MSNBC is owned by two mega-corporations, General Electric and Microsoft. MSNBC is simply doing its patriotic duty reporting this intrusive underwear drawer sniffing sort of activity. GE is the world’s largest corporation by market share and makes a bundle not simply manufacturing innocuous things such as light bulbs and household appliances but also stamps out jet engines for Boeing and Lockheed Martin who in turn sell military aircraft to the government so small countries may be invaded and occupied, however tenuously.

In order for this handsomely profitable process to continue ad infinitum, a police state must necessarily be erected. It stands to reason the people will eventually militate against a situation where they are fleeced every payday in order to line the deep pockets of GE and Lockheed Martin and Boeing and all the other death merchants who have a vested interest in perpetuating invasions and occupations.

It may seem MSNBC is simply reporting the news but in fact they are spreading fear and paranoia—if an 81-year old guy, a retired academic writing to a Catholic colleague, can be snooped, no doubt activists and peaceniks can and are being snooped as well. None of these folks have anything to do with "al-Qaeda" and the government knows it. If the truth be told, the neocons do not consider "al-Qaeda" a threat—in fact, the fake terror organization was long ago commissioned as a boogeyman—but they do consider the activists, patriots, and peaceniks a threat. Not only are they a threat to the profit margins of GE and the death merchants, they are also a threat to the neocon plan to decimate Muslim culture and society. So, for the moment, the plan is to make all stripe of activists paranoid and, as well, troll a massive amount of data about the day-to-day doings of those the neocons consider a threat. It works pretty much the same in all police states.

Meanwhile, in the ranks of the far-flung patriot movement, a COINTELPRO-like subversion and disinformation operation is in full swing. It’s an old game and works quite famously. One faction declares other factions to be either disinfo agents or dupes. For instance, last year, a certain podcaster and blogger declared I was unwittingly working for the CIA, never mind that I was passing out antiwar newspapers back in 1970 when he was in short pants (and it can be argued I fell victim to an Operation CHAOS dirty trick, but that is a story for another time).

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, the government was busy at work subverting the mostly ineffectual so-called "New Left." It’s no secret the antiwar and so-called counterculture movement was financed by gatekeeper foundations and the government (for instance, in 1970 an Illinois commission report revealed that $192,000 in government money and $85,000 in Carnegie Foundation funds were paid to the Students for a Democratic Society during the fall of 1969; see Ralph Epperson, The Unseen Hand, Publius Press, Tucson, Arizona, 1985). "They (sixties radicals) have no idea they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they are fighting the forces of the super-rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and don’t realize that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes," former Communist Party member and FBI informant James Kirk told the House and Senate Security Committees (see Des Griffin, Fourth Reich of the Rich, Emissary Publications, Oregon, 1995).

Phillip Darrell Collins writes:

It is painfully clear that political activism in the United States has been rendered ineffective or, in some cases, detrimental to the activists themselves. A portion of the blame rests on the shoulders of the Establishment, which has controlled movements through elite funding. However, a larger portion of the blame must be shouldered by the activists themselves. Contaminated by Hegelian memes and trapped in dialectical snares, activists continue to help the very plutocrats they claim to hate. Only when activists learn to transcend partisan affiliations and develop some autonomous aptitude will America finally see the fruits of any political activism.

It is my experience that the patriot movement is unable to transcend its "partisan affiliations" and is slowly imploding with plenty of help from the government (in the current context, under neocon control, from within the Pentagon and the Counterintelligence Field Activity program; for more on this, see my CIFA: The Pentagon’s COINTELPRO). Moreover, as a cursory examination of COINTELPRO reveals, the idea was (and is) not simply to spy on activists, but mainly to discredit and disrupt (as J. Edgar Hoover elucidated) and undermine trust and scare off potential supporters (see Brian Glick, COINTELPRO in the 60s). In regard to the 9/11 truth movement, the idea is not so much to "scare off potential supporters," but rather to make the entire movement look like a cavalcade of idiots—thus the mixing of UFOlogy and theories about hologram planes in with legitimate research.

In fact, the neocon Pentagon and associated off-the-books intel and covert op organizations are running a massive psychological operation on the entire population at large—from an unrelenting tidal wave of fake news about Freddy Kruger Muslims to getting folks accustomed to the emerging technocratic Panopticon state (see Charles Stross). Recent "news stories," supposedly "leaked" to the corporate media, detailing neocon snoop efforts at the NSA, are part and parcel of this massive psyop program, as is the latest tidbit revealed by the death merchant owned MSNBC on the Ministry of Homeland Security reading transcontinental mail.

As noted above, the neocons are running a "coordinated domestic counter-insurgency" (as Glick terms it), long ago pioneered by General Frank Kitson (see my General Frank Kitson: Trail Blazing Fake Terrorism) and modified for use against domestic enemies. Kitson called for the use of "pseudo gangs," that is to say a state sponsored group used to advance an agenda, while discrediting the real opposition. Clearly, this is now happening within the patriot movement (sometimes I believe there are more disinfo agents than real patriots). If this covert program continues unabated, there will be no need for mass roundups of patriots and activists, no need for the legendary FEMA concentration camps, because the movement will implode and the activists will become a laughingstock, completely discredited and marginalized.