 Six months ago, we wrote to you about the NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, a menace to Big Brother and a hero to millions of people who don’t want the National Security Agency spying on their emails, texts and phone calls. (For details about why and how the U.S. Justice Department tried to imprison Tom, click on links at the bottom of his essay below.) After a very long ordeal, Tom won his battle with federal prosecutors. But during the last couple of years, he’s been fighting a very different kind of adversary. As he recalled this week, “Hard to believe that I found out, after a multi-week hospital stay two years ago and then a relapse a few months later requiring another hospital stay, that I had a rather advanced (equivalent to Stage 4) form of lymphoma that also penetrated my bone marrow, both kidneys and the majority of my lymph nodes throughout my body.” Tom is still speaking out for civil liberties and against mass surveillance by the “national security” state. And we want to share with you what he wrote to us at the RootsAction Education Fund a few days ago: The significant and even life-threatening health challenges I faced admittedly consumed my energy and sapped my strength for quite a while as I fought to remain alive and then regain my health through a lot of aches and pain and seemingly endless checkups and appointments. This past January (after I went through a follow-up referral biopsy at NIH in December of 2023), I received an updated diagnosis for a rather rare form of a blood cancer lymphoma called Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia, also known as lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma. The good news? The latest set of recent results from detailed advanced blood tests over the past few months shows I am stable and improving! My treatment regimen now consists of a second generation targeted oral therapy combined with certain supplements and a modified diet. Glad I am still here, as I still have a lot of life left to live in me! So let me take a moment right here and now and express my deepest gratitude and heartfelt thanks for all of your thoughts and continuing support. Whether or not the rare whistleblowers at places like the NSA go to prison, a key official goal is to drive them close to the poverty line for the rest of their lives, deprived of pensions and rendered unemployable for all but low-paid jobs. While Tom Drake remains deeply in financial debt, we are in his debt -- morally, politically and ethically. You can help repay that debt with a tax-deductible donation for the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign. Three-quarters of every dollar will go directly to Tom, while the other quarter will help sustain the civil liberties work of the RootsAction Education Fund. Another brave NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, said: “If there hadn’t been a Thomas Drake, there couldn’t have been an Edward Snowden.”  And now, here is Tom’s new essay that he asked us to share with you: ___________________________ A Future of Fear or a Future of Freedom? By Thomas Drake Follow the news of late and one could believe that there are apparently extreme political divisions and a deeply blind partisanship in America — between people who want to try to bring the polarization rocket of division and rancor down to a soft landing or people who want to target the wayward rocket of America and blow it all up through chaos and confusion. I am admittedly haunted by the din of history — seemingly echoing without end in my head these days and even waking me up in the middle of the night. Sometimes I even wonder if Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is more ascendant and relevant in today’s world than George Orwell’s 1984, and then the next day the future feels more Orwellian, all over again. The realities we face today on the eve of Election Day in the U.S. also remind me of the following salient quotes from Huxley and Orwell. “Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”
—Aldous Huxley “The Party told him to reject the evidence of his eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
—George Orwell, 1984 Far too many are seemingly losing their grip on reality and buying into false equivalencies. Others are deconstructing truth with sly and seductive lies, embracing a disembodied politic, gravitating toward a view of the world where mendacity is the central lodestone. Still others are captured by conspiracies, entertained by popularized propaganda, immobilized by fear and cynicism — slowly sliding into the depths of silent despair spinning around them, dragged down by anchors of angst and anomie. There are also too many engaged in what I will coin insane scrubbing of the truth with lies, hiding behind smirks and smiles and lots of guile, filled by soap opera drama and lots of denials. And yet absent a common set of shared facts, we also lose our common realities. But the alt-washing of reality or avoiding the future(s) we face as the human race — through elisions of history, neocolonialism, widening gaps and disparities in wealth and well-being, the rise and attraction of populist authoritarianism as well as revisionist counter-narratives — just won’t work. And yet we must also look in the mirror and ask a really uncomfortable close-up question: Does America go the way of the Roman Empire or the Weimar Republic — as it circles the dustbins and drains of history? This future we face is a real question as most systemic and institutionalized political and governance paradigms are increasingly found wanting no matter what -ism or -ocracy you pick from history. Yet with respect to the U.S. political establishment — merely staying the normalized and sclerotic institutionalized course and keeping itself going through the conventional lens of exceptionalized Americanism — can only maintain, at best, an uneasy and increasingly fragile social and economic order. On the other hand, embracing the siren call of a dystopian strongman-led Americanized form of autocratic, neofascist-based rule invites civil breakdown, severe economic disruption, civic displacement and social disorder — a distinct virulent form of raw power rule that I will call klepto-chaoscracy. Why? Because there are those in America with little or no allegiance to democracy, the rule of law, civil rights or to a Constitutional Republic, while also displaying — for all who can see — an appalling lack of commitment and even disdain for social welfare, civic equality, the protection of personal freedoms and liberties or even continuing to work toward forming a more perfect Union for all. They want to turn America into a disunited states of AmeriKa inhabiting a dark dystopian landscape ruled by unchecked plutocratic, oligarchical power, Orwellian Newspeak and techno-authoritarian control via the fusion of government agencies and corporations — occupied by fear, division and abject fealty. This despotic ideology of chaotic, nihilistic, resurgent ultra-populist nationalism and blatant supremacist-laden xenophobia adheres to a litany of abiding lies, wrapped in the flag and furies of neofascism. This virulent movement includes the rhetoric of retribution, revenge and retaliation — plus threats of violence while punishing adversaries via extra-legal and extra-constitutional means — and using or threatening outright lawfare to go after, denigrate, de-legitimize and de-humanize anybody or any group deemed an enemy of the state, or the enemy from within, an internal threat or just labeled bad or “other” because they are just different and then declared objectionable or who oppose, resist or dissent from the party line. And the spreading of manufactured consent, regressive politics, deliberate disinformation campaigns, propaganda promotion and the incitement of violence to rile up people against each other is also decidedly not part of a longer-term solution, either — no matter how slick the presentation or crude the packaging or tightly wrapped the flag of faketriotism. I also realize that some just want to see the whole system collapse for the depraved sport of it. And yet reclaiming the aspirational and better nature of our higher selves faces seemingly insurmountable challenges, yet still holds out promise — even it feels like a day dream — but would mean finding ways to transcend the often-negative dynamics and historical drama of our cross-state, cross-border, cross-tribal, cross-ethnic humanity so often fraught by racism, exploitation, xenophobia, identity grievance and social confirmation biases. In other words, how do we get along better longer-term, based on our common humanity — despite our factions and frictions — instead of finding ready reasons for conflict, division and the all too familiar dogs and drumbeats of dehumanizing war that reflect the base human condition and drive us apart? No doubt this would require a far more radical re-conceiving of democracy and self-determination as well as the nature of all the direct and indirect connections between peoples through a more liquid, free enterprise-oriented, distributed, de-centralized, community-based and largely self-governance-based set of societies. At least we still have the chance to keep what little is left of democracy, rule of law, hard-fought civil rights, progressive policies and our individual and community agency and sovereignty the U.S. — so we have the freedom and the time to discuss their very future. But as an American I see that we are slipping away and regressing from the high ideals and aspirations of the Great Experiment. I, for one, remain firmly embedded in the promise of democracy and the ideals of a Constitutional Republic that is lived by We the People while continuing to stand for the liberty and justice of all, and rejecting any form of tyranny or an Americanized form of neo-fascist, corporate dictatorship. And yet I am also quite triggered by Donald Trump’s recent exclamation of “the enemy from within” as the real enemy that includes what he called “radical leftist lunatics” and getting the military to go after them as well as those in dissent and political opposition to him. He clearly threatens to round up “enemies of the state” by targeting whistleblowers, disloyal military leaders, journalists, the press and politicians he doesn’t like. The prospect that this future is even possible makes me shudder and decidedly NOT a future I would want anybody to live. Why? Because I lived through a version of that dystopian future and know what it’s like to experience the full weight of the government coming after me as an enemy of the state when I blew the whistle while a senior executive at the National Security Agency. The government sought to put me away for a long, long time for allegedly violating the Espionage Act for committing crimes against the state because I exposed state crimes, violations of the Constitution, executive wrongdoing and fraud under cover of national security at the highest levels of government in my many-year ordeal to remain free. And yet I can never ever memory hole what happened to me given that the government declared me an insider threat — placed me on the equivalent of a national security enemies list — who also allegedly caused “exceptionally grave damage” to the national security of the U.S. — and that was under the Obama administration! I paid a very heavy price personally and professionally for simply standing up against the subversion of the Constitution, all the corruption, the abuse of power and critical intelligence failures to provide for the common defense of the nation and NOT keeping people out of harm’s way on that fateful 9/11 day. I was declared indigent by the federal court where I was indicted and ended up nearly bankrupt with no pension after some 30 years of combined military, contractor and government service. The “enemy from within” AmeriKa is also NOT the America I rediscovered while crisscrossing the country recently to visit family and friends and through the amazing set of conversations with people I met from all walks of life along the way and traveling many byways sharing their hopes, dreams and aspirations. But, as I also discovered, the vast majority of real America is not endlessly doom scrolling and spectator sport trolling on social media. This America rarely ends up in the news — because the everyday local life and lives of most Americans just being people in America and in their communities are not the subject or even in the interest of most mainstream media. And as I further discovered — beyond stereotypical party affiliations or ideological identities — just about everybody I met through short chats or longer discussions were actually pro-democracy and pro-community — even with all the messiness, diversity and differences in perspective and opinion — and were decidedly NOT pro-fascist or autocratic — with all its centralized power and obsession with control over the lives and livelihoods of others and going after its enemies within. I do utterly shudder at the prospect and specter of a neo-fascist, plutocratic AmeriKa under a distinctly anti-democratic regime taking over the levers of government and taking away the last few guardrails of democracy and what little remains of a Constitutional Republic. Fascism is knocking at our door. And we cannot let ourselves sleepwalk into a future filled by fear with our precious freedoms and liberties on the line with those who wish to sweep them away. But I also don’t count out the heart of America in We the People. Why? We still need to protect and defend the inalienable rights, freedoms and the lives and liberties of people. And by the way, I do prefer a softer landing — so we can at least be free enough for another day and re-commit ourselves and to our future generations the work of renewing the promise of real democracy for all — and bend that long arc of human history just a little bit closer toward justice and mercy. The verdict of history is on us and is our future now. ___________________________ PS from the RootsAction Education Fund:
Living in what is supposed to be a democracy, we get vital information because of the courage of whistleblowers. You can make a tax-deductible contribution in support of Tom Drake.
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Background:
>> Jane Mayer, The New Yorker: Thomas Drake -- "The Secret Sharer"
>> PBS: The FRONTLINE Interview with Thomas Drake
>> Jesselyn Radack, The New York Times: “Whistleblowers Deserve Protection Not Prison” | 
