Tag: deep state

This Is How It Begins: The Deep State Wants to Terminate the Constitution

This is how it begins. This is how it always begins, justified in the name of national security.

Mass roundups. Raids. Indefinite detentions in concentration camps. Martial law. The erosion of habeas corpus protections. The suspension of the Constitution, at least for select segments of the population. A hierarchy of rights, contingent on whether you belong to a favored political class.

This is what you can expect in the not-so-distant future.

Once you allow the government to overreach the restraints imposed  by the Constitution, no matter what that threat might be, it will be that much harder to restrain it again, no matter which party is at the helm.

We’ve seen this played out time and again.

Some years ago, for instance, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and deploy the National Guard “to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

In other words, they wanted the government to use the military to round up and lock up the unvaccinated in concentration camps.

That didn’t happen, but it so easily could have.

Now the script has been flipped, and it’s the soon-to-be Trump Administration promising to use the military to round up and lock up undesirables in concentration camps.

At this moment in time, those so-called “undesirables” are illegal immigrants, but given what we know about the government and its expansive definition of what constitutes a threat to its power, any one of us could be next up in the police state’s crosshairs.

Once you give the government a taste of that kind of power—to disregard the Constitution, even for a day; to use the military for domestic policing; to rely on mass deportations and concentration camps in order to sidestep due process procedures—it won’t be so easy to rein it in when it runs amok.

And it will run amok.

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Deep State Focus On The FBI

It’s becoming more clear by the day that the Deep State is gathering itself for an all out war against Trump 2.0. The attempts at disruptive “leaks”—hoaxes—were just the start, although we can expect them to continue, perhaps at more sophisticated levels. The ATACMS authorization, which was quickly implemented, is a lesson in how far the Deep State is willing to go. How that will work out remains to be seen.

Early on when the first rumors were floated, touting former Congressman Mike Rogers for the Director FBI position, I warned that there could hardly be a worse choice, from a purely Trumpian standpoint. Rogers is totally Deep State and Swamp Dweller, having served as chairman of the HPSCI and now being on the board of directors for the Atlantic Council. If you require more confirmation of how bad Rogers would be, The Federalist can fill you in:

A New FBI Director: Americans Can’t Trust Mike Rogers To Give The FBI The Reckoning It Needs

Today we got another Rogers related rumor from Sundance:

Reported Senate Offer: We’ll Give You Matt Gaetz in DOJ, if You Give us Mike Rogers in FBI

That says so much, doesn’t it? For starters, you know that if that’s the Senate offer, it’s a bad deal for Trump. And it raises the question of why the Deep State/Ruling Class place such a high priority on the FBI—as if we couldn’t figure this out from Trump 1.0. This tells you that the Deep State view is that controlling the investigative process with regard to USPersons and controlling the flow of classified information is a top priority. It has to be the case, if Thune is willing to tolerate Gaetz at DoJ. There may also be a calculation that Gaetz may be more easily thwarted at DoJ than a tough Director at the FBI. Or that Gaetz could be ousted after confirmation. Lots of possibilities here, but they all militate against Trump’s interests.

All of this fits in with my speculation that at least some of Trump’s announced appointments may be initial bargaining positions. If this rumor is true, it’s a strong indication that the Deep State and the Ruling Class are playing for keeps against Trump. It also suggests that they are very fearful that Trump will prioritize a full airing of the Russia Hoax. One which would implicate large swathes of the Deep State/Ruling Class.

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The Very Definition of Tyranny: A Dictatorship Disguised as Democracy

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom, but concentrated power across all three branches is the very definition of tyranny: a dictatorship disguised as democracy.

When one party dominates all three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial—there is even more reason to worry.

There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

This is true no matter which party is in power.

This is particularly true in the wake of the 2024 election.

Already, Donald Trump, who promised to be a dictator on “day one,” is advancing plans to further undermine the nation’s already vulnerable system of checks and balances.

To be fair, this is not a state of affairs that can be blamed exclusively on Trump.

America’s founders intended our system of checks and balances to serve as a bulwark against centralized power being abused.

As constitutional scholar Linda Monk explains, “Within the separation of powers, each of the three branches of government has ‘checks and balances’ over the other two. For instance, Congress makes the laws, but the President can veto them, and the Supreme Court can declare them unconstitutional. The President enforces the law, but Congress must approve executive appointments and the Supreme Court rules whether executive action is constitutional. The Supreme Court can strike down actions by both the legislative and executive branches, but the President nominates Supreme Court justices, and the Senate confirms or denies their nominations.”

Unfortunately, our system of checks and balances has been strained to the breaking point for years now, helped along by those across the political spectrum who, in marching in lockstep with the Deep State, have conspired to advance the government’s agenda at the expense of the citizenry’s constitutional rights.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the farce that is the highly partisan, two-party, bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches.

Yet as law professor William P. Marshall concludes, “The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance. The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

The outcome of the 2024 elections is not a revolutionary bid to recalibrate a government run amok. Rather, this is a Deep State coup to stay in power, and Donald Trump is the vehicle by which it will do so.

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Deep State Creep John Brennan Has the Nerve to Question Tulsi Gabbard’s Fitness for National Security Role

Former CIA director John Brennan recently appeared on MSNBC and had the audacity to question Tulsi Gabbard’s fitness for a national security role not that Trump has tapped her for DNI.

Brennan pushed conspiracy theories about Gabbard being in league with Russia and Putin, same old playbook from four years ago. John Bolton is pushing the same lies.

These people have no shame and will say anything to smear anyone connected to Trump.

Transcript via Real Clear Politics:

JOHN BRENNAN: Clearly, Tulsi Gabbard has taken actions and made statements over the past several years that raise serious questions about her common sense, judgment, and political sympathies. Cozying up to Putin as well as to Bashar al-Assad shows she doesn’t have the type of perspective needed for someone who is going to head up these 18 intelligence agencies.

As Tom Nichols said, she doesn’t have any qualifications. The Director of National Intelligence is a serious and complex position that requires someone who actually understands the intelligence community. It’s like an orchestra conductor for all the different agencies and departments involved in the intelligence process. I don’t think she understands the instruments involved in this orchestra, nor has she had any experience at the strategic level of running and leading a large, complex organization.

The Director of National Intelligence is, according to legislation, the President’s principal intelligence adviser, responsible for ensuring the President’s daily brief is put together in a sound and forthright manner.

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History of clashes with ‘deep state’ signals Gaetz would bring Trump reform to DOJ

In Congress, Donald Trump’s Attorney General pick Matt Gaetz was at the forefront in challenging the Justice Department and was a staunch defender of the former president, hinting at the role the firebrand could play in remaking the troubled federal agency if he is confirmed. 

Gaetz rose to prominence defending then-President Trump and bashing the Justice Department during the Russia collusion investigation into the Trump campaign, frequently appearing on television and using his role on key committees to challenge the agency, which pushed the long-debunked “Russian conspiracy” narrative. 

After Trump’s first term ended, the four-term congressman challenged the department on its handling of Hunter Biden probes and the investigation into the Trump assassination attempts. 

President-elect Trump undoubtedly nominated Gaetz for these reasons, seeing him as an important defender and loyal ally to head an agency he felt was undermining him at every turn in his first term. 

But, Gaetz will still likely face a tough confirmation battle and his nomination has drawn skepticism from Senate Republicans who will be vital to confirming him to the role. 

When spurious allegations that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia were being pushed by Capitol Hill Democrats, Donald Trump’s first attorney general, former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, angered the president when he recused himself and allowed the department to appoint a special counsel to investigate the allegations. 

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All States Are Empires Of Lies

“Most economists are political apologists masquerading as economists,” wrote Doug Casey in one of his columns.

“They prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for power.”

Moreover, wrote Casey, “The field of economics has been turned into the handmaiden of government in order to give a scientific justification for things the government wants to do.”

This of course is not a new development. Ludwig von Mises was calling the universities of his day “nurseries of socialism” but, thankfully, there is always a remnant of students who resist the statist brainwashing. The above quote about concocted “scientific” justifications for interventionism and socialism, by the way, sounds like a precise definition of Keynes’s General Theory.

Casey’s sound advice is that to be a good citizen one needs to “become your own economist.” Don’t rely on the state’s mouthpieces in the “media” or even academe for your economic knowledge. Educate yourself to some degree; it doesn’t take a university degree. Indeed, everything we do at the Mises Institute is geared toward helping anyone anywhere to become their own economist (preferably Austrian School and not Keynesian or Post Keynesian!) and avoid being bamboozled by the state and its court historian economists.

Mises never joined the American Economic Association, the association of academic economists founded in the 1880s. The association’s founding document provides a clue as to why. “The state is an educational and ethical agency whose positive aid is an indispensable condition of human progress,” the document purred. “The doctrine of laissez faire,” on the other hand, “is unsafe in politics and unsound in morals,” said the statist moral scolds who founded the American Economic Association.

There are exceptions, the Austrian School economists being the most prominent, but the majority of academic economists view themselves as advisors or potential advisors to the state. They are Rothbard’s “court historians” with degrees in economics instead of history. The role that they serve is the same as all “intellectuals” in our almost 100 percent state-funded universities. As Rothbard put it: “The majority [of the electorate] must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise, and at least inevitable. Promoting this ideology . . . is the vital task of the ‘intellectuals.’” In return, the “intellectuals” are given government jobs, grants, placement at prestigious universities, book deals, and myriad other political payoffs. (Mises wrote that history, law, and economics are the disciplines most widely used to bamboozle the public about the supposedly good, wise, and inevitable state).

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Everybody Knows: Do They?

When the polls closed on Tuesday, November 5th, I was sound asleep, like a baby rocking gently in his cradle, lost to the frenzied rants or joyful shouting of the different political claques. Even though I missed the results of what the mass media had been telling us was the most important election in our lifetimes, I was happily oblivious to their cant.

I remember hearing that nonsense many times before.

I gave up on my country’s electoral system more than fifty years ago.  Every presidential election is a contest between two sides of the ruling monied elite, chosen to represent their interests.  It is corrupt beyond repair and was so even then.

Do most people have a clue that their country is owned and run by a small group of the super-rich and ten or so financial institutions, such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, etc., the big banks and financial interests that in 1947 formed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to spearhead the US warfare state around the world in support of its economy that is reliant on endless war?

The electorate continually puts its hope in the performers that the spectacle’s producers put up to front for their interests, failing to grasp that the rulers’ interests are not theirs. Arguing and anguishing over certain policy differences between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, they fail to see that both exist to serve global capital, not regular people, that exchanging presidents is a counterfeiter’s con-game with the voters the scammers’ marks.

Trump’s current victory is an example of that, as was Biden’s in 2020.  If Harris had won, it would have proven the same.  They are two sides of one coin.  That the system is rigged by the oligarchs should be obvious but isn’t.  Or maybe it is obvious but people secretly harbor a perverse liking for it.  Stranger things are true, as on personal levels people embrace the symptoms of their neuroses because the symptoms are their disguised solutions, their ways of staying stuck because change is hard and frightening and requires admitting repressed realities.

The cliché that all politics is local has a certain appeal and a trace of veracity, but 99 + % of the truth lies elsewhere.  Apprimately 145 + million Americans just lined up to vote like puppies looking for a bone to be thrown their way by the people who own the country.  They do get a bone here and there, which keeps them looking for the meat, but that is reserved for the fat cats, as always.

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Post-Election Truths: The Things That Won’t Change (No Matter Who Wins)

“If voting could ever really change anything, it’d be illegal.”— Thorne, Land of the Blind (2006)

After months of handwringing and mud-slinging and fear-mongering, the votes have finally been cast and the outcome has been decided: the Deep State has won.

Despite the billions spent to create the illusion of choice culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, when it comes to most of the big issues that keep us in bondage to authoritarian overlords, not much will change.

Despite all of the work that has been done to persuade us to buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the “right” political savior, the day after a new president is sworn in, it will be business as usual for the unelected bureaucracy that actually runs the government.

War will continue. Drone killings will continue. Surveillance will continue. Censorship of anyone who criticizes the government will continue. The government’s efforts to label dissidents as extremists and terrorists will continue. Police shootings will continue. SWAT team raids will continue. Highway robbery meted out by government officials will continue. Corrupt government will continue. Profit-driven prisons will continue. And the militarization of the police will continue.

These problems have persisted—and in many cases flourished—under both Republican and Democratic administrations in recent years.

The outcome of this year’s election changes none of that.

Indeed, take a look at the programs and policies that will not be affected by the 2024 presidential election, and you’ll get a clearer sense of the government’s priorities, which have little to do with representing the taxpayers and everything to do with amassing money, power and control.

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‘Off Leash’: The Crypto-Fascist Group Influencing Global Right Wing Politics

In the lead up to the November 2024 US (s)election the fervor around identity politics has become more polarized than ever. Both sides of the false left versus right dichotomy have become more vitriolic than ever in their respective echo chambers. Like rival gangs warring over a particular street corner neither with any regard for the common people, they objectify their opponents and cajole their constituents into further perpetuating the statist charade that is political theater.

Over the last few years as we have witnessed The Great Inversion take its hold on the minds of the masses within the right wing side of the spectrum, we have watched rise of what can generally be referred to as “The New Right”. This inversion is akin to a controlled opposition psychological operation, particularly in regard to the prevailing narratives of the Trump deception, i.e. the illusion that Trump is saving the people from the so-called “Deep State”.

This illusion is being peddled by this New Right, an uber-authoritarian, ultra-nationalist, neoconservative sector of the political sphere maintaining themselves as faux populists while retaining all of the inherent systemic supremacies of the typical US oligarchy. They are a branch of that same oligarchy, draping themselves in a pax-Americana to be presented as a bulwark against the “woke left”; seemingly preserving traditional American values against the encroaching dregs of Marxism through a veil of pseudo-patriotism. A new polarity in the old paradigm.

This polarity has contributed to the political rise of figures already entrenched in the orbit of the likes of Peter Thiel, and pervasive agendas such as Project 2025.

Thiel, founder of the CIA cut out surveillance technology corporation Palantir, has been a darling of the military industrial complex, member of the steering committee for the Bilderberg Group, and since 2016 one of the primary donors for the Trump campaign, as well as maintaining significant influence over the current campaign through his bankrolling of J.D. Vance.

While this New Right promotes Project 2025, a road map to radically reshape the federal government during the next Republican presidency that is reviled by the left as an existential threat to human rights and civil liberties, it reads more like a reboot of Reagan era neocon policy with a MAGA twist. Not exactly the boogieman it’s been made out to be but still a boon for centralizing even more power into the hands of the state.

Amid this rise of the new right overlapping with the great inversion is a group of figures already deeply entrenched within right-wing circles both in the open and behind the scenes who wish to influence the direction of policy.

The group has privately dubbed themselves “Off Leash”.

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Brace Yourselves: A Tsunami Approaches

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.

As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.

Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

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