Will it be fear or hope today?

Too much fear, no matter how grounded in fact, and I risk turning readers away. But is too much optimism even worse?

The relentless barrage of evidence that America is tilting into lawlessness is dispiriting, to say the least. But before you turn away to protect your mood for the day, please indulge me to the end. I promise, I’ll try to cheer you right up after a few necessary but bitter pills.

Three letter agencies run amok

Do you realize we just had a whistleblower say out loud that the CIA was involved in the assassination of JFK? The silence from the CIA says more than the reams of declassified documents released in the past 50 years ever could. Or the ones released last week, for that matter. (To follow some of the most thorough investigative reporting on this, I recommend the JFK Facts Substack.)

Further, we now know the FBI and CIA have been surveilling and suppressing citizens and reporters. The fierce independence of the Fourth Estate from political power used to be sacred Americanism. Now it’s just part of our mythology.

Not only that, those same agencies have been shaping the information we r…