Matt Taibbi is flummoxed. So am I. Any curious person would be. Matt tries to explain what happened in he recent article: “A Saturday Massacre in CongressOn a Saturday to mark and remember, congress funds two wars and hands the intelligence agencies sweeping new surveillance power, getting nothing in return.”

Please. Someone tell me who is moving the levers of power in DC and how?  Matt Taibbi offers this:

Mike Johnson is now Winston Churchill. All he had to do was give the NSA unlimited spying power, overrule constituents about funding two wars, and support allowing government to block a platform used by 60 million Americans.

In return he got: nothing. No immigration reform, no articulation of benchmarks or a plan for success in Ukraine, no accounting for past spending, no insistence on warrants to spy on Americans, no concession that FISA can only be reauthorized by Congress, no claw-back of a major new “Everybody is a Spy” surveillance ask. Johnson traded his starting lineup for the proverbial bag of balls.

History will look back at a moment below from April 12th, just before the House passed FISA, and wonder about a last comment from Johnson. The Speaker talks about being originally horrified by the “terrible abuses, hundreds of thousands of abuses” of FISA by the FBI.

But “then when I became Speaker, I went to the [secure briefing room] and got a confidential briefing” from intelligence officials, and heard “sort of the other perspective on that.” It “gave him a different perspective.”

Regarding FISA, Reason explains what was at stake in an article titled “Revised Section 702 Surveillance Authority Poses More Danger Than EverNew language could make almost anybody with access to a WiFi router help the government snoop.”

If this became law, millions of American small business owners would have a legal obligation to hand over data that runs through their equipment,” caution former Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R–Va.) and former Sen. Mark Udall (D–Colo.), both now with the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability. “And when they’re done with doing their part in mass surveillance, these small businesses would then be placed under a gag order to hide their activities from their customers.”

It seems like Glenn Greenwald is thinking more bad things are happening than he is willing to articulate at this time. Consider this part of Glenn’s monologue:

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has long been a vocal and steadfast opponent of the U.S. Security State, generally in its attempts to censor the Internet and spy on Americans in particular. Shortly before becoming a speaker, we interviewed him on this show, and he was very clear about his views on these questions. Yet since being elected Speaker, Mike Johnson has seemingly changed his views in quite radical ways on many key issues. He was a longtime opponent of providing more U.S. aid to the war in Ukraine, yet now is working to ensure that Joe Biden’s $60 billion request for Ukraine is approved in the House, even if that means relying on Democrats and Democratic protection to do so. Earlier today, Speaker Johnson tried to bring to the floor a vote to renew the domestic spying powers of the NSA and the FBI and to do so without allowing even a single reform, safeguard, or warrant requirement. In other words, Speaker Johnson worked hard to give the Biden White House and the U.S. Security State what they were demanding for renewal of their domestic spying powers and spying on Americans, which was originally enacted during the Bush administration in the name of the War on Terror, and to renew it without any reforms or protections at all. But Mike Johnson had a serious surprise today: his own caucus delivered a major and quite unusual defeat to the House Speaker, with 19 members defecting and preventing the speaker from bringing the bill to the floor. It is likely that some domestic spying bill will eventually pass, though it’s not guaranteed and we’ll explain what happened today in Congress that dealt a serious blow to the efforts suddenly led by Speaker Johnson, to hand the FBI all these spying powers they want without a single reform.

And for goodness sake, don’t think about bribery or its extreme cousin, blackmail. Wash those thoughts from your mind. After all, we have a democracy that is run by you and me! Now . . . I truly don’t know anything and that is the way they want it, but all of this looks extremely strange, almost impossible to explain in the absence. of nefarious goings-on.  But is it as bad as what Tucker Carlson recently suggested to Joe Rogan?  I don’t know . . . I truly don’t, but I’m struggling to come up with anything that makes sense here. Here’s what Carlson told Rogan:

“Members of Congress are terrified of the intel agencies. I’m not guessing at that. They’ve told me that, including people who run the intel committee.” Why are they afraid? Well, one of the reasons is because they’re terrified that the intel agencies will frame them by “putting kiddie p*rn on their computer,” Carlson mentioned. But it’s what Carlson said next that was even more revealing. “I said to somebody, a very powerful person, the other day, in a conversation in my kitchen, an elected official — holds a really senior position… But I was like, ‘All these people are controlled. They’ve all got weird s*x lives, and all these things they’re hiding, and they’re being blackmailed by the intel agencies.’ And he said, and I’m quoting, ‘I know.’ I was like, okay, so at this point, we’re just sort of admitting that’s real? Like, why do we allow that to continue?”

In the meantime, the NYT just ran this article with this headline:

As I read this NYT article, I was dismayed because I was reminded that the NYT continues to serve as stenographer for the unelected people who run our government. What NYT is telling you is to be afraid, folks. And just trust us. You’ll find only the meekest and mildest articles opposing the vast extension of FISA anywhere in corporate media. What happened to our most prominent liberals? Ed Snowden used to be their hero and they used to oppose spying. They used to be in favor of free speech. They used to be anti-war.

What else do I think as I write this article? I think of some of the many videos of Mike Benz that I’ve seen recently (here is a sample, and see here). I’ll be posting on those in coming weeks. The national security state has a LOT of money and all you might need to do to come up with a very general explanation is to read this quote by Upton Sinclair and then extrapolate:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”