A friend sent me a note commenting on Glenn Greenwald’s piece about Tucker Carlson, in which Greenwald revealed that the CIA is reportedly preparing a criminal referral of Carlson to the DOJ, the apparent offense being that Tucker had conversations with Iranian officials prior to the Trump-Netanyahu war against Iran. My friend’s reaction was telling: he “mostly hates” Tucker, doubts criminal charges will actually materialize, and concludes with a shrug: “no surprise that Tucker is watched.”
With pretzel logic like that, he has managed to normalize the CIA preparing criminal referrals over conversations with foreign officials during a war his own government started without provocation, reassuring himself it’s “unlikely” they’ll actually go through with it, as if the core issue were his emotional comfort rather than the precedent of criminalizing dissenting journalism and speech.
If you can recognize that Trump was spied on and that the hysteria over him talking to Putin was manufactured garbage, then you’ve already conceded the basic pattern: the security services target whoever deviates from approved foreign policy, and their media allies dress it up as protecting “democracy.” Yet instead of being alarmed that the same machinery is now being turned on someone he “hates,” my friend is busy grading his own feelings about whether he’ll be “upset” if they push it too far.
That posture is exactly why this keeps getting worse. People who know better keep giving the surveillance state a pass as long as it is aimed at the right heretics. You don’t need to like Tucker Carlson. You just need to decide whether you oppose secret police power as a principle, or only when it inconveniences politicians and pundits you happen to support.
What is truly staggering is that so many otherwise intelligent people still talk as if the executive and legislative branches are meaningfully in charge of any of this. The American oligarchs and rentiers bought the Left and Right long ago, controlled both majorities with splinter caucuses, and, once that stopped being efficient, shifted their imprint to other captured “sovereigns” and institutions (bypassing the democratic architecture altogether. Donald Trump did not reverse that decay; he accelerated it, just as Kamala Harris would have been a different, more anodyne instrument of the same order) politically harmless precisely because her handlers were not. Nothing in that arrangement would have restrained the machinery my friend is busy excusing; it would only have given it a more palatable face.
At this point, we are not watching a functioning democracy struggle with hard choices. We are watching sovereign anarchism in real time: no meaningful rule of law among nations, just a fading hegemony frantically protecting its oligarchs and the system they purchased, willing to prosecute a journalist for talking to the people it just bombed.
That should alarm everyone. The fact that it doesn’t is the most dangerous story of all.
Related reading
- The Trump Protection Racket: How a Declining US Empire Extorts Friends and Enemies Alike
- The Merger of the National Security State and Predatory Capital
- Американский пузырь искусственного интеллекта лишён смысла. Каждый его участник это знает. И тем не менее он раздувается. Почему?
- The American AI Bubble Makes No Sense. Every Party to It Knows. It Is Happening Anyway. Why?
