle with inflation, instability and the cascading costs of his policies, Trump presides over the pageantry of the presidency seemingly untouched by the consequences.

And while the American people are told to sacrifice, Trump’s family continues converting access to presidential power into extraordinary private wealth.

Trump reported more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures in 2025, while Reuters calculated that the family added at least $2.3 billion to its fortune through its principal crypto businesses after Trump returned to the presidency.

The problem is not merely one of appearances.

It is that Trump remains conspicuously insulated from the human and financial consequences of his own decisions.

That insulation from consequence is matched by a swaggering display of bluster and bravado that passes for leadership within the Trump administration.

Take Pete Hegseth, the self-styled “Secretary of War,” who speaks less like a civilian entrusted with the grave responsibility of war and peace than a character delivering an action-movie threat.

“If you kill Americans, we will hunt you down,” Hegseth warned.

The Trump administration has embraced that threat as a statement of national resolve: anyone who kills an American will be hunted down and made to pay.

Unless, of course, the Americans are killed by their own government.

Unless they are service members sent to die in a preemptive war the president started without constitutional authority and cannot seem to end.

Unless they are shot by immigration agents or police officers conditioned to treat fear, resistance and the mere presence of a weapon as a license to kill.

Unless they die in government custody.

Unless they become casualties of public-health safeguards weakened by mass firings, budget cuts, political interference and administrative incompetence.

In those cases, no one is hunted down, no one in power is made to pay, and no one is held responsible.

This is the double standard that passes for justice in the American Police State.

Yet this culture of official impunity did not begin with Donald Trump.

For decades, presidents of both parties have expanded executive power, surrendered constitutional checks, protected government agents from meaningful accountability and conditioned the public to accept official violence as the unavoidable price of security.

Trump inherited that machinery.

He has also embraced its deadliest powers, accelerated its abuses and made the elimination of accountability a governing principle.

The Iran war is merely the latest—and most visible—example.

American service members are dying in a war that is not making America safer, no matter what Trump insists to the contrary.

Seventeen American service members have reportedly been killed in the war, while more than 400 have been injured. Rather than treating those deaths as evidence of the terrible costs and strategic failures of his war, Trump has used them to justify further escalation, warning that Iran will “pay many times over” for every American life lost.

This is how endless wars become unending.

Every American death becomes a reason to continue the war that caused it. Every retaliation generates another retaliation. Every escalation becomes the excuse for another escalation. Every failure is rebranded as a reason to stay the course.

The president starts the war. The military carries it out. American service members die in it. And the public is told that questioning the wisdom or legality of the conflict is tantamount to betraying the troops.

This is not a strategy for peace.

It is a self-perpetuating cycle of death, vengeance and political evasion.

Trump’s response to the mounting casualties has not been restraint, transparency or a serious accounting of how the country became trapped in another Middle Eastern war.

It has been more threats, more bombs, more chest-beating and more demands that the American people fall in line—and not even a glimmer of ownership for the mistakes that landed us here.

Meanwhile, the dead become justification for still more death.

The failures become justification for still more money.

And those who made the decisions remain insulated from the consequences.

Yet the Iran war is only one front in the government’s longstanding war on accountability.

The same culture of impunity that shields presidents from responsibility for unconstitutional wars also protects government agents from meaningful scrutiny when raids, detentions and uses of force result in injury or death.

Nowhere is that more visible than in the Trump administration’s increasingly militarized approach to immigration enforcement.

Federal immigration agents carry out raids in masks, tactical gear and unmarked vehicles. They detain people at homes, workplaces, traffic stops and routine immigration appointments. Record numbers of people are being arrested and warehoused in detention centers, many of them with no criminal history.

The Trump administration calls this law enforcement.

But law enforcement without transparency, restraint or accountability quickly becomes something far more dangerous.

In recent weeks, ICE agents have fatally shot men in Texas and Maine, prompting senators to demand body cameras, visible identification, clearer use-of-force rules and greater transparency about who is being entrusted with the power to kill.

Both men were reportedly shot in their vehicles. Neither was the intended target of the enforcement action. Neither encounter was captured on an officer’s body camera.

A temporary pause in ICE traffic stops reportedly lasted only one day before the White House intervened and ordered the operations resumed.

That is the Trump administration’s idea of accountability: pause briefly, manage the fallout, and then allow the machinery to continue operating as before.

There is no meaningful independent review.

There is no public accounting of what went wrong.

There is no assurance that deadly force will be treated as a last resort rather than an acceptable consequence of aggressive enforcement.

Instead, the government investigates itself, controls the evidence, shapes the official narrative, and moves on.

The government kills. The government investigates. The government absolves itself.

This is not unique to immigration enforcement.

The same pattern has defined policing in America for decades.

Police officers are trained to perceive threats everywhere and to treat their subjective fear as more important than the objective constitutional rights of the people they serve.

Reach for your wallet and you may be shot. Hold a cellphone and you may be shot. Fail to obey confusing or contradictory commands quickly enough and you may be shot.

Possess a firearm—even lawfully—and the government may argue that the exercise of your Second Amendment rights made you sufficiently dangerous to kill. Then the legal system steps in to prevent a jury from ever weighing what happened.

Qualified immunity, judicial deference and doctrines that elevate “officer safety” above almost every competing constitutional consideration have helped create a system in which government agents can use deadly force and avoid meaningful scrutiny afterward.

Trump did not create this system.

Police militarization, qualified immunity, aggressive federal enforcement and institutional self-protection were firmly entrenched long before he returned to office.

What Trump has done is intensify those tendencies, remove restraints, reward aggression and treat demands for accountability as attacks on law enforcement itself.

The result is a system in which the greater the government’s power, the smaller the consequences for its abuse.

The police state does not have to pull a trigger to put lives at risk.

It can also endanger the public by weakening the safeguards designed to prevent avoidable harm.

Public-health agencies, food inspectors, disease-surveillance programs, medical researchers and drug-safety personnel exist because failures in these areas can have deadly consequences.

When those protections are weakened, risks increase. When expertise is driven out, warnings are missed. When oversight disappears, preventable crises become more likely.

The Trump administration’s mass firings, funding cuts and political interference have hollowed out critical public-health and food-safety agencies.

The Food and Drug Administration reportedly lost thousands of employees in 2025 and hundreds more in 2026. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food Safety and Inspection Service and other agencies responsible for protecting the public have also undergone substantial staffing reductions. Foreign food-facility inspections have fallen to historic lows following layoffs and budget cuts, even as the American food supply becomes more global, complex and difficult to monitor. Programs that track and respond to emerging disease threats have also been scaled back.

These are not abstract bureaucratic changes.

They determine whether contaminated food and unsafe drugs are identified before people are harmed, whether emerging diseases are contained before they spread, and whether qualified experts are available before a manageable threat becomes a national crisis.

No government can eliminate every danger or prevent every death, but when an administration knowingly strips away safeguards, disregards expert warnings and replaces competence with loyalty, it cannot pretend that the resulting harm has nothing to do with its decisions.

Accountability requires recognizing that policy choices have foreseeable consequences—and asking who ordered the cuts, ignored the warnings, benefited from dismantling oversight and will answer when the public is harmed.

Yet when those consequences arrive, no one in power accepts responsibility. The victims and their families are left to absorb the consequences, while the officials who made the decisions retreat behind bureaucracy, immunity and plausible deniability.

The same machinery of official impunity operates across administrations and agencies.

What distinguishes Trump is the speed with which his administration has dismantled remaining safeguards, dismissed expertise and treated accountability as an obstacle to power.

The pattern is the same whether the harm occurs on a battlefield, during an immigration raid, in a police encounter or through the failure of an institution charged with protecting the public.

Those with power make the decisions. Those without power bear the consequences.

This is how official impunity becomes a system of government.

Presidents claim immunity. Congress surrenders its constitutional responsibilities. Military officials classify their mistakes. Federal agencies investigate themselves. Police officers invoke qualified immunity. Prosecutors protect government agents. Courts keep juries from weighing the evidence. Corporations profit from government contracts. Officials leave public service for lucrative private-sector positions with the very industries they once oversaw.

Taxpayers pay every settlement, bailout, reconstruction cost and replenishment bill.

The names and political parties change. The machinery of impunity remains.

What distinguishes Trump is not that he created this machinery but the brazenness with which he uses it. He treats oversight as obstruction, criticism as disloyalty, constitutional restraints as inconveniences, and public office as a vehicle for private power and profit.

Under Trump, the buck stops nowhere.

Every consequence is transferred to someone else.

No one in power pays a personal price. No one admits fault. No one resigns. No one is prosecuted. No one is held accountable.

Instead, the public is told to move on. The policies continue. The machinery rolls forward.

This is how temporary abuses become permanent powers.

It is how republics become empires. It is how elected public servants become rulers who answer to no one. And it is how a government learns that it can inflict enormous harm without ever being required to pay a price.

Trump and Hegseth insist that anyone who kills an American will be hunted down and made to pay.

Yet who demands accountability when the decisions that cost American lives originate in the White House?

Who answers for the service members sent to die in an unconstitutional war launched without meaningful public debate or congressional authorization? Who answers for those who die during immigration raids, police encounters or government detention? Who answers when those in power enrich themselves while everyone else is left to bear the danger, instability and cost?

In the American Police State, the answer is almost always the same: Those in power are protected. Those without power bear the consequences.

The government operates above the law. Those who wield power become untouchable. Those who suffer are treated as disposable. Justice becomes whatever the government says it is.

And the machinery of government moves on without accountability.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is how the American Police State gets away with murder.

WC: 2605

Having burned through billions of dollars and depleted critical munitions stockpiles, the Pentagon is running out of money.

Our money.

According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon is facing an urgent budget shortfall caused largely by the Iran war, with some critical funding accounts expected to run dry within weeks. Training, maintenance and other military priorities are reportedly being squeezed as the government struggles to sustain Trump’s escalating conflict.

Once again, the government is looking to the American people for a taxpayer-funded bailout—this time to the tune of $67 billion.

Nor is the $67 billion emergency infusion the end of it.

Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget calls for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in national-defense spending—a staggering increase that would pour still more money into a military apparatus that cannot account honestly for the costs of its current war, maintain its existing priorities, or keep from returning to taxpayers for another bailout.

The problem is not simply how much the war machine consumes. It is how little accountability accompanies that spending.

The government can launch a war, exhaust military resources, conceal its full costs, and return to Congress for billions more without anyone responsible being required to admit error, change course, or answer for the lives lost.

That is becoming a familiar pattern under Donald Trump.

He makes the decisions—others absorb the consequences.

He launches the war—the troops make the sacrifices, and taxpayers inherit the bill.

The Iran war is not merely another example of government waste, although the cost is already staggering. The war has already cost an estimated $80 to $100 billion, not counting its long-term economic impact, future veteran expenses, or the cost of repairing damaged military bases. Analysts estimate that the broader toll on American households could eventually reach as much as $1,000 per household.

Yet the true cost cannot be measured in dollars alone.

American service members are dying in a war Trump started without meaningful congressional authorization, without a credible plan for ending it, and without an honest accounting of what it will cost.

The Pentagon is draining resources from training, maintenance and weapons programs to keep the conflict going. Congress is being asked to supply billions more. And the American people—already struggling under the weight of debt, inflation and economic uncertainty—are expected to pay without question.

This is government without accountability.

When Trump’s decisions cost American lives, deplete military stockpiles and burn through billions of taxpayer dollars, the bill never finds its way to him. It finds its way to us, while Trump remains conspicuously insulated from the human and financial consequences of his own decisions.

That insulation from consequence is matched by a swaggering display of bluster and bravado that passes for leadership within the Trump administration.

Take Pete Hegseth, the self-styled “Secretary of War,” who speaks less like a civilian entrusted with the grave responsibility of war and peace than a character delivering an action-movie threat.

“If you kill Americans, we will hunt you down,” Hegseth warned.

The Trump administration has embraced that threat as a statement of national resolve: anyone who kills an American will be hunted down and made to pay.

Unless, of course, the Americans are killed by their own government.

Unless they are service members sent to die in a preemptive war the president started without constitutional authority and cannot seem to end.

Unless they are shot by immigration agents or police officers conditioned to treat fear, resistance and the mere presence of a weapon as a license to kill.

Unless they die in government custody.

Unless they become casualties of public-health safeguards weakened by mass firings, budget cuts, political interference and administrative incompetence.

In those cases, no one is hunted down, no one in power is made to pay, and no one is held responsible.

This is the double standard that passes for justice in the American Police State.

For decades, presidents of both parties have expanded executive power, surrendered constitutional checks, protected government agents from meaningful accountability and conditioned the public to accept official violence as the unavoidable price of security.

Trump inherited that machinery.

He has also embraced its deadliest powers, accelerated its abuses and made the elimination of accountability a governing principle.

The Iran war is merely the latest—and most visible—example.

American service members are dying in a war that is not making America safer, no matter what Trump insists to the contrary.

Seventeen American service members have reportedly been killed in the war, while more than 400 have been injured. Rather than treating those deaths as evidence of the terrible costs and strategic failures of his war, Trump has used them to justify further escalation, warning that Iran will “pay many times over” for every American life lost.

Yet the Iran war is only one front in the government’s longstanding war on accountability.

The same culture of impunity that shields presidents from responsibility for unconstitutional wars also protects government agents from meaningful scrutiny when raids, detentions and uses of force result in injury or death.

Trump did not create this system.

Police militarization, qualified immunity, aggressive federal enforcement and institutional self-protection were firmly entrenched long before he returned to office.

What Trump has done is intensify those tendencies, remove restraints, reward aggression and treat demands for accountability as attacks on law enforcement itself.

The pattern is the same whether the harm occurs on a battlefield, during an immigration raid, in a police encounter or through the failure of an institution charged with protecting the public.

The names and political parties change. The machinery of impunity remains.

What distinguishes Trump is not that he created this machinery but the brazenness with which he uses it. He treats oversight as obstruction, criticism as disloyalty, constitutional restraints as inconveniences, and public office as a vehicle for private power and profit.

Under Trump, the buck stops nowhere.

No one in power pays a personal price. No one admits fault. No one resigns. No one is prosecuted. No one is held accountable.

Likewise, in the American Police State, those in power are protected. Those without power bear the consequences.

And the machinery of government moves on without accountability.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is how the American Police State gets away with murder.

WC: 1062

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

While Americans remain transfixed by the political circus—cheering for their preferred party, jeering at the opposition, obsessing over every manufactured outrage and waiting for the next spectacle—the Surveillance State continues its steady march forward.

The government is watching.

It watches where you go, whom you meet, where you worship, what medical offices you visit, what political rallies you attend, what protests you join, what books you read, what websites you visit and what causes you support.

It watches through your phone, your car, your doorbell, your appliances, your purchases, your social media accounts and the cameras positioned along the roads you travel every day.

This is how freedom dies in the digital police state: not always through dramatic declarations of martial law or soldiers stationed on every street corner, but through the gradual construction of a technological dragnet—an electronic concentration camp—so pervasive that privacy becomes impossible and anonymity becomes suspicious.

Enter Flock Safety, a private surveillance technology company whose automated license plate readers have spread throughout thousands of American communities.

These cameras, which do much more than photograph license plates, represent the next evolution of the government’s public-private surveillance partnership.

They document the time and location of every passing vehicle and record identifying characteristics such as its make, model, color, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other distinctive features. That information can then be placed in a searchable database and used to retrace a vehicle’s movements over time.

Yet the real power—and the real danger—of Flock does not come from the cameras alone.

It comes from artificial intelligence.

A camera can photograph a car. Flock’s AI-powered platform can identify and categorize a vehicle, compare an observation with stored records, generate alerts, identify connections and help police reconstruct where that vehicle has been.

AI is what transforms a photograph into the building blocks for a suspect society.

With AI, every driver becomes a data point. Every data point becomes a pattern. And every pattern becomes a suspicion.

This is how ordinary movements become potentially suspect and subject to government scrutiny. It allows law enforcement agencies to search not only for a complete license plate number but also for partial plates and physical descriptions such as vehicle color, make, model, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other identifying characteristics.

A police officer might ask the system to locate every red pickup truck with a ladder rack seen near a protest, every vehicle that repeatedly visited a particular address, or every car observed traveling between two locations.

The artificial intelligence does the sorting. The database supplies the history.

The government receives a list of potential suspects.

This is no longer surveillance conducted by individual officers following particular leads. It is surveillance conducted at machine speed, across entire populations, with algorithms deciding whose movements merit further scrutiny.

Consider the scale of what is taking place.

License plate cameras now log approximately 20 billion vehicle scans every month.

Twenty billion.

That is not targeted policing. That is mass collection.

The overwhelming majority of those scans do not involve stolen cars, wanted suspects, kidnappings or violent crimes. They document ordinary people carrying out the ordinary activities of daily life: driving to work, taking children to school, visiting friends, attending church, keeping medical appointments, participating in protests or simply going home.

Yet each of those innocent journeys becomes part of a searchable police database.

At 20 billion scans a month, Flock is not searching for particular suspects and then attempting to follow them. It is recording the movements of everyone so police can decide later whom they want to follow.

That is the digital equivalent of assigning a government agent to trail every driver in America—and preserving the agent’s notes in case the government someday finds them useful.

Yet mass collection is only the first stage of the AI surveillance state. The next is merging those billions of observations with everything else the government and its corporate partners know about us.

Flock is also part of a much larger shift toward AI-powered “data fusion,” in which license plate records are combined with facial recognition results, surveillance video, police reports, social media activity, commercially purchased information, gunshot-detection alerts and other government databases.

The danger is no longer merely that one system can track a car. It is the merger of previously separate streams of information into a single system capable of mapping a person’s movements, relationships, habits and associations.

These systems increasingly do more than provide officers with information to evaluate. They assign significance to associations, flag supposed threats and generate investigative leads—often through proprietary algorithms that neither the accused nor the public can examine.

Artificial intelligence does not eliminate human prejudice, institutional bias or bad information.

It industrializes them.

Feed a flawed system inaccurate data, biased arrest records or constitutionally suspect surveillance, and AI can reproduce those defects at a speed and scale no individual police officer could match.

Once the computer labels someone suspicious, moreover, officers may treat the algorithmic conclusion as objective fact.

The machine accuses. The police act. The citizen is left to prove that the machine was wrong.

Despite the extraordinary reach of this technology, Flock continues to portray its system as a limited, carefully controlled crime-fighting tool.

Flock insists that its cameras collect information about vehicles rather than people, that agencies control access to their own data, that searches are logged and that information is generally deleted after 30 days. Yet these assurances largely amount to distinctions without a difference.

Vehicles are extensions of the people who drive them.

Track a vehicle long enough, and you know where its owner sleeps, works, worships, shops, socializes, seeks medical treatment and participates in political activity.

You know when someone leaves home, when they return, whom they visit and how often.

You may not know the contents of their conversations, but you know enough to construct an intimate portrait of their life.

That is surveillance.

It does not become less invasive merely because the government has outsourced the cameras, databases and algorithms to a private corporation.

Nor does it cease to be surveillance because police claim that the information may someday be useful in solving a crime.

Indeed, that is the sleight of hand that has allowed the surveillance state to expand so rapidly.

The government no longer has to install every camera, maintain every database or directly collect every piece of information.

It merely encourages private companies, businesses, homeowners’ associations, schools and individual consumers to create an interconnected surveillance ecosystem—and then asks for access.

This public-private arrangement allows government agencies to acquire capabilities they might never receive public approval or sufficient funding to build on their own.

It also makes accountability almost impossible.

When abuses occur, local police blame the technology provider. The technology provider insists that local police control the data. Federal agencies claim they merely requested access. Local officials say they were unaware that information could be shared beyond their jurisdiction.

Everyone points elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the American people remain under observation.

Flock has become especially controversial because its network can transform what appears to be a collection of local cameras into something far more powerful: a searchable surveillance system that permits law enforcement agencies to look far beyond their own jurisdictions.

Flock says data sharing among agencies is optional and controlled by its customers. Yet the entire value of such a system lies in its interconnectedness.

A camera in one town is a traffic-monitoring device.

Thousands of cameras connected through searchable databases constitute a movement-tracking network.

The danger is not simply that police might search for a stolen car.

The danger is that the system permits government officials to begin with a location, a description or a fragment of information and work backward until someone emerges as a suspect.

That reverses the traditional order of constitutional policing.

Under the Fourth Amendment, police are supposed to develop individualized suspicion, establish probable cause and then apply for a warrant to search for evidence connected to a particular person or crime.

Mass surveillance systems begin by collecting information on everyone.

In the process, every innocent person is treated as a potential suspect whose movements must be recorded just in case the government someday decides they are relevant.

This is guilt by algorithm.

It is also the same constitutional inversion at the heart of geofence warrants, which allow police to demand information identifying every cellphone that happened to be near a particular location at a particular time.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Chatrie v. United States may signal that constitutional scrutiny is finally beginning to catch up with the surveillance state.

The case involved a geofence warrant used to obtain Google location records for cellphones near the scene of a robbery. Rather than beginning with an identified suspect, police demanded information about devices that happened to be within a designated area during a particular period and then worked backward to identify their owners.

The Supreme Court held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain an individual’s cellphone location history from a technology company.

That conclusion matters.

It rejects the government’s increasingly convenient argument that intimate information loses constitutional protection merely because a private corporation collected, stored or analyzed it.

The Court did not rule on Flock cameras or automated license plate databases. Nor did it decide that every geofence demand is necessarily unconstitutional. The justices left it to the Fourth Circuit to determine whether the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s probable-cause and particularity requirements at each stage of the search.

Nevertheless, the constitutional principle at the heart of Chatrie extends far beyond cellphones.

The government should not be able to evade the Fourth Amendment by outsourcing mass surveillance to private technology companies.

It should not matter whether the location trail comes from Google, Flock, a cellphone provider, a data broker or an interconnected network of privately owned cameras.

A detailed record of a person’s movements does not become less revealing because it follows a vehicle rather than a phone. The government should not be permitted to accomplish through Flock what it could not constitutionally accomplish by assigning police officers to follow millions of Americans everywhere they drive.

Indeed, Flock may present an even more troubling inversion of constitutional policing.

Geofence searches generally begin with a particular crime, location and period. Flock continuously collects information on millions of vehicles before any crime has occurred and before any individual is suspected of wrongdoing.

Police can then reach backward into that stored history and reconstruct a person’s movements.

The surveillance comes first. Suspicion comes later.

A warrant, when one is sought at all, may arrive only after the government has already built the database it intends to search.

Chatrie may provide constitutional ammunition for challenging this arrangement, but no single court ruling will dismantle the machinery of mass surveillance.

The technology is already embedded in thousands of communities.

The databases are already being populated.

The agencies are already connected.

And the companies profiting from this infrastructure will fight to preserve it.

Unfortunately, constitutional protections have rarely kept pace with the government’s appetite for surveillance.

The dangers are no longer theoretical.

Flock data has reportedly been used in investigations far removed from the serious violent crimes routinely invoked to justify these systems.

This is the inevitable trajectory of every surveillance technology. First, it is introduced as an emergency measure. Then it is justified as a crime-fighting tool. Then it is expanded to lesser crimes. Then it is used for administrative enforcement, political monitoring, immigration investigations and personal purposes.

Eventually, it becomes part of the background machinery of government—a permanent feature of daily life that no longer attracts attention because everyone has become accustomed to being watched.

That is how mission creep works.

Surveillance powers created to find kidnappers and violent criminals do not remain limited to kidnappers and violent criminals.

Databases built to locate stolen vehicles do not remain limited to stolen vehicles.

Government agencies cannot resist the temptation to use whatever power is available to them, especially when the use of that power is cheap, easy and largely hidden from the public.

The technology’s potential for error makes this even more dangerous.

License plate readers can misread plates, rely on inaccurate hot lists or associate an innocent vehicle with a crime. Once the system issues an alert, officers may treat the computer-generated result as fact.

The individual on the receiving end may be pulled over, surrounded by armed police, handcuffed, searched or detained before anyone discovers that the machine was wrong.

This is not justice. It is automated suspicion.

Flock is only one component of a surveillance ecosystem that includes doorbell cameras, facial recognition, drones, cellphone tracking, biometric databases and real-time crime centers.

The result is 360-degree surveillance.

A person may leave a home monitored by a smart doorbell, drive past a network of license plate readers, enter a business equipped with facial recognition, carry a phone broadcasting location data and return home along streets monitored by police cameras and private security systems.

At no point does the government need to physically follow that individual, because the infrastructure does it automatically.

Algorithms sort the information. Databases preserve it. Private companies monetize it. Government agencies search it.

All of this is taking place while the country remains locked in an endless partisan cage match.

Both parties have contributed to the Surveillance State. Both parties have expanded it. Both parties have exploited fear to convince the public that freedom must be sacrificed for safety.

The targets may change depending on who is in power, but the machinery remains.

Once the infrastructure exists, there is no guarantee that it will be used only against people you dislike or with whom you disagree politically.

That is the lesson Americans repeatedly refuse to learn.

A surveillance tool created by one administration will be inherited by the next. A database assembled for one purpose will inevitably be used for another. A system established to monitor “them” will eventually be turned against “us.”

Communities across the country are finally beginning to recognize the danger.

Some cities have terminated or declined to renew their Flock contracts. Others have paused deployments or demanded stronger restrictions on data sharing, retention and federal access.

This resistance is long overdue.

We cannot afford to become so distracted by the theater of politics that we fail to notice the architecture of tyranny being assembled around us.

The surveillance state does not care which party you support. It does not care whom you voted for.

It does not care whether you believe you have nothing to hide.

The cameras are watching. The databases are growing. The networks are connecting.

And as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, unless we act now, there may soon be nowhere left to go without the government knowing exactly where we have been.

WC: 2515

While Americans remain transfixed by the political circus—cheering for their preferred party, jeering at the opposition, obsessing over every manufactured outrage and waiting for the next spectacle—the Surveillance State continues its steady march forward.

The government is watching.

It watches where you go, whom you meet, where you worship, what medical offices you visit, what political rallies you attend, what protests you join, what books you read, what websites you visit and what causes you support.

It watches through your phone, your car, your doorbell, your appliances, your purchases, your social media accounts and the cameras positioned along the roads you travel every day.

This is how freedom dies in the digital police state: not always through dramatic declarations of martial law or soldiers stationed on every street corner, but through the gradual construction of a technological dragnet—an electronic concentration camp—so pervasive that privacy becomes impossible and anonymity becomes suspicious.

Enter Flock Safety, a private surveillance technology company whose automated license plate readers have spread throughout thousands of American communities.

These cameras, which do much more than photograph license plates, represent the next evolution of the government’s public-private surveillance partnership.

They document the time and location of every passing vehicle and record identifying characteristics such as its make, model, color, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other distinctive features. That information can then be placed in a searchable database and used to retrace a vehicle’s movements over time.

Yet the real power—and the real danger—of Flock does not come from the cameras alone.

It comes from artificial intelligence.

A camera can photograph a car. Flock’s AI-powered platform can identify and categorize a vehicle, compare an observation with stored records, generate alerts, identify connections and help police reconstruct where that vehicle has been.

AI is what transforms a photograph into the building blocks for a suspect society.

With AI, every driver becomes a data point. Every data point becomes a pattern. And every pattern becomes a suspicion.

This is how ordinary movements become potentially suspect and subject to government scrutiny. It allows law enforcement agencies to search not only for a complete license plate number but also for partial plates and physical descriptions such as vehicle color, make, model, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other identifying characteristics.

A police officer might ask the system to locate every red pickup truck with a ladder rack seen near a protest, every vehicle that repeatedly visited a particular address, or every car observed traveling between two locations.

The artificial intelligence does the sorting. The database supplies the history.

The government receives a list of potential suspects.

This is no longer surveillance conducted by individual officers following particular leads. It is surveillance conducted at machine speed, across entire populations, with algorithms deciding whose movements merit further scrutiny.

Consider the scale of what is taking place.

License plate cameras now log approximately 20 billion vehicle scans every month.

Twenty billion.

That is not targeted policing. That is mass collection.

The overwhelming majority of those scans do not involve stolen cars, wanted suspects, kidnappings or violent crimes. They document ordinary people carrying out the ordinary activities of daily life: driving to work, taking children to school, visiting friends, attending church, keeping medical appointments, participating in protests or simply going home.

Yet each of those innocent journeys becomes part of a searchable police database.

Mass collection is only the first stage of the AI surveillance state. The next is merging those billions of observations with everything else the government and its corporate partners know about us, part of a much larger shift toward AI-powered “data fusion,” in which license plate records are combined with facial recognition results, surveillance video, police reports, social media activity, commercially purchased information, gunshot-detection alerts and other government databases.

Surveillance does not become less invasive merely because the government has outsourced the cameras, databases and algorithms to a private corporation.

Nor does it cease to be surveillance because police claim that the information may someday be useful in solving a crime.

Indeed, that is the sleight of hand that has allowed the surveillance state to expand so rapidly.

The government no longer has to install every camera, maintain every database or directly collect every piece of information.

It merely encourages private companies, businesses, homeowners’ associations, schools and individual consumers to create an interconnected surveillance ecosystem—and then asks for access.

This public-private arrangement allows government agencies to acquire capabilities they might never receive public approval or sufficient funding to build on their own.

It also makes accountability almost impossible.

When abuses occur, local police blame the technology provider. The technology provider insists that local police control the data. Federal agencies claim they merely requested access. Local officials say they were unaware that information could be shared beyond their jurisdiction.

Everyone points elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the American people remain under observation.

Under the Fourth Amendment, police are supposed to develop individualized suspicion, establish probable cause and then apply for a warrant to search for evidence connected to a particular person or crime.

Mass surveillance systems begin by collecting information on everyone.

In the process, every innocent person is treated as a potential suspect whose movements must be recorded just in case the government someday decides they are relevant.

This is guilt by algorithm.

It is also the same constitutional inversion at the heart of geofence warrants, which allow police to demand information identifying every cellphone that happened to be near a particular location at a particular time.

When coupled with a surveillance ecosystem that includes doorbell cameras, facial recognition, drones, cellphone tracking, biometric databases and real-time crime centers, the result is 360-degree surveillance.

All of this is taking place while the country remains locked in an endless partisan cage match.

Yet we cannot afford to become so distracted by the theater of politics that we fail to notice the architecture of tyranny being assembled around us.

The surveillance state does not care which party you support. It does not care whom you voted for.

It does not care whether you believe you have nothing to hide.

The cameras are watching. The databases are growing. The networks are connecting.

And as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, unless we act now, there may soon be nowhere left to go without the government knowing exactly where we have been.

WC: 1072

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — In a unanimous decision reaffirming that political speech receives the highest protection under the First Amendment, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot use attorney disciplinary rules to punish a candidate for statements made during an election campaign.

The ruling in The Florida Bar v. Crowley reinforces the principle that government cannot serve as the arbiter of acceptable political debate. In coming to the defense of decorated Gulf War veteran and attorney Christopher Crowley after the Florida Bar sought to discipline him for statements he made while campaigning for Florida’s 20th Judicial Circuit State Attorney position, Rutherford Institute attorneys argued that the First Amendment provides heightened protection of speech in the election context and allows candidates to communicate relevant information to voters.

The Court agreed, citing James Madison’s observation that in a constitutional republic, “the censorial power is in the people over the Government, and not in the Government over the people.” Quoting Madison, the Court emphasized that the people’s “right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon,” is “the only effectual guardian of every other right.” Without the freedom “to examine, to discuss, and to ascertain” the character of candidates seeking public office, the Court noted, voters would be forced to make their choices in ignorance.

“The First Amendment exists to protect the freedom of the American people to criticize those who seek to govern them,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “When government licensing boards begin deciding which campaign statements are acceptable, they cease protecting the public and begin policing political thought. The Constitution leaves that judgment where it belongs—with the voters.”

Crowley, a decorated Gulf War veteran, challenged the incumbent Chief Assistant State Attorney in the Republican primary for State Attorney. During the campaign, Crowley sharply criticized his opponent’s qualifications, record as a prosecutor, and other matters he believed were relevant to voters. The Florida Bar subsequently charged him with violating professional ethics rules prohibiting attorneys from making statements attacking the qualifications or integrity of legal officers or candidates for judicial or legal office.

After a trial judge concluded that Crowley’s campaign statements violated the Bar’s rules, The Rutherford Institute entered the case and filed a Motion to Reconsider, arguing that the judge’s analysis violated First Amendment protections by applying an unconstitutional standard that would enable claims through the State Bar to be weaponized to chill speech critical of public officials. When the trial court declined to correct its ruling, Rutherford Institute attorneys appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, arguing that political campaign speech enjoys the highest level of constitutional protection and that professional speech is entitled to no lesser weight under the First Amendment.

The Florida Supreme Court agreed, rejecting the Florida Bar’s argument that it possesses broad authority to regulate attorneys’ speech because licensure is a conditional privilege. The decision reinforces one of the First Amendment’s oldest and most important principles: in a constitutional republic, government officials do not decide what political speech the public may hear. That responsibility belongs to the people themselves.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated, and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.”—Justice William O. Douglas, dissenting in Colten v. Kentucky (1972)

President Trump has no problem criticizing, condemning, insulting, demonizing and threatening those who refuse to fall in line.

He has branded political opponents “communists,” denounced critics as anti-American, lashed out at NATO allies, threatened to cut off trade with Spain, and referred to Iran’s leaders as “scum” amid the ongoing war.

In Trump’s America, the president is free to call other nations bad actors, label his opponents dangerous, and treat disagreement as betrayal.

But dare to criticize Trump, his administration, ICE, the police state, the war machine, the surveillance state, or the government’s steady assault on the Constitution, and you may find yourself treated as the threat.

This is the hypocrisy of the moment: those in power claim an unlimited right to criticize everyone else, while increasingly denying the people the right to criticize them.

Criticize the government, question the police state, object to ICE raids, oppose war, challenge corruption, reject propaganda, refuse to salute the party line, or insist that public officials obey the Constitution, and you may find yourself accused of being anti-American, extremist, subversive, ungrateful, communist, terrorist-adjacent or worse.

This is how free speech dies: not all at once, but by redefining dissent as disloyalty.

Yet the First Amendment was not written to mandate flattery and applause for those in power. It was written to safeguard the right of the people to criticize, condemn, expose, challenge and resist government abuses without fear of being investigated, surveilled, threatened, prosecuted or treated like enemies of the state.

The American Revolution itself began as an act of criticism.

The Declaration of Independence was a bill of complaints against a government that had abused its power, violated the rights of the people, used the military to intimidate civilians, obstructed justice, imposed unjust burdens, and treated resistance as rebellion.

By today’s standards, the Founders would likely be labeled extremists, agitators, radicals, anti-government dissidents and threats to national security.

What was once rebellion against tyranny is now being recast as a warning sign of extremism.

That is the police state’s playbook for discrediting dissent: start with finger-pointing and name-calling, then turn criticism into subversion, dissent into danger, and those who demand accountability into enemies of the state.

On cue, President Trump and his allies have increasingly wrapped political opposition in the language of extremism, communism, terrorism and anti-Americanism.

We have seen this movie before. It was called McCarthyism.

Then, as now, the charge of “communism” was less about ideology than control: a smear used to discredit critics, frighten citizens, ruin reputations, trigger investigations, justify blacklists and make government power appear patriotic.

The accusation did not have to be true. It only had to be useful.

In the Trump administration’s telling, criticism of the country is evidence of ideological rot, radicalism or disloyalty. The message is unmistakable: love America or leave it; praise it or be punished; comply or be watched, surveilled and targeted.

That is not patriotism. That is tyranny dressed up in red, white and blue.

This campaign against dissent is not limited to protests, political speeches or social media posts. It extends to the past itself.

Consider the administration’s war on historical memory.

The Trump administration has now accused the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of pushing “extreme political activism.” In a 162-page report, the White House has attacked the museum for presenting aspects of American history that do not conform to the administration’s preferred ideology.

The Smithsonian’s offense, apparently, is that it has failed to sufficiently sanitize its depiction of American history by removing references to slavery, exploitation, Native displacement, civil rights struggles, labor unrest, police abuses, government lies, war crimes and the long, hard fight to make the words “We the People” mean something more than political decoration.

This is not about history. It is about whitewashing history.

A government that gets to dictate how the past is remembered will soon dictate how the present may be discussed. A government that insists museums must celebrate America rather than tell the truth about America is not defending patriotism. It is manufacturing propaganda.

In an Orwellian throwback to 1984’s requirement that “you must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him,” the Trump administration has proposed installing signs at every entrance to the Smithsonian’s exhibits that read, “Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don't want you to love your country.”

History is not supposed to be a Hallmark card. It is supposed to be a warning.

That same demand for state-mandated devotion—the insistence that to love America one must flatter it, sanitize it and never demand better of it—was on display in the backlash to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 250^th anniversary remarks invoking the promises of the Declaration of Independence.

Whatever one thinks of Mamdani’s politics, the reaction to his speech was telling. Critics blasted the speech as ungrateful, divisive and hostile to American values, and Mamdani was denounced as anti-American for daring to suggest that America’s greatness lies not in pretending that its promises have already been fulfilled but in demanding that they be fulfilled for all.

Yet that is precisely what the Declaration of Independence was about.

The Declaration was a protest document. It did not flatter the king. It accused him. It did not praise the empire. It indicted it. It did not say, “Everything is fine.” It said the government had become destructive of the rights it existed to secure.

That is the American tradition.

Not government-approved history. Not obedience to presidents, police, generals, bureaucrats or political parties.

The American tradition is dissent. The American tradition is resistance to tyranny.

The American tradition is the right—and the duty—to criticize the government.

This is why the First Amendment stands first as a chain placed around the neck of government power: Freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. Freedom of religion. Freedom of assembly. The right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

These are not separate freedoms. Together, they protect the ability of the people to speak, gather, organize, investigate, expose, protest and demand accountability from those who govern in their name.

Without the right to criticize the government, every other right becomes conditional.

Once the government is allowed to decide which criticism is patriotic and which criticism is dangerous, the Bill of Rights becomes a permission slip. Rights once guaranteed become privileges reserved for those who flatter power, obey orders and keep their grievances to themselves.

Once criticism is treated as extremism, constitutional rights become privileges reserved for the compliant.

This is why the government’s increasing tendency to equate dissent with danger should alarm every American, regardless of party.

We have already seen what this looks like.

Americans who criticize ICE online, write angry emails to government officials, document raids, protest enforcement actions, or speak out against official misconduct increasingly risk visits, warnings, subpoenas, surveillance or investigations by the government’s secret police.

The government does not need to jail everyone in order to silence a population. It only needs to make examples of a few.

A knock on the door. A warning from agents. A subpoena. A phone call from law enforcement. A file opened. A name entered into a database. A social media post flagged. A protest monitored. A journalist questioned. A nonprofit investigated. A student visa threatened. A donor list scrutinized. A museum audited. A professor disciplined. A mayor denounced as anti-American. A citizen taught to think twice before speaking again.

This is how a free people are trained to censor themselves.

Let us be clear: violence and true threats can and should be investigated. No one has a constitutional right to assault, threaten, stalk, bomb, kill or terrorize.

But criticism is not violence. Anger is not terrorism. Dissent is not extremism. Opposition is not treason. Petitioning the government for redress of grievances is not a crime. It is the essence of citizenship.

Yet every administration, sooner or later, discovers the convenience of labeling its critics as threats.

John Adams used the Sedition Act to punish critics of the federal government. Woodrow Wilson used the Espionage and Sedition Acts to prosecute antiwar speech. Richard Nixon kept enemies lists. George W. Bush gave us the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, watchlists and the language of “with us or against us.” Barack Obama targeted whistleblowers. Joe Biden’s administration leaned on agencies and platforms in the name of combatting misinformation and domestic extremism. Donald Trump has taken all of that machinery and openly aimed it at political enemies, protesters, immigrants, journalists, universities, museums, law firms and anyone else who refuses to bow.

Do not make the mistake of thinking this is merely a Trump problem.

Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom.

The disease is power.

The disease is a government that believes it may define truth, patriotism, extremism, history, loyalty and acceptable opinion. The disease is a police state that has learned to speak in the language of safety, order, border security, anti-terrorism, anti-communism, anti-radicalism, public health, national unity and American greatness.

The disease is the dangerous idea that government exists to be obeyed rather than restrained.

The Founders knew better.

They did not trust government. They bound it down.

They did not assume that rulers would be virtuous. They divided power, checked power, limited power and gave the people the tools to expose and resist power.

They understood that the greatest threat to liberty would not come from citizens criticizing the government. It would come from government officials who believed themselves entitled to silence criticism.

That is why the right to criticize government cannot be treated as a partisan indulgence.

No matter which party holds power, the people must be free to criticize the government.

When Republicans are in power, Democrats must be free to criticize the government. When Democrats are in power, Republicans must be free to criticize the government.

When police, ICE, the military, the courts, Congress or the president abuse their authority, citizens must be free to say so—loudly, publicly and without fear of being branded enemies of the state.

This is not incitement. This is accountability.

A government that cannot tolerate criticism does not deserve power. A president who treats dissent as disloyalty has betrayed his oath of office. A nation that punishes its truth-tellers has lost sight of its principles.

And a people who self-censor because they are afraid to criticize their government are no longer free.

This is the great danger of the moment.

We are being told that to love America, we must stop seeing what has been done in America’s name. We must stop talking about the bodies, the prisons, the raids, the wars, the surveillance, the corruption, the cages, the lies, the poverty, the brutality, the stolen land, the stolen labor, the broken treaties, the broken families, the broken promises and the broken Constitution.

We are being told that patriotism requires amnesia.

That is a lie.

Real patriotism is not worship of government. Real patriotism is not loyalty to a president. Real patriotism is not blind obedience to police. Real patriotism is not a flag big enough to cover up injustice.

Real patriotism is the willingness to tell the truth about your country because you believe it can and must be better.

Those who criticize America are often the only ones still taking America seriously.

The abolitionists were called agitators. The suffragists were called radicals. The labor organizers were called subversives. The civil rights marchers were called outside agitators and communists. The antiwar protesters were called traitors. The whistleblowers were called criminals. The journalists were called enemies of the people. The immigrants demanding dignity are called invaders. The citizens filming police are called threats. The protesters opposing ICE are called extremists. The historians telling the truth are called activists.

The pattern never changes. Power always has a vocabulary for discrediting those who challenge it. Yet history has repeatedly vindicated the critics.

America did not become freer because citizens kept quiet. America became freer because citizens made themselves impossible to ignore. They marched. They wrote. They spoke. They published. They exposed. They resisted. They refused to comply with unjust laws. They demanded amendments. They challenged police. They sued officials. They filled jails. They confronted presidents. They forced the country to look in the mirror.

That is not anti-American. That is how America survives.

The irony is that the loudest defenders of “American greatness” are often the most eager to criminalize the very conduct that made America possible.

They celebrate 1776 while condemning the spirit of 1776. They praise the Founders while fearing the people. They quote the Declaration while attacking those who petition for redress of grievances. They wrap themselves in the flag while trampling the freedoms for which the flag is supposed to stand. They call themselves patriots while demanding servility.

They insist that America is exceptional while treating the Constitution as optional.

They want citizens who salute, not citizens who think. They want history without victims, rights without resistance, liberty without dissent, and patriotism without conscience.

That is not freedom. That is authoritarianism with fireworks.

In such a climate, silence is surrender.

When the government claims the power to decide what history may be taught, what speech may be tolerated, what criticism may be investigated, what protest may be monitored, what viewpoint may be flagged, and what truths may be spoken, the people have a duty to push back.

We must insist that the First Amendment protects the speech government hates most. We must insist that criticizing ICE is not a crime. We must insist that criticizing the president is not treason. We must insist that criticizing police is not extremism. We must insist that criticizing America’s failures is not anti-American. We must insist that history belongs to the people, not to politicians. We must insist that no president, no agency, no party and no bureaucrat gets to decide what patriotism requires.

We must insist that the Constitution means what it says.

After all, the government works for us—not the other way around. The moment Americans forget that, the experiment in self-government is over.

So criticize the government.

Criticize it loudly. Criticize it relentlessly.

Criticize it when it spies, lies, censors, raids, detains, prosecutes, propagandizes, militarizes, profiteers and abuses.

Criticize it when it rewrites history, calls truth anti-American, mistakes obedience for patriotism, and forgets that “We the People” are the masters and the government is the servant.

That is the duty of a free people.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the police state does not need everyone to agree with it. It only needs enough people to fear disagreeing with it.

We do not owe the government our silence.

We owe the Constitution our vigilance.

WC: 2546