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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“In handing down a ruling in Hedgepeth v. Washington Metro , Judge Roberts stated that “no one is very happy about the events that led to this litigation.” Ansche Hedgepeth, he recounted, “was arrested, searched, and handcuffed. Her shoelaces were removed, and she was transported in the windowless rear compartment of a police vehicle to a juvenile processing center, where she was booked, fingerprinted,”
― 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

“Inherent in the artist's creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change," observed McLuhan in a 1969 interview. "It's always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it."70”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“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

“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

“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

“enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny” upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight, and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”94”
― 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

“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

“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 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

“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

“Fast-forward two hundred years, and we seem to have lost sight of that spirit of 1776. Case in point: In Indianapolis, a group of students showed copies of the Declaration of Independence to several hundred people and asked them to sign it. Most refused, stating that it sounded rather “dangerous.”58 In July 1975, the People's Bicentennial Commission passed out copies of the Declaration of Independence in downtown Denver without identifying it. Only one in five persons recognized the document. One man remarked, “There is so much of this revolutionary stuff going on now. I can't stand it.”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“The second principle revolves around the belief that no one is above the law, not even those”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“[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

“Nearly all U.S. public schools have zero-tolerance policies for firearms or other “weapons,” and most have such policies for drugs and alcohol.”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elected, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”1 —JAMES MADISON”
― John W. Whitehead, Battlefield America: The War On the American People

“In November 2006, Representative Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) voiced his concerns over proposals to do away with the United States as a stand-alone entity: “The president of the United States is an internationalist. He is going to”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“Furthermore, does the federal government violate the Posse Comitatus Act when it uses these private mercenaries to conduct domestic law enforcement missions? The answer remains unsettled since it is difficult to establish whether private mercenaries are under the direction and control of the federal government, local officials,”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“Some people have even had a chip implanted in their arm to provide personal and medical information to doctors and emergency personnel when needed.36 Human microchip implantation took a leap forward in July 2007 when the American Medical Association (AMA) announced”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. 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."328–GEORGE ORWELL, 1984”
― John W. Whitehead, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

“Equally important, the words of the First Amendment assume, and even insist on, a citizenry that not only has access to whatever information the government may have on them but control over the information as well.”
― John W. Whitehead, The Change Manifesto: Join the Block by Block Movement to Remake America