Overcriminalization: The government's tendency towards militarization and overcriminalization, in which routine, everyday behaviors become targets of regulation and prohibition, has resulted in Americans getting arrested for making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, feeding a whale, holding Bible studies in their homes, and picking their kids up from school.
Strip searches: Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip-search us, and probe us intimately.
Drones: As corporations and government agencies alike prepare for their part in the coming drone invasion, it won't be long before American citizens find themselves to be the target of these unmanned aerial vehicles.
Prisons: America's prisons, housing the largest number of inmates in the world and still growing, have become money-making enterprises for private corporations that manage the prisons in exchange for the states agreeing to maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years.
Censorship: Free-speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero-tolerance policies, hate-crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core First Amendment freedoms.
Fascism: As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation's capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives.
James Madison, the father of the Constitution, put it best when he warned: "Take alarm at the first experiment with liberties." Anyone with even a casual knowledge about current events knows that the first experiment on our freedoms happened long ago.
We are fast moving past the point of no return when it comes to restoring our freedoms. Worse, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government has been operating ten steps ahead for quite some time now, and we have yet to catch up, let alone catch our breath as the tides of change swirl around us.
You'd better tighten your seat-belts, folks, because we could be in for a rough ride in 2017.
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