However, an insightful comment by Dutchman today has just pushed me to write it.  Unlike most writing, this is no notes, few citations, just thoughts.

You guys are having a discussion about Larry Hogan’s commentary to CBS News.

In the middle of the discussion, someone writes the familiar and common sentiment about Ron DeSantis, a reasonably decent and good governor, doing his big politically stupid run for 2024.   Dutchman responds:

DUTCHMAN – […] “IMHO, you and others who express your sentiment, don’t REALLY “get it”;

The WHOLE reason DeSantis was the most popular Governor throughout his first term, was a CON;
EVERY action he took as Governor, was a political calculation planned and intended to create the image of “the free State of Florida” and RDS as “Trump lite”.

It wasn’t that “he changed” after getting the $millions, he was ALWAYS terrible at connecting with voters, a terrible campaigner, and he was NEVER MAGA; it was all a “PR.” or advertising campaign to create a totally artificial, and unconnected from reality IMAGE.

And it is that IMAGE that people “fell in love with” and it never existed.

This is important because if people don’t understand this, recognize they were “conned” and understand HOW they were manipulated, they will keep falling for it, every time.

However, once you understand your own vulnerability to being manipulated, accept you need to CHANGE how you view things, THEN you won’t need someone else (like Sundance) to point it out to you, again.

5 minutes of OBJECTIVELY looking at a candidate, will be about 4 1/2 minutes more than necessary, to spot the phonies.” (link)

Perhaps, let me take you back to the spring of 2022 in my thoughts, and show you just how subtle, weird and difficult it is to really understand the nature of this political world we are in right now.  A political world where nothing is what it seems.  I have been inside this research rabbit hole for over a decade, so bear with me.

[SIDEBAR – Y’all know how I dug, and dug, and dug, and dug into the GOPe after the 2012 election to figure out just how the powers that be are able to construct the illusion of choice.  From that research I was able to drill down into the raw material, the stuff they actually did, that outlined the concept of the “splitter strategy”, which I then held in my notes until 2015 while watching for the replay.  The work back in 2012 helped me to foresee what would happen in 2016, and like clockwork, it rolled out exactly as expected.]

In the winter of 2021 and spring of 2022, every Spidey-sense within me said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is setting himself up for a 2024 run for the GOP nomination. Every data point that I was looking at aligned with it happening, and that included the part that no one was paying attention to in 2016.

♦BACKGROUND – In 2015, when Marco Rubio filed to run as a candidate for the 2016 GOP nomination for President, then little known one-term congressman Ron DeSantis filed to run for Rubio’s Senate seat.  WTF?  DeSantis’ only real qualification to run for that Florida Senate seat was a big donor assist from the Club 4 [NO] Growth.  CfG supported DeSantis in Congress, big time – and CfG was the financial mechanism behind DeSantis in 2016 to take the Rubio Senate seat if he won the GOP nomination.  Just keep this in mind.

In the latter part of 2021 and early 2022, all of the obscure stuff in the background of DeSantis looked like he was being positioned to run in 2024.

It was January 6, 2022, when someone (Pushaw) organized that influencer confab at the governor’s office.  However, and this is where my own intellectual bias comes into play at times defeating my cynicism, I kept telling myself there’s no way DeSantis could be so stupid.

No way, regardless of all the mechanics that were paving this path, that Ron DeSantis would be stupid enough to run against a likely reelection bid by Donald Trump.  For over six months, I kept putting the human factor at the forefront and forcing myself to ignore all of the datapoints that indicated DeSantis was being managed to do this.  After all, c’mon, he’s not a stupid guy….  I kept telling myself.

Even in July 2022, every time the thought crossed my mind to revisit this issue, I kept making the mistake of denying the data, denying what was visible, simply because the alternative to stupidity was almost unthinkable in scale.

♦The Alternative – If DeSantis wasn’t stupid, and if DeSantis was indeed going to run for 2024, the alternative to stupidity was a long-term plan… A plan that would have been laid out essentially before his first campaign in 2018…. A plan that times to the exact same moments when Paul Ryan and the other GOPe member of congress announced they were not seeking midterm reelection for Trump’s midterm race…. A plan that coincided with buckets of former CIA operatives running for congress in both the Democrat and Republican races in that 2018 midterm….  A plan that had Eric Holder working in California to trigger the first ballot harvesting test run….

Now, stay with me… Under this scenario, if DeSantis wasn’t stupid, then he was always a controlled ‘political’ operative waiting to be triggered and have his career boosted by the Big Club crowd who funded him.  Names like Bush, Clinton, Cheney, McCain, Romney and McConnell all circle this controlled orbit.

The odd, and seemingly impossible, DeSantis registration to run for the Florida Senate seat of Marco Rubio aligned with this almost conspiratorial outlook; except it wasn’t based on conspiracy theory, it was just a big datapoint, sitting there – staring back.

All of the data aligned that way, but I kept telling myself to ignore it – because at a certain point human reason has to be placed into the analysis, and there’s no way that DeSantis would be so stupid.  Surely, regardless of how much he was controlled and influenced, he -the person- would have the ability to say, “No, this is just silly.”

That said, throughout the spring and summer of 2022, 80% of the objective data, and even more when considered in historic context, indicated DeSantis was going to enter the 2024 election at the behest of the people who control the Republican National Committee, the Republican Governors Association and the various political fundraising committees in both the House and Senate along with PAC’s and Superpacs.

In essence, if DeSantis was indeed planning a 2024 White House run, then all of the datapoints reconciled.   If he wasn’t going to run, then there was just a lot of coincidental questions that didn’t make sense in the activity.

When faced with that scenario, you apply the scientific method and try to prove the opposite of the thesis.

Could I prove: DeSantis was *not* going to run and was *not* under the control of the Big Club (Sea Island et al.)?  The answer was no.

Now it’s July 2022.  The headlines were all about Donald Trump and the conflicts with the NARA over documents and presidential records.  Something was coming.

I told myself to put away all of the DeSantis questions until that moment with Trump was triggered; then wait and see how he responds.

If DeSantis is abhorred by the outcome of the DOJ/FBI targeting of Florida resident Trump, then he likely was not part of the plan to use him.  However, if DeSantis was not abhorred by whatever was being cooked up, well, that would tell a big story.

Despite his extremely high Florida visibility, literally almost every single day of the year holding press conferences and media events, DeSantis went fully into a bunker after the raid, and for five days was completely silent and missing from the public. There was no opportunity to question DeSantis about his feelings on the raid.

Instead, the people managing the governor broadcast two recorded video messages about innocuous subjects and never made a public appearance.

Simultaneously, the people around the governor restructured a newly branded national campaign, and launched a national tour outside the State of Florida immediately after the five days in the bunker.   These tours are planned long in advance, so someone knew something.

Mid-August 2022, the national tour, the book, the media use, the change in tone and personality, the new branding message, the people visited for fundraising, all of it…  carefully scripted, long planned and being executed on cue.   All prior polling showed a double-digit lead in Florida.  Democrats had pulled out of financing; the Democrat Governors Association didn’t put in a dime to support Charlie Crist, and yet DeSantis was banging a big tin cup raking in tens-of-millions.

Immediately, I said that’s it… that’s enough.  The evidence is overwhelming… It’s August 2022, and its crystal-clear; DeSantis is running for 2024, and I was confident outlining every step in the customary sequence that would take place including the timing of his announcement to May 2023.  It was all obvious.

But back to the scenario…. Back to the discussion y’all are having…. Back to my original thoughts in 2021….

….If DeSantis isn’t stupid, that means?

It means exactly what Dutchman has just said.  “This is important because if people don’t understand this, recognize they were “conned” and understand HOW they were manipulated, they will keep falling for it, every time.”

It means Ron DeSantis was a Big Club operation put into play in 2018.

Start there, review the timeline, review the events and everything makes sense.  Republicans are very good at creating the illusion of choice.  They are doing it again, only this time they are failing. (read more)

Hageman utilized most of her allotted five minutes to address Durham, reading prepared remarks:

How long can our country survive with a two tiered justice system?

Watch my comments on the Durham report below: pic.twitter.com/iFakyvvjI0

— Rep. Harriet Hageman (@RepHageman) June 21, 2023

Mr. Durham, in reviewing your report, I sincerely wanted to understand the work that you did and decipher the various investigations that we have been discussing: the origins, the history, the backstory, the whos, the whys, the whats, the what ifs, and the hows. I desperately wanted to figure out what happened to what was once our flagship law enforcement agencies — the FBI and the DOJ — to determine what went wrong and to evaluate how we can go forward from here. I have listened with great interest, hoping to find some answers to the burning questions of the day. And I have reached a few conclusions that I do not believe are subject to dispute or debate.

Now, I truly appreciate your regard for the agency you have dedicated your career to. I am sure that as your investigation progressed, you must have been truly saddened by what you found. What you have exposed, however, is that we are dealing with something so corrupt and so rotten that no amount of face paint, deflection, or whitewashing can fix this. You have been asked lots of questions about predicates, protocols, the Steele dossier, the Australian connection, Mr. Papadopoulos, Mr. Carter, the FISA court, and Crossfire Hurricane, among others. Your responses have been enlightening, but let’s get to the brass tacks: None of those people or documents or reports were relevant to the FBI when it identified Donald Trump as Public Enemy Number One. What do I mean? The accuracy and veracity of the Steele dossier was irrelevant to the FBI. The accuracy and veracity of the reports coming from the Australian embassy were irrelevant to the FBI. The fact that the Russian experts in the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies had no evidence of any kind of relationship between Mr. Trump and Putin or Russia was irrelevant to the FBI. And the fact that there was no verifiable evidence, such as testimony, documents, videos, or recordings of Russian collusion was irrelevant to the FBI.

Hageman continued, laying out her theory of the motivation behind the whole endeavor.

pic.twitter.com/tICOVxXSbF

— Rep. Harriet Hageman (@RepHageman) June 21, 2023

Nothing — and I repeat, nothing — that the FBI did was designed to show that Donald J. Trump was a Russian asset. That wasn’t the purpose of the entire charade. How do I know this is true? Because they told us so. The very people who cooked this up, and the ones who ran this entire operation: Strzok, Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, Clinesmith, Steele, the DNC, Perkins Coie. It was never their purpose to prove Russian collusion, and in fact, from the very beginning, they knew that no such thing actually existed. They knew that the entire Russian collusion narrative was fabricated by the Clinton campaign to deflect attention from her mishandling of classified materials and destruction of official emails. They didn’t need to prove Russian collusion. They just had to keep the investigation alive. And so long as they had a complicit press, and so long as they had people in this very body, who has been here — one of the gentlemen, who has been here much of the day, who would go on TV every night and lie about the smoking gun — they could further their personal and political agendas. Oh no, the purpose of Crossfire Hurricane wasn’t to prove Russian collusion — it was to destroy Donald J Trump, and they told us that with the text messages that are set forth on page 49 and 51 of your report — 49 and 50 of your report. And then, if they failed at blocking Mr. Trump from being elected as president, well, they had a backup plan — they had their “insurance policy,” to use Strzok’s terminology — which was to make it impossible for him to govern; to use whatever tools were available to taint his presidency, the legitimacy of his election, his ability to work with foreign leaders, and to make everything about “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

And then, Hageman drilled down to the heart of the matter.

pic.twitter.com/H3wnQcvA41

— Rep. Harriet Hageman (@RepHageman) June 21, 2023

And how has this corruption and rot manifested itself in our everyday lives? In our national culture? In our ability to solve the problems we are facing? It has destroyed some of the key foundations of this country, a foundation built on equal protection, on the belief that justice is blind, on the belief that you will be held accountable if you commit a fraud of the magnitude of what we have been discussing here today, on the belief that due process, justice, and constitutional rights are more than mere words. It has left a smoldering hot volcanic mess where the soul of this country used to be — all because a few people in the FBI decided they wanted to destroy a political candidate and ultimately a president and anyone associated with him. While these folks set out to destroy a presidential candidate and later a presidency, the fact is that they destroyed so much more — and that will be their ultimate legacy. One casualty is America’s faith in our institutions, and another casualty is the erosion of a justice system that is supposed to apply equally to all Americans, but that has been weaponized to protect the favored few elites — the Clintons, the Bidens — while targeting political enemies. That is the current legacy of the FBI and DOJ,

Now at the end of her allotted time, Hageman asked her one and only question of Durham — though Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) did his level best to cut her off:

Mr. Durham, here is my question: How long do you think that this country will survive with a two-tiered justice system that seeks to persecute people based on their political beliefs?

Whatever one’s takeaway of Durham’s report and his testimony might be, it would be difficult to doubt the sincerity (or the foreboding accuracy) of his response:

I don’t think that things can go too much further with the view that law enforcement, particularly the FBI or Department of Justice, runs a two-tiered system of justice. The nation can’t stand under those circumstances.

Why won’t mRNA Covid vaccine advocates stand up for their jabs anymore?

Two years ago, they talked endlessly about the shots, the miracle of modern science.

They said the jabs might eliminate Covid in the United States. They said anyone who refused them was a fool, at best. They defended mandating them for anyone who wanted to work or go to college. Some said unvaccinated people should be denied medical care.

No longer.

This weekend, Joe Rogan offered to donate $100,000 to charity if Dr. Peter Hotez, a loud vaccine supporter, would debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., probably the most prominent vaccine skeptic, on his podcast.

Rogan’s challenge generated national and even international attention.

But Hotez wouldn’t touch it, even after other people added pledges and the charity pool rose over $1 million. This morning, he whined that debating Kennedy was beneath him. “One typically doesn’t debate science,” Hotez said.

One doesn't?

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-mrna-fanatics-are-nervous

“I’m very put off by the word. It always throws me for a loop,” Ellsberg tells me when I ask him recently what he believes his legacy will be as one of America’s most iconic whistleblowers. “I didn’t plan on a legacy. I don’t know what a legacy is.” Ellsberg, who is dying of pancreatic cancer at age 92, says one reason he doesn’t think he’s really leaving any legacy is that the act he is famous for — leaking the Pentagon Papers more than 50 years ago — was highly unusual, if not unique. Despite the government-shaking magnitude of his revelation, he was one of the few whistleblowers who got away with exposing deception and wrongdoing in high places without turning the rest of his life into one long misery.

Nor did leaking the Pentagon Papers, by itself, do anything to shorten the war, which was his intention, Ellsberg admits. What did happen is that Nixon erupted in outrage over the leak and created the “Plumbers” unit to discredit Ellsberg. The Plumbers’ first break-in was to the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, but that led later to the Watergate burglary, Nixon’s resignation and the dismissal of all charges against Ellsberg on grounds of “improper government conduct.” Thus, indirectly, Watergate may well have prevented further escalation and shortened the war because it “undermined Nixon’s authority,” as Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years. Congress cut off aid to South Vietnam in 1975, and the war ended in April of that year with total victory by North Vietnam.

So Ellsberg has some parting advice to future whistleblowers: “Don’t do it under any delusion that you’ll have a high chance of ending up like Daniel Ellsberg.” This is especially true, he says, now the government is zealously prosecuting under the Espionage Act, which was first used in Ellsberg’s case. (Barack Obama later deployed it eight times, more than any other president, despite pledging to run “the most transparent administration in history.”)

Even if they escape prosecution, whistleblowers in high places face long odds against success in changing government policy — and yet at the same time Ellsberg says they are more necessary than ever. “I would caution people against thinking that any revelation by itself, no matter how spectacular — how amazing, how shocking, and extraordinary it is — would necessarily evoke a reaction, from the media or Congress, or that people will react to it,” Ellsberg tells me. “But it can work. My case shows that probably more than any other case.”

Ellsberg, snowy-haired but energetic despite the cancer — renowned for his eloquence, he still speaks in perfect paragraphs — was calm, even jovial, during what his son, Robert Ellsberg, said would be his last interview. Based on his experience in the covert world, Ellsberg sees a direct line between the deceptions and lies that led to the Vietnam War — and 58,000 American deaths — and the deceptions and lies that justified the Iraq war. This high-level deceit, Ellsberg says, extends to America’s current drone war policy around the world, in which the government has allegedly covered up the number of civilian deaths it causes.

“The need for whistleblowing in my area of so-called national security is that we have a secret foreign policy, which has been very successfully kept secret and essentially mythical,” he says. “I’m saying there’s never been more need for whistleblowers … There’s always been a need for many more than we have. At the same time, it’s become more and more dangerous to be a whistleblower. There’s little doubt about that.”

For many whistleblowers and their legal defenders, Ellsberg remains an inspiration, not just because of the Pentagon Papers but for his later actions revealing how nuclear strategy during the Cold War had been secretly based on war plans that would have left hundreds of millions of civilians dead, and how dangerous the nuclear threat remains today.

“For me and my generation, Daniel Ellsberg was the defining whistleblower,” says Scott Horton, a prominent human rights attorney who has defended whistleblowers going back to Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov in the 1970s. “The striking thing about him was that his position within the national security establishment was a prominent one. He realized there was something wrong with the whole way the Vietnam War was being justified, that this process was corrupting the way decisions were being made about national security affairs, and the system was so self-sealing that really the only way you could puncture that was presenting the public with the truth.”

At the same time, Horton believes that Ellsberg, like other whistleblowers, occasionally sees conspiracy and government perfidy when the evidence is scant. During the course of our hour- and-20-minute interview, Ellsberg contended America still runs a “covert empire” around the world, embodied in the U.S. domination of NATO. He believes Washington deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine by pushing its seat of power eastward toward Russia’s borders; that the mainstream media is “complicit” in allowing the government to keep secrets it has no right to withhold; and that any notion Americans are ever the “good guys” abroad “has always been false.”

“I think very few Americans are aware of what our actual influence in the former colonial world has been, and that is to keep it colonial,” Ellsberg says. “King Charles III [of Britain] is no longer an emperor, as I understand it, but for all practical purposes Joe Biden is … Here’s a point I haven’t made to anyone but would like to in my last days here. Very simply, how many Americans would know any one of the following cases, let alone three or four of them?” Ellsberg then rattles off a series of U.S. orchestrated coups, most of them fairly well documented, starting with Iran in 1953, and then in Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Brazil and Chile.

I respond by saying those were all Cold War policies, if covert ones, and ask him whether he thinks anything has changed since. In announcing the complete U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, for example — as the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of the country — Biden declared that the United States was “ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”

Ellsberg doesn’t believe it. “Democrats in this area are as shameless as Republicans,” he says. “Our elections in the realm of foreign policy and defense policy and arms sales, I have come to understand, are essentially between people vying to be manager of the empire.”

Even his most fervent admirers say that sometimes Ellsberg, haunted by his experience in the covert world, occasionally goes too far in seeing dark designs in U.S. policy. “He’s really serious about conspiracy theories,” Horton says. “I would contrast what he did during the Vietnam era to some of the more recent things where he’s really not on the inside anymore and doesn’t have that access to information.”

Christian Appy, a University of Massachusetts historian who is currently working on a book about Ellsberg based largely on his papers, says he doesn’t believe Ellsberg is a conspiracy theorist but adds: “I do think he sometimes speculates on things that I myself think are improbable.”

Even so, Appy says, Ellsberg is not entirely wrong in asserting that since World War II the U.S. has been effectively running an empire. “I think he is more careful than some people. In the last 10 years he has placed more stock on the military-industrial complex underpinnings of U.S. power, that they really do have huge influence on sustaining this huge imperial footprint around the world. And after all, we still have 800 military bases on foreign soil, and we conduct exercises in 25 countries.” (The current number of U.S. bases abroad is closer to 750.)

Louis Clark, the CEO of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower legal advocacy organization inspired by Ellsberg, says his influence has been titanic over the decades. “There’s been a tremendous sort of cultural change from the time he came forward, an acceptance of whistleblowing.” Unfortunately, that in turn has incited use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, a 1917 law that was intended for use against spies for foreign governments.

“People need to know what they’re getting into, especially with the abuse of the Espionage Act. These people are obviously not spies. There needs to be at a minimum a public interest kind of defense, which you can’t do under the Espionage Act,” says Clark.

In the interview, Ellsberg agrees not all leaks are created equal, and that it’s sometimes difficult to tell a real whistleblower from a fantasist, like the mysterious Q of the QAnon conspiracy, or someone who seems mainly interested in self-promotion. He believes Jack Teixeira, the National Guardsman who recently leaked a raft of classified documents by posting them on a gaming site, fits into the latter category.

“He’s invented a new form of leaking. It is not easy to understand why he thought he would get away with it,” Ellsberg says. “But there’s a big difference between whistleblowing and just leaking. Leaking is part of the way the system works. It has nothing to do with revealing wrongdoing. It’s much more about how great our weapons system is compared to the other one.”

No one ever sets out to become a whistleblower.

Most whistleblowers start out as patriots or devoted company people, often passionate ones. And there is a pattern to their behavior: Most of them try at first to address wrongdoing within the system; going to the media is a last resort. Ellsberg describes himself as a Harvard-educated U.S. Marine who in the beginning completely bought into the Cold War struggle against communism, including the Domino Theory. When he went to work for the Defense Department and Rand Corp., he says, “I very much accepted the idea that we were a force for democracy in the Third World, as in Korea, and the former colonial world, and for self-determination, for sovereignty, for peace. We were the good guys.” Initially, he wanted to divulge the Pentagon Papers to Congress, but few people in Congress seemed interested, he says. Ellsberg only reluctantly agreed to go to the media when he began “hearing from contacts in the Nixon administration that Nixon was planning to escalate the war,” says Robert Ellsberg, who as a 13-year-old helped his father secretly copy the Papers.

In a later era, a number of people who turned into whistleblowers were inspired by 9/11 to help their country. Among them: Ian Fishback, the dedicated U.S. Army captain who revealed that the torture practices at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were systemic, not isolated incidents, only to suffer criticism, mental illness and die years later in a charity hospital; and Reality Winner, who was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking details of Russian infiltration in the 2016 U.S. election. Other whistleblowers who have served time include Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army soldier who disclosed military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks, and Daniel Hale, who is currently imprisoned in Illinois after being convicted of giving classified material about drone operations to the media. Edward Snowden, who leaked massive amounts of information about surveillance by the National Security Agency, is in permanent exile in Russia.

Whistleblowers often end up bitter and incurably self-righteous. Like Ellsberg and Snowden, they are variously called “hero” or “traitor” for the rest of their lives. Or in the case of Frank Serpico, the famous cop, a “rat.” Not long before Ellsberg exposed the Pentagon Papers, Serpico was testifying to the Knapp Commission in 1970 about endemic graft in the New York City Police Department, which later became the subject of a book and a classic film. Like Ellsberg, Serpico tried for years to register his complaints inside the system — in his case the police department and the city government — before finally going to the New York Times in frustration. To this day, Serpico says, he is viewed as an outcast by the NYPD.

“It’s pretty lonely out there,” says Serpico, who is 87 and lives in a wooded tract outside Albany, N.Y. “It doesn’t end. Dan is the unforgiven and I’m the unforgiven.”

Still, in a phone interview in May, Serpico adds: “Whatever you do, no matter how small, it makes a difference … And you have to keep struggling. That’s what whistleblowers are doing: They’re struggling to keep the system from going under.”

Whistleblowers, it must be said, often do seem to be a different breed of human — and more alike than different, no matter what they are exposing. They are motivated by a moral outrage that often leads them to take on an entire system they were once part of and even loved with little hope of changing that system. Nor are they welcomed back into their organizations or industries, much less promoted. Certainly, they get no reward — with the exception of some financial whistleblowers who revealed illegal corporate gains.

“It’s not just a question of awarding an act which from almost every point of view, social and personal, is irrational, in the sense that it’s likely to be extremely personally risky and I think there will be no change to that,” Ellsberg says. “You can’t change the fact that when you tell secrets that your boss or your old area of industry is anxious for you to keep, you can’t escape retribution for that. I was very much an outlier on that. You might almost say Frank Serpico is the other absolute end of that. He got shot in the face.”

In the last half century, Ellsberg amassed a huge amount of hate mail calling him treasonous, Appy said. As Kerry Howley describes it in Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey through the Deep State, her new book about Reality Winner and other whistleblowers, they often just don’t understand why others fail to see the world the way they do, why most people just go along even with what they think is a bad or unjust system. “Most of us are good at not looking,” she writes. “People who feel they must confront the nature of reality, whom we call ‘whistleblowers’ or ‘traitors,’ tend to feel that the rest of us should do the same, which makes those people annoying, because not looking is a skill, and after a while you too might lose the ability not to look.”

As a result, whistleblowers often find each other, forming a loose band of exiled brothers and sisters — or, at the very least, a support group. After hearing about Ellsberg’s diagnosis, Serpico and Ellsberg recently spoke on FaceTime and “reminisced about old times,” as Serpico puts it, “what was going on back then and how both our situations were happening pretty much at the same time.” Serpico refuses most requests to have video conversations though he occasionally makes public appearances to support whistleblowing causes, but he says: “I couldn’t deny Dan. He wanted to see my face.”

And in the end, that is the legacy Ellsberg hopes to impart — the idea that whistleblowers are not alone. They are a team, and they need to become more effective by learning from each other.

“Here’s a very good piece of practical advice, which is don’t go through channels. Don’t go to the Whistleblower Protection Act. Don’t go to the inspector general as Tom Drake did, for example. That only serves to identify you as a troublemaker and someone who’s not with the system, somebody who whines about the fact that we’re killing people,” he says.

In 2005, Thomas Drake was working as a career intelligence official and employee of the National Security Agency when he grew worried that an NSA program code-named Trailblazer had turned into a boondoggle that cost more than a billion dollars and violated U.S. citizens’ privacy rights. Internally, Drake pushed for a more effective alternative program but when he was ignored, first by his superior, then by the NSA and Defense Department inspector generals, and even testified to Congress with no effect, Drake finally leaked to a Baltimore Sun reporter. He became the first official since Ellsberg charged under the Espionage Act and barely managed to avoid prison when he pled guilty to a misdemeanor. But his career was ruined.

Ellsberg also believes whistleblowers should try to remain anonymous if they can. “If you possibly can avoid exposing yourself, do that, don’t reveal yourself as I did, although I felt I had to do it and would do it again under other circumstances. Like Snowden and Chelsea Manning, we always felt we didn’t want other people blamed for what we had done. But if you’re not worried about that, the first thing would be to do it as anonymously as possible. In that respect there has been some improvement: a cipher system so whistleblowers can speak with the press.

“My biggest advice is, don’t do this unless you’re ready to accept the high risk of having your career destroyed and actually going to prison,” Ellsberg says. “Going to prison is a new one, starting under Obama, but it’s there now, very much so. Obviously, that really narrows the number of things worthy of whistleblowing considerably. I wouldn’t do it, for example, just for bribery or cost overruns. That’s not important enough to go to prison.”

“But the final thing I would say is there are lots of things having to do with preserving the Constitution, as in Snowden’s case, or shortening a war, or in stopping a massive assassination program, the drone program, as in Daniel Hale’s case, that do make it indeed quite worthwhile to sacrifice yourself in order to save the lives of lot of people,” Ellsberg says. “I would like to encourage people to ask themselves the question: ‘Am I willing to sacrifice my career, my life, to save these other lives?’ And most people will say no. That’s humanity. That’s the way it is. But definitely, if they ask that question as I was led to ask myself the question, you can very well look at it that way and you can say yes.”

When I asked whether whistleblowing has made government or corporate America any more honest, however, Ellsberg waxes gloomier.

“That’s easy to answer: No. The short answer is no. The long answer is no. It hasn’t changed the desire to keep secrets. People in all governments in all of history have been willing to take all actions necessary…to keep people from knowing what will lead to their being blamed for a mistake, for a lie, or a crime or for their incompetence. Talking about national security: Who exactly has had their career hurt by incompetence? Maybe some Russians have. They have fired some Russians. Walt Rostow [Lyndon Johnson’s hawkish national security advisor] had to go to the University of Texas, instead of back to MIT, for example. So that’s the level of accountability.”

Those aren’t very encouraging words, I reply.

“Despite all those odds there is a chance and that can make it worthwhile,” Ellsberg says. “When everything is at stake — I’m talking about nuclear war implicitly here but climate is the same. When we’re facing a pretty ultimate catastrophe. When we’re on the edge of blowing up the world over Crimea or Taiwan or Bakhmut. … From the point of view of a civilization and the survival of eight or nine billion people, when everything is at stake, can it be worth even a small chance of having a small effect? And the answer is: Of course. Of course, it can be worth that. You can even say it’s obligatory.” (read more)