“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” 

— Ayn Rand

Rule by brute force.

That’s about as good a description as you’ll find for the sorry state of our nation.

SWAT teams crashing through doors. Militarized police shooting unarmed citizens. Traffic cops tasering old men and pregnant women for not complying fast enough with an order. Resource officers shackling children for acting like children. Homeowners finding their homes under siege by police out to confiscate lawfully-owned guns. Drivers having their cash seized under the pretext that they might have done something wrong.

The list of abuses being perpetrated against the American people by their government is growing rapidly.

We are approaching critical mass.

The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

In effect, you will disappear.

American Citizens are just “things” that the elites use

Our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

We have seen this come to pass under past presidents with their use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements.

President Biden’s long list of executive orders, executive actions, proclamations and directives is just more of the same: rule by fiat.

Now the Biden Administration is setting its sights on gun control.

Mark my words: gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, which allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats, will become yet another means by which to subvert the Constitution and sabotage the rights of the people.

In Radley Balko's study of police raids of the homes of civilians for the CATO Institute, he described the mayhem currently taking place at the hands of federal and state governments in the United States in the name of law enforcement:

"Americans have long maintained that a man's home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

"These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects."

- from the Executive Summary of a research paper titled, 
Overkill: he Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America
by Radley Balko, CATO Institute.

But you have already heard this spiel…

These “red flag” laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals.  They are an excuse. The excuse sounds so reasonable. People who are viewed as a danger to themselves or others, have their guns removed. Yes, this is yet another Trojan Horse, a stealth maneuver by the police state to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.

Nineteen states and Washington DC have red flag laws on their books.

That number is growing.

As The Washington Post reports, these laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”

Sound familiar?

Someone in the neighborhood doesn’t like you…

… they claim that you are a witch…

…or you are a communist…

…or a child sex offender…

…or are a danger to yourself.

In the midst of what feels like an epidemic of mass shootings (the statistics suggest otherwise), these gun confiscation laws—extreme risk protection order (ERPO) laws—may appease the fears of those who believe that fewer guns in the hands of the general populace will make our society safer.

Of course, it doesn’t always work that way.

It’s just an excuse

SWAT team raids "The Garden of Eden" The beast is gaining more and more unbridled power to lash out as he did this week at "The Garden of Eden" - a small organic farm in Texas reported by a RT News. This is but one of many raids that take place on a daily basis throughout the U.S. In this case they held 6 adults at gunpoint and handcuffed them for 10 hours saying they were looking for marijuana. Throughout the day the police conducted their search, destroying parts of the farm in the process. However, the property owner Shelley Smith told the media, "They came here under the guise that we were doing a drug trafficking, marijuana growing operation. They destroyed everything.”

The residents believe the raid was only an excuse to allow them to change the farm's "unconventional appearance." Code enforcement cops came along with the SWAT team and Smith said that they had been issued a number of code violations recently including, “grass that was too tall, bushes growing too close to the street, a couch and piano in the yard, chopped wood that was not properly stacked, a piece of siding that was missing from the side of the house and generally unclean premises,” The cops found no drugs or criminal activity but arrested one of the members of the group for an unpaid parking ticket.

-Axis of logic

Anything—knives, vehicles, planes, pressure cookers—can become a weapon when wielded with deadly intentions.

With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats… to “stop dangerous people before they act.”

While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Any excuse serves a tyrant

It took place in August, 2005 when a SWAT team killed an innocent man in his home while his wife and 4 year old son hid in a bedroom closet in Sunrise Florida. After killing the man, the police claimed they knocked on his door and announced they were police. But according to neighbors who watched the scene unfold from their window, the police in black masks did not identify themselves before smashing down his door and using a flash grenade expecting to find drugs and guns. The neighbors said that if the police had yelled, "POLICE!" - they would have heard it. The police claimed that 23 year old Anthony Diotaiuto (a two-time Iraq war veteran) fled from his bed into another room and "armed himself." Radley Balko (quoted above) reported that the police initially claimed that he fled to the bedroom for a handgun and pointed the gun at them. Later, the story changed with a spokesperson for the police saying that the "found the weapon next to his body" after they killed him.

Diotaiuto returned from his night shift at one of the two jobs he had to provide for his family. According to his friends, he had a shotgun and handgun which he kept for protection with a valid concealed weapons permit. Balko surmised that he rose from a deep sleep, disoriented by the crashing of his door and flash grenade and ran terrified into another room. After they killed him, the police claimed that they found 2 ounces of marijuana, some plastic baggies and a scale. But by the time the case went to a jury trial, that amount of marijuana was determined to be 16 grams, a little more than half an ounce. The Broward County medical examiner reported 10 bullet wounds in his head, chest, torso, and limbs.

-Axis of Logic

We’ve been down this road before.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution ...

(namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), 

...you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

Let that sink in a moment.

You are a threat by your very existence

Radley Balko’s White Paper, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America:

Balko said that botched raids such as this one are not 'isolated incidents.' Other examples of SWAT teams misused are the hundreds of raids conducted each year at a wrong address. Often the people targeted are completely innocent, unlike in the Diotaiuto tragedy. Further, the 'no-knock' and 'quick-knock' raids often rely on anonymous tips and 'dubious informants to obtain the search warrants.'

The raids are intended to terrify. The police generally break down the doors with a battering ram or blow them off with explosives. Sometimes police use a flash bang grenade. Once inside, police force the occupants to lie prone, generally at gunpoint...

Balko wrote in Overkill, 'The idea of sending battalions of men dressed, trained, and armed like soldiers to do civilian police work should give us great discomfort'.”

Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority: to preemptively raid homes in order to neutralize a potential threat.

It’s a powder keg waiting for a lit match.

Duncan Lemp

Under these red flag laws, what happened to Duncan Lemp—who was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home—could very well happen to more people.

At 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that had most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, a masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.

The entire household, including Lemp and his girlfriend, was reportedly asleep when the SWAT team directed flash bang grenades and gunfire through Lemp’s bedroom window.

Lemp was killed and his girlfriend injured.

No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.

No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.

So what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?

According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”

Thus, rather than approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash bang grenades and acted like battle-crazed warriors.

In May, 2010 Joseph Weekley, a Detroit cop shot and killed Aiyana Stanley Jones, a seven-year-old girl when they raided a home during the early morning hours as she lay sleeping on a sofa in her home on Lillibridge Street in Detroit. Aiyana was shot in the head and neck. Assistant Police Chief Ralph Godbee said the heavily armed "Special Response Team" was executing a "no-knock" search warrant for a homicide suspect and they threw a flash grenade through an unopened window around 12:45 a.m. before charging in with guns drawn but they got the wrong house. It may have never gained international attention except that it was recorded by a reality TV crew, which was filming an episode of “The First 48,” a program like "Cops" and other racist TV shows that feed off the misery of victims in praise of the work of US police.

In June, 2013 Weekley went on trial for involuntary manslaughter with a possible sentence of 15 years in prison. The cop claimed that he had "physical contact" with the little girl's grandmother, Mertilla Jones, after entering the home. On June 18, the trial ended in a hung jury and he is now to be retried. In the trial, Grandmother Mertilla testified,

"I saw the light leave out of her eyes, and blood gushed out of her mouth. I knew she was dead.” After the first trial, Mertilla stated, "He admitted he shot and killed her. He's a dirty cop because he said I touched him. I never touched that man. ... I was never anywhere near Joseph Weekley. He's a lying [expletive] cop."

The Military patrol America today

This is what you get when you live inside a Military Empire.

This is the blowback from all that military weaponry flowing to domestic police departments.

This is what happens when you use SWAT teams to carry out routine search warrants.

Red Flag Laws

This is what happens when you adopt red flag gun laws, which Maryland did in 2018, painting anyone who might be in possession of a gun—legal or otherwise—as a threat that must be neutralized.

Therein lies the danger of these red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws such as these generally where the burden of proof is reversed and you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.

Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

The American Police State

In fact, U.S. police agencies have been working to identify and manage potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats for some time now.

All you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates)…

…surf the internet,

…communicate using a cell phone,

…limp or stutter, 

…drive a car,

…stay at a hotel,

…attend a political rally,

…express yourself on social media, 

…appear mentally ill,

…serve in the military, 

…disagree with a law enforcement official, 

…call in sick to work,

…purchase materials at a hardware store,

…take flying or boating lessons,

…appear suspicious,

…appear confused or nervous,

…fidget or whistle or smell bad,

…be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane),

…stare at a police officer,

…question government authority,

…appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom,

…or …

….generally live in the United States.

Government Watch Lists

Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.

You will be tracked wherever you go.

You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

The government has been building its pre-crime, surveillance network in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

To that noxious mix, add in a proposal introduced under the Trump Administration and being considered by Biden for a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) that will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.

It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

If you’re not scared yet, you should be.

It’s a Nightmare America

Connect the dots.

Start with the powers amassed by the government under the USA Patriot Act, note the government’s ever-broadening definition of what it considers to be an “extremist,” then add in the government’s detention powers under NDAA, the National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance networks, and fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.

To that, add tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones that will soon blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that will identify and track you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the picture, toss in the real-time crime centers being deployed in cities across the country, which will be attempting to “predict” crimes and identify criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.

Hopefully you’re starting to understand how easy we’ve made it for the government to identify, label, target, defuse and detain anyone it views as a potential threat for a variety of reasons that run the gamut from mental illness to having a military background to challenging its authority to just being on the government’s list of persona non grata. Finally, add in the local police agencies and SWAT teams that are being “gifted” military-grade weaponry and equipment designed for the battlefield and trained in the tactics of war.

It all adds up to a terrifying package of brute force coupled with invasive technology and totalitarian tactics.

This brings me back to those red flag gun laws.

It’s the nail in the American Coffin

In the short term, these gun confiscation laws may serve to temporarily delay or discourage those wishing to inflict violence on others, but it will not resolve whatever madness or hate or instability therein that causes someone to pull a trigger or launch a bomb or unleash violence on another.

Indeed, those same individuals sick enough to walk into an elementary school or a movie theater and open fire using a gun can and do wreak just as much havoc with homemade bombs made out of pressure cookers and a handful of knives.

Nor will these laws save us from government-instigated and directed violence at the hands of the militarized police state or the blowback from the war-drenched, violence-imbued, profit-driven military industrial complex, both of which remain largely overlooked and underestimated pieces of the discussion on gun violence in America.

No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes. In this way, even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.