Total Tyranny
Frank Church's warning has sadly come to pass
In 1975, Senator Frank Church of Idaho chaired a committee to investigate the US intelligence community. Their hearings revealed that the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies were engaged in some incredibly unsavory activities. Consider just some of the operations uncovered by the committee:
MK-ULTRA: CIA mind control experiments that involved drugging people, sometimes without their knowledge.
COINTELPRO: Surveillance and infiltration of political and social organizations.
FAMILY JEWELS: A CIA program to covertly assassinate foreign leaders.
MOCKINGBIRD: The CIA inserted fake stories into news media, both print and television, to push certain narratives.
SHAMROCK: The NSA had backdoors into telecom companies like AT&T, allowing them to easily tap phone lines.
The only reason we know of these operations today is because of Senator Church. Being a Democrat, Church certainly had positions that we would disagree with, but unlike today’s Democratic Party, he believed that the American government existed to serve the American people, not the other way around.
Senator Church went on Meet the Press to explain the gravity of his findings. “There would be no place to hide if this government ever became a tyranny,” he said. “The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”
I think recent history demonstrates that Church’s worst fears have come true. Despite the reforms he initiated, the intelligence community has only grown stronger, as well as explicitly partisan.
In the aftermath of the Church Committee hearings, our government created the FISA Court, a body of judges that is supposed to sign off on any covert surveillance of American citizens. Obviously, it is a dangerous world, with nuclear weapons and cyberterrorism and such, so covert operations are a necessary evil. But what happens when those covert operatives decide that the American people themselves are an impediment to their goals?
9/11 scared the crap out of the American people. We were so worried about another major terrorist attack – perhaps a dirty nuclear weapon even – that we allowed the government to pass the Patriot Act. Some of the provisions of the Act were fine, reasonable even. But there were many nefarious aspects. The intelligence community, now a generation removed from the Church Committee, used the Act as justification for even more spying on the American people, despite NSA Director James Clapper claiming before Congress that there was no such activity. A young intelligence contractor named Edward Snowden proved them wrong.
Snowden’s revelations shocked the world. Not only was our intelligence community spying on foreign leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, they were indeed spying on American citizens – collecting our texts and emails, listening in to our phone calls, and most importantly, mapping massive amounts of metadata about our activities.
I know that some conservatives still bristle at the name of Snowden, figuring that he is just another leftist liar who wants to tear down America. You surely remember the days of the Cold War, when Communist sympathizers like Alger Hiss tried to destroy trust in our institutions. The fact that Snowden ended up in exile in Russia doesn’t help his case. But we have to recognize that our government has become the enemy of liberty in America, rather than its guardian as our Founders intended. The massive national security state created after World War II and put on steroids after 9/11 has been used to redraw borders abroad and manipulate society at home.
I know this is hard to accept, but we cannot move forward if we still cling to the idea that our government agencies are the good guys. It’s not just a recent development either - Senator Church discovered in 1975 that our intelligence community was already up to no good, and they have not gotten any better in the last half century. The Snowden leaks showed that the FISA Court, rather than providing true oversight for our intelligence operations, had become a rubber stamp, a charge that was later proven again by the Russia hoax against Donald Trump. Consider that our intelligence community wiretapped the headquarters of the Republican presidential nominee and later president-elect based upon manufactured evidence. This is a scandal that makes Watergate look like jaywalking.
In the wake of the 2020 election and the January 6th protests, our government turned that massive security apparatus against American conservatives. Since that fateful day when a few thousand peaceful protesters took an unauthorized tour of the Capitol Building, we have all been labeled insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, and radical extremists. Joe Biden has made two speeches recently denouncing half the country as evil insurgents who must be stopped at all costs. People who were present on January 6th have been rotting in jail for years without bail, while others have been forced by vindictive judges to publicly disavow conservative ideology. The regime is also targeting pro-life activists as well as parents who dared speak up at local school board meetings. In short, this national security apparatus created to protect the American people has been turned into an American Stasi or KGB.
Frank Church is surely turning in his grave. “I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge,” he said on Meet the Press. “I know the capacity is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss.”
If there was any doubt left in your mind as to whether or not we have crossed over that abyss, the release of the Twitter Files should banish it completely.
Over the past two weeks, journalists have been combing through the internal documents that Elon Musk purchased along with Twitter. They have revealed that the line between Twitter staff and federal intelligence agents was extremely blurry. Multiple employees of Twitter were hired directly from the intelligence agencies, and it is not unreasonable to assume they continued their work for the FBI and CIA in their new positions. Former FBI general counsel James Baker is the most notable example; Musk fired him after learning that he was literally combing through the Twitter Files themselves to erase evidence of FBI involvement in censorship.
In the 6th drop, Matt Taibbi explained how Twitter was essentially run as a subsidiary of the FBI itself:
In the 7th drop, Michael Shellenberger demonstrated that the FBI knew the Hunter Biden laptop was legitimate, but still leaned on Twitter to censor it:
Finally, in the 8th drop yesterday, Lee Fang showed how the CIA and other intelligence agencies used Twitter to launder propaganda aimed at foreign governments - both enemies and allies:
Take the time to read each of these threads. You might well say, “This isn’t new, we all knew this was going on,” but seeing it in black and white is extremely jarring. Frank Church’s worst fears have come true: the United States government has indeed become a tyranny, and they are using intelligence technology to oppress the American people.
Senator Church feared that a dictator would take over the American government, but in reality we have a deep state bureaucracy, a managerial oligarchy that has no clear leader, no easy target that we can fight. Our dictator is a million federal bureaucrats, millions more NGO staffs and think tank employees, and workers at dozens of Big Tech platforms such as Twitter. They work in concert to bring about an Orwellian nightmare of surveillance and an erosion of the very freedoms our fathers fought for and died to protect.
How then should we live?
We need political leaders who understand the gravity of the situation. We need leaders who have the skills and the courage to reign in Big Tech as well as the out-of-control intelligence community. This is no time for half measures. It is time to abolish the FBI and break up the CIA. John Kennedy threatened to do it, but he was brutally murdered. Richard Nixon wanted to do it, and he was driven from office. Donald Trump himself underestimated the lengths they would go to stop him from draining the swamp - remember Senator Chuck Schumer’s threat?
"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."
Fighting the unholy alliance of Big Tech and the federal government is the great battle of our time. If we cannot stop this Orwellian leviathan, then nothing else matters.
If only the sheeple gave a rats patootie about these issues....but they don't. Your on point as usual Brian. Your right these issues make Watergate look infantile. Again, nobody seems to care. No outrage, no outcry, no demand for correction...nada...itsconly going to get significantly worse....BIG E , TPAGE...spot on!...Cure the apathy in the republican party and perhaps change will occur.
Thank you for speaking so forthrightly on this topic, Brian. I have zero faith that our “leaders” will do anything about this. Most are compromised in one way or another. We need solutions from the grassroots level. I wish I had some.