Although the Bill of Rights--the first ten amendments of the Constitution--was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned. Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, post-9/11 and in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s time to bring all our troops home. It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date. It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs. We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law. It is time to recalibrate the government.

A federal COVID-19 vaccination strike force may soon be knocking on your door, especially if you live in a community with low vaccination rates. Will you let them in? More to the point, are you required to open the door?

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state. It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984. Yet what once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who will be forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.

For good or bad, COVID-19 has changed the way we navigate the world. It is also redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up. We have entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations. This powerful international cabal, the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences.

What started out a year ago as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including our own) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead warns in this week's podcast, it remains to be seen whether our freedoms will survive the tyranny of the government’s heavy-handed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps. With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up. As constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead makes clear in this week's podcast, this is what it means to live in a suspect society.