Steve Bannon—former propagandist for alt-right media outlet Breitbart News, who managed Trump’s first campaign and served as presidential advisor until he ticked off Jared and Ivanka and was voted off the island, and who went on to become a carnival barker for a web-based MAGA pseudo-news channel called “Real America’s Voice”—appears to have always known what the Deep State is, who is running it, and where it is located. He has been talking about it for a really long time. But Mr. Bannon is a cagey guy and has not disclosed the pertinent details to any of us.
Having heard the phrase repeatedly, first from Tea Party Republicans and then, again, from MAGA Republicans, I decided to conduct my own investigation to see if I could locate and excavate the Deep State. Were they working from an interstellar colony somewhere in deep space? Were they submerged beneath the Bermuda Triangle? Were they hiding in subterranean bunkers? Would this require a lunar launch, an ocean dredge, or a steam shovel? Exactly how deep was the Deep State?
It took some time, but I am pleased to report that Sherlock Shufton, amateur sleuth, equipped with a large magnifying glass and her magic decoder ring, has finally solved the mystery.
According to POLITICO Magazine, the term originated in the mid-20th century when political scientists applied the phrase to networks of military personnel and undercover operatives (think of the Soviet generals and KGB spies of Russia under Stalin & Co.) and was largely a phrase applied to foreign autocracies. Somehow, it migrated into our domestic political discourse not long thereafter.
Senator Joseph McCarthy (R – Wis.), assisted by the ever-repulsive Roy Cohen, decided to frighten our country to death so that McCarthy would be reelected by his terrified constituents (sound familiar?). They decided to make up the lie, based on the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage case, that Washington, D.C., and all of Hollywood were crawling with home-grown communist spies (an assertion that was demonstrably untrue). Eventually, McCarthy and his henchmen were consigned to eternal infamy for ruining the lives of countless completely innocent American citizens.
Following McCarthy’s malicious Red Scare, all of the “Deep State” nonsense seemed to morph into the theory that the government of the United States was rife with overzealous bureaucrats in the military and intelligence sectors, in addition to personnel in various civil service agencies, who, according to POLITICO, operated within a system based on “a complex web of legal, congressional, bureaucratic and political oversights.”
Thus, the notion of a sinister Deep State that was monitoring your every move was born, and it created angst among a portion of the electorate who viewed the complex bureaucracy as a Big Brother-like confederation of Nosy Parkers who were all secretly up in our business.
Were all of us being surveilled?
No.
No, we were not being surveilled. In plain speak, the “complex web” created by government bureaucrats served to provide the oversight necessary to prevent waste, fraud, abuse, corruption, and lawlessness. Since the apparatus for oversight evolved over many generations and political incarnations, it undoubtedly grew, over time, into an overly complicated Rube Goldberg-like organism for federal accountability.
But that particular form of government oversight does not seem to me to constitute a “deep” state; an overly broad state, perhaps, a lugubrious state, maybe, but there does not seem to be anything very hidden or nefarious at all. Steve Bannon has alternatively referred to the “Deep State” as the “administrative state,” as if the administration of a state is also undesirable. But the term “administrative state” is probably the most accurate descriptor for our federal government, or at least it was until Donald Trump and his gibbering band of nitwits got rid of it.
When a state is not administrative, it becomes something else entirely: an anarchy. This is happening in real time, right now, as lunatic Elon and his Musketeers have taken their ubiquitous chainsaw to all of the “Deep State” services and programs that formerly existed to prevent our public servants from committing crimes and to meet the pressing needs of citizens.
Administrative state begone, and feel free to fend for yourselves. The citizens of Missouri can figure out how to clean up and rebuild their storm-shattered communities all by themselves because FEMA has been neutered, and parents in Ohio, Florida, Illinois, and Wisconsin can figure out how to replace the corroded lead pipes that are poisoning their kids because the EPA has been eliminated. And good luck building and staffing your own rural health clinics, because that funding has gone away, too.
Medicaid? SNAP benefits?
Gone.
Goodbye, bureaucracy, and good riddance. People wearing red hats in red states, who, by the way, disproportionately benefit from those programs and services, must be very happy that the administrative state will no longer interfere in their lives by forcing them to accept free food, free healthcare, free education, free therapy for their disabled children, free supports for their elderly parents, and free federal assistance in a crisis.
What a relief.
Lest you think that this discovery puts the mystery of the Deep State to rest, not so fast. There really is a sinister and, until recently, heavily veiled Deep State, screened from public view until Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito pulled back the curtain through their own greed and nakedly pro-wealth, anti-constitutional scheme for ending the rule of law. Their overt pandering to Leonard Leo, Harlan Crow, and the Heritage Foundation (none of them known to any of us until after they went on a political influence spending spree and began to purchase politicians and jurists as one might purchase the last vestiges of democracy at a big box corruption store) has resulted in the creation of an actual Deep State comprised of people who have an entire agenda—also known as a “shadow docket”—of legislative, legal, social, and economic policy “gimmes” designed to benefit them and their cronies.
Please keep in mind that none of us, and I mean none of us, are among the cronies who stand to benefit from the systematic, deliberate, and craven destruction of our American constitutional republic.
We come closer to an actual definition of “Deep State” when the people who are directing every government action are in fact not a part of our government at all. They did not apply for civil service positions. They did not run for office. They were vetted by no one. They are not located at the United States Capitol or in any federal building. They are not employees of the federal government. They receive no salaries.
No salaries, but enormous benefits, because they are the captains of industry, the masters of hedge funds, the super-rich who cheer the expansion of the Second Amendment while reviling the First, who want to jettison environmental protections because protections interfere with profits, who loathe government oversight and have already made sure that oversight no longer exists, and who work tirelessly to create a permanent underclass of impoverished minorities who can wait on them hand and foot at bargain basement prices. Of course, a permanent underclass is impossible to achieve in a true democracy, so they are trying to fix the problem by erasing every vestige of the intrusive administrative state.
A permanent underclass can be more easily assembled in the absence of high-quality public education, so, poof! No more Department of Education, but plenty of inaccurate, revisionist curricula and a grand whitewash of American history. A permanent underclass is easier to control when you barricade every onramp to equal opportunity, so, poof! No more affirmative action! A permanent underclass is easier to achieve when you prevent poor people from voting, so, poof! Hundreds of thousands of voters, primarily Black, were purged from the voter rolls and not allowed to cast provisional ballots in the last election. The mortar that binds the underclass to the autocracy is a complete lack of political representation or influence.
Our Deep State is of, by, and for rich white men who have no intention of sharing power with women and minorities. They despise anyone who does not fit neatly into their 1950s tableau of sanitized white neighborhoods full of stay-at-home white moms, crew-cut white children, and clock-punching white dads who marched off to war on cue from their superiors, marched off to factories and office buildings on cue from their superiors, and never attempted to scale the wrought-iron gates encircling the social order that benefited their superiors.
Titans of the Deep State started by purchasing the votes of ethics-free politicians quite some time ago, immeasurably enabled by their buddies on the Supreme Court who were delighted, after years of accepting lavish gifts from their wealthy and amoral patrons, to decide in the Citizens United case that plenty of dark money in politics was just what this country needed. Then Leonard Leo, Harlan Crow, and what used to be a completely fringe organization of socially and religiously conservative white racists—the Heritage Foundation—invited a number of demented ideologues from Trump’s first presidency to write a blueprint for autocracy.
The result was Project 2025, a step-by-step guide to the destruction of democracy that apparently very few people bothered to read. As a result, Trump has implemented at warp speed all of the policies written by his beastly besties. This has ensured the rapid descent into dictatorship that all of them desired.
Trump’s virtual suspension of the Constitution and the rule of law, as outlined in Project 2025, has acted as a massive tsunami that has spewed all of the previously submerged Deep State bottom feeders onto the shore of public awareness, exposed for all to see.
Surprise! The hidden power brokers, string pullers, manipulators, and enemies of the people who have secretly controlled the rest of us as a Deep State shadow government for at least a decade, depriving the rest of us of real opportunity, real freedom from violence, and real economic security are now running the grift in broad daylight, because it turns out that the Deep State consists almost exclusively of Donald Trump and his completely corrupt playmates.
There you have it—the Deep State revealed at last, yet another mystery solved. It was not all that difficult, really. I just followed the stench.
Next up: The search for Jewish Space Lasers.
