Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.
While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesnโt bode well for the future of this country.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, youโd better beware.
Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, youโd better beware.
And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, youโd better beware.
Weโve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.
As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each otherโrather than the governmentโas the enemy, weโll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
Mind you, by โgovernment,โ Iโm not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, Iโm referring to โgovernmentโ with a capital โG,โ the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.
So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.
Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.
This is how evil wins.
This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.
This is how good, generally decent peopleโhaving allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them campsโfail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.
The world has been down this road before, as historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitlerโs rise to power,ย They Thought They Were Free.
We are at our most vulnerable right now.
The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.
Weโre in a national state of denial, yet no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
No matter how often the team colors change, the playbook remains the same. The leopard does not change its spots.
Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that nothing has changed.
The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.
In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).
Consider for yourselves:
- Police havenโt stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.
- SWAT teams havenโt stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
- The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security havenโt stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.
- Schools havenโt stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.
- For-profit private prisons havenโt stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
- Censorship hasnโt stopped.
- The courts havenโt stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
- Government bureaucrats havenโt stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
- The surveillance state hasnโt stopped spying on Americansโ communications, transactions or movements.
- The TSA hasnโt stopped groping or ogling travelers.
- Congress hasnโt stopped enacting draconian laws.
- The Department of Homeland Security hasnโt stopped being a โwasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.โ
- The military industrial complex hasnโt stopped profiting from endless wars abroad.
- The Deep Stateโs shadow government hasnโt stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
- And the American people havenโt stopped acting like gullible sheep.
So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to Americaโs decline over the past century, it will be just another lie.
The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.
They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.
โStill,โ historian Robert Gellately writes, โthe vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on.โ
The German people backed Hitler because for the majority of them, life was good.
In a nutshell, life was good becauseย theirย creature comforts remained undiminished,ย theirย bank accounts remained flush, andย theyย werenโt being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor.
Life is good in America, too.
Lifeย isย good in America as long as youโre able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.
Lifeย isย good in America as long as you donโt mind being made to pay through the nose for the governmentโs endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meetโthat is, we the 99%.
Lifeย isย good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my bookย Battlefield America: The War on the American Peopleย and in its fictional counterpartย The Erik Blair Diaries,ย itโs getting worse by the day for the rest of us.
So, please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.
Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to any one particular administration has not been paying attention.
Originally published at The Rutherford Institute.
- Battlefield America: The Federal War on the “Enemy Within” - October 1, 2025
- How Tyranny Becomes Entrenched: 9/11 and the Police State’s Endless Power Grabs - September 11, 2025
- The Real National Emergency - June 23, 2025