Tag: deep state

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media and media people national politics & policies

Praying to the Deep State

Stephen Colbert, deep state, conspiracy, Donald Trump

The Deep State does not exist.

How do we know?

If it did exist, it would have stopped Trump’s tariffs!

Welcome to modern political theology and ideological theodicy — by way of late-​night “comedic entertainment.”

Because of Trump’s tariffs, “we’ve had the worst day for our economy since Covid,” quipped Stephen Colbert on Thursday’s Late Show. “Just a reminder: this time he’s the disease.”

I found his setup somewhat funny, goofy looks and all, and I don’t usually find Colbert funny. But as the bit progressed …

“It’s all pretty solid proof that there is no Deep State.”

I’ve already given away his punchline, because it was not so much funny as eye-roll-worthy.

“Because if there was, they would have stopped this s**t.”

The assumption here is that, by definition, the Deep State must be omnipotent. While we can point to existing institutions working under the new rubric of “Deep State,” it’s never been all-​powerful. It’s just very powerful, working in mysterious (secret) ways.

“But if they do exist,” Colbert continued, “I just want to say to the cabal of financial and governmental elites who pull all the strings behind the scenes, ‘maybe put a pause on your 5G chip/​JFKjr/​adrenochrome/​chemtrail orgy and jump in here cuz we’re f**king dying!’”

Here’s the deal: Trump was hounded with unprecedented state surveillance, impeachments, lawfare, and speech suppression … and dodged bullets from assassins. While we know nothing, if we catch a whiff of anything it’s that “non-​existent” Deep State.

So begging it to take out Trump is … late-in-the-game.

The cabal has already tried. Many times. And failed. Proving itself perhaps more desperate than competent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

The Defi(l)ers of the First Amendment

free speech, censorship, corporations

Early on, we carefully phrased our objections to the suppressions of dissident opinion on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. 

We knew (because we had been making the distinction for years) that when companies and private parties engaged in discrimination on the basis of opinion, including “de-​platforming” of opinion-​mongers, these weren’t, at least on the face of it, First Amendment violations. The First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech apply to the federal government and, by the stretch of the 14th Amendment, to state and local governments.

These were corporations.

Sure, corporations thriving under government liability rules, and with sometimes-​cushy contracts with government.

And social media companies’ actions were clearly partisan, obviously opposing Donald Trump. The dreaded Orange Man had used social media to get elected in 2016, running rings around the gatekeepers of Accepted Opinion; the ultra-​partisan censorship a reaction.

Only with the release of the Twitter Files, after Elon Musk bought Twitter, did we get the crucial facts in the case: Agents of the U.S. government (many of them eerily in the Deep State nexus) pushed the censorship.

Now, with Mark Zuckerberg’s very recent and very public pulling back from the excesses of DEI as well as government-​coerced content moderation, we’ve learned more of the manner of the duress in which his companies caved to censorship demands. Government agents called up Facebook managers and content moderators and screamed at them to suppress certain stories and “memes.”

The sharing of visual memes really, really bugged the Deep State, which was hell bent on delivering to everybody a jab in the muscle with gene therapeutics allegedly to “vaccinate” us against a disease that … well, their buddies in the Deep State helped China, it just so happened, create. 

Worldwide, millions died in a pandemic whose origin was actively covered up through violations of the First Amendment in America. 

Defend free speech to defend life itself. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency insider corruption scandal

Managing the President: 2021 – 2024

Joe Biden, deep state, lizard people

Yesterday, we considered the farce of Congresswoman Kay Granger (R‑Tex.), serving out her term from an assisted living home — suffering, her family says, from “dementia issues.”

So, today, let’s discuss the donkey in the room: the president of these United States, one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. 

“Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public,” explains a major exposé in the Wall Street Journal.

How “throughout”? Almost from day one: “a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on,” notes The Journal, “in just the first few months of his term.”

The reportage confirms what we suspected. “The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-​person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.”

This structure also served to cover for Biden’s most characteristic failing, “foot-​in-​mouth”: his hand-​holders sought “to prevent Biden, an undisciplined public speaker throughout his half-​century political career, from making gaffes or missteps that could damage his image, create political headaches or upset the world order.”

Not a morning person, the staff concocted an elaborate schedule of afternoon meetings which they tried to keep very short. “If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether.”

Perhaps most importantly, “[t]he strategies to protect Biden largely worked,” the report reminds, “until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump.”

Luckily, the Washington cabal has not quite figured out a way to have a president as figure-​head only and keep the deception from the American electorate. 

But too close for comfort.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights too much government

Deep State in a Corner

deep state, censorship, mind control, PSYOP, CIA

Once upon a time, the CIA and allied agencies pushed free speech as a norm. 

Overseas.

The rationale? Without some free speech and press rights, it was too hard to organize a populace to overthrow their government. Our spooks exported freedom of speech abroad not because they were so gung-​ho American; it was all about seeding revolutions.

But not here! 

The CIA couldn’t let others take advantage of American free speech like its agents leveraged free speech abroad. A change in government might mean … loss of jobs. Mission. Money.

What to do? Disinform at home. By corrupting journalism.

The Operation Mockingbird efforts in the 1960s helped intel insiders control information and manage “the consent of the governed,” and these early efforts grew into the close ties between the Deep State and credentialed journalists today. 

The connections, I’m told are many: it’s not just Anderson Cooper’s internship at the CIA. 

During the Cold War, the disinformation element found a plausible justification. Then, the Soviets had us at a disadvantage: we had trouble extracting reliable information from within the Iron Curtain, but they could grab all sorts of useful information from our open, comparatively free speech realm.

Disinformation: a strategic necessity. But the consequences?

 “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete,” William Casey explained to President Ronald Reagan, “when everything the American public believes is false.”

In the early days of the Internet, the Deep State pushed online speech platforms, the better to allow for foreign coups. Is there a social media space that hasn’t received surreptitious government subsidy? It’s hard to be sure. We’re supposed to assume our government protects us rather than controls us. 

But, increasingly, Internet-​connected Americans see government officials chiefly as manipulators.

Which is why the Deep State’s most ardent partisans (neocons; Democrats; plutocrats) now routinely attack free speech here, and why allies overseas are so thoroughly cracking down on “de-​stabilizing” opinions. It’s why Rumble is no longer available in Brazil and why Musk is pulling out Twitter personnel … and why France has arrested the CEO of Telegram.

Us catching on to the psy-​op game places the Deep State in a corner. All the disinformation agents have left is censorship and repression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment judiciary regulation

The Court v. the Power Grabbers

bureaucrats, regulations, deep state, law

The U.S. Supreme Court giveth and the U.S. Supreme Court taketh away.

A slew of Supreme Court decisions is keeping us off balance. While we were still reeling from the blow delivered by Murthy v. Missouri’s go-​ahead for federal suppression of social-​media speech, the court also acted to rein in runaway bureaucrats.

The decision, which some call a “major blow to big government”  — let’s see how it plays out before echoing this — is Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. In this 6 – 3 ruling to limit the administrative state’s power to expand its power, the court reversed its own 1984 ruling, Chevron USA v. NRDC.

According to Stanford Law professor Michael McConnell, Chevron meant that when the actions of a federal agency — to stop you from cleaning up a pond (“wetland”) on your own property or whatever — end up being litigated, courts must “defer to the agency’s own construction of its operating statute” unless that construction is too wildly unreasonable.

Agencies consequently enjoyed “considerable leeway in determining the scope” of what they can do to us. 

Guess what. They typically prefer more power to less, less constitutional restraint to more.

“Chevron is overruled,” the new ruling states. Courts must “exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”

Maybe more courts will now more often stop runaway bureaucrats in their tracks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies regulation

Stop the Work Stoppers

Labor Department, gig economy, freelancing

Republican Representative Kevin Kiley of California has introduced H.J. Resolution 116 to block “the rule submitted by the Department of the Labor relating to ‘Employee or Independent Contractor Classification Under the Fair Labor Standards Act.’ ”

116 is a legislative attempt to thwart legislation by regulators.

Labor’s rule is modeled on the AB5 Act passed in California several years ago. Catering to unions, AB5’s idea was to kill the livelihoods of many gig workers or freelancers by making it much harder for companies and independent contractors to deal with each other.

The new rule, too, aims to kill competition with unions and expand the pool of employees who can be unionized.

AB5 caused a firestorm, leading to citizen initiatives, court battles, and victories and setbacks for besieged employers and freelancers. There’s been some backtracking of AB5, in part because sponsoring lawmakers realized that it hurt even favored constituencies. But California is still a land mine for would-​be freelancers.

The Labor Department is trying to impose AB5-​style reclassification on the national level now that national lawmakers have failed to pass legislation to do it.

These days, the many dictators in our government often regard legislative means of passing legislation as an option only of first resort. If that fails, well, stick it to the people some other way.

So Kiley — and, hopefully, an effective congressional majority — must pass a law saying no, regulators, you may not pass this law in the guise of a regulation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Internet controversy media and media people social media

NPR’s Wide Stance

deep state, wide state, business, NPR

When the term “the Deep State” entered our vocabulary, establishmentarians and insiders were annoyed. They argued the term was meaningless or vague or designated something that did not exist. 

The rest of us accepted the term to identify the parts of the administrative state — coupled with the military-​industrial complex’s corporations — that keep big secrets and act mostly independently of our democratic-​republican institutions, including those who work behind the scenes to effect policy and mold public opinion.

The Deep State is all-too-real.

Now that National Public Radio has been dubbed “state-​affiliated media” by Elon Musk’s Twitter, it may be time to add a new term to our lexicon: the Wide State.

“It was unclear why Twitter made the move,” writes David Bauder of the AP. “Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, quoted a definition of state-​affiliated media in the company’s guidelines as ‘outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/​or control over production and distribution.’”

When NPR objected on Twitter, Musk tweeted back: “Seems accurate.” 

But, but, but, they sputter: only 1 percent of NPR’s budget is from the federal government, and the organization has a well-​established editorial independence!

Well, as the power of the Deep State has shown, directorial independence does not really constitute a non-​state nature. 

It’s obvious that many “private” institutions do exert immense political and governmental power: corporations through regulatory capture; news media through rank partisanship; all organizations that express eagerness to (and have demonstrated repeated instances of) collaborating with partisans in power. 

These constitute the Wide State. 

Of which NPR is a part.

Besides, if NPR lives “only” with a single percentage-​point subsidy, why not cut the umbilical cord and prove its independence? 

And get Twitter to change the label.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies social media

Electoral Fraud, Google-Style

Google, deep state

“There exist many sneaky ways to get other people to do what you want, voluntarily — effectively blurring the line between legitimate persuasion and fraud.”

I wrote that in a Common Sense squib entitled “The Online Manipulation of Democracy,” in which I discussed the work of Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. That was over four years ago. Since then, his research has carried forward, focusing on how “the biggest tech companies influence human behavior, and conducting extensive monitoring projects of bias in these companies’ products, with a particular focus on Google.”

I’m quoting from an article by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek, from page A4 of the latest issue of The Epoch Times. In that article, and in an online interview published April 7, we are told how vast this power is — capable of flipping close elections around the world — and how difficult the influencing is to identify.

And that’s not just because Big Tech outfits like Google are sneaky. 

Ephemeral events on our screens, like “a flashing newsfeed, a search result, or a suggested video are the ideal form of manipulation,” Epstein argues, “because they aren’t recorded and are hard to document.”

He insists they “affect us, they disappear, they’re stored nowhere, and they’re gone.” 

Think about what that means: we don’t know we’re being manipulated, and “authorities can’t go back in time to see what people were being shown,” explains Epstein.

But it’s worse: Google, like many “free” online service companies, started out as a Deep State project.

We shouldn’t be shocked to find that sneaky, evasive, ephemeral manipulation techniques have been pioneered by … tax-​funded spies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs national politics & policies

In Deep with Biden

Joe Biden, war, deep state

On Election Day, “the Empire hopes to strike back,” writes Daniel McCarthy for The Spectator. “Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016.”

McCarthy argues that “Biden’s overall record is one of foreign policy interventionism,” but Biden’s Senate voting record is iffy-​fifty: Biden “voted for the Iraq War, but he also voted against the 2007 surge.” He voted for the 1999 Serbian war, which destabilized relations with Russia, allowing the rise of Putin. But Biden voted against 1991’s Persian Gulf adventure which set the stage for post-​Cold War American megalomania.

Nevertheless, McCarthy argues that “Joe Biden is an archetypal liberal interventionist of the post-​Cold War variety. He understands war in the same terms as domestic policy: as an occasion to expand the power wielded by experts in Washington, whose moral and rational qualifications are beyond question — no matter how disastrous the consequences of their policies.”

Such a plausible case. War is certainly government “activism.”

McCarthy has spotted a real problem in “progressive liberalism,” and understands the “peer pressure” that so oppressively rules in the corridors of power. But he misses — perhaps merely for reasons of space — the sheer institutional power of the Deep State. It holds the secrets, it controls vast amounts of money, its immensity overpowers rational thought.

It is the government we cannot get to; it is the government that tried to “get” Trump.

Perhaps our “right to petition the government” can skip Congress and go right to the source, the Deep State.

Which really wants Biden to win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment

Lying to Liars

Peter Strzok,Licensed to Lie, CIA, deep state,

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its awards, the presenters say, “And the Oscar goes to …”

We should hand out an award for lying in government — and name it after President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. On March 12, 2013, Clapper lied to Congress about NSA collection of data on U.S. citizens.

Clapper roams free, while Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn ran afoul of lying to the FBI, in his bizarre case. Flynn seemed merely to misremember, yet being caught in a flub was enough to leverage a plea deal.

Now The Epoch Times adds a wrinkle to the story. “The prosecutors handling the case of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said they mixed up notes from the FBI interview that served as a basis for making Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI,” we read in the November 7 – 13 paper edition. The jumbled notes in question were those of the infamous Peter Strzok and his assistant. 

“It’s now impossible to take [the DOJ’s and FBI’s] word for anything,” says Sidney Powell, Flynn’s lawyer. 

A former prosecutor herself, Ms. Powell has written a relevant book, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice. 

In her motion for Flynn, she argues that a formal FBI summary of the Flynn interview contains information not in the notes, yet it formed the basis for the prosecution.*

On November 5, prosecutors apologized for their error, which they admit “caused some confusion.”

In a just world, their flub would be called a lie and they’d face major consequences.

As it is, the Clapper goes to them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* It gets worse, if murkier, with apparent editing of the notes to implicate Flynn and the allegation that Clapper himself directed a reporter to “take the kill shot.”

Peter Strzok,Licensed to Lie, CIA, deep state,

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