Q: “How do you know if a politician is lying?”
A: “When your lips are moving.”
The First Amendment guarantees us the right to free speech.
Unfortunately, this law does not explicitly guarantee us the right to not be lied to by our government and its various officials. Our hope of holding government officials accountable for lies rests on political processes, such as the ballot box and impeachment proceedings, which have themselves become so inefficient that they offer little hope for transparency, accountability, or reform.
We have been lied to so many times about everything, by all walks of government, for so long that political lying has become commonplace. This speaks to the dire state of our country and the low standards we hold to the people we elect to represent us.
Yet despite almost no punishment for government officials who lie to the public, the Deep State continues to wage war against those who challenge its lies, half-truths, and subterfuge.
Case in point: Julian Assange.
While news of Assange's plea deal was quickly overshadowed by the drama of the 2024 presidential election (the WikiLeaks founder pleaded guilty to “a single felony charge of unlawfully obtaining and disclosing national security materials in exchange for his release from a UK prison”), his persecution at the hands of the deep state was a warning to anyone who dares to speak truth to power.
The Deep State has launched a relentless, take-no-prisoners all-out attack on truth-tellers.
Activists, journalists and whistleblowers alike continue to be intimidated, traumatized and tortured by the superpowers' fear-mongering, mind-altering, soul-destroying and punch-in-the-face tactics.
In an era of thoughtcrime prosecutions, crime prevention programs, and government agencies that function like organized crime syndicates, this is a new kind of tyranny imposed on those who dare expose the crimes of the Deep State, whose influence has expanded globally.
What happened to Assange was intended to send a message to anyone who dares to speak truth to power: don't even think about it.
Background: Assange, founder of a website that publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources, was arrested on April 11, 2019 for assisting U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in accessing and leaking more than 700,000 classified military documents that portrayed the U.S. government and its military as reckless, irresponsible, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians.
In a very Orwellian style, the government would have us believe that Assange and Manning are the real criminals who dared to expose the sordid underside of the war machine.
This is how a police state deals with anyone who challenges its stranglehold on power.
Make no mistake: the government is waging a war on journalists and whistleblowers who disclose information about government wrongdoing that is within the public’s right to know.
But we desperately need more oversight and transparency, not less.
In fact, transparency is one of the things the Shadow Government fears most.
Why? Because it might inspire troubled Americans to actually exercise their rights and resist the tyranny that is relentlessly suffocating their freedoms.
The need to shine a light on government actions—to make the murkiest and least transparent parts of government accessible and accountable—was a common theme for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who coined the famous line, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.”
Of course, transparency is meaningless unless the public is prepared to be informed, engaged, and hold their government accountable to uphold the rule of law.
For this reason, it is vital that citizens have the right to criticize their government without fear.
After all, we are citizens, not subjects. For those who don't fully understand the difference between the two and why transparency is so important to a healthy constitutional government, Manning explains it well: “There is a clear distinction between citizens, whose rights and privileges are protected by the state, and subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.”
Manning further recommended that the US “needs laws to protect the people's rights of free speech and a free press, to protect them from executive branch action, and to promote integrity and transparency in the US government.”
Technically, such a law already exists: the First Amendment.
The First Amendment to the Constitution gives people the right to speak freely, peacefully protest, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize their government without fear of arrest, isolation, or other punishment like those imposed on whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Assange, and Manning.
The challenge is to hold governments accountable for complying with the law.
But this isn't just a question of whether whistleblowers and journalists are a constitutionally protected class. This is a debate about how long “we the people” will remain a constitutionally protected class.
If the current downward trend continues, it won't be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable will be labeled an “extremist,” relegated to an underclass that doesn't fit in society, constantly watched, and subject to mass arrests whenever the government deems it necessary.
After all, we are all potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of our government.
We are all at risk.
There is no room for partisan politics in this debate, and Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the government's motives provide a necessary counterweight to those who blindly follow where politicians lead.
We do not have to agree with every criticism of our government, but we must protect the right of every individual to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.
We must never forget that what the designers of a police state want is a docile, submissive, cooperative, obedient, and docile people who will not talk back, who will not challenge government authority, who will not speak out against government misconduct, and who will not break the rules.
What the First Amendment protects, and what a healthy constitutional republic needs, are individuals like Julian Assange who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictionalized version, The Diary of Eric Blair, the right to speak out against government injustice is the ultimate freedom.
About John and Nisha Whitehead:
Constitutional lawyer and author John W. Whitehead is founder and director of the Rutherford Institute. His latest books, The Diary of Eric Blair and Battlefield America: The War on Americans, are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at (email protected). Nisha Whitehead is executive director of the Rutherford Institute. Information about the Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
