The Deep State doesn’t care about you or your laws

Still unconvinced we’re living in the midst of an Orwellian nightmare? With the introduction of Apple’s new iPhone 6 that includes an improved encryption system, the FBI went on a whine-spree about how dangerous this was to national security that they couldn’t easily hack the phones. It culminated last week with an appearance by FBI Director James Comey at the Brookings Institute where he declared in a speech that Apple was creating an environment where America “…is no longer a country governed by the rule of law.”

It’s ridiculous to even have to point out this Orwellian double-speak to anyone over the age of five. Imagine, there are actually people out here who don’t think the government should be able to listen in on their conversations. They think that it might actually be against the law and unconstitutional. So a company does something to try and reassure a very nervous public that its phones are less likely to be bugged by the government, and the government reacts as if this is high treason.

Simply put, our government no longer believes that Americans have a right to privacy. The Constitution? Fuggetaboutit. We have secret courts that hand out secret rulings that say anything we want to do is okay. The unelected Deep State is not concerned with what Americans want or the rule of law, it’s sole concern is its own survival.

War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Ignorance is strength.

Our puppet president

I don’t think Barack Obama is really President of the United States. No, I’m not talking about a “Kenyan-born communist Manchurian candidate” conspiracy. It’s much more below the radar than that, but no less cause for alarm. I don’t think Obama is the person who has his hands on the controls of our ship of state. Other people with names we wouldn’t recognize and benign job titles in offices in the Pentagon, NSA and CIA headquarters, the Federal Reserve and in the C suites of America’s largest companies, run this country. Obama is a figurehead.

I believe this because of the huge chasm that has existed between Obama’s words and reality since he took office in 2009. He advocated for more transparency in government, but we have less, far less. The surveillance state has its tentacles into every facet of our lives and whistleblowers are punished instead of hailed as heroes. He said he’d close Gitmo, but he hasn’t. He said he wanted to move in a new direction after eight years of Bush, but based on the government we have today, it’s like Bush never left the Oval Office. He brings economic inequality to the forefront in speeches, but his economic policies do nothing to change the status quo. He said he wanted to improve our image internationally, but recent polls indicate that citizens of other countries view the United States as the number one threat to world peace.

The Deep State is real and in control. Obama gives the speeches, poses in the photo ops, but the real work of the government is carried out by bureaucrats who are not accountable to the voters. I wonder sometimes about when Obama came to the realization that the President of the United States was merely a title and not a job description. Once you’ve been inaugurated and you’re sitting in the big leather chair in the White House, there isn’t a helluva lot you can do about it. I would think it would be soul-crushing to realize that your vision for America, the vision that voters agreed with, would never become reality, that you would be forced to spend your tenure spinning excuses for why this or that couldn’t be done, or worse, why we need to do things that you find personally reprehensible.

Yes, Obama has had to try and deal with a hostile congress, and that certainly has been a thorn in his side. But that doesn’t adequately explain why we are where we are today as a country. With the exception of the Affordable Care Act, Obama has not used his office to rally Americans around the proposals and policies he advocated as a candidate in 2008. Why? We hear a lot of the same inspiring words and phrases he used six years ago while campaigning, but once the speech is over we don’t see any effort to turn those words into reality.

If this is America’s future, a puppet president willing to dance for the public while unelected bureaucrats run the government, it’s a bleak future that will see a once powerful and admired democracy devolve into a reviled international pariah.

The deep state and the death of democracy

Most progressive emags, blogs and news sources shy away from conspiracy theories such as 9/11, the JFK assassination and the like, and from their perspective, it makes sense. They’re already marginalized, and their credibility is important to their very survival, so delving into highly speculative and controversial “theories” could easily backfire and do more harm to their reputation than good.

There is one area that some might consider a conspiracy theory, however, that the progressive media has investigated and written about extensively, and that is the deep state (great in-depth article here). The deep state or shadow government consists of people we as citizens know very little about, yet who are the ones whose hands are actually on the controls of the surveillance state. This is a relatively small group of civilians and military personnel who work at the highest levels of the NSA, CIA, Department of Defense and other far less visible government organizations. They are the keepers of the secrets.

Sir Francis Bacon is attributed with coining the phase, “Knowledge is power.” This aphorism has never been so true as it is today. A small cabal of officials in Washington has the power to find out virtually anything about anyone, and that includes you, Mr. President, and you, Dianne Feinstein, and you, potential whistleblower. The deep state has the access to, and the control over, information that can ruin political careers, embarrass allies into cooperation and even bring down governments. Bearing all of this in mind, it should come as no surprise that those who could theoretically reign in the spymasters, like the president and congress, haven’t done so, and will not do so in the future.

The idea of the deep state might sound like tin foil hat stuff to some, but it really makes a lot of sense when you consider how little control we the people have over anything done in Washington these days, no matter who we elect to office. Some call it a silent coup, and that seems pretty accurate to me.