(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) In an article for the Rutherford Institute, civil liberties attorney John Whitehead made the case that the incremental militarization of both the federal bureaucracy and state police—not to mention the Justice and Homeland Security departments, and FBI‘s increasing focus on “domestic extremism”—were intended by the political elite to condition American citizens to the presence of an unconstitutional “standing army” in their midst.
“This standing army has been imposed on the American people in clear violation of the spirit—if not the letter of the law—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the government’s ability to use the U.S. military as a police force,” Whitehead wrote.
Ever since an ammunition shortage purportedly due to pandemic demand rose to national consciousness in 2021, Americans have become wary of the effect that the rise of both an increasingly well-armed federal bureaucracy and an increasingly militarized police must eventually have on their constitutional rights.
That state and local police have been gathering up billions of dollars worth of military equipment under 9/11-era federal programs is old news.
That the Biden administration is weaponizing the IRS to the tune of thousands of guns and millions of rounds of ammunition is still subject to corporate media fact-checks meant to calm neoliberal pieties—despite the efforts of Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to expose the alarming stockpile efforts.
After listing the incredible number of federal agencies that lately have been stockpiling weapons and ammunition, and developing internal police, Whitehead argued that “we are sliding fast down a slippery slope to a Constitution-free America” in which a “standing army” of federally deputized civilians can revoke the Bill of Rights at will.
“There are now more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with weapons than U.S. Marines,” Whitehead wrote. “The militarization of America’s police forces in recent decades has merely sped up the timeline by which the nation is transformed into an authoritarian regime.”
