Description
The winner of two national book awards, including a Gold Medal in the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Awards, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State paints a chilling portrait of a nation in the final stages of transformation into a police state, complete with surveillance cameras, drug-sniffing dogs, SWAT team raids, roadside strip searches, blood draws at DUI checkpoints, mosquito drones, Tasers, privatized prisons, GPS tracking devices, zero tolerance policies, overcriminalization, and free speech zones.
Whether you’re talking about the militarized police response to riots in Ferguson, Missouri, the city-wide lockdown of Boston in the wake of the alleged Boston Marathon bombing, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s insidious domestic surveillance campaigns, or laws criminalizing everything from growing vegetables in your backyard, A Government of Wolves speaks to this strange new world in which police shoot first and ask questions later and Americans are treated like criminals and outlaws.
A widely-respected constitutional attorney and author, Whitehead charts America’s transition from a democratic society governed by “we the people” to an environment where the adherence to the law becomes another tool of oppression. Hailed by those on the left and right of the political spectrum and at every point in between, for its masterful chronicling of America’s shift away from the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, which historically shielded us from government abuses, A Government of Wolves reveals the inner workings of an increasingly pervasive and militaristic surveillance state in which there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from the government’s all-knowing, all-seeing eyes.
As American historian and nationally-syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff notes in his special introduction to A Government of Wolves: “We have been through some troubling times before in our nation’s history. What we have now may be more insidious. Indeed, I believe we are in a worse state now than ever before in this country. With the surveillance state closing in on us, we are fighting to keep our country free from our own government.”
Making the case that fiction has now become fact, A Government of Wolves also shows how sci fi movies such as Minority Report, 1984,The Matrix, They Live, and V for Vendetta have pointed the way towards America becoming a futuristic society in which a passive, uninformed populace gives rise to an overbearing, out-of-control government. This is the future George Orwell warned against. This is the present that Whitehead cautions could become an endless nightmare from which there is no awakening unless we act now.
Hardcover, 288 pages
