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, relentless pace under President Trump as it did under President Obama.
- SWAT teams haven't stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
- The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven't stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.
- Schools haven't stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.
- For-profit private prisons haven't stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
- The courts haven't stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
- Government bureaucrats haven't stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
- The surveillance state hasn't stopped spying on Americans' communications, transactions or movements.
- The TSA hasn't stopped groping or ogling travelers.
- Congress hasn't stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA.
- The Department of Homeland Security hasn't stopped being a "wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast."
- The military-industrial complex hasn't stopped profiting from endless wars abroad.
- The Deep State's shadow government hasn't stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
- And the American people haven't stopped acting like gullible sheep.
Here's the problem as I see it: "we the people" have failed to recognize these warning signs as potential red flags to use as opportunities to ask questions, demand answers, and hold our government officials accountable to respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of law.
Unfortunately, once a free people allows the government to make inroads into their freedoms, or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny. And it doesn't really matter whether it's a Democrat or a Republican at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is what happens when you ignore the warning signs.
This is what happens when you fail to take alarm at the first experiment on your liberties.
This is what happens when you fail to challenge injustice and government overreach until the prison doors clang shut behind you.
In the American police state that now surrounds us, there are no longer such things as innocence, due process, or justice--at least, not in the way we once knew them. We are all potentially guilty, all potential criminals, all suspects waiting to be accused of a crime.
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 America's decline over the past 50 years, it will be just another lie.
The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.
As the wife of a prominent German historian recalled: "[O]n the whole, everyone felt well.... And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time.... We also had good years. We had wonderful years."
In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren't being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
Remember, freedom demands responsibility.
Freedom demands that people stop sleep-walking through life, stop cocooning themselves in political fantasies, and stop distracting themselves with escapist entertainment.
Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least, Americans.
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