The Politics of Hate: Weaponized Discord Is the Deep State’s Most Effective Tool

“Love your enemies.”
Jesus Christ

“I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”
President Trump

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend… Love has within it a redemptive power…and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.”
Martin Luther King Jr

“We the people” once expected more from our government—and demanded more of ourselves. What has changed is not the makeup of the populace, but how power in a police state is exercised.

This country was built on the radical idea that government exists to serve the people—not to control them, monitor them, manage them, or rule over them.

That idea is being systematically dismantled by a Deep State determined to entrench its power at our expense by keeping the nation divided, distracted, and perpetually at war with itself.

What we are witnessing in America today is a deliberate effort to rebrand cruelty as strength, division as patriotism, and hatred as love of country.

Despite what ad companies and politicians want us to believe, love is not sentimental platitudes, flashy gestures, or expensive gifts.

Love is powerful. It is transformative. It is radical.

As a political force, love is dangerous to those who rule by fear, division, and control.

It refuses to dehumanize. It refuses to surrender community. It refuses to turn neighbor against neighbor or to hate on command. Ultimately, it refuses to abandon the idea that we belong to one another—that we share a common humanity, a common fate, and a common responsibility to one another.

That kind of love—the kind embodied by Jesus Christ, by Martin Luther King Jr., and by those who in every age refuse to surrender their humanity in the face of empire—has always been a threat to systems built on militarism, materialism and domination.

This is not about party politics, or which side can shout louder, quote more scripture, or claim the moral high ground.

It is about what happens when those in power discover that a divided people are easier to manipulate than a united one—and that hate is not a byproduct of politics, but one of its most effective weapons.

We can’t even turn on a football game without being subjected to a demonstration of how outrage is manufactured and division monetized.

This nation is being destabilized by forces that masquerade as political movements, but dig down deep, and you’ll find that power and greed work the same no matter which party hat they wear.

The “politics of hate” is a bipartisan tool.

The division that is tearing this country apart is not an accident. It has been cultivated, weaponized, and exploited.

As a result, life in America has become a gut-wrenching, soul-sucking, misery-drenched existence.

“We the people” are being subjected to crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns.

We’ve been held up, stripped down, faked out, photographed, frisked, fracked, hacked, tracked, cracked, intercepted, accessed, spied on, zapped, mapped, searched, shot at, tasered, tortured, tackled, trussed up, tricked, lied to, labeled, libeled, leered at, shoved aside, saddled with debt not of our own making, sold a bill of goods about national security, tuned out by those representing us, tossed aside, and taken to the cleaners.

We’ve had our freedoms turned inside out, our democratic structure flipped upside down, and our house of cards left in a shambles.

We’ve been locked down, shut in, fenced off, fined, cited, censored, silenced, surveilled, tracked, traced, coerced, mandated, ordered, threatened, and punished in the name of “public health,” with our rights treated not as inalienable, but as conditional privileges—granted, suspended, or revoked at the whim of governors, bureaucrats, and unelected officials.

We’ve had our children burned by flashbang grenades, our dogs shot, and our old folks hospitalized after “accidental” encounters with marauding SWAT teams.

We’ve been told that as citizens we have no rights within 100 miles of our own border. Now those “Constitution-free zones” have expanded far beyond the nation’s borders, as federal agents stop, question, detain, raid, and surveil Americans in a profit-driven quest to fill quotas and establish a “papers please” society.

We’ve seen the police transformed from community peacekeepers to point guards for the militarized corporate state. We’ve been pushed around, prodded, poked, pried at, spied on, scanned, shot and intimidated by the very individuals—police—hired to safeguard our rights.

We’ve been deemed suspicious for engaging in such dubious activities as talking too long on a cell phone and stretching too long before jogging, dubbed extremists and terrorists for criticizing the government and suggesting it is tyrannical or oppressive, and subjected to forced colonoscopies and anal probes for allegedly rolling through a stop sign.

We’ve been sodomized, victimized, jeopardized, demoralized, traumatized, stigmatized, vandalized, demonized, polarized and terrorized, often without having done anything to justify such treatment. Blame it on a government mindset that renders us guilty before we’ve even been charged, let alone convicted, of any wrongdoing.

We’ve been railroaded into believing that our votes count, that we live in a democracy, that elections make a difference, that it matters whether we vote Republican or Democrat, and that our elected officials are looking out for our best interests. Truth be told, we live in an oligarchy.

We’ve gone from having privacy in our inner sanctums to having nowhere to hide, with wearable devices and biometric trackers monitoring our bodies, apps logging our movements and interactions, homes that spy on us through smart meters, cameras, and remotely controlled systems, and cars that listen to our conversations and track our whereabouts. Even our cities have become wall-to-wall electronic concentration camps, with license-plate readers, facial recognition systems, and high-definition cameras recording everything that takes place within city limits.

We’ve had our schools locked down, our students handcuffed, shackled and arrested for engaging in childish behavior such as food fights, our children’s biometrics stored, their school IDs chipped, their movements tracked, and their data bought, sold and bartered for profit by government contractors, all the while they are treated like criminals and taught to march in lockstep with the police state.

We’ve been rendered enemy combatants in our own country, denied basic due process rights, held against our will without access to an attorney or being charged with a crime, and left to molder in jail until such a time as the government is willing to let us go or allow us to defend ourselves.

We’ve seen families ripped apart by militarized ICE raids, homes entered without judicial warrants, asylum seekers caged, long-time residents disappeared into detention centers, and entire communities terrorized by quota-driven enforcement schemes that trample due process and treat human beings as collateral damage.

We’ve had the very military weapons we funded with our hard-earned tax dollars used against us, from weaponized drones tracking our movements on the nation’s highways and byways and armored vehicles, sound cannons and grenade launchers in towns with little to no crime to an arsenal of military-grade weapons and equipment given free of charge to schools and universities.

We’ve been silenced, censored and forced to conform, shut up in free speech zones, gagged by hate crime laws, stifled by political correctness, muzzled by misguided anti-bullying statutes, and pepper sprayed for taking part in peaceful protests. We’ve been kettled, beaten, tear-gassed, surveilled, arrested, and branded extremists for protesting government abuses, while officials pick and choose which speech is protected and which dissent will be crushed.

We’ve had our tax dollars burned on no-bid emergency contracts, bloated surveillance programs, militarized policing grants, mass detention facilities, endless foreign wars, and government handouts to private corporations tasked with censoring speech, tracking behavior, enforcing mandates, and building databases on the American people—while roads crumble, schools fail, and basic needs go unmet.

We’ve been subjected to fear campaigns, propaganda blitzes, mass messaging, and behavioral manipulation designed to keep us anxious, compliant, divided, and distrustful of one another.

We’ve had our possessions seized and stolen by law enforcement agencies looking to cash in on asset forfeiture schemes, our jails privatized and used as a source of cheap labor for megacorporations, our gardens smashed by police seeking out suspicious-looking marijuana plants, and our buying habits turned into suspicious behavior by a government readily inclined to view its citizens as terrorists.

We’ve been told that national security is more important than civil liberties, that police dogs’ noses are sufficient cause to carry out warrantless searches, that the best way not to get raped by police is to “follow the law,” that what a police officer says in court will be given preference over what video footage shows, that an upright posture and acne are sufficient reasons for a cop to suspect you of wrongdoing, that police can stop and search a driver based solely on an anonymous tip, and that police officers have every right to shoot first and ask questions later if they feel threatened.

We are no longer just being governed. In many parts of the country, we are being occupied—by our own government.

American cities are increasingly treated as hostile territory—patrolled by National Guard units, federalized police forces, and armed immigration agents operating with military tactics, military equipment, and military rules of engagement. What were once described as temporary “deployments” have become normalized shows of force: troops in the streets, armored vehicles at intersections, helicopters overhead, and tactical units positioned not to protect communities, but to intimidate them.

Under the guise of “public safety,” “border enforcement,” and “emergency response,” federal authorities have turned entire neighborhoods into zones of control—raided, cordoned off, surveilled, and saturated with armed personnel. Residents are stopped, questioned, searched, detained, and disappeared into detention systems that operate far from public view and beyond meaningful judicial oversight.

At the same time, the country has seen the quiet expansion of vast warehouse-style detention centers—human storage facilities designed to make so-called “undesirables” disappear. Men, women, and children are processed, catalogued, restrained, and warehoused in sprawling compounds that function less like jails than like domestic concentration camps: isolated from communities, shielded from scrutiny, and optimized for profit.

These facilities are being built to accommodate mass detention, indefinite confinement, and a future in which entire populations can be rounded up under ever-shifting definitions of “illegality,” “extremism,” or “noncompliance.”

Are you exhausted yet?

You should be. That exhaustion is not an accident. It is the point.

More than exhausted, however, you should be outraged at what has been done to our country.

I’m outraged at what has been done to our freedoms.

A populace at war with each other is easier to control. Divide them, isolate them, keep them fighting each other. As John Lennon recognized, “The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”

This is not a culture war. It is not a partisan feud. It is not a battle between left and right, red and blue, believer and nonbeliever.

It is a power struggle between a ruling class that governs through fear, division, and exhaustion—and a people whose greatest strength lies not in violence, but in solidarity.

The Deep State does not fear protests it can predict, riots it can suppress, or outrage it can monetize. It fears solidarity it cannot control. It fears a public that refuses to be baited, refuses to be divided, and refuses to turn on itself.

That is why the provocation never stops. That is why the anger is constantly stoked. That is why every disagreement is framed as a threat. That is why the bullying, dog whistling, rage-baiting and trolling continue.

Division is not a side effect of the system. It is the system.

History is littered with examples of societies that allowed noise to stand in for resistance, outrage for power, and hatred for courage. They shouted. They fought. They fractured. And while they were busy tearing one another apart, the machinery of control locked into place.

Free societies do not collapse all at once. They collapse when people grow too divided to defend the principles that once bound them together—when citizens stop seeing one another as neighbors and start seeing one another as enemies.

By the time the danger becomes obvious, it is usually too late.

The question is not whether this country is being destabilized. It is whether enough people will recognize the strategy before it succeeds.

We do not have to agree on politics to see what is happening. We only have to decide whether to continue playing a role in our own manipulation.

Appearances to the contrary, this country does not belong exclusively to the corporations or the special interest groups or the oligarchs or the war profiteers or any particular religious, racial or economic demographic.

This country belongs to all of us: each and every one of us—“we the people”—but most especially, this country belongs to those of us who love freedom enough to stand and fight for it.

Loving this country means refusing to let it be torn apart for profit and power. It means resisting the forces that benefit from division—even when that resistance is uncomfortable, unpopular, or misunderstood.

America will not be saved by rage.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, America will be saved—if it is saved at all—by people who refuse to play by the Deep State’s rules.

Demand instead that the government play by our rules—the rules of the Constitution. And when those in power fail to do so, when they trample over the rule of the law and disregard the contract that holds them accountable, boot every last one of them out— peacefully, lawfully, and without exception.

No excuses, no coverups, and no exceptions—no matter what party they belong to or how many Bible verses they spout.

Don’t fight on their terms. Fight on our terms—through the power of our numbers, the strength of our economic might, and a collective refusal to be manipulated into serving the Deep State’s ends.

Originally published via The Rutherford Institute

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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