John W. Whitehead > Quotes

“[W]hile the use of non-lethal weapons such as tasers and LEDIs may not necessarily reduce the number of civilian casualties, they have been largely accepted as the humane alternative to deadly force because they make the use of force appear far less dramatic and violent than it has in the past.

Contrast, for instance, the image of police officers beating Rodney King with billy clubs as opposed to police officers continually shocking a person with a taser. Both are severe forms of abuse. However, because the act of pushing a button is far less dramatic and visually arresting than swinging a billy club, it can come across as much more humane to the general public. This, of course, draws much less media coverage and, thus, less bad public relations for the police.”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government Of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for the simple fact that the government is doing something it has no licence to do–that is, invading the privacy of a law-abiding citizen by monitoring her daily activities and laying hands on her person without any evidence of wrongdoing.

Privacy is also instrumental in nature. This aspect of the right highlights the pernicious effects, rather than the inherent illegitimacy, of intrusive, suspicionless surveillance. For example, encroachments on individual privacy undermine democratic institutions by chilling free speech. When citizens–especially those espousing unpopular viewpoints–are aware that the intimate details of their personal lives are pervasively monitored by government, or even that they could be singled out for discriminatory treatment by government officials as a result of their First Amendment expressive activities, they are less likely to freely express their dissident views.”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government Of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“The time to act is now, before it's too late. Indeed, there is power in numbers, but if those numbers will not unite and rise up against their oppressors, there can be no resistance.

You can't have it both ways.

You can't live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.

You can't claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.

You can't expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and a utter disregard for the rule of law.”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government Of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“A nation of sheep will "beget a government of wolves." – EDWARD R. MURROW CBS BROADCAST JOURNALIST 1908-1965”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“[W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are all incapable of being conquered.14”
― John W. Whitehead, Battlefield America: The War On the American People

“License plate readers—which collect upwards of 1,800 images per hour—can identify the owner of any car that comes within its sights. (Illustration by Molly Zisk, courtesy of The Register)”
― John W. Whitehead, Battlefield America: The War On the American People

“If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“A far more effective way to subdue a population, more so than through the use of compliance weapons, is to numb them with drugs, which come in all shapes and sizes. Of the many drugs available, legal and illicit alike, the drug of materialism–the endless pursuit of consumerism–is the most effective at distracting the populace from what is happening around them. Coupled with the wall-to-wall corporate entertainment complex and the distractions of everyday life, it's a wonder that there is any resistance at all to the emerging police state.”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface:”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“Obedience is the precondition to totalitarianism, and the precondition to obedience is fear.”
― John W. Whitehead, Battlefield America: The War On the American People

“2006 Congressional Pig Book were”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“Prudence” is practical wisdom or good sense.”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“Air Force authorities defended the abaya policy as a gesture of sensitivity to”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“Under such a unified court structure, author Jerome R. Corsi foresees an immediate challenge to First Amendment free speech laws, as well as the Second Amendment's right to bear arms. As he explains in Human Events ,”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution: “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“example, some 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, are convenient guinea pigs for the Student Locator Project, which required students to carry "smart" ID cards embedded with an RFID tracking chip.574 Although these schools already boast 290 surveillance cameras,575 the Northside School District ID program gave school officials the ability to track students' whereabouts at all times. School officials plan to expand the program to the district's 112 schools, with a student population of 100,000.576 Students who refuse to take part in the ID program won't be able to access essential services like the cafeteria and library, nor will they be able to purchase tickets to extracurricular activities.”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“identification card (dubbed “an internal passport” by its critics) has been hailed by many as a necessity in America's fight against terrorism. What once was seen as a tool for controlling immigration and zeroing”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“As a result, the Department of Defense now spends billions of dollars on counternarcotic crusades, and American troops have become an adjunct to many local police forces in the country.”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“Through the use of identity cards, the Ethiopian authorities were able to identify people with Eritrean affiliation during the mass expulsion of 1998, while the Vietnamese government was able to locate ethnic Chinese more easily during their 1978–79 expulsion. The USSR used identity cards to force the relocation of ethnic Koreans (1937), Volga Germans (1941), Kamyks and Karachai (1943), Crimean Tartars, Meshkhetian Turks, Chechens, Ingush, and Balkars (1944), and ethnic Greeks (1949). Ethnic Vietnamese were identified for group denationalization through identity cards in Cambodia in 1993, as were the Kurds in Syria in 1962.”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“Television results in a kind of zombification—not a great thing for a genuinely democratic society.”1 —BRUCE LEVINE, clinical psychologist”
― John W. Whitehead, Battlefield America: The War On the American People

“ThinThread, a pilot program developed by the NSA in the late 1990s, would have enabled the NSA to collect, analyze, and secure massive quantities of communications data while protecting personal privacy in the process. ThinThread combined four advanced”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“As a result of the Pentagon's giveaway program, more and”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“fighting the war on drugs and supporting civilian authorities”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“As Dr. Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1944, discovered about the German people in Nazi Germany "There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn't the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors."529”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“including three-year-olds—were regularly left home alone to care for themselves.5”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“Health screening tests such as Teen Screen and YRBSS are often given to students without parental knowledge or consent. While the CDC insists that local parental permission procedures are followed prior to administering the test, many school systems use so-called passive parental notification procedures, which assume that parents have given their consent unless they notify the school of an objection. But passive notification is simply a way to avoid obtaining written parental consent. In the end, whether”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“As Radley Balko, senior editor of Reason magazine, details in his insightful study of the problem, these characteristics include: The militarization of domestic policing, not just in big cities but in small towns and suburbs. The increasingly frequent use of heavily armed SWAT teams for proactive policing and the routine execution of drug warrants, even for simple marijuana possession.”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“The Barf Beamers A non-lethal weapon with the potential to do untold damage is the previously mentioned "LED Incapacitator" (LEDI). Designed like a flashlight, this light saber (also dubbed a barf beamer and a puke saber) is intended to totally incapacitate the people at whom it is aimed by emitting multiple light frequencies and colors that confuse the brain, resulting in symptoms ranging from discomfort and disorientation to temporary blindness and nausea. It has been suggested”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) has called for initiation of the Right to Know Act, which would require that commodities containing RFID tags bear labels stating that fact in order to protect consumer privacy.”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“This weapon uses the Active Denial System (ADS), which dispenses brief, high-energy waves at a target, resulting in a sensation of severe burning pain. As one reporter explained, the $51 million crowd-control device “rides atop a Humvee, looks like a TV dish, and shoots energy waves 1/64 of an inch deep into the human skin.”32”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America