Frustrated Americans take to the street in opposition to the actions of the Federal government. The President casts everyday Americans as pawns of foreign interests. He deploys National Guard units and other Federal forces to quell the protests, which only further inflames the situation. Inevitably, American citizens are shot dead by those same forces.

While the above actions can serve as a depiction of the situation in our country today, they also recount the events of the late 1960’s and early 70’s during the administration of President Richard Nixon. These earlier incidents included nationwide mass demonstrations and the deadly shooting of four students and the wounding of nine others at Kent State University by Ohio National Guard troops. Then, as now, actions by the Federal government posed a grave threat to the civil liberties of the American people. What remains to be seen is whether the other two, coequal branches of the Federal government, will fulfill their constitutional responsibility to rein in an out-of-control Executive.

In my prior role as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, I was responsible for the policy oversight of several protective programs to include the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Counterintelligence (CI) activities. The department’s CI activities were primarily directed toward protecting DoD’s intelligence activities from our nation’s foreign adversaries. A key area of my focus was ensuring that the DoD did not repeat the abuses of the late 1960’s when U.S. Army CI assets engaged in domestic data collection and surveillance. Then, as now, the U.S. military was deployed in American cities to quell unrest. Then, as now, the Federal government spied on everyday Americans to identify those it believed to be a threat.

Beginning with the Watts riot in 1965, U.S. military forces, both National Guard and active duty, were increasingly deployed domestically, culminating in deployments in scores of American cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Beginning in 1967, the U.S. Army Intelligence Command (USAINTC) began a massive and unauthorized program directed at collecting data and exercising surveillance over thousands of American citizens. The program was known as Continental United States Intelligence, or CONUS Intel.

At its peak, the U.S. Army deployed up to 1,500 CI agents, usually in civilian clothes, to surveil groups of as few as 20 Americans. It was later estimated that upwards of a 100,000 Americans were the subject of Army CI files. In January 1970, Christopher Pyle, a former USAINTC captain published a series of articles in a magazine revealing the existence of the military’s domestic spying network. In response to an attempt by the U.S. Army to cover up such activities, Senator Sam Ervin, a conservative senator from North Carolina, who later rose to fame during the Senate investigation into the Nixon Watergate scandal, held a series of hearings intended to highlight how the U.S. Army’s domestic surveillance threatened the liberties of everyday Americans. As a result of the pressure generated by these hearings, the Army eventually destroyed most of its civil disturbance files, and the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was dissolved on June 30, 1974. Many of its functions were transferred to the Defense Investigative Service, an organization within which I served early in my career as a Federal civil servant. Ervin’s hearings eventually contributed to the bipartisan Church Committee hearings, which exposed additional abuses by the Federal government’s intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, NSA, and FBI, to conduct illegal surveillance on American citizens.

The Church Committee hearings precipitated a series of reforms culminating in the initial issuance of Executive Order 12333, United States Intelligence Activities, by President Ronald Regan in 1981. In part, this order is intended to fulfill the “solemn obligation” of the Federal government “to protect fully the legal rights of all United States persons, including freedoms, civil liberties, and privacy rights guaranteed by Federal law,” when engaging in intelligence collection.

In a direct repeat of the government’s abuse of everyday American’s civil liberties, Federal agents are once again collecting data and conducting surveillance of its citizens. In Minneapolis, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are using facial recognition technology to identify and track U.S. citizens simply for exercising their Constitutional rights. Reportedly, ICE is also using cellphone and social media tools to monitor American’s online activity and potentially hack into phones. With repeated threats by the President to deploy active-duty troops to American cities, it is not difficult to imagine that the military’s CI assets will be tasked with force protection responsibilities intended to identify threats on the ground. What is clear is that the current administration sees those threats to include everyday American citizens exercising their First and Second Amendment Constitutional rights.

Both Congress and the Federal courts, the two coequal branches of our Constitutional form of government, have a solemn obligation to expose and bring to a halt the blatant violation of American civil liberties by agents of the Executive branch. This is not a Republican or Democratic issue. Much the same way the two parties came together during the Ervin and Church committee hearings to expose and halt the abuses of the Nixon administration, the American people of all persuasions must be protected from Executive branch overreach by the Trump administration. Whenever some Americans’ civil liberties are threatened, all Americans’ liberties are threatened.

J. William Leonard is the Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Security & Information Operations), Former Director, Information Security Oversight Office and Former Chief Operating Officer, National Endowment for Democracy. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

An altered image that U.S. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social features the American flag superimposed over a map that includes Canada and Greenland (Donald J. Trump via Truth Social)

Masked federal agents on the streets of American cities: Snatching innocents. Trampling constitutional guarantees of due process. Defying judicial orders to cease and desist. Violent rioters who stormed the US Capitol: Pardoned, along with corrupt politicians (even including a major narcotics trafficker from Honduras). Federal prosecutors and FBI agents who worked to hold such criminals accountable: Fired.

Meanwhile, the president’s loyalists at the Department of Justice and FBI have been busy rounding up the usual suspects: the president’s perceived political enemies. Such authoritarian abuses of the rule of law have dominated daily headlines since Donald Trump returned to the (now gold-plated) Oval Office thirteen months ago.

America’s democratic backsliding has been “the most rapid in contemporary history,” Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch has (painfully) observed. “It outpaces the early stages of backsliding under Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, where similar steps unfolded over several years.”

It’s the same for America’s traditional respect for international legal norms that have shaped the world for the past eight decades.

Don’t take my word. The president and his subordinates have been operating in broad daylight.

On Jan. 23, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (a proud manosphere denizen who prefers to be called War Secretary) sent a memo to the Pentagon’s top brass, introducing the Trump administration’s 2026 National Defense Strategy. Previous American presidents, Hegseth wrote, had “squandered our military advantages and the lives, goodwill, and resources of our people in grandiose nation-building projects and self-congratulatory pledges to uphold cloud-castle abstractions like the rules-based international order.” President Trump, Hegseth added, “has decisively changed that.”

Indeed. Think about the “War” secretary’s derisive phrase: “cloud-castle abstractions like the rules-based international order.” China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin talk like that. No American president ever has. Until now. As senior White House strategist Stephen Miller has put it, the world has always been dominated by raw “power.” Period.

In 1945, after the end of World War II and the loss of more than 70 million lives resulting from similar thinking, the United Nations – led by the United States – was launched. The driving idea, enshrined in the UN’s preamble, was “to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.” Four years later, NATO’s charter reaffirmed those democratic ideals.

NATO’s Article I specifies that signatory members of the North Atlantic Treaty are (legally) required “to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”

Unimpressed, Trump has spent the past year threatening to seize — “one way or the other” — Greenland, the semi-autonomous territory of fellow NATO ally Denmark. While he has backed off (for now) in the face of international revulsion, the damage has been incalculable.

Just ask Canadians, who will not soon forget that Trump actually said — in the Oval Office, in front of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — that the map of North America would look better if Canada would surrender its sovereignty and become the 51^st U.S. State.

Don’t laugh. Trump’s serious. Never mind the absurdity of weakening the vitally important US-Canadian defense and intelligence-sharing arrangements that have long protected North America from Russian aggression.

Canadians — who have aggressively resisted Moscow’s designs on Ukraine and the Baltics — have grown used to being targeted by Russian information warfare. Now, they have a new worry: the MAGAphone. “Canada is now considered a hostile actor by MAGA,” noted Canadian journalist John Ivison in the National Post.

Far-right separatists in Canada’s oil-rich Alberta province have been meeting with Trump’s U.S. State Department diplomats, according to a well-sourced report in the Financial Times. One even boasted that he had a “much stronger relationship” with officials in Washington than Ottawa. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent piled on last month, saying that Alberta was “a natural partner for the US.” Trump himself has close ties with right-wing “influencers” on both sides of the border.

Meanwhile, Trump is pushing a new idea to move on from the traditional rules-based international order. He is working up a “Board of Peace” with like-minded countries interested in, for openers, funding real estate projects in war-ravaged Gaza.

The board’s funds would be controlled by Trump (with input from son-in-law Jared Kushner and others close to the family). The initial members include the familiar autocratic regimes whose leaders Trump admires: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Hungary. Not one European democracy.

Trump has invited Russia’s Putin to join, while conspicuously disinviting Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney. A man who knows how to handle bullies, Carney’s popularity has risen in direct proportion to the continuing insults and threats from the president of the United States.

Greg Rushford is a former congressional aide who conducted intelligence oversight, and a former Washington journalist. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

The phrase “release the Epstein files” has such rhetorical power because it promises moral clarity. It offers the public a cathartic moment, exposure, accountability, a sense that the powerful can’t hide behind the system.

And in a political culture that increasingly treats outrage as both a pastime and a strategy, it can feel especially satisfying: like we’re sticking it to our opponents and shaking loose a network of predators.

But the pleasure should instead signal a warning light.

The bigger danger in an all-at-once “files” release isn’t that we’ll learn something uncomfortable about famous people. It’s that we’ll further damage the one thing a society cannot function without: credible trust in the rule-of-law process, law enforcement, prosecutors, courts, and the professionalism that makes those institutions something other than weapons.

If our standard for justice becomes “dump everything and let the internet sort it out,” we are not strengthening accountability. We’re degrading it into a spectacle.

The process is the point

We’ve built a serious, rights-protecting system over many decades because we learned, often the hard way, that justice is fragile.

It requires rules. It requires restraint. It requires a chain of custody, evidentiary standards, defense rights, judicial oversight, and accountability mechanisms that are boring precisely because they are meant to be fair.

That system is not perfect. But it’s the only system designed to produce outcomes that can be defended as legitimate rather than simply popular.

Please read here the entire article published by Tomorrow’s Affairs on February 2, 2026

John Sipher ( @johnsipher.bsky.social ) is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment. He worked for the CIA’s Clandestine Service for 28 years and is the recipient of the Agency’s Distinguished Career Intelligence medal. He is also a host and producer of the “Mission Implausible” podcast, exploring conspiracy theories. He is a member of The Steady State and a host of The Steady State Sentinel Podcast.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

The world’s longest land border is the over 5000 miles between the United States and Canada. It is also the world’s longest unguarded border.

This may be changing. Last week Canada revealed its military is modeling a US invasion. The Canadian response would reportedly involve mimicking the Afghan mujahideen and using Canada’s size and harsh terrain to tie down invading forces and inflict unacceptable casualties.

Americans take for granted the advantages the United States gains from living in a peaceful neighborhood. But other major powers face potentially hostile countries next door and have to plan accordingly. Russia borders China in the east—friendly for now, but not in the past—and NATO countries in the West. China faces Russia, plus bitter enemy Vietnam to the south, nuclear-armed India to its west, and rich and powerful adversaries nearby, including South Korea and Japan.

Unfriendly neighbors require extensive border infrastructure. The Russian Border Guard Service, for instance, numbers some 170,000 troops. In countries with dangerous neighbors, the military must continually plan, train, and equip for possible hostile action from next door. There are almost always unresolved territorial disputes that can quickly escalate into armed confrontation.

The United States has been protected by two oceans but also by the absence of any threat from Canada or Mexico. Neither country maintains forces designed to threaten the US, and the US is not postured to carry out operations in either country.

Until now. Trump’s reckless statements about making Canada the 51^st state have alarmed Canadians. Trump and senior administration officials have made frequent hints about the need to intervene unilaterally in Mexico to fight criminals and terrorists. The new National Security Strategy asserts an American right to rule the Western Hemisphere. Tariffs on Canada and Mexico have been threatened, imposed and rescinded for blatantly political ends. Unilateral action against Venezuela and threats to annex Greenland are further convincing Canadians and Mexicans that the United States could turn on them without warning.

Americans may be surprised to know that Canada—Canada!— has emerged as perhaps the most outspoken opponent of the Trump administration’s vision for the world. Two weeks ago at Davos Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (who is ironically only in power because Trump angered Canadian voters so much they turned against the Conservative Party in last spring’s elections) delivered a widely praised speech that distilled what Canada and many other countries fear, and how they plan to push back.

Carney said what we are experiencing now is not temporary, but a ‘disruption’ in the global order. The United States is abandoning or weaponizing the multilateral institutions it helped create, and no longer sees itself as acting for the good of anyone other than itself.

“…great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security, that assumption is no longer valid.”

Canada is responding immediately by reducing its dependence on the US and strengthening ties with other economic and strategic partners.

“We are fast-tracking $1 trillion of investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond. We’re doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade, and we’re doing so in ways that build our domestic industries. And we are rapidly diversifying abroad.”

“We’ve agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.”

“In the past few days, we’ve concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We’re negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.”

The long term response is for ‘middle powers’ like Canada to cooperate and work around the United States to shore up the rules-based international system.

“Our view is the middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

“In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact. We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together.”

The United States has always been willing to occasionally use its domination of international finance and its global military power for its own advantage. Other countries have chafed but until now considered the benefits outweighed the costs, because the US was seen as committed to a system of mutual benefit. But under Trump that is no longer the case. Middle powers like Canada are actively seeking alternatives; over time, American power will drastically decline. The power of rivals such as China will increase.

One clear implication of Carney’s approach will be less defense cooperation. Canada is reportedly reconsidering whether to buy 88 American F-35 fighters, with Swedish Gripen aircraft as the likely alternative. Canada’s new Defense Investment Agency is prioritizing purchases from non-US suppliers, and Sweden is offering Canada a co-production agreement that would create 12600 Canadian jobs.

Many European countries have voiced concerns that military dependence on the US is no longer safe. The American supply chain may be abruptly broken for political reasons. US weapons could be designed with built-in kill mechanisms allowing the US to disable them when it pleases. Canada shares these fears.

Back to that long border. Today it is barely noticeable. But tomorrow it may bristle with barbed wire, watch-towers, and sophisticated sensors. Americans will miss the old Canada when it’s gone. We will have only ourselves to blame.

Adam Wasserman is a retired CIA analyst with experience on failing democracies in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He served on the State Department Policy Planning Staff, the CIA Red Cell, and the National Security Council staff. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

Political analyst shares three red flags with The Steady State Sentinel podcast guest host , warning that Iran, attacks on the judiciary, and targeting of U.S. citizens by the government are potentially incendiary threats to U.S. democracy and national security.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or your preferred platform.

New episodes every Tuesday, special features on Fridays until March 2026.

AI-supported summary follows.

Steady State Sentinel – Conversation with Jack Hopkins

Introduction

Margaret Hennock:
Good day. This is Margaret Hennock from The Steady State. I’m a 25‑year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service, and I’m now working with The Steady State, a political advocacy group.

My guest tonight is Jack Hopkins — Navy veteran, behavioral consultant, and author of the Substack Jack Hopkins Now. I recommend it to everybody; it’s terrific.

How Jack Entered Political Writing

Margaret:
How did you get into the political writing business? When did you decide to do it? Was it a major change for you?

Jack Hopkins:
It was a major change. I sort of entered into it without realizing it. In 2018, I made a hard pivot.

I’d been a Republican for many years — though I voted for Obama in 2008, so I was always a bit of an odd case. Raised Republican, thought of myself as Republican, but never had a problem voting for the better candidate in a given race.

And then COVID happened.

As a former Navy hospital corpsman, EMT, and nurse — with family still in nursing — I pay close attention to medical issues. I subscribe to nursing journals, track medical trends.

Watching top epidemiologists get trashed — personally attacked — at a moment when millions were predicted to die? That lit a fire inside me. A fire I couldn’t have put out even if I wanted to.

I didn’t decide to write; I just started. And then suddenly I had a following. So I kept going.

Top National Security Threats Today

Margaret:
What do you think are the three most important or frightening national security challenges today?

1. Domestic threats

We didn’t used to talk about domestic threats as a national security issue, but now it’s front and center.
A toxic mix of:

• rising domestic enforcement, and

• collapsing public trust

…is extremely dangerous.

A subcategory is the escalation of ICE, which everyone has seen in recent months.

2. Threats to federal judges

We don’t have to like every judicial decision, but a functioning republic requires judges who can rule without fear of violence. Threats are rising, correlating with political rhetoric.

3. The Netanyahu–Trump–Iran triangle

Many see it as a regional issue — for now. But Netanyahu has signaled willingness to use military force against Iran. Trump signals the same daily.

One misstep could globalize the conflict.

What worries me most are the actors not on stage — players with vested interests we don’t see.

Digging Deeper Into the Netanyahu–Trump–Iran Nexus

Margaret:
Can you give a few more words on how that triangle might blow up?

Jack:
There’s a strange, ambiguous relationship between Netanyahu and Trump. Shared interests, overlapping agendas. Netanyahu has taken more openly Trump‑like positions recently.

But the bigger concern isn’t those two — it’s the people offstage. The ones who don’t like the spotlight but have power.

The domestic issues here at home are actually clearer because the president is openly describing his actions, defending the indefensible, and leaning into inflammatory behavior.

Meanwhile, in communities across the country, American citizens — not just migrants — are being beaten, injured, even killed in ICE‑adjacent incidents. That’s shifting public perspective dramatically.

On Public Anger and the Temptation Toward Violence

Margaret:
How do you see your influence on people who feel like violence is the only answer?

Jack:
I love that question.

A lot of people feel that years of resistance haven’t worked. They’re emotionally exhausted. They feel like violence is the only option left.

I understand it.
But:

Violence almost never produces the outcome people want.
It kills the wrong people.
It justifies authoritarian crackdowns.
It plays directly into Trump’s hands.

The things that actually work — calling lawmakers, emailing, showing up, forming groups, applying pressure — are “boring.” They don’t feel heroic. They don’t give you that gut‑fire sensation.

But they are historically effective.

And the emotionally intense actions people fantasize about right now are exactly what Trump hopes they will do. That’s the trap.

If widespread political violence erupts, I don’t know that we ever claw our way back.

How Trump Might Respond to Civil Unrest

Margaret:
What do you see him doing if the public reacts violently?

Jack:
He loves targeting blue states. Look at deportations — he’s comfortable wielding the state against political enemies.

If he invoked martial law or the Insurrection Act, I doubt it would be nationwide. I think it would be segmented:

• harsh crackdowns in blue states

• red states left largely alone

• targeted actions in red states against vocal Democrats

It matches his established patterns.

The “Worry Prevention System”

Margaret:
I loved your “worry prevention system” today. Is that connected to all this?

Jack:
Absolutely.

Worrying is a process, not a personality trait. People say “I’m a worrier” as if it’s genetic, but really, they’ve practiced the process for decades.

Once people realize worrying is something they do, not something they are, it gives them a key to their own emotional freedom.

Worrying feels like doing something, but it actually paralyzes you. And paralysis is deadly for democracy.

If worry keeps people home on Election Day, democracy loses.
Emotional regulation is civic engagement.

Closing

Margaret:
Jack, thank you so much. As always, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

Jack:
Likewise, Margaret. Anytime.

Margaret:
This is Margaret Hennock for The Steady State — still standing watch.

Thank you for listening to the Steady State Sentinel podcast. Don’t miss more insights from America’s premier global security experts. Subscribe to our Substack at substack.com/@SteadyState1 and join us next week.

The Steady State is a nonprofit organization working to sustain our democracy and national security. Support us at www.thesteadystate.org.