The Deep State is Breaking Down
America hasn't been a democratic republic for a long time. But recent events and a few good writers are exposing the rot in a system that runs more like a Mafia than a "democracy."
You can’t handle the truth.
–Col. Jessup, from A Few Good Men
Since the Frank Church Committee investigations of the 1970s, the deep state’s information control structure remains functional. The FBI, CIA, DHS, and other agencies have been shaping the narrative and replacing news with information warfare for decades. Americans’ minds are the battlespace.
But as media continue to decentralize, the deep state is starting to lose control.
Now that new Church-style investigations have begun, one wonders if it’ll do any more good than the last one. The overall warping of our collective intelligence has been helped by countless stories on TV and movies portraying our alphabet-soup agencies as heroes—despite real-world mission creep and deep corruption.
Nicolas Schou details this whitewashing phenomenon in his 2016 article and related book, Spooks.
In 1996, the CIA hired one of its veteran clandestine officers, Chase Brandon, to work directly with Hollywood studios and production companies to upgrade its image. “We’ve always been portrayed erroneously as evil and Machiavellian,” Brandon later told The Guardian. “It took us a long time to support projects that portray us in the light we want to be seen in.”
But as revelations surrounding NSA spying on American citizens surfaced due to the Edward Snowden leaks, it has become clearer that deep-state players are, indeed, Machiavellian. Their objective is to maintain social coherence around their power. Their mantra is Exitus acta probat. Along with long-standing corruption, partisan contagions now infect their ranks—with agencies being more thoroughly politicized, weaponized, and turned on ordinary Americans.
Revealing the Rot
Recent work by indie journalists, such as those working on the Twitter files and others that reveal details of various leaked DHS documents, offer proof of deep-state actors willing to pull out all the extra-legal stops. The efforts are meant to keep the herds timid and credulous—with the deep state firmly in control. The blue-check Twitterati's response to suspicions had been “Conspiracy theorists!” right up until the evidence dropped, whereupon it was a “Nothingburger!”
Groupthink meets gaslighting.
But what happened to journalism as a check on power? Armies of j-school grads had gone from modeling themselves after Woodward and Bernstein, questioning authority, to modeling themselves after Pravda—with a dash of Judith Butler thrown in for good measure. Activists captured newspapers of record. Readers craved team sports over truth, and the j-school activists served it up.
The proverbial March through the Institutions continued in the deep state, as well, until corporate media crawled into bed with the g-men. What monstrosities nurse in Langley and Quantico?
Mainstream journalism went from speaking truth to power to shouting power over truth. This shift put several veteran truthseekers in the unpleasant position of admitting that Donald Trump was right, at least in part: The 2020 election had been “stolen,” at least in the sense that the U.S. government actively interfered. Not the Russians. Americans. (See receipts in the box below.)
But a few independent reporters, many of whom are on the Dissident Left, revealed a bizarro world of allegations against the Biden family’s corruption in China and Ukraine. “Bizarro” because Americans had spent years listening to hollow accusations of Russian collusion, which had all along been a contrivance of the DNC in collaboration with the FBI. This scheme included the likes of former FBI attorney Jim Baker, who journalist Bari Weiss figured out was the fox guarding Twitter’s henhouse.
Whether and to what extent unconstitutional actions by the deep state are justifiable has now become a partisan shuttlecock among the Twitterati. However, this is a significant seachange from a people who once understood themselves as united in principles of accountable authority. For far too long, deep-state actors such as FBI agent Elvis Chan had been able to evade accountability and shape narratives to reinforce Americans’ faith in the Church of State.
The mainstream media are now cheerleaders in such efforts, confusing partisanship with patriotism. Worse still, agents and spooks have been able to infiltrate all the major social media companies by paying or pressuring proxies to disappear truth-tellers and send dissent down the memory hole.
Recent Examples of Deep State Violations
COVID
Notable people censored at the behest of the U.S. government include Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kuldorff, journalist Alex Berenson, and Stanford economist Jay Bhattacharya.
Head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Francis Collins, along with the head of NIAID, the infectious disease sub-agency, Antony Fauci put AIER in its crosshairs for hosting the Great Barrington Declaration. Thanks to a FOIA request, we now know Collins wrote, “there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.” As of this writing, more evidence of censorship pressure from the NIH and the CDC is coming to light.
Innumerable citizens were de-platformed for either questioning the “natural origins” theory of COVID or asking questions about the lab-leak theory. Since this mass censorship, a number of mainstream journalists began openly questioning the theory of natural origins, prompting social media companies to relax their censorship of ordinary users.
After sternly worded letters from the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA), Amazon removed books that these and other state agents referred to as “misinformation.”
The U.S. government even pressured the Canadian government to censor and freeze the accounts of protestors in Ottawa who had been part of the Freedom Convoy, a group of truckers opposing vaccine mandates, passports, and other travel restrictions.
2016 Election
The FBI, in collusion with the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, assisted in propagating the now-discredited Russian interference narrative, with one agent going so far as to claim (falsely) that the original source of the Russia accusation had been the DOJ. Such accusations prompted the FBI to investigate the newly-elected President Trump, based solely on rumor and ‘evidence’ associated with the fraudulent Steele dossier.
Recovered texts also revealed that rogue agents were bent on taking down the newly-elected president Trump: “He's not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" to which the other agent replied, "No, No he's not. We'll stop it." The agents had attempted to delete these texts, but forensic teams located them.
A group of former spooks and G-men associated with a eely organization known as Hamilton 68 make multiple requests to take down “Russian bots” Twitter accounts, which turned out to be accounts of ordinary Americans.
Whistleblowers
According to Congressional Republicans, 14 FBI whistleblowers came forward to accuse the Bureau of a “systemic culture of unaccountability,” full of “rampant corruption, manipulation, and abuse.”
The accusers say the FBI is:
Artificially inflating statistics about domestic violent extremism in the nation;
Abusing its counterterrorism authorities to investigate parents who spoke at school board meetings;
Abused its foreign intelligence authorities to spy on American citizens, including people associated with the campaign of President Trump in 2016;
Clearing the Bureau of employees who dissent from its politicized agenda.
Since I wrote the above, those whistleblowers —from both IRS and FBI — have given Congressional testimony that is way more serious than Watergate ever was, and yet the media have roundly ignored it.
The sad fact is that the serious corruption of the Bidens before and after his election will only be revealed once partisans find a way to replace the senile executive and his floundering Veep.
2020 Election
The FBI also pressured companies to censor the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, justifying the pressure due to what the Bureau termed a so-called “hack and leak” operation. Yet the FBI had been in possession of the Biden laptop for almost a year and could vouch for its existence and veracity. The agency did not vouch. Instead, agents told social media companies it was likely the work of “Russians”—a coordinated psyop designed to elicit compliance, making the suppression a crime of election interference rivaling Watergate.
Fifty former national-security state operatives, including former CIA director John Brennan, signed a letter claiming that the infamous Hunter Biden laptop was “Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The Atlantic Council, staffed by seven former CIA heads and funded by the Ukrainian energy company Burisma (yes, that Burisma), partnered with Facebook and the DHS to monitor “election misinformation.” According to sources familiar with the matter, 22 million tweets were labeled ‘misinformation’ on Twitter, with a unanimous partisan bias.
1/6
As with the attempted kidnapping of governor Gretchen Whitmer, many observers wonder whether the FBI was involved in planning or encouraging January 6th protestors to breech the capitol. If true, the psyop narrative would be designed to frame Trump voters as “insurrectionists,” and especially Trump for directing the coup.
“Go into the Capitol! Go into the Capitol!” cried Ray Epps like a Marine leading a charge at Iwo Jima.
We now know that more than 100 fed-adjacent informants or proxies were there that day, with Ray Epps working as the tip of the deep-state spear. More recent footage from the day reveals that most of the storming activity came primarily from the Ray Epps side of the building.
Then, of course, there is the strange case of Yogananda Pittman:
Disinformation
According to documents leaked to left-leaning The Intercept, the DHS doggedly pursued shaping national narratives despite the sudden dismantling of the Disinformation Governance Board, after popular backlash. DHS officials pledged to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
National Science Foundation (NSF) spent $38.8 million on government grants and contracts to combat “misinformation” since the start of the Biden administration. “Misinformation” is information that works against the deep state’s agenda.
The upshot is: You are being compelled to pay for your censors.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, who created the above graphic, got a strange house call the day he testified before the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” congressional hearings. The visitor was from the IRS.
Dead Presidents
In 2022, after the Biden Administration released an incomplete trove of files associated with the JFK assassination, more investigators are coming around to the view that the CIA was responsible for killing the thirty-fifth president. The recent trove helps to draw a closer connection between Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA. Even though all of the documents were required, by law, to have been released by 2017, every president since the 1992 law’s passage has fought to keep the remaining documents sealed. What on earth would prompt five different presidents to cover it up?
One shudders.
The thought that the deep state has been far more in control for much longer than most of us imagine is deeply disturbing. Not only does the national security state function as a mafia, but some commenters also suspect that organized crime and the deep state became entangled a long time ago. The minds of “conspiracy theorists” get set alight. As they should. Ironic that the deep state coined the term conspiracy theory to dispel questions beyond the Warren Commission’s report. In other words, the accusation was a psyop from the start, designed to make investigators look crazy. Subsequently, though, critics chipped away at the official narrative, so much so that by 1966, popular faith in the Warren report was already shaken. The government’s story seemed too simple, pimpled and bleeding with Occam’s Razor burn.
Breakdown
The silver lining is that we are witnessing the breakdown of the deep state, which is part of what social theorist Jordan Hall calls the Blue Church.
The abstract is this: the Blue Church is a kind of narrative/ideology control structure that is a natural result of mass media. It is an evolved (rather than designed) function that has come over the past half-century to be deeply connected with the Democratic political “Establishment” and lightly connected with the “deep state” to form an effective political and dominant cultural force in the United States.
Such cultural dominance means the deep state has had to multiply its tendrils to infiltrate all the new vectors of media influence.
The key insight for this post is that as an audience we are coherent. As a mass, we transform from millions of diverse individuals into one, relatively simple, group. So long as we can be maintained in this coherence, we present something that can be managed.
This is the formal core of the Blue Church: it solves the problem of 20th Century social complexity through the use of mass media to generate manageable social coherence.
But in the twenty-first century, something changed.
The Internet brought decentralization and the rise of digital insurgencies, forces that—though sometimes disorienting—changed the dynamic. The medium, following social theorist Marshall McLuhan, is still the message. Or as former CIA analyst Martin Gurri writes: “McLuhan was among the first to grasp that the structure of information is far more determinative than the content.” (My emphasis.) For better or worse, then, authorities’ desire to fashion social coherence is becoming increasingly difficult. Though Internet usage has consolidated around big social media companies, decentralization continues to restructure information in ways that allow digital insurgencies to emerge.
Anti-authoritarians don’t want social coherence at the expense of the truth. We want the truth. Will the market provide a suitable medium? Currently, we’re looking for salvation from politicians and billionaires. We have to do better.
No one can confirm whether Kennedy, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, said he wished to “splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” But such threats would not be taken as idle by powerful elites inside the agency, including those with ties with international criminal syndicates. With Kennedy out of the picture, they could act with relative impunity. And for decades after the assassination, they did.
These days, when Senators Schumer and McConnell meet behind closed doors to drop an Omnibus slush fund bill, it’s not very different from the meeting of the ‘five families.’ The powerful are negotiating ways to extort more from Americans. It’s no accident that the FBI makes out like a bandit.
But as the Internet continues in fits and starts to decentralize, anonymize, and integrate cryptography, the deep state’s control structures could continue to founder.
We can imagine more intrepid reporters such as Ryan Grim, Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, Lee Fang, Whitney Webb, Glenn Greenwald, and Bari Weiss continuing to dig, learn, and tell the truth about the lengths to which deep-state actors will go to shape national narratives.
We can also imagine a thousand more citizen journalists acting as digital insurgents.
We can imagine a decentralized, open-source version of Wikileaks that allows anyone to upload whistleblower documents from anywhere onto an immutable blockchain. (Psst, hey blockchain developers—stop futzing about with goofy projects like NFTs.)
We can imagine truth-tracking systems built similarly to betting markets.
We can imagine other countries, eager to see an empire fall, decouple from America’s dollar hegemony. If they do, it’s unclear how the federal government will continue to fund the encroachment of these illiberal agencies in our information commons or lives.
The U.S. government, after all, is broke.
The aggregate effect of such measures will be the continued breakdown of deep-state control structures. For better or worse, this process seems to be underway. Indeed, we see not a sudden turn by deep-state actors to self-serving extra-legal agendas. They’ve always been self-serving. They’ve long been extra-legal.
What we see is that we can finally see it—a glimpse, at least.
One remaining question is whether we can stomach what we’ll find once it all falls down.
A masterly summary of why societal collapse is possible.
Yet, we do our work because there is still hope to prevent the worst and as Epictetus said we must "act our part with honor. "
Emotionally, it is easier for me to focus on what we might build than on how utterly messed up the world is. (I am more of a thinker than a feeler, but I do also feel sometimes 🤣.)