How powerful is the CIA? Consider this "Six ways till Sunday . . ." comment Chuck Schumer to Rachel Maddox in 2017:
Maddow: "Let me ask you, I don't know if you've seen this. I don't want to blindside you with this. This is the latest tweet--as you were just saying--the President elect's latest unsolicited pronouncement on the intelligence community. This was his tweet just a little while ago tonight, and as you see the scare quotes there."
The intelligence briefing on so called Russian hacking was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange.
Maddow: "We're actually told intelligence sources tell NBC News since this tweet has been posted, that actually this intelligence briefing for the president elect was always planned for Friday. It hasn't been delayed. But he's taking these shots, this antagonisms, taunting to the intelligence."
Chuck Schumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you. So even for a practical, supposedly hard nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this."
Maddow: "What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were mad?"
Schumer: "I don't know, but I from what I am told, they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them. And we need the intelligence community. We don't know what's gonna--look at the Russian hacking! Without the intelligence community, we wouldn't have discovered it."
Maddow: "Do you think he has an agenda to try to dismantle parts of the intelligence community. I mean, this form of when we talk to hostility . . ."
Schumer: "Let me tell you, whether you're a super liberal democrat or a very conservative Republican, you should be against dismantling the intelligence community."
An Ag-Gag Law has been struck down by an Iowa Federal Court. Trespass is already prohibited and those who trespass can be punished for trespassing. Ag-gag laws go further and impose additional penalties on those who seek to engage in free speech regarding the things they notice while trespassing. Here is an excerpt from the Des Moines Register:
A federal judge has struck down the third attempt by the Iowa Legislature to stop animal-welfare groups from secretly filming livestock abuse, finding once again that the law passed last year violates free-speech rights in the U.S. Constitution.
The decision Sept. 26 rejected the law approved by Iowa lawmakers in April 2021 that makes it a crime to trespass on a property to place a camera to record or transmit images. The law, which had support from Republicans and some Democrats, made the first offense punishable by up to two years in prison and subsequent offenses a felony.
The case is one of many so-called ag-gag laws that have surfaced in the U.S. in recent years that pit the right of farmers to protect their property from trespassers against animal-welfare advocates. Farmers argue intruders could track in disease and want to unfairly portray their livestock practices, while animal-welfare groups say producers don't want the public to see how farm animals are treated.
Here is the conclusion of the court:
[T]he Act provides protection with respect to the exercise of a First Amendment right. The United States Constitution does not allow such a singling out of the exercise of a constitutional right. The decision to single out this conduct is most plainly shown by Defendants' description of the Act as “enhancing the penalty for conduct that is already prohibited by law.” That is the issue with the law—it is enhancing a criminal penalty based on the exercise of speech (or a predicate component of speech). The law does not limit its reach to specific instances of using a camera, such as a peeping tom situation. Rather, the Act only punishes a trespasser exercising a constitutional right. Section 727.8A burdens the exercise of speech and Defendants have not proffered a sufficient justification for such a burden.
The case is ANIMAL LEGAL DEFENSE FUND, PEOPLE FOR THE ETHICAL TREATMENT OF ANIMALS, INC., BAILING OUT BENJI, FOOD & WATER WATCH, and IOWA CITIZENS FOR COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENT, Plaintiffs, v. KIMBERLY REYNOLDS, in her official capacity as Governor of Iowa, TOM MILLER, in his official capacity as Attorney General of Iowa, Case No. 4:21-cv-00231-SMR-HCA, United States District Court, S.D. Iowa, Central Division.
What the fuck is happening to Democrats? We have tons of recent evidence telling us that the deep state exists and that it comprises anti-democratic poison coursing through our country's arteries.
Six or seven years ago, “Deep State” was a term you would only see in left-leaning media. Bill Moyers explored the theme on his site from time to time, and when The Nation asked Edward Snowden about it, he said, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.”
The “deep state” was on the liberal left’s front burner then because a spate of horrendously ugly revelations put it there. We learned via Snowden that the NSA was collecting the communications of people all around the world in secret (Carollo might want to mark down that congress wasn’t informed) in a program the U.S. Court of Appeals just last year declared illegal.
We found out top intelligence officials like CIA chief John Brennanand Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to congress, among other things about the warrantless surveillance program, and got away without perjury charges despite a furious outcry from legislators (another useful factoid for Carollo, on the oversight front). We learned about the CIA’s systematic use of torture techniques, ranging from anal feeding to threatening to rape and murder relatives to induced hypothermia, another fun set of pastimes the agency decided not to burden congress with knowledge of. . . . Pre-Trump, all of this spoke to the worst nightmares of American liberalism. Millions of Boomers and Gen-Exers alike had grown up worshipping at the altar of Miranda and Mapp v. Ohio, believing the ideas of due process and transparency inviolable. . . .
Young or not, the average commentator now is both committed to forgetting the sordid history of agencies like the CIA, and perfectly equipped mentally to keep that commitment. . . .
Then Trump arrived. Almost immediately, it was obvious his historical destiny was to be the best thing that ever happened to the secret services. In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the “Deep State” became a myth the moment Trump and his minions started talking about it. Deep state warriors like Brennan, Clapper, and former CIA chief Michael Hayden, held in near-universal disdain before as some of the world’s most loathsome people, people so morally ugly it showed on their hideous faces, became immediately respectable by rebranding themselves as Trump critics. The early Trump years, in fact, made heroes of every tumescent peeping-Tom creep and spook in the federal register, now cast in the press as democracy’s infantry, saving the world through intercepts, informants, and leaks.
In a flash, programs that terrified American liberals previously, like FISA, became weapons of Holy War, in the ongoing campaign to Oust Trump via a succession of investigations and impeachment bids. When it came out that a known FBI informant spied on presidential candidate Trump, pundits not only cheered, they refused outright to call it spying.
. . . .
The cultural memories of the coming wave of media professionals extend back a few years at most. Most have read thousands more tweets than book pages. Their opinions come mainly from the dung-pile of popular news and are in sync with most Democrats, whom polls consistently show to have strong majority favorable views of the CIA and the FBI, a dramatic turnaround from the pre-Trump years. In fact, now that the War on Terror has ostensibly been reconfigured to target gun owners, white supremacists, and “insurrectionists,” they can scarcely remember why they ever felt negatively about the NSA or the folks at Langley, which of course makes them perfect for their jobs. In a dystopia, a good memory is just an inconvenience.
If this is not enough to make you cry a river, Taibbi reminds us that the liberal news media is infested with spooks:
Now, just like any other tinpot third-world country, we get our news directly from secret agents. I made a list once:
Ed Snowden invited Daniel Ellsberg to have a conversation. These two men who are heroes to me (and to each other), discuss the importance of whistle-blowers, free speech and the war powers of the United States. Ellsberg points out (at min 8) that he did not disclose the Pentagon Papers because the government was lying or because the Vietnam war wasn't winnable. Almost everyone knew these things at that time. He did it because the war was "wrong" and it was "getting bigger," at a time where Nixon knew that he might be drawing the Chinese into the war and he was considering the use of nuclear weapons.
At minute 12, Ed Snowden explains that he acted not because he was against spying (though he was against spying), but because the government was acting outside of the knowledge and control of the People. The government was reinterpreting the Constitution outside of the knowledge of the People (and outside of the knowledge of most members of Congress) in a "secret rubber-stamp court." The People were no longer "partner" with the government, but "subjects" of the government. Snowden continued, from Bush to Obama to Trump, "the government is becoming less accountable to the People, and the people are becoming more accountable to the government."
A friend is quite perturbed at me for (as I view it) not adopting the top-to-bottom progressive platform. The friend found it disturbing that I would get some of my information from sources that the friend considered to be the other team. I told this friend: "You are the 1,000th person to get frustrated with me for wanting to get my facts straight without reference to the prevailing narratives of political tribes. I am prepared to die on this hill."
I am wired to make sense of things as best I can, letting the chips fall, regardless of whether I offend people in the process (with rare exceptions). I was prepared for this way of learning during a childhood where my father force-fed me buckets of religious dogma, resulting in this five-part essay.
I am willing to get useful information from anyone who has information that seems useful. I'm working hard to not divide the world into "good" people and "bad" people. Good people often say untrue things and bad people often say things that make sense. Everyone has a batting average. Everyone is flawed. It is my act of faith that we need to listen to all of it and then pretend that we are emotionally detached Martian anthropologists in order to decide what is accurate. In other words, we need to pay close attention to John Stuart Mill, who is as relevant as ever.
Hence, I reject any Manichean outlook. I fear that our two main political tribes and their respective news silos (amplified by social media) are poisoning our national dialogue. In fact, ruining our national dialogue to the point where, truly, our de facto national motto is getting to be "Fuck e pluribus unum!" It's gotten to the point where people are hating other people for ideas, whereas I think we can hate the idea but must always love the person. I am not religious, but I think that Jesus' "Love your enemy" is one of the most radical, brave and brilliant things ever said.
We need to listen to people that others call the "enemy" because sometimes they are right--sometimes it takes years for it to become apparent that they are correct. I have long been ridiculed for listening "to the enemy." That is, and will forever be, my plight, because the world is complex, not a cartoon, and no tribe has it completely right. We need to actively listen to each other and test each others' claims without feeling like this is a threatening thing to do, in order to make good sense of our world. Without each other, we are all prone to become ideologues who "win" all of our arguments because we refuse to consider competing views (and in fact many of us actively work to muzzle competing views). Hard earned, carefully distilled facts first to prepare the way for meaningful opinions, is the only way to make sense. Whenever we do the opposite, indulging in thinking and opinion-vomiting as a team sport, we are poisoning all dialogue and shutting down human flourishing.
I believe that real conversation (not the pundits barking at each other on CNN, or regular folks on the street, imitating the pundits) will dissolve many of the differences we see in each other. That brings me to an inspiring dialogue I recently heard: a discussion involving Joe Rogan and Glenn Greenwald. This is an odd couple in many ways. At the beginning of the show they both admitted that, in prior years, they weren't each others' favorite people. But they reached out, sat down for three hours and had a riveting conversation that covered many issues, including whistle-blowers, corruption in Brazil, Hunter Biden. My favorite part is where Joe and Glenn discussed the importance of reaching out to people who think differently in order to understand them and to better understand yourself.
Rogan and Greenwald both tout the long-form podcast as one of the best ways to dissolve the pundit-coating that people construct around themselves and to then get down to some interesting conversation--the kind of conversation where people learn interesting things about each other and about themselves. You can be a politician for a short session on FOX or NPR, maybe even 30 or 40 minutes, but you can't hide it for several hours. Rogan mentions that he stumbled upon this powerful revelation because he was too lazy to edit his long podcasts, but then he started to appreciates incredible power of the long-form podcast to reveal who people really are. This conversation between two wide-open complex minds is pure gold, and I invite you to listen to the entire podcast, but especially from 118 min mark to the 140 min mark. You can also read along here (beginning at 2:01:38).
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