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On The Front Lines

John W. Whitehead to Speak on ‘Battlefield America: The War on the American People’ at Ron Paul Institute 2018 Peace & Prosperity Conference

WASHINGTON, DC — Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, will be a featured speaker at the third annual Ron Paul Institute’s Peace and Prosperity Conference on August 18, 2018, in Washington, DC. Whitehead will speak on the far-reaching ramifications of domestic militarization and the transformation of America into a war zone. This year’s conference includes a special focus on the symbiosis between the mainstream media and the warfare state. In addition to Whitehead, other featured speakers include Ron Paul, former three-time U.S. presidential candidate, and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. 

“The military-industrial complex continues to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives. We are a military culture engaged in continuous warfare. We have been a nation at war for most of our existence. We are a nation that makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars. We are being fed a steady diet of violence through our entertainment, news and politics. And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military, which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This is how you acclimate a population to war. This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine. This is how, to borrow from the subtitle to the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, you teach a nation to ‘stop worrying and love the bomb.’ The media, eager to score higher ratings, has been equally complicit in making (real) war more palatable to the public by packaging it as TV friendly. In order to sell war, you have to feed the public’s appetite for entertainment. Not satisfied with peddling its war propaganda through Hollywood, reality TV shows and embedded journalists whose reports came across as glorified promotional ads for the military, the Pentagon has also used sports to further advance its agenda. This is how you sustain the nation’s appetite for war.”

John W. Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law and human rights. Whitehead's concern for the persecuted and oppressed led him, in 1982, to establish The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization. The Rutherford Institute is one of the nation's leading advocates of civil liberties and human rights, litigating in the courts and educating the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting individual freedom. The Institute’s mission is twofold: to provide legal services in the defense of civil liberties and to educate the public on important issues affecting their constitutional freedoms. The Institute provides its legal services at no charge to those whose constitutional and human rights have been threatened or violated. Whitehead serves as the Institute’s president and spokesperson, in addition to writing a weekly commentary that is distributed nationwide. Whitehead's aggressive, pioneering approach to civil liberties issues has earned him numerous accolades. The Rutherford Institute is a 501(c)(3) organization, gifts to which are deductible as charitable contributions for Federal income tax purposes.

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