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America has become an occupied nation.
Not by one invading army, but by many occupying powers: the police state, the surveillance state, the war state, the corporate state, the foreign influence machine, and a ruling class that treats the American people as little more than collateral damage in its pursuit of power, profit and control.
We have been policed, surveilled, taxed, indebted, manipulated, censored, tracked, searched, silenced and sold out.
Foreign powers are buying up our farmland, buying favor with the Trump family, weaseling their way into the White House, dictating national policy, and now - with the backing of the Trump administration and bipartisan support in Congress - one of America's closest partners-in-crime may soon gain even greater access to U.S. intelligence and surveillance capabilities.
This is what we have come to.
The swamp under President Trump has taken on a decidedly foreign flavor: any nation with enough money, leverage or strategic value to enrich the Trump family can now get its hands on a piece of the American pie - all the while, the American people continue to struggle to survive Trump's self-enrichment schemes, broken promises, endless wars, militarized streets and vanity projects.
We're being sold to the highest bidders, and still nothing is being done to protect us.
Ordinary Americans are told there is not enough money to honor the government's promises to them. Social Security's retirement trust fund is now projected to run short in late 2032, at which point retirees could face an automatic 22 percent cut in scheduled benefits if Congress fails to act. Medicare's hospital insurance fund is projected to run short the following year. Seniors, the disabled, working families and the poor are told to brace for sacrifice.
But there is always money for war.
There is always money for surveillance.
There is always money for police-state crackdowns, border militarization, private contractors, foreign aid, weapons systems, tax breaks for the wealthy, slush funds for political allies, and spectacles of imperial excess.
While Americans worry about groceries, rent, medical bills, job security, retirement and whether their children will inherit anything resembling freedom, the White House is being turned into a playground for power and celebrity.
Trump's June 14 birthday celebration is reportedly set to include a UFC fight on the White House lawn, with weigh-ins at the Lincoln Memorial, transforming public symbols of sacrifice, liberty and national memory into props for one man's vanity show.
This, too, is occupation.
Not merely the occupation of land, but the occupation of the public imagination. The occupation of the people's institutions. The occupation of the Constitution itself.
The contrast could not be more obscene.
On June 8, 1789, James Madison rose in the House of Representatives to introduce amendments to the Constitution that would become the Bill of Rights. Madison and the founding generation fought to bind the government down. They understood that written limits on government power were not optional. They were essential.
Today's rulers are fighting to free the government from those restraints.
They want fewer limits on surveillance, police power, presidential immunity, war-making, foreign entanglements, secrecy, corruption, and the ability of the rich and powerful to buy their way into the machinery of government.
That is how far we have fallen.
From a Bill of Rights, we have descended into a bill of sale.
From a Congress that amended the Constitution to protect the people from government power, we now have a Congress that hides government power inside thousand-page defense bills, intelligence authorizations, classified annexes and emergency spending packages.
From founders who warned against foreign influence, we now have rulers who auction off access to foreign governments, foreign donors, foreign wars and foreign intelligence interests.
Surveillance is not just another government program. It is the nervous system of the police state. It is how the government tracks who you are, where you go, what you say, who you know, what you believe, what you fear, what you oppose and what you might become.
Once that machinery is built, everyone wants access to it: federal agencies, local police, private contractors, political operatives, corporate partners and foreign governments.
That is why the latest push to deepen intelligence sharing with Israel should stop every American cold.
This is not happening in a vacuum.
It is happening in a country where the government already treats the Fourth Amendment as a nuisance, where speech is increasingly flagged as threat activity, where protesters and journalists are monitored, where private companies help police public opinion, where Congress hides massive expansions of government power inside defense bills and intelligence authorizations, and where foreign influence has become one more currency of power.
It is happening at the very moment U.S. officials are reportedly warning that Israel poses a growing espionage threat to the United States.
And yet Congress is moving to give Israel even greater access to America's intelligence machinery.
According to recent reporting by The New York Times, Pentagon officials have grown increasingly alarmed about Israel's espionage efforts against the United States, including alleged attempts to gather information about American diplomacy involving Iran. Israel has denied spying on U.S. officials or entities. The White House has downplayed the concerns.
But the question remains.
How much does it really matter that Israel is allegedly spying on the United States if Congress is preparing to give Israel even greater access to America's intelligence?
That is the question no one in Washington seems eager to answer.
Because while the Pentagon is reportedly warning that the back door may be unsecured, Congress is preparing to hand out keys to the front door.
Buried inside the latest intelligence and defense legislation are provisions that would deepen U.S.–Israel intelligence and defense technology cooperation.
That may sound harmless, even routine.
This is about access.
The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027 would require the president, through the Director of National Intelligence and, when needed, the Secretary of Defense, to expand and enhance intelligence sharing with Israel.
In plain English:
And not just narrow intelligence about one isolated threat.
The categories are sweeping:
...and other threats involving Israel, U.S. forces and regional partners.
That is a wide door.
Even more troubling, the bill would make it harder to close that door once it is opened. Intelligence sharing with Israel could not be suspended, reduced or materially limited unless the president points to a specific national security concern, such as protecting intelligence sources and methods or addressing a counterintelligence risk. Any such reduction would have to be documented and reported to Congress.
Think about that.
At a moment when U.S. officials are reportedly raising concerns about Israeli espionage, Congress is proposing to make expanded intelligence sharing the default - and any reduction in that sharing the exception requiring justification.
The 2027 National Defense Authorization Act adds another layer. Section 224 would create a United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, requiring the Pentagon to synchronize cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel in defense research, development, testing, evaluation, integration and industrial cooperation.
Again, strip away the bureaucratic language.
This is about fusing systems.
This is about joining forces on defense technology, cyber capabilities, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence, surveillance tools, missile defense, drone tracking, network integration and data fusion.
And when governments fuse their intelligence systems, they do not merely share threats.
That is where the Constitution gets lost.
The Fourth Amendment was written to protect the people from government searches that are unreasonable, generalized and unchecked. It was meant to force the government to justify its intrusions, identify what it is looking for, and answer to the law. The modern surveillance state was built to evade those restraints.
It outsources. It pools. It launders. It hides behind agencies, contractors, secret courts, classified briefings and foreign partners. That is why this is so dangerous.
The issue is not whether Israel is friend or foe.
The issue is whether the American government should be allowed to expand foreign access to U.S. intelligence systems while the American people are left with nothing but reassurances, classified briefings and vague promises that safeguards exist somewhere behind closed doors.
No foreign government's interests are identical to America's.
That is why constitutional government requires independence, caution and oversight in foreign entanglements. It is why the founders warned so forcefully against allowing foreign influence to corrupt domestic policy. It is why a free people cannot afford to let their government become the errand boy for another nation's wars, intelligence aims, political demands or security priorities.
For decades, the U.S. government has used intelligence alliances to expand surveillance while avoiding the full force of constitutional scrutiny.
Five Eyes - the intelligence-sharing network involving the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - should have been a warning.
It showed how easily surveillance can become borderless. One government collects. Another government shares. Agencies swap data. Restrictions blur. Responsibility disappears. And the people whose communications, movements and associations are swept into the system are left with no way to know who saw their information, how it was used, or whether it will follow them forever.
The problem is not cooperation among nations as such.
The problem is that intelligence sharing has become one of the easiest ways for governments to do indirectly what they may be forbidden from doing directly.
The answer, too often, is that we cannot know.
That is the genius and the menace of the modern surveillance state.
Yet liberty dies just as easily under acronyms as under edicts.
We have been down this road before.
After 9/11, Americans were told that extraordinary surveillance powers were necessary to protect the nation from terrorism. The Patriot Act, secret FISA court rulings, NSA bulk collection programs and intelligence fusion centers transformed the relationship between the citizen and the state.
Surveillance that would once have been unthinkable became routine. Tools created for foreign enemies migrated inward. Databases multiplied. Watchlists expanded. Local police were folded into federal intelligence networks. Private companies became extensions of the surveillance apparatus.
Every expansion came with the same command: trust us.
Yet again and again, the public learned only after the fact that the government had abused its powers, exceeded its authority, misled Congress, deceived courts, targeted dissenters, tracked journalists, monitored activists, and turned emergency powers into permanent fixtures.
A free people do not trust rulers. They bind them down.
That is the whole point of the Constitution.
The framers did not create a government of secret permissions.
The intelligence state is proof.
It has grown through crises, wars, emergencies and classified exceptions. It has grown under Republicans and Democrats. It has grown through foreign threats and domestic fears. It has grown by convincing Americans that safety requires secrecy, secrecy requires trust, and trust requires surrender.
Under the bill, if a president later decides that intelligence sharing with Israel has gone too far, become too risky or needs to be pulled back, he would have to explain himself to Congress and point to a specific national security concern.
There isn't one.
There are only assurances. There are only classified briefings. There are only vague promises that someone, somewhere, behind closed doors, will make sure the American people are not abused by the very surveillance machinery being built in their name.
That is not good enough.
These are not abstract concerns.
This is the danger of an occupied nation: the people are no longer treated as sovereigns to whom the government must answer. They are treated as subjects to be monitored, managed, searched, silenced, sacrificed and sold.
Now imagine that architecture merged more deeply with foreign intelligence systems.
Imagine an American's communications, travel patterns, associations or online speech being swept into a shared intelligence environment because it touches on terrorism, cyber threats, sanctions evasion, state actors, regional security or some other elastic category. Imagine that information being passed from one government to another, analyzed by artificial intelligence, stored in classified databases and used to generate a suspicion that the individual can never see, challenge or correct.
The problem is not merely Israel. The problem is the premise that constitutional rights can be protected after information has already been collected, fused, shared and acted upon.
They cannot.
That is how republics drift into empire.
But the greater danger lies in not questioning it.
The surveillance state has no borders.
That is the problem.
This is how America becomes unfree . Not merely through one dictator, one party, one war, one emergency or one foreign entanglement, but through the steady surrender of constitutional safeguards to every institution that claims power in the name of protecting us.
That is occupation...!
Not occupation in the old sense alone, with armies marching through the streets and flags planted in conquered soil, but occupation in the modern sense: a people ruled by forces they do not control, watched by systems they cannot see, taxed for wars they did not choose, governed by deals they were never allowed to debate, and stripped of rights by officials who insist it is all for their own good.
That is the America being built around us.
The founders did not fight a revolution so future generations could be governed by secret intelligence networks, foreign entanglements and unaccountable security bureaucracies. They understood that liberty requires vigilance, not trust.
The question, then, is not simply whether Israel is spying on America...
We are not merely being watched.
We are being occupied..."
As I make clear in my books,
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