What if politicians actually challenged the Deep State?

I think they'd get an A for effort instead of an F for not even bothering, their current grade. But apart from that, I don't think it would go so well, and I'll explain why.

To begin with, I’ll link to a couple of videos which any readers can view at their leisure.

The first one is from Glenn Greenwald, who tells the story of Jane Harman. She was a Democratic politician who thought that domestic spying was a really good idea…right up until she learned that she was also being spied on, at which point she changed her tune.

The second comes from Jimmy Dore, who had journalist Whitney Webb on his show. In this one, she talks about how the intelligence agencies have been gathering material with which to blackmail powerful elites for many decades. (At the time of this writing I’ve only watched about a third of it, but that’s enough for me to get the general idea.)

Of course, these days with people storing their sex videos or whatever on their computers or phones, it’s a lot easier for the Deep State to obtain such material. They used to actually have to do legwork in order to get that stuff, search people’s houses, etc. Now they can do the same thing without ever leaving the office, thanks to that aforementioned surveillance.

So imagine the following dystopian scenario, if you will…

Imagine that there are lots of unaccountable people behind the scenes who are capable of leaking information which will destroy the reputations of even people like the President of the United States, and that’s if those people are lucky. If they’re unlucky, then not only will their reputations be destroyed, but they will also find themselves prosecuted for crimes.

Real serious stuff, because maybe these agencies had a partnership with a notorious human trafficker.

Maybe this human trafficker had an island he owned where he kept lots of underage girls enslaved, and he would invite elites to his island and tell them that if they wanted, these girls would show them a good time. Perhaps the visitors to his island would realize and care that they were being offered sex with somebody both underage and unwilling, or perhaps not, but enough of them would take the bait. And those agencies would be recording everything.

Maybe the agencies would approach those people who visited the island afterwards and inform them of those recordings. “We can expose you as a pedophile any time we want. Just remember that.”

Undoubtedly, if this were happening then it would have an extreme chilling effect on anybody in a powerful position who wanted to go against the Deep State for one reason or another.

But let’s imagine that those powerful people weren’t chilled like that, that politicians actually tried to dismantle the CIA, or at least rein it in. Also, let’s imagine that the CIA has nothing on any of them which is actually incriminating.

What’s likely to happen?

My guess is that the CIA, or NSA, or FBI, or the whole damn alphabet would decide to share the most damaging material they had on their new enemies, which would be pretty much everything on their hard drives.

We’ve all kind of had to make peace with the fact that we’re being spied on all the time. We try not to think about it. We go about our lives as if nobody’s watching, even though they are watching. And in my case, I tell myself that I’m not important enough for anybody at these agencies to actually do anything to me.

If I were in the U.S. Senate, though, and if by some miracle both my Senate and the House agreed to do something about these agencies, and if in another miracle the president didn’t veto the legislation, what would be the result of the Deep State deciding to air everybody’s dirty laundry?

Imagine the most embarrassing stuff you’ve ever done, things that people would judge you for even if they were within the boundaries of the law.

Now imagine that everybody you care about—your family, your friends, your colleagues, everyone on your list of contacts—gets sent footage of you doing that embarrassing stuff.

Your personal life would be in a shambles, wouldn’t it? You’d have lots of people contacting you about it, in varying degrees of shock. Some of them might not judge you too harshly, but plenty of others would. And god help you if you’re into anything really kinky and THAT is what everybody in your life is shown.

Imagine that at the same time you’re having to deal with all of that and trying to put out all of those fires in your social life and your family life as a Senator, all of your colleagues are having to do the same, because they have their own collection of embarrassing files that got leaked.

Probably make it hard to concentrate on doing anything to curb the excesses of the Deep State, right? But they could probably make it even more difficult.

How could they do that? By not only throwing your personal relationships into disarray by outing you as whatever you may be, but also driving a wedge between you and your colleagues if you are in fact a member of Congress.

For example, maybe you were complaining about what an asshole one of your colleagues was in an e-mail, and you never meant for them to learn about it. Then, later on, you and this colleague join forces to take on the Deep State. And then, the Deep State shows this colleague of yours exactly what you said about them. Your colleague’s probably gonna confront you over that. It’s going to make it harder for you to work together and accomplish anything, right? Divide and conquer.

I’ve been pessimistic a whole lot more often than I’ve been optimistic in my life so far, and this is one more example of it, because it seems to me that the Deep State is capable of destroying literally everybody who could possibly oppose it. Amazing as it may be, all the leaks against Trump to punish him for just slightly going against the establishment and even everything that’s been done to discredit, imprison, and torture Julian Assange…this may be what it looks like when these spooks are holding back. I have no trouble believing that they could have done even worse, especially to Trump, if they really wanted to. Or if they were desperate.

Should I be as pessimistic as I am? I don’t know. I hope not. I hope that something can happen to neutralize these motherfuckers. And maybe if they really had such an unbreakable stranglehold over everybody, nobody would be able to even talk about this, Whitney Webb wouldn’t even have been able to finish writing a book about it before they tore her life apart. So I don’t know, maybe it isn’t as bad as I think it is, but right now it seems real fucking bad and the situation looks real fucking bleak.