Otherwise you're pretty much spot on.
The larger confusion on the part of the parent is thinking the President is in charge of much of anything or has the power to dismantle any of these deep state perma structures that have been built up in the post WW2 era; these are structures that survive any given administration, regardless of political agenda, and which nobody really dares to challenge. That includes the always expanding spying systems and military industrial complex. Any President that tries it will be burned out of DC every which way possible. Instant lame duck, crippled by their own party, on the outs with the news media (which is entirely a pet of the deep state), lambasted coming and going, tripped up in staged scandals set up by deep state opponents in the FBI or CIA, probably get impeached a few times for relatively trivial things (vs, say, starting wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya that got a million plus people killed; you know, things you should actually get impeached for). The President is more of a token figurehead today than not.
There was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee after all. The people that benefit from the current situation would be against changing it of course. But I agree it's extremely unlikely to be changed. I think the reason is that most federal elected politicians have a comfort with what these groups are doing that gives them a sense that we need these things. Something like "we are doing a terrible amount of spying on americans but it's protecting us". Plus they get campaign donations from the military industrial and spying complexes. And not much attention is given to the fact that a dishonorable leader could use this to start blackmailing opponents and maybe even ultimately control the population. Fortunately we haven't ever come close to a leader like that, ha ha.
How do you persevere in the face of this type of media blacklisting?
The irony of this statement is you see it as evidence of there being no conspiracy, but I see it as exactly the opposite. Maybe everyone complaining about the same problem means the problem is real?
Easiest mainstream evidence is treatment of candidates in debates — which, reminder, are operated entirely by...basically whoever in academia or media.
Persevere, though? Anyone that dares to tell the truth today is begging for a blacklisting. That's what building the big tech censorship systems is all about (which will be America's version of the great firewall), being able to dictate what the supposed truth is for any given topic at any given moment in time. It's a martyrs game, telling the truth, I assume Ron Paul has known that for a long time.
Indeed. Liz Cheney's fate[0] is a great example of that.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/12/liz-...
Yet another person completely unaware that Trump let the Patriot Act expire: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/27/politics/house-vote-fisa/inde...
Can't say I'm surprised, the left didn't want to make huge news about it because it made Trump look good (and the establishment left supports the Patriot Act), and the right establishment/military supports the Patriot Act as well so they didn't want to raise a hubbub about it.
If it was any other campaign and there was sigint that a foreign power was trying to influence the campaign then they would have reached out to the candidate to alert him as such. But the intention here was not to prevent foreign tampering. It was to use the FISA process as an excuse to surveil the campaign wholesale.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/20/did-fbi-w...