Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Rutherford Institute”
Host Dave Lindorff interviews John Whitehead, founder and head of the Rutherford Institute, a legal organization dedicated to defending civil liberties, and combating threats to the Bill of Rights. Whitehead talks about his concrete experiences defending people wrongfully arrested by gestapo like federal, state and local police, about police militarization, and what he decries as the rapid consolidation of a police state in the US.
The United States stands at the endpoint of a long series of attacks on democracy, and the choices faced by many in the US today point to the divide between those who are and those who are not willing to commit to democracy. Debates over whether Donald Trump is a fascist are a tactical diversion because the real issue is …
America is at a crossroads. History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have moved beyond the era of representative …
Being a citizen in the American corporate state is much like playing against a stacked deck: you’re always going to lose. The game is rigged, and “we the people” keep getting dealt the same losing hand. Even so, most stay in the game, against all odds, trusting that their luck will change. The problem, of course, is that luck will …
Justice in America is not all it’s cracked up to be. Just ask Jeffrey Deskovic, who spent 16 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. James Bain spent 35 years in prison for the kidnapping and rape of a 9-year-old boy, but he too was innocent of the crime. He was finally freed after DNA testing proved …
“Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s a shell game intended to keep us focused on and distracted by all of the politically expedient things that are being said—about militarized police, surveillance, and government corruption—while the government …
“Free worlders” is prison slang for those who are not incarcerated behind prison walls. Supposedly, those fortunate souls live in the “free world.” However, appearances can be deceiving.”As I got closer to retiring from the Federal Bureau of Prisons,” writes former prison employee Marlon Brock, “it began to dawn on me that the security practices we used in the prison system …
“The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.” ― Mark Twain How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the …
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and …
John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney. As head of the Rutherford Institute he is actively involved in defending our civil liberties. Being actively involved in legal cases, he experiences first hand the transformation of law from a shield of the American people into a weapon in the hands of the government. American civil liberty was seriously eroded prior to …
