Like I said above, a lot of people will never buy that everything that’s going wrong on the national stage is going wrong because of deliberate machinations behind the scenes. I mean, I certainly don’t buy that conspiracies explain everything and I’m probably more open to these ideas than most. So what I think we need to be able to articulate is that, hey, these things may not be intentional plots, but they are still serious problems. They are still a threat to us, and a means by which someone down the line could commit some abuses of power that make the recent IRS scandals seem positively trivial.

And we need to be able to articulate that things like the NSA happen because of the size, heterogeneity, complexity, and organizational structure of the contemporary United States. That the enormous, centrally managed bureaucracy that is our government needs to be dismantled, divided, or radically re-envisioned or else these horrors are just going to keep cropping up.

My basic party line would be: we’ll figure out who all was responsible for what in due time, right now let’s focus on stopping this runaway train we’re on.

Ever since the NSA leaks though, I’ve noticed people stop degrading “conspiracy theorists.” The common CT joke used to be “HEY DUDE! Don’t you know THE GOVERNMENT is listening to everything we say!? HAHA! Conspiracy theorists are such idiots!”

And now we know they are.

The government IS literally listening to everything you say, send or type.

The conspiracy theorists were literally right all along.

So it’s a little more awkward to mock them now. And everyone knows it, even if they don’t say it outright.