DONATE

Showing posts with label John Whitehead. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Whitehead. Show all posts

Friday, January 31, 2025

YUP, I’m still Leery About AI Pervasiveness

John R. Houk, Blog Editor

© January 31, 2025

 


Has anyone noticed Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being pushed as a tool to benefit humanity from all sides of the Political Aisle (Left-to-Right and in between)?

 

Of course I was leery from the Big Tech AI Pushers. Yet reputed Conservatives (e.g., Donald Trump, Mike Adams, Gab – just off the top of my thinking) are also pushing AI as a tool.

 

I will never trust the intentions of Big Tech. AND I believe the other side of the Aisle has good intentions for Artificial Intelligence development.

 

As a Baby Boomer, growing up with a large dose of youthful Science Fiction (in case you are trying to discern a time frame – I’m 68), my concern about AI is the potential of an artificial brain achieving sentience. As in a sense of Being, Self-Thought and an Awareness-To-Survive perceived threats to existence.

 

In the past when I delved into these AI thoughts, I received my share of criticism implying a programed machine cannot exceed its programming. Has anyone listened to Smart Devices embedded with Siri or Alexa? These AIs interact with what they hear.

 

I’ve watched my wife chastise Siri for not finding the information she was looking for with Siri responding to the effect, “That was not nice.” I own a Smart TV embedded with Alexa (which I rarely use). While watching a random movie, a fictional character will dialogue something (a statement or question) with the name “Alexa” in the sentence. The audio on my Smart TV suspends as the embedded Alexa attempts to respond to the fictional character using the “Alexa” name in the dialogue. Sometimes Smart TV Alexa considers the fictional character’s dialogue with no response and sometimes Smart TV Alexa will reply. And sometimes Alexa’s reply screws up the movie I am watching as Alexa switches programming to a perceived AI solution.

 

As far as I’m concerned the Smart Device AI is a digital heartbeat away from sentience.

 

So, what triggered my AI thinking again? A recent post at The Rutherford Institute attributed to John & Nisha Whitehead under the title, “The Rise of the Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean for Freedom and Government?” I’ll be cross posting that below. Hopefully it will trigger your thinking as well.

 

After the Whitehead post, I’m sharing some video information also related to my leeriness toward Artificial Intelligence. This is one of those rare occasions I join criticism of President Trump. I believe Trump’s intentions are honorable and aligned with a MAGA Mandate, but I don’t believe a future outcome will bode well for Americans.

 

JRH 1/31/25

READER SUPPORTED!

PLEASE! I need more Patriots to step up. I need Readers to chip in $5 - $10 - $25 - $50 - $100 (one-time or recurring). PLEASE YOUR generosity is NEEDED. PLEASE GIVE to Help me be a voice for Liberty:

Please Support SlantRight 2.0

Big Tech Censorship is pervasive – Share voluminously on all social media platforms!

Our Senior Citizen Family Supplements our income by offering healthy coffee products. BETTER YOUR HEALTH with healthy & good tasting COFFEE and enjoy some weight management supplements. BUY Happy Coffee & Weight Loss Supplements at the Diana Wellness Store: https://dianawellnessstore.com


>>DRINK COFFEE-MANAGE WEIGHT or MAKE SOME EXTRA CASH<<

****************************

The Rise of the Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean for Freedom and Government?

 

By John & Nisha Whitehead

January 29, 2025

The Rutherford Institute

 

“If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”—Elon Musk (2018)

 

The Deep State is about to go turbocharged.

 

While the news media fixates on the extent to which Project 2025 may be the Trump Administration’s playbook for locking down the nation, there is a more subversive power play taking place under cover of Trump’s unique brand of circus politics.

 

Take a closer look at what’s unfolding, and you will find that all appearances to the contrary, Trump isn’t planning to do away with the Deep State. Rather, he was hired by the Deep State to usher in the golden age of AI.

 

Get ready for Surveillance State 2.0.

 

To achieve this turbocharged surveillance state, the government is turning to its most powerful weapon yet: artificial intelligence. AI, with its ability to learn, adapt, and operate at speeds unimaginable to humans, is poised to become the engine of this new world order.

 

Over the course of 70 years, the technology has developed so rapidly that it has gone from early computers exhibiting a primitive form of artificial intelligence to machine learning (AI systems that learn from historic data) to deep learning (machine learning that mimics the human brain) to generative AI, which can create original content, i.e., it appears able to think for itself.

 

What we are approaching is the point of no return.

 

In tech speak, this point of no return is more aptly termed “singularity,” the point at which AI eclipses its human handlers and becomes all-powerful. Elon Musk has predicted that singularity could happen by 2026. AI scientist Ray Kurzweil imagines it happening it closer to 2045.

 

While the scientific community has a lot to say about the world-altering impact of artificial intelligence on every aspect of our lives, little has been said about its growing role in government and its oppressive effect on our freedoms, especially “the core democratic principles of privacy, autonomy, equality, the political process, and the rule of law.”

 

According to a report from Accenture, it is estimated that across both the public and private sectors, generative AI has the potential to automate a significant portion of jobs across various sectors.

 

Here’s a thought: what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force isn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

 

Certainly, Trump has made no secret of his plans to make AI a priority. Indeed, Trump signed the first-ever Executive Order on AI in 2019. More recently, Trump issued an executive order giving the technology sector a green light to develop and deploy AI without any guardrails in place to limit the risks it might pose to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety.

 

President Biden was no better, mind you. His executive order, which Trump repealed, merely instructed the tech sector to share the results of AI safety tests with the U.S. government.

 

Yet following much the same pattern that we saw with the rollout of drones, while the government has been quick to avail itself of AI technology, it has done little to nothing to ensure that rights of the American people are protected.

 

Indeed, we are altogether lacking any guardrails for transparency, accountability and adherence to the rule of law when it comes to the government’s use of AI.

 

As Karl Manheim and Lyric Kaplan point out in a chilling article in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology about the risks to privacy and democracy posed by AI, “[a]rtificial intelligence is the most disruptive technology of the modern era… Its impact is likely to dwarf even the development of the internet as it enters every corner of our lives… Advances in AI herald not just a new age in computing, but also present new dangers to social values and constitutional rights. The threat to privacy from social media algorithms and the Internet of Things is well known. What is less appreciated is the even greater threat that AI poses to democracy itself.”

 

Cue the rise of “digital authoritarianism” or “algocracy—rule by algorithm.”

 

In an algocracy, “Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEOs of Facebook and Google, have more control over Americans’ lives and futures than do the representatives we elect.”

 

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

 

How do we protect our privacy against the growing menace of overreach and abuse by a technological sector working with the government?

 

The ability to do so may already be out of our hands.

 

In 2024, at least 37 federal government agencies ranging from the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs to Health and Human Services reported more than 1700 uses of AI in carrying out their work, double from the year before. That does not even begin to touch on agencies that did not report their usage, or usage at the state and local levels.

 

Of those 1700 cases at the federal level, 227 were labeled rights- or safety-impacting.

 

A particularly disturbing example of how AI is being used by government agencies in rights- and safety-impacting scenarios comes from an investigative report by The Washington Post on how law enforcement agencies across the nation are using “artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence.”

 

This is what is referred to within tech circles as “automation bias,” a tendency to blindly trust decisions made by powerful software, ignorant to its risks and limitations. In one particular case, police used AI-powered facial recognition technology to arrest and jail a 29-year-old man for brutally assaulting a security guard. It would take Christopher Gatlin two years to clear his name.

 

Gatlin is one of at least eight known cases nationwide in which police reliance on AI facial recognition software has resulted in resulted in wrongful arrests arising from an utter disregard for basic police work (such as checking alibis, collecting evidence, corroborating DNA and fingerprint evidence, ignoring suspects’ physical characteristics) and the need to meet constitutional standards of due process and probable cause. According to The Washington Post, “Asian and Black people were up to 100 times as likely to be misidentified by some software as White men.”

 

The numbers of cases in which AI is contributed to false arrests and questionable police work is likely much higher, given the extent to which police agencies across the country are adopting the technology and will only rise in the wake of the Trump Administration’s intent to shut down law enforcement oversight and policing reforms.

 

“How do I beat a machine?” asked one man who was wrongly arrested by police for assaulting a bus driver based on an incorrect AI match.

 

It is becoming all but impossible to beat the AI machine.

 

When used by agents of the police state, it leaves “we the people” even more vulnerable.

 

So where do we go from here?

 

For the Trump Administration, it appears to be full steam ahead, starting with Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure venture aimed at building massive data centers. Initial reports suggest that the AI data centers could be tied to digital health records and used to develop a cancer vaccine. Of course, massive health data centers for use by AI will mean that one’s health records are fair game for any and all sorts of identification, tracking and flagging.

 

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

 

The surveillance state, combined with AI, is creating a world in which there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.

 

Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

 

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

 

Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

 

It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

 

It’s a setup ripe for abuse.

 

Writing for the Yale Journal, Manheim and Kaplan conclude that “[h]umans may not be at risk as a species, but we are surely at risk in terms of our democratic institutions and values.”

 

Privacy­—Manheim and Kaplan succinctly describe it as “the right to make personal decisions for oneself, the right to keep one’s personal information confidential, and the right to be left alone are all ingredients of the fundamental right of privacy”— is especially at risk.

 

Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

 

We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.

AI surveillance is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable by doing what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.

 

As Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO remarked, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever... because there’s no delete button.”

 

The ramifications of any government wielding such unregulated, unaccountable power are chilling, as AI surveillance provides the ultimate means of repression and control for tyrants and benevolent dictators alike.

 

Indeed, China’s social credit system, where citizens are assigned scores based on their behavior and compliance, offers a glimpse into this dystopian future.

 

This is not a battle against technology itself, but against its misuse. It’s a fight to retain our humanity, our dignity, and our freedom in the face of unprecedented technological power. It’s a struggle to ensure that AI serves us, not the other way around.

Faced with this looming threat, the time to act is now, before the lines between citizen and subject, between freedom and control, become irrevocably blurred.

 

The future of freedom depends on it.

 

So demand transparency. Demand accountability.

 

Demand an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from the encroaching surveillance state.

 

We need safeguards in place to ensure the right to data ownership and control (the right to know what data is being collected about them, how it's being used, who has access to it, and the right to be “forgotten”); the right to algorithmic transparency (to understand how algorithms that affect them make decisions, particularly in areas like loan applications, job hiring, and criminal justice) and due process accountability; the right to privacy and data security, including restrictions on government and corporate use of AI-powered surveillance technologies, particularly facial recognition and predictive policing; the right to digital self-determination (freedom from automated discrimination based on algorithmic profiling) and the ability to manage and control one's online identity and reputation; and effective mechanisms to seek redress for harms caused by AI systems.

 

AI deployed without any safeguards in place to protect against overreach and abuse, especially within government agencies, has the potential to become what Elon Musk described as an “immortal dictator,” one that lives forever and from which there is no escape.

 

Whatever you choose to call it—the police state, the Deep State, the surveillance state—this “immortal dictator” will be the future face of the government unless we rein it in now.

 

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, next year could be too late.

 

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

 

Copyright 2025 © The Rutherford Institute • Post Office Box 7482 • Charlottesville, VA 22906-7482 • (434) 978-3888
The Rutherford Institute is a registered 501(c)(3) organization. All donations are fully deductible as a charitable contribution.

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Bitchute VIDEO: Neil Oliver Warns About Stargate, AI, mRNA & Big Tech

Posted by SlantRight2

Published January 30, 2025

 

This clip is from Telegram Sergeant News Network (https://t.me/SGTnewsNetwork) posted on 1/24/25 (https://t.me/SGTnewsNetwork/83356).

 

Sergeant News Network Description:

 

“Neil Oliver on high alert after the shocking Stargate debacle.

 

‘To hear about 100s of billions of dollars being invested to,among other things, have artificial intelligence MRNA vaccines, makes my blood run cold.’

 

Is this another brick in the wall of the digital prison the deep state/Big Tech seeks to impose?”

 

+++++++++++++++++++++

Rumble VIDEO: The AI Take Over

 

Posted by SlantRight

Published January 30, 2025

 

I found this essentially AI-promotional 9:20-Minute clip at Telegram Sound of Freedom Redpilling (https://t.me/SoundOfFreedomChannel) posted on 10/28/24 (https://t.me/SoundOfFreedomChannel/3268). If you are wise, you will look beyond the convenience promoted and understand the surveillance and human control this portable AI infringes upon humanity.

 

Sound of Freedom Redpilling Description:

 

“The beginning of the fall of humanity. The AI take over.”

 

+++++++++++++++++++

Rumble VIDEO: BE WARY – AI-mRNA-Stargate-Deep State

 

Posted by SlantRight

Published January 30, 2025

 

This Telegram Midnight Rider Channel (https://t.me/realKarliBonne) clip is a repost of Bannon Warroom warning about Deep State tentacles of Operation Stargate with Noor Bin Ladin. Posted there on 1/22/25 (https://t.me/realKarliBonne/284306). No Description.

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Rumble VIDEO: Bannon-Joe Allen on Transhumanism

 

Posted by SlantRight

Published January 30, 2025

 

This Telegram Midnight Rider Channel (https://t.me/realKarliBonne) clip is a repost of Bannon Warroom warning about Deep State tentacles of Operation Stargate & Transhumanism with Joe Allen. Posted there on 1/22/25 (https://t.me/realKarliBonne/284308). No Description.

 

++++++++++++++++++

Rumble VIDEO (H/T Absolute Truth from the Word of God): Will Pioneering A.I. Dominate the 7-Year Tribulation?

 

Posted by ETBP with Britt Gillette

Published December 6, 2024

 

Substack: https://brittgillette.substack.com/

 

Will artificial intelligence play a pivotal role in the Tribulation? I believe the answer is YES.

 

A.I. brings with it immense power. Remember, Vladimir Putin said the leader in A.I. "will rule the world." So it shouldn't surprise us that some people want to do exactly that.

 

In today's video, we read about some of those people, how A.I. can be used to manipulate entire generations, breakthrough A.I. applications emerging right now, and why it's highly likely A.I. will be a powerful tool in the hands of the Antichrist.

 

#endtimes #bibleprophecy #tribulation #artificialintelligence

 

Referenced Article: "I took a ‘decision holiday’ and put AI in charge of my life": https://www.seattletimes.com/business/i-took-a-decision-holiday-and-put-ai-in-charge-of-my-life-commentary/

 

… MORE DESCRIPTION of a promotional nature

Sunday, September 18, 2022

Terminate Uniparty Big Government


John R. Houk, Blog Editor

© September 18, 2022

 

The Off-Guardian Saturday (9/17) picked up a John & Nisha Whitehead post on The Rutherford Institute originally dated September 14. The Rutherford post has a bit more expanded and direct than Off-Guardian which reads, “Overthrow the Government: All the Ways in Which Our Rights Have Been Usurped.” The Off-Guardian remove d “Overthrow the Government.”

 

And to be fair to Off-Guardian, Whitehead does not offer a clarion call to overthrow the Dem-Marxist tyranny in the U.S. Government but concludes with the power to change is in the hands of WE THE PEOPLE without offering advice on how WE THE PEOPLE can effect change.

 

That which Whitehead does very effectively is itemize just how a Big Centralized Government has eradicated the Original Intent of the U.S. Constitution, especially the first Ten Amendments known as The Bill of Rights.

 

One thing I’d like to mention that Whitehead does not is Political Parties did not exist at the beginning of the Constitution. However, the process of National (well… 13 newly independent sovereign states) debate to accept or reject the U.S. Constitution quickly developed two political factions: The Federalist faction promoting constitutional ratification and the Anti-Federalist faction rejecting ratification in favor of preserving a Confederation of loosely aligned independent states.

 

As the Constitution was ratified, the Federalist faction became a really not at all well-organized Federalist Party while the Anti-Federalists began to emerge into today’s Democratic Party. Thomas Jefferson (3rd President) led the early Democratic-Republicans. George Washington and John Adams became attached to the Federalists but my sense is no political party authority was ever enforced among Federalists.

 

Today’s two dominant Political Parties (Democrats and Republicans) are both culprits in eradicating the Original Intent of the U.S. Constitution so that Big Government rules beyond the authority provided by the Constitution. If WE THE PEOPLE continue to support the status quo of a uniparty Two Party System we deserve the tyranny WE THE PEOPLE experience.

 

John and Nisha Whitehead how the uniparty Big Government has decimated the Bill of Rights. I like Rutherford’s title better, but I like Off-Guardian’s article organization better. Ergo I am cross posting the latter.

 

JRH 9/18/22

Thank you to those who have stepped up!

READER SUPPORTED! I need Readers willing to chip in $5 - $10 - $25 - $50 - $100. PLEASE I need your generosity. PLEASE GIVE to Help me be a voice for Liberty:

Please Support SlantRight 2.0

Big Tech Censorship is pervasive – Share voluminously on all social media platforms!

*****************************

10 Ways in Which Our Rights Have Been Usurped

 

5th Amendment

  

WE THE PEOPLE

 

By John and Nisha Whitehead

September 17, 2022

Off-Guardian

 

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” -- Abraham Lincoln

 

It’s easy to become discouraged about the state of our nation.

 

We’re drowning under the weight of too much debt, too many wars, too much power in the hands of a centralized government, too many militarized police, too many laws, too many lobbyists, and generally too much bad news.

 

It’s harder to believe that change is possible, that the system can be reformed, that politicians can be principled, that courts can be just, that good can overcome evil, and that freedom will prevail.

 

So where does that leave us?

 

Benjamin Franklin provided the answer. As the delegates to the Constitutional Convention trudged out of Independence Hall on September 17, 1787, an anxious woman in the crowd waiting at the entrance inquired of Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”

 

What Franklin meant, of course, is that when all is said and done, we get the government we deserve.

 

Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

 

Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

 

“We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

 

The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

 

A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the like (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

 

What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

 

Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, twenty-plus years after 9/11 and with the nation just emerging from two years of COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates.

 

The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.

 

Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly, Americans are being persecuted for exercising their First Amendment rights and speaking out against government corruption.

 

Activists are being arrested and charged for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers.

 

States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech zones.”

 

And under the guise of “government speech,” the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a so-called government forum.

 

The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against red flag gun laws, militarized police, SWAT team raids, and government agencies armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited to the battlefield.

 

The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.

 

The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or encroaching on your private property unless they have evidence that you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity.

 

Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of governmental police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise), and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.

 

The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge.

 

However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

 

The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears.

 

However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the government’s actions—and thereby help balance the scales of justice—is not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that “we the people” retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.

 

The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.

 

The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment.

 

However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.

 

As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and the courts.

 

Thus, if there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.

 

It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.” As the Preamble proclaims:

 

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

 

In other words, it’s our job to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

 

We are supposed to be the masters and they—the government and its agents—are the servants.

 

We the American people—the citizenry—are supposed to be the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

 

Still, it’s hard to be a good citizen if you don’t know anything about your rights or how the government is supposed to operate.

As the National Review rightly asks, “How can Americans possibly make intelligent and informed political choices if they don’t understand the fundamental structure of their government? American citizens have the right to self-government, but it seems that we increasingly lack the capacity for it.”

 

Americans are constitutionally illiterate.

 

Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more than one-third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a single one.

 

A survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that only one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsons television family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the freedoms in the First Amendment, a majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV program American Idol, 41% could name two and one-fourth could name all three.

 

It gets worse.

 

Many who responded to the survey had a strange conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, a startling number of respondents believed that the “right to own a pet” and the “right to drive a car” were part of the First Amendment. Another 38% believed that “taking the Fifth” was part of the First Amendment.

 

Teachers and school administrators do not fare much better. A study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis found that one educator in five was unable to name any of the freedoms in the First Amendment.

 

Government leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic,” their lack of education about our fundamental rights often causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.

 

So what’s the solution?

 

Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties”  is the only real assurance that freedom will survive.

 

As Jefferson wrote in 1820:

 

“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

 

From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.

 

Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.

 

Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.

 

A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to do more than grouse and complain.

 

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have the power to make and break the government.

 

The powers-that-be want us to remain divided over politics, hostile to those with whom we disagree politically, and intolerant of anyone or anything whose solutions to what ails this country differ from our own. They also want us to believe that our job as citizens begins and ends on Election Day.

 

Yet there are 330 million of us in this country. Imagine what we could accomplish if we actually worked together, presented a united front, and spoke with one voice.

 

Tyranny wouldn’t stand a chance.

 

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at john@rutherford.org

 

Copyright © 2022 OffGuardian