Spooks, spooks everywhere. The US political landscape has been so overrun with spies and other denizens of the evermore sprawling national security state that most people have scarcely noticed.

The most recent reminder of the spookification of politics came just last week, when the New York Times offered new reporting on the hijinks of Trump ally Erik Prince, brother of the former president’s education secretary and the former chief executive of abusive private military firm Blackwater (now named Xe). According to the paper, interviews and documents it obtained show that Richard Seddon, a former British spy, had recruited Prince as a fundraiser for an undercover operation aiming to gather dirt on Democrats, RINOs (those Republicans viewed as being too liberal), and “radical left networks” — in Wyoming to start with, then expanding beyond.

This isn’t the first time Prince and Seddon have conspired to use the tools and techniques of spycraft for nakedly political, partisan ends. Back in 2017, Prince recruited Seddon and other former US and British spies for private intelligence-gathering operations run by Project Veritas, the conservative dirt-dumping organization run by right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe known for its (often dishonest) “stings.” The idea was to infiltrate Democratic congressional campaigns, unions, and other groups working against then-president Donald Trump’s agenda, and to train Project Veritas employees in the basics of spycraft: recruiting sources, surreptitious recordings, and so forth.