Free Society

Sleepwalking into Tyranny

by John W. Whitehead February 14, 2025

“This is what militaries do during coups: you capture the major targets, with government buildings high on the list, and you take over communications and other systems.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian on fascism and authoritarian leaders How something is done is just as important as why something is done. To suggest that the ends justify the means is to launch ...

Animal Farm Politics: The Deep State Wins Again

by John W. Whitehead January 24, 2025

“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”—George Orwell, Animal Farm It cost the American taxpayer $24 million to find out what we knew ...

Classical Liberalism versus Modern Unlimited Democracy

by Richard M. Ebeling October 1, 2024

Election years have the tendency to bring out the worst in political rhetoric. Both major political parties color their opponents as dangers to the foundations of American democracy and even the world in general. I remember seeing on television in 1964 the famous “Daisy” political ad with a small girl holding a flower being vaporized in a huge nuclear ...

The Political Matrix Sustains the Illusion of Freedom

by John W. Whitehead August 21, 2024

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Neil Postman What you smell ...

The Right to Not Be Lied To: Making the Case for Truth in Politics

by John W. Whitehead July 31, 2024

Q: “How can you tell if a politician is lying?” A: “When his lips are moving.” “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological ...

Project Total Control: Everything Is a Weapon When Totalitarianism Is Normalized

by John W. Whitehead July 15, 2024

“The biggest mistake I see is people waiting for A Big Sign that’ll tell them that things have gone too far. One Big Thing that police or lawmakers or the president/leaders will do that will cross the line. It’ll never come because they won’t cross it. They’ll move the line. That line you think you stand behind is shifting ...

The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 3, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 As I pointed out in parts 1 and 2 of this article, the main thrust of the U.S. government’s case against Ian Freeman involved money-laundering and conspiracy to launder money. The money-laundering charge came after the undercover IRS agent Pavel Prilotsky posed as a drug dealer in an attempt ...

The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 2, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 In 2008, a person by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto revolutionized the monetary world with the invention of bitcoin, the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency. Concerned about the omnipotent control over money that governments all over the world wielded and the massive violations of financial privacy that came with such control, ...

Tyranny and the Homelessness Problem

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2024

I grew up in Laredo, Texas, which was the poorest city in the United States based on per capita income. The poverty in Laredo was so extensive that people in some parts of town actually lived in shacks. Yet, there was never a homelessness problem in Laredo. Yes, people lived in dilapidated housing, but at least they had a ...

The Political Economy of Natural versus Contrived Inequalities

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2024

To discuss the political economy of natural versus contrived inequalities requires some explanation of what is meant by “natural,” “contrived,” and “inequalities.” The use of the word “natural” has had a long, if sometimes controversial, history in economics over the last two and half centuries. When using this term, the French Physiocrats in the eighteenth century meant that along ...

The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 28, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 If one googles the name “Ian Freeman” and “bitcoin,” the result will be hundreds  of articles describing Freeman as a “fraudster.” That’s because immediately after  Freeman’s sentencing in a criminal case in a U.S. District Court in New Hampshire  on October 2, 2023, the U.S. Attorney’s office in ...

How the Police State Acclimates Us to Being Modern-Day Slaves

by John W. Whitehead June 27, 2024

“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all ...