Guest: John Whitehead - From Iran to Palantir, How War Fuels The Surveillance State

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Welcome to the Free Thought Project podcast, a hub for free-thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability. Here are your hosts, Jason Bassler, Matt Agarist, and Don Vyde Jr. Hello again, Freethinkers. Welcome back to the Freethought Project Podcast.

My name is Jason Bassler, and joining me is the Freethought Project Editor-in-Chief, Matt Agarist, and TFTP Editor and Writer, Don Vyde Jr. Well, guys, today is June 19th or Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day or Freedom Day. And it's officially a federal holiday in the States, which is quite ironic as we continue to creep closer to the totalitarian technocratic surveillance state and continue to have our taxes extorted from us to fund the U.S. war machine.

But the good news is, guys, that we have an awesome guest joining us today, a guest who we've long admired over here at the Free Thought Project. So we're definitely excited to jump into today's conversation. But first, I just wanted to make two quick announcement, guys. And I'll make this quick because you'll likely notice we have some new sponsor messages on the podcast now.

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podcast and with a little luck we'll continue expanding the reach of the show to more open minds and free thinkers out there. All right, so let's go ahead and get into this. Now, we've written thousands of articles over the years at the Free Thought Project, and for years, people have praised us for writing them.

But today, we get to speak to a man who was an influence to our writing, both in the topics we cover and with his relentless coverage of unconstitutional acts and policies by the American government. He's also provided guidance and legal knowledge for our censorship battle with big tech and the state. But I should probably mention that my mind was blown this morning when I realized that he's been doing this work for as long as I've been alive.

So today's guest is constitutional attorney and author and the founder of the Rutherford Institute, Mr. John Whitehead. John, it's an honor and a privilege to talk to you, my friend. Welcome to the Free Thought Project podcast. It's an honor to be here with you guys and it's good that there are people out here like you and myself and others, they're trying to get the message out that we're really.

Absolutely. And, you know, for as long as we've been doing this, it's kind of mind blowing that this is our first conversation, you know, especially all the help that you've provided with the Rutherford Institute over the years. And so, yeah, we're very grateful that you're joining us. And we wanted to touch on a few of your recent articles.

But first, I think it only makes sense to start with a topic that the whole world is talking about and really can't ignore right now, which is the Israel-Iran war. And, of course, the million-dollar question, will the Trump administration drag us into World War III? Now, as of this morning, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that President Trump has privately approved of attack plans for Iran, but is holding off on giving the final order.

So I think it's safe to say that the war drums are beating, and almost every indicator points to Trump having the U.S. join the war. Now, we've certainly had mixed signals from the press, but we've seen reports of soldiers eating lobster, so it's a bit confusing. But I want to ask you, John, how do you interpret this moment from a constitutional and civil liberties perspective? Are we watching the stage being set for another undeclared, unconstitutional

war? And how do you think this engagement will be much different from the war with Iraq and Afghanistan? It's going to be hard to tell. I mean, it's, you know, again, people, if you study this subject, we put out a commentary just a couple of days ago, in fact, it was yesterday, I believe, called The Real National Emergency, Endless Wars, Failing Infrastructure, and Dying Republic. It's about this idea about how the United States is spread across the world.

You know, we're in almost every country in the world. We drop a bomb every 12 minutes in the world. We have faces all over the world. It's just, it's been that way for a long time. It's almost like, to be honest with you, we moved into a global environment where the United States is just dancing in everybody's tune or whatever we're doing. And I was a former military officer, served in the military, infantry officer.

But I've had some people come to me here recently that have gotten out of the service and are really upset by what they were seeing the military doing. I had one fellow who was a young pilot, by the way, a decorated pilot, jet pilot, who came back and visited me and said that he was just shocked. He'd been reading my stuff, but he said, it's worse than you think. He said that he was driving by a field, by the way, a big field in Afghanistan, and it was guarded by all these American troops.

He said, what in the hell are they guarding? And the driver said, oh, it's the opium. We're doing the opium for the populace. And he was just shocked. He said, I'm not doing this anymore. And he actually resigned, quit, came back to the United States as a lawyer now. And he's been doing work with us. But the point is, is that when I've been in Washington, D.C., and I've suited out of Washington, D.C. For over 40 years, I've had people I've met with in private,

senators in Congress, who say basically the same thing. John. One thing is one thing that D.C. is about, and that's basically the only thing, money, money, money, money. And there have been some studies, by the way, really detailed, fine studies. There was a study that came out of Princeton University, Harvard, Princeton professors, looked at where money congregated in the United States. And this is leading up to something else that's part of the conversation.

But they came to the conclusion that it was Washington, D.C., where money congregated. And they've actually documented it. There are 585 billionaires that basically run what's going on in Washington, D.C. This would be equated to the so-called deep state. There's another study that came out of some SMU in 2018 that tried to focus where psychopaths, I mean, prominent psychopaths, were they congregated in the United States?

It was Washington, D.C. I mean, basically what we're run by is a millionaire psychopath. We have one thing, they like power, they want to be treated like little gods and things like that. And I've seen it, by the way, in meetings. The point is that if they want to blast somebody off the face of the earth, they'll do it. And they don't really care about human beings.

Human beings are gone. and they don't you know again they refer to us as the unhumans by the way there's a book that came out recently endorsed by many of the people around trump called the unhumans have you seen that book uh negative i find it i can't look at it's scary but they they view most of the human race as the unhuman in other words. We slaughtered chickens, cows, whatever to eat, whatever. You slaughtered the unhumans the same way.

I mean, there's only so many humans, according to them. But the other thing is, is the way that artificial intelligence is moving so very rapidly, by the way. And it's been coming for many years. In 1986, I wrote a book that people looked at me and said, are you nuts? It was called The End of Man. And it's where I first saw AI emerging. This was 1986, many years ago, and about 40 years ago, in fact. And it was, I saw it coming then.

The problem is most people don't understand. They're not educated on what's going on. They don't get anything in the public schools about this kind of stuff, their education or whatever they're doing. They don't get it off the TV, maybe in a sci-fi movie, which they say is fiction. But the point is that we're moving very rapidly into a system where people are going to be able to flick your wrist, kill those people. Who gives a damn?

We don't care. They aren't humans. And that's where it's headed. I've told people we have less than 10 years, in my opinion, before everything collapses. And we move into, basically, a mechanized AI network, which many professors, by the way, and we should talk a minute about this, where they're predicting basically that, wow, it's going to be an amazing experience, basically where there's no need for humanity, no reason for humans.

And it's coming. And, you know, Musk said it really well, by the way, not too long ago, and he said, when there's an evil dictator, he said, when there's an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI dictator, there'll be no death. It will live forever. And then you'll have an immoral dictator, which will never be an escape.

And that's basically where we're headed right now. We're only a few years away from what they've been predicting for a while. And so when you go talking about wars, wars are for money. That's basically all they're about. And power. Money and power. So whatever Trump and his people are thinking about or doing about, and whoever they're working with, yeah, I think they could very well, you know, just bomb the hell out of wherever they want to bomb the hell out of and move on.

But you know what? They won't get bombed. Right. Well, some excellent points there. and I'm hoping to get into that deeper AI conversation at some point during this conversation. But boy, it's funny that you said that they call us the unhumans because I think we feel the same exact way, especially some of these technocrats that are kind of into the transhumanism side of things. And again, maybe we could touch on that a little bit later.

But I would also suggest it's not just the power-hungry psychopaths that are in DC, but it's also the pedophiles, right? And we know that there's a whole ruling elite that are attached to the Epstein network. And I guess that is also grounds for another conversation. We don't have to go down that road.

Yeah, I've also seen a lot of people online, a lot of active military kind of pushing back saying that they're not going to die for Israel. And it seems to be kind of an overwhelming sentiment for most people, except for some of the hardcore right wing war hawks and MAGA folk. But, you know, you mentioned the opium going on in the Middle East and that being a big incentive and motivation for a lot of these wars and proxy wars as well.

And, you know, at some point during this conversation, I was hoping to bring this up because we actually had John Kariaku on the podcast maybe a couple of weeks ago. I think maybe maybe a little bit more than that, maybe a month or so. But he said the same exact thing, John. He said when he was there in Afghanistan,

he saw miles and miles and miles of poppy fields. And when he tried to raise some awareness about it, he got shot down by his higher-ups and basically told not to speak about it anymore. Maybe it was this pilot that I told you about. He was told, shut up. Yeah, yeah. He said, I'm not going to shut up. And he said, that was it. He said, your career is gone. Now, he also had some kind words about you. We mentioned you during that podcast.

And Kariaku said, God bless John Whitehead and the Rutherford Institute. So I think he's a big fan of your work. just a side note there. But yeah, it really has shifted. I want to talk on that, but I just want to sink our teeth a little bit further into this Iran thing here a little bit, because it does seem like such a big conversation. And this is a follow-up.

You said money is usually the propulsion for war, but what do you think the real goal is here, considering that the Trump administration is full with so many pro-Israel war hawks? I mean, they're using the same exact rhetoric from the war on terror years, why we needed to invade Iraq. It's, you know, it's the WMDs again. It's crazy to think that they're feeding us this nonsense once again, but like, you know, what is this really about specifically?

And this feels like every time that there's some type of conflict abroad, it just justifies more crackdowns and surveillance at home. So yeah, what do you think is really going on here, John? Well, I think it's the, like I said, it's the, uh i mean to be honest i don't know what it's about except this you'll get money control.

Shutting anybody up that doesn't agree with them or whatever i don't to be honest with it and you know israel has a very strong influence as we know on what's going on and like i said whatever you know it's it's, They're not telling the American people. No, that's another thing. We don't get told anything. They do what they're going to do. And if they want a nuclear war, another thing, too, about war is, to be honest with you, I think Trump wants to go to war.

I think that gives him more power in every way possible. And that's what he wants. Yeah, you know, sadly, I completely agree with what you just said, because, I mean, you know, we're looking at these escalations right now. Now, I was going through the news wires just a little bit earlier.

I saw two articles that that seemed quite pertinent with regard to the situation. One of the Times of Israel says Israel is expecting a U.S. Decision on joining its strikes against Iran within 24 to 48 hours. And of course, you know, who knows if that's more saber rattling. But with what we've seen, we saw just a few days ago out of the New York Post that Trump blatantly admitted he knew when Israel was going to strike Iran.

And these talks were essentially just a means of lulling them into a false sense of security all the while he knew that this war was coming. The second article I saw this morning, quite concerning, is out of Newsweek, says Trump's nuclear attack doomsday plane arrives in Washington, D.C. The E-4B Nightwatch aircraft landed at Joint Base Andrews on Tuesday night. It's the first time it's been sent into D.C. Since just after September 11, 2001. So that's certainly concerning in and of

itself. But to your point, I think that essentially a lot of this, and also to Jason's point. A lot of it, in my personal belief, comes down to the fact that Israel, sorry for the frank language, just sort of has America by the balls. And especially we know with the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad asset, that's incontestable. We know that Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell's father, was also a Mossad asset.

We have all this information connecting Epstein to Ehud Barak and numerous other people. And of course, Trump's deep connections to Epstein as well. I made a post on Twitter just the other day. I said, imagine the insane amount of blackmail that Israel has to have on Trump for him to be threatening to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei and demanding unconditional surrender this early on.

And I would just like to get your thoughts on that because, I mean, obviously there's also this long, long we've known of the Project for a New American Century and the desires of the deep state to expand the American empire to destabilize the Middle East. We know that General Wesley Clark came out shortly after 9-11 with his big speech in seven countries in five years about all the nations that they wanted to destabilize.

So obviously that plays into it as well, but I'd like to get your thoughts on just the pervasive influence that this colonialist apartheid regime has on influencing American foreign policy.

Well it's like i said we're many years ago like i said some writers that i saw were really good thinkers way ahead of their time basically said as the internet gets started moving around the world ai develops there's not going to be any countries we're going to be a global state they'll still use me but most of these people like you said whether it was a side or whatever they're working together in my opinion and anybody that disagrees is going to be put away or anybody

that's pulled out and got it gets caught and may actually expose them is going to be done away with and that's always been true with the federal government uh it's just gotten worse over the over recent years and we ought to mistrust all those in power you know that was a the great statement by the founding fathers, you know, James Madison, who wrote our Bill of Rights. But the problem is, with our educational system today, everybody's deluded, basically.

People don't know the Bill of Rights. They don't know anything about the Constitution. Trump has never read the Declaration of Independence. He doesn't know anything about the Constitution. These are idiots running our government, basically. And I've said this over and over. If we had any common sense in America, okay, before you take a position of power in America as a representative or a president or whatever, a government official, you should have to pass the test of the Constitution.

Trump doesn't know anything about, like I said, they don't know anything about the Constitution. I've raised this with people before. I've raised it with politicians. They don't have any idea what our country is about. These people, like I say, they're not about America. They're about money and whatever growing power they're going to get to wrap around the world. The problem is most Americans are distracted by all the entertainment and stuff they're put through.

As George Orwell said, football, beer, etc., you get people into that and they're gone, basically. And the great thinkers in the early days, like the Orwells and Huxleys, saw all this coming. They tried to warn us, but no one's listening. It's here, folks. We're here now. I mean, we could end up dead by the end of the day. All right? Let's hope not. We're doing this podcast. But here's the thing.

We need to speak truth to power. We need to get out there and say, listen, disobedience to governments that are crooked is basically, so the founder said, and some good stuff. was obedience to God. Disobedience to tyrants is obedience to God. But most people don't have any idea of that because, again, we've got a great bill of rights. We've got a great constitution we can use. But it's being warped and bent over, and no one knows what's in it, by the way.

I find, as I ask people today, even lawyers, can you give me the freedoms of the First Amendment? They look at me blankly. Yeah, isn't that sad? In our intern program, I had a student come in And she had studied with us for a while, very bright. And she said, I'm just shocked. I don't know the Bill of Rights. And she was a constitutional. She was studying the Constitution, basically. And she said, maybe here's what my professor said at the beginning of the year.

He said, there's one thing we'll not be discussing this year in our Constitution class, the First Amendment. He said it shocked her. I said, it shouldn't shock you. That's the way it is. They don't want you to know you have a right to rebel. You have free speech. you have a right to protest against the government. They don't want you to read the Declaration of Independence because it says if they start taking your rights away, let's trash them and throw them away

and build our own government. That's what Jefferson said, basically. Yeah, I agree. And it's clear that that point you made, like that you don't even have to take a constitutional test to be a politician, much less even the president. And it's also clear that Trump is definitely blind to the powers that the Constitution tries to rein in from him. Right. Well, he calls it a beautiful, sweet thing. Yeah.

It's not a beautiful, sweet thing. Right. If rumors stink, let's kick their bus and get them out of power and let's take over. He doesn't want you to think like that. No. Listen, there have been some brief periods in history where people have been a little bit more educated. And risen up like the 1960s, I saw some pretty good movements started. But after a while, they too were co-opted by money and entertainment. And the people in power know how to manipulate people.

And, you know, there comes a time when you have to just say, F you, I'm not going to do it. And we're going to fight back and we're going to do everything we can to make sure you don't stay in power very long and start some movements and movements that last, not movements that last a day or two, movements that last till we get the power back to the people. As freedom lovers, we know that solutions do not come from government. As entrepreneurs, we know they do come from relationships.

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And John, that's why you've been one of the most consistent voices warning about this, this, this rise of the surveillance state and the erosion of constitutional protections. I mean, what we're seeing unfold right now with Trump's renewed alliance with Palantir and his past threats to suspend habeas corpus and now this saber rattling, which is now morphing into maybe possible potential war in 24 hours with Iran. It's all like painting this really disturbing picture.

I mean, if Trump if Trump does push forward with this aggression towards Iran, like the writing on the wall is that anyone who questions it, especially like us anti-war voices, right, are going to be labeled a threat because they have this threat matrix that they're already applying right now. We've already seen the FBI threat assessments targeting people for using encrypted apps or sharing anti-war memes.

So if Trump does ramp up this war with Iran, how do you see this evolving into a crackdown on anti-war dissent here at home? Well, it's going to get worse because the American people have been led into this. Again, I wrote a book called Battlefield of America, The War on the American People. It came out in 2015 where I was seeing how the federal government, the Department of Homeland Security.

They're sending all this military equipment down to local police, turning them into, you know, basically military people and going into homes. 80,000 SWAT team raids on an annual basis. Now, it's still occurring. FBI surrounding homes now and shooting people, veterans who don't even have a gun, by the way. All kinds of cases are still going on. The press, though, is pretty quiet about it.

So it's been going on for a living they're being taught that we live in a martial law state to begin with like i say when you have the local cops running around with mraps and vests and mk-14s i had a police chief call me and say john i didn't agree with your stuff but i think i'm gonna reduce my SWAT team and what it's doing i said why what happened he said we get a SWAT team raid entered this hole, and one of our agents put an AK-47 to a kid's head, a four-year-old,

laying on a rug. He said it freaked out everybody. He says, we're pulling back. But I've had these guys at work that are good cops. They talked to me. They said everything is military now. So it's always been leading up to this, because when people say this, it's shocking. I say, hey, haven't you been watching the news? It's been going on, building up since the 80s. I mean, it's just gotten worse and worse and worse at home. Now you're sending in the Marines?

Again, I'm a former infantry officer. I would have said, don't send me in. I'm not going into an American city and doing that. That's awful. We would never have done that because we were trained differently. Today, though.

Hey, listen, people who speak out against the so-called president, which is our job, by the way, that's our job, our duty, are now seen as enemy combatants, and that's how they're training the cops and the Marines and people in the service. So, listen, I think that this country can shut down in no time. And by the way, the way they position it on the news media, and I can't stand the news media on TV, a bunch of baloney, is that they are training people to get ready and be obedient, okay?

But listen, anybody with a half a brain is not obedient, not to a tyrant or a dictator or an idiot. You fight back, you know, and you stand on the line. Then, you know, if you have to go down, you go down. But listen, the great thinkers in history, and I named the Rutherford Institute after a guy named Samuel Rutherford, who was so hated in Scotland that in England they were going to execute him. he died before they could execute.

But the point is, is that he stood up for faith. A lot of your great thinkers have, but they've been killed. They've been arrested. They've been put in jail. Okay. Julian Assange, you go down the list. No, people who just say, here's the truth. Well, they don't want the truth because they don't want you to wake up. Absolutely. Brilliantly stated. And we agree 100%.

And regarding the kind of escalation of police in this country, you know, I'm sure you are aware, John, we've been covering the police accountability stories and side of things for over a decade now. So it's definitely in our wheelhouse. And obviously, you know, Nixon ramped up the war on drugs in the early 70s.

And that's been 50 plus years of failure. But I would suggest that, yeah, you're right, like around the 80s, around the 90s, even the early 2000s was when we started to really see things kind of ramp up within the drug war. And a lot of this seems like it's just police culture now. Like this is just kind of the norm. It's the standard.

And when we're talking about tens of thousands of raids every year being conducted by SWAT, a million plus drug related arrests each year in the US, obviously this has become big business. And on top of that, as you were saying, you know, Trump actually signed that executive order in late April, which was the Strengthening and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens executive order.

Which, you know, there's even that that title alone is very much gives kind of the Patriot Act vibes of, you know, kind of the doublespeak. But that actually expanded legal protections for officers and ended up giving them more military equipment from, you know, what was left over from the DOD 1033 program, which, you know, was something that started, I think, back in the early 2010s with Obama. And boy, what a nightmare that's been.

Yeah, it's a nightmare. And we're living the nightmare right now. And it's only going to get worse. When people ask me, like, what do you think the future is? And the future, as I see it, like I say, is basically going to be run by robotic minds, you know, and Trump's really pushing it. You know, plenty of air and all that, you were mentioning it. A musk in there putting AI into effective action. You're telling robots when we're making decisions about how we think and what we do, what we eat.

And that's exactly where it's, it is. It's headed that direction. It's already here. And again, like I said, I saw it coming many years ago and was concerned about it. And, you know, it's like one of the quotes in my book, in Battlefield America, I end the chapter, and there's a guy standing next to a robot, and the guy looks up to the robot and says, do you think there's a God? And the robot looks down at him and says, there is now.

Yeah that's where we're at almost folks and and you got you got guys like trump and trump's not a very intelligent man obviously and he's not a very moral man as you said he's connected to epstein and all that stuff right it's it's but the way the company's so corrupt when you see two people running for president today it's just you're looking at both of the so-called candidates and you're going that's what we get but you have people with brains like you three guys for example that

you should be running for president but then they don't let somebody like you run for president because you might say i don't agree with this we don't shut this down they don't want any of that, like i said that book the unhumans i can say if you read it it's freaky because the way it poses the future and this is run by you know again i've been trying i said you like you said i've been talking about this for a long time and it's people

are going as long as you can connect them to what some kind of object of, the neural lake or whatever Musk has come up with to make people tune into the intranet and become and the idea of singularity and all that. Sure. Transhumanism, all that stuff. Speaking of the future here, you know, Matt just brought up Palantir and that feels like it is the doorway to a dystopian future.

And ever since, you know, the New York Times article about the Trump administration enlisting Palantir to create this master database for our private records to be centralized. It feels like a lot of people are very concerned, rightfully so. It finally kind of woken up a sleeping giant, and still there's plenty of people asleep. But it seems like it's going to be the nail in the coffin for our privacy. And I should probably mention Palantir has no problem sidestepping local and state laws.

I don't know if you guys heard this story, but they basically partnered with the New Orleans Police Department to deploy this predictive policing without city approval. Like the city council didn't even know what was going on. It's pretty foreboding if you think about it. And that's just one element of what Palantir and their AI systems do.

You know, they also use the Gotham software to predict mission planning and geo analytics for government and defense operations and basically what Israel is using right now in Gaza. So, you know, when we talk about this, sometimes this digital prison that is basically being constructed around us, sometimes people say that we're crazy, that we're kooks, because we say that it's something that's being built that's similar to China's social credit score.

But because Trump's the one rolling this stuff out, like they seem to either not care or they claim to say that it's fixing the immigration crisis by deporting illegals. So like do you think that this Palantir will indeed lead us to the doorstep of a social credit score system here in the US?

They already are they're already there in my opinion they're we just haven't seen it bounce up and you know it's we're algorithms now we're moving into that say you call it digital prison no doubt and, David Chomsky, he's an NYU science professor. Here's a great quote. He says, there's more than a 50-50 chance AI will wipe out humanity by the middle of the century. We're coming to that point. And the question is, is there any way that we can stop that?

And when I say we, it's just, listen, the people running the show want the AI. And they want to say that they're going to be back there behind the AI running it. But sooner or later, the AI is going to turn on them. And they're going to be controlled in their digital prison. There's no way we're going to get out of it. That's where this country is headed. It's where the world is headed.

I think part when you see the wars and stuff are going on right now, there may be some people that are resisting. We don't agree obviously, but they're going to be flattened. That is how you control them. Again, with the violence and attacks and stuff like that. And the fact that we're watching the possibility of a nuclear war coming about right now is so insane that it, well, look at the populace of the United States. No one's even thinking hardly about it. Not your average citizen.

They're too busy watching the news, Fox News or MSNBC, run by, again, some of the great thinkers in the past that were on those media channels came forward where they quit and said, hey, it's run by the CIA and the NSA, most of those places. They vet articles. They vet what you're going to say, what you're going to do. It's all in control.

And that's been going on a long time. The only way, again, like I'm telling people, take your kids, homeschool them if you can, possible. Teach them about all this stuff so that they're at least aware of what's coming. Today, most people aren't even aware of any of this going on, by the way. We're talking about it. that's what's good about this podcast if you can get it out there and get more people thinking and you know again.

Your eyes are useless if your mind is blind you won't be able to see anything and they're blinding our minds right now they're making sure we don't think and so again, again if people listen to this podcast if you have children start training your children start teaching them the bill of rights they don't know they have a bill of rights in schools today they don't read the declaration of independence anymore they don't want people saying f you get out

of here you stinking government official which used to be my dad by the way i remember him in the early days he it's the way he talked to government officials it doesn't get off my property right now or i'm coming out with my gun and you can do that during that you do that today you'll have a swap team in your house that night probably. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's amazing that you actually bring up, you know, people homeschooling their kids and teaching them the rights.

The Free Thought Project, we've actually published a book called Little Free Thinkers Know Your Rights for parents to help teach their young kids about their constitutional freedoms. And so just a little shameless plug there for any of our listeners that haven't picked one up, head on over to the freethoughtproject.com and pick yourself up a copy. But, John, you mentioned the AI and all this encroaching digital dystopia that we're seeing and the fact that most people aren't even aware of it.

They're just completely sleepwalking into it. And that's, in my opinion, it's one of the biggest things that people should actually be educating themselves about is the concept of technocracy. That really is the driving ideology of this whole cabal of people is the technocratic ideology.

For people who don't know what that is, if this is the first time you've ever heard the word technocracy, this is an ideology that stretches back over 100 years, back to the 1930s, where all of these people didn't really believe in democratic government. They didn't believe in representative government. They believed that the quote unquote, the experts.

So again, some, some, you know, subtle messaging we heard during COVID that the engineers that the, you know, the technologically minded people are the ones that should be ruling society. And they had this essentially this idea for what they called a great American technate with a quote unquote techno king on top of it, who would be the one micromanaging and running things. This idea was then revived in the 1970s by Zbigniew Brzezinski and a number of these other deep state assets. And.

Is really what is now driving this advancement towards, and it has been for the last 20, 30 years or so. Some of our frequent listeners, you're aware that our colleague Derek Brose over at the Conscious Resistance Network heavily focuses on exposing technocracy and things of that nature. But that's what people really need to understand. This is not a new thing. As a matter of fact, Elon Musk's grandfather was involved in that original early 1930s technocratic movement.

So this is something that is ingrained into the ideology of the ruling class of replacing humanity, replacing any sort of individual freedom or personal sovereignty with this AI and digital dystopia. Top-down control grid surveillance panopticon. And however, I would say, at least thankfully, it seems as though there is some kind of pushback. I'm starting to see more people talk about technocracy, whereas previously the word was very seldom used in the contemporary lexicon.

And with regard to this you know our push towards the war with iran i was watching the ron paul liberty report just yesterday and there is a poll came out there's a you gov poll that shows about 60 percent of americans or so are against this escalation towards war with iran and majority of the respondents to that poll are republicans and so thankfully we're seeing some sort of pushback So I'd just like to get your thoughts on that.

And, you know, what kind of pushback, if any, have you been seeing that sort of makes you perhaps a little optimistic that we might be able to, you know, resist this nonsense they're trying to shove down our throats? It's going to be difficult. I mean, I have to be honest with you. Again, I've been doing this for over 40 years. I've seen it. It's going to take, there has to be a concerted effort of people gathering together. I keep saying this is the key, why we have a 10th Amendment.

Local communities, you know, under the 10th Amendment, under the 10th Amendment can dole by acts of the federal government. I've been trying to get local communities together to start their... Civil liberties committees and start taking over their local government and banding together would be great in trying to fight some of it. But that's going to take a while. I don't know how it's going to sit. I think we have a very short amount of time before we can stop most of this.

And if they want to drop a bomb here or do a 9-11, which will just completely wipe out people mentally, they'll do it, in my opinion. And I just don't trust anything the government does. I think if you do, I'm just telling people you're very foolish. The only hope we have is that you're getting people together and people fighting back against this stuff. But it's just very, very difficult. That's why I'm continuing to do what I do.

You know, I've had people ask me, when are you going to retire? I said, when I'm in the grave, you know, and that's basically the response. Don't give up. Get your local communities together and start fighting back against this stuff and tell the government to F off. Get the FBI out of your neighborhood. The FBI is spent around the country, by the way, is working with local police chiefs and stuff.

And they've invaded, basically, local government with all this equipment they've got now from the federal government. And, you know, again, I've had cops that just think I'm an idiot because of my feelings on this. and they would rather have all the military equipment. But the point is right now, everything we have, the laptop, what we're doing now, our cell phones, our smart TVs, everything is listening to it. We're becoming an algocracy, which is we're basically going to become algorithms.

We're moving into a really nutty pre-crime state where you'll be arrested at your door by whatever comes to your door from the government. And that will be based on algorithms. We're just information to the algocracy that we're seeing coming. And it's going to get freaky. I mean, you guys are awake, but most people aren't going to get it. That's the point. They never have.

And there's all kinds of things I detail in my books that I'm getting people just to think about, you know, what's happened to our country. From the FBI in the 1950s, what they were doing, going into people's homes and arresting people and all the things we've seen. It's just, it's been going on a long, long time. And I see with the militarization of the police, I've seen the big jump.

Now you see all people, I know we can disagree, but we can disagree, but we should be able, we can get people together in the community and say, don't you be bombing anybody. No, stop the bomb. Stop the bomb. Quit all the crap. Quit killing people, by the way. But there's things we can do, but we have to get them off our butts and do it. Most people, like I say, when I go out to eat dinner sometimes,

I'm watching whole families, mother, father, two kids. They're all, they're all reading their cell phones. I agree. They're being programmed. My family and I noticed that the other day we were out at dinner and we're just looking around the restaurant. And I mean, entire families are not even having conversations. They're just staring at their phones.

Yeah. Which are all going, which is collecting data on them and all going to Palantir and all helping to build a technocratic police state that we're trying to fight against, right? Well, you must like that real good thinker. I think my name is Matt Goldwhite or whatever to quit Google. He walked out the door about a year ago and he said, I'm quitting. We're creating God. We're creating conscious machine. I quit. He walked out. This is out of Google.

And it's these are the people that are running the show google and all these people they care about one thing money and control money and control and we need disobedient minds you know it's just like the great thinkers someone like thomas jefferson today would be a loner out there and probably get arrested you know for standing in front of a building and again you know as a rest of the institute we defend those kind of people all the time they're out there fighting for freedom,

then I'm going to continue to do it. And we should. Don't give up. You know, it's easy to give up in the face of what we're seeing, but it's worse than I've ever seen it. Well, yeah. I mean, speaking of disobedience and protests, I mean, obviously, you know, there are protests going on. And in fact, the last week we saw riots kind of take root in Los Angeles and kind of spread to several other cities. And boy, there's a lot of nuance here, right?

Because the protests like we're all for, but the riots were not for.

And they seem to cause a lot of chaos in our communities and create a lot of confusion online because let's face it we're just more polarized than ever as you were just saying john with the psyops and world-class propaganda and a lot of people who used to defend free speech were kind of cheering on the protests and riots being squashed by military being there and the police and you've written a lot about how protests are one of the the tools that we have to hold power accountable.

But over the years, we've seen that right kind of shrink with these so-called free speech zones, and you need permits and requirements, and there's surveillance. And now military police are treating these demonstrations as if there were the security there, basically. So do you still think that protests function as a meaningful form of dissent?

Or because we have to have permission and follow all these policies and be in these barricaded zones, doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose of protest in the first place? It makes it much more difficult, yeah. I agree. The only thing we can do is either turn off your laptop, turn off your cell phone, and whatever. Most people, you can't even communicate because we're not allowed that. I don't think we give up, no. I think that you do what you can do, and to the end.

And sooner or later, hopefully we can make some kind of progress. The problem we're facing, though, we've talked about already on the show, is the amount of control people have over us now of so-called people in the government. With all the technology they have. We're definitely a technocracy, and we're being watched, and they want to control us the way they can. They're doing a darn good job of it in many ways because they're spending so much money, our money.

They tax the crap out of us and tax us, and some people can't even hardly function in society anymore. Homeless populations grow.

All the things we're seeing, and I hate to say this but in many ways I'm surprised that the religious people in this community that I used to know are falling right in line with Trump and saluting me but you know there was a guy named Jesus that came along a while back he said F you I'm not thinking he kicked people out I mean that's true he kicked them out why do you think they nailed somebody to the cross because he's a good guy and he's working for the government no,

They're going to do that to some people. They're going to get their head back because they're doing the right thing.

But it would be better to do that than to be part of the group that's doing all the oppression and doing all the immoral things we're seeing doing. And that's what we need to teach our children. And hopefully they'll wake up someday, but it's going to be very difficult with the cell phones and all the electronic devices.

I've never seen it's just like an evil spider as a huge spider is in the middle of everything and spreading out and grabbing people's minds and controlling them yeah i absolutely agree and you know it's one of those situations where you know like you said educating the children is is so absolutely important and i know that.

And, you know, one thing that I'm glad to see is that throughout a lot of religious communities, you know, as you mentioned, unfortunately, there are many of the Christian community who are just sort of falling in line with this evangelical Zionism. But thankfully, there's also from what I've seen, there's a huge chunk of like Christians who really do follow the message of Yeshua and realize like, look, this is not, you know, good.

This is not the way that government should be behaving and things of that nature. And even in my communities, because I'm a Norse pagan, I'm devout, you know, Germanic heathen following Thor and Odin and, you know, gods like that. And many, much of the pagan community has always been very much, at the very least, very much against right wing government. Unfortunately, a lot of them sort of fall to the wayside when it comes to the left wing thing.

But at least, you know, we're seeing some kind of pushback. point being there's a when it again comes back to you know educating children about their rights and and you know pushing back against this there's a we usually taught like to end our podcast with a white pill question so i'll let matt take that in just a moment but there's a quote of mine that's not a quote of mine but it's a favorite of mine that i read a few years back that that gives me hope and and i saw.

I saw it a few years ago when we were talking about these sorts of things and people were just talking about how disheartened and sort of demoralized they are and how that sort of plays into the fact that a lot of people just don't want to have kids now because they're just so afraid of this world that's being created. And I saw this quote and now I reiterate it to a lot of people. It said, never be afraid of raising dragon slayers in a time of dragons.

So just because, you know, essentially the point of that is just because, you know, it looks like we're going down a bad road here. Don't let that one make you afraid of having a family and the beauty of creating life and continuing a family. But also that's all the more reason to raise your kids to push back against this and to know their rights and to, you know. In a way, you know, to be the resistance that that needs to be needs to come in the next generation.

And so I'd just like to hand that over with that thought. It's like to hand it over to Matt so that he can, you know, pop out our white pill question and close out the show. Yeah, for sure. And speaking of handing that knowledge to your kids, you can go to littlefreethinkers.com. I know Don said it earlier. It was the freethoughtproject.com, but it's actually littlefreethinkers.com. That's where you can pick that book up. But anyway, John, we are here at the last question now.

And before I ask this last question, though, man, I just want to take a second and sincerely thank you, not just for coming on, but for everything you've done over the years. Amen. You've been doing this work since I was a toddler. And that's just amazing. You've written more than a dozen books, including fiction. And I mean, it's amazing. And you're just consistent and principled and you're a very much needed voice against tyranny, especially when it wasn't popular or profitable. Right.

And beyond the writing and the warnings, you're literally on the front lines like through the Rutherford Institute. You're fighting these legal battles on behalf of people whose rights have been trampled, whether it's illegal searches, government surveillance or attacks on their free speech. You guys have been defending the Constitution in court. For decades. And it's very admirable. And books like Battlefield America, they have become road maps for understanding the moment we're in.

And I know many of us wouldn't even have the language to describe this fight without groundwork you laid. So as your last question, you've already offered a whole bunch of solutions throughout this conversation, like asserting the 10th Amendment, building localized communities, homeschooling to get kids out of these indoctrination camps. But I know all this stuff feels incredibly overwhelming to most people.

So if you had a magic wand or you could change one thing overnight to help turn the ship around, what would it be? What is the best shot that we have for changing course before this surveillance state becomes fully permanent?

Well, like I said, teach your kids. Well, education precedes action. That's the key. Educate them. They're the future. Teach them that the thing, the cell phone they have in their hand is not God. That it's a tool. Limit how they use it. Don't let them sit and stare at all the time. Get them into conversations. Get them to reading decent books. Books of the old days that have a lot of information. Some of our books are good.

And again, get them educated because going to public schools today and in public universities, I don't see they're not being educated in the way that we want. We want a nation of rebels. And rebels are people who just say, basically, I'm not taking this anymore. I'm going to fight back. You don't have to be violent to do it. And violence doesn't work. But, again, you have to realize John Lennon had that great statement, we're ruled by the insane for insane reasons.

Let's be sane. And here's the key. We've lost empathy in our society as care for others. There are no such thing as unhuman. We're all human. And let's take care of one another, support one another, no matter what. Don't dodge, folks. It's easy to dodge and get out of the fire. And I'd rather not dodge and stand up to people and say, we're going to defend you no matter what. You're taking a stand and that's what we do at the Rutherford Institute.

We're not going to, like I say, leave you standing there by yourself. We're going to stand there with you. Hear, hear, man. Very well said, John. Before we sign off here, besides the Rutherford Institute at Rutherford.org, can you tell people how they can follow and support your work? Yeah, just go to Rutherford.org, get educated, because we do good commentary, as you know. They're all documented. The books are good.

Again, if you don't know your rights, you don't know what's in the Constitution, you don't know some of the great thinkers of the past, which we talk about all the time, learn that, because there have been some great people in the past. If they had to come alive, we wouldn't be here today.

And they were willing to give their lives for freedom. and there comes a point when you have to do that I agree man and I think you're pretty damn close to that thank you for coming on John I appreciate it we really appreciate it thank you sir, thank you for listening to the Free Thought Project Podcast and please don't. Music.