Comment by nwienert
6 days ago
There’s incredible utility to the term.
It refers to people in the government with a lot of power and little public exposure, and perhaps some indication of using their power against the will of the general public, and yes there’s tons of these people, and it’s quite good to have the public generally worried about them.
American political history is littered with deep state plots that turned out to be true - Iraq war being a big recent one, the insurance policy FBI agents another.
Iraq war was definitely not the work of any deep state, if you follow your definition. It was pushed by the president and his government, not faceless bureaucrats.
Certainly the pressure on them and the “intel” they saw on WMD was in part the work of the deep state, that the president was captured by them is sort of the point.
That's completely backwards.
The CIA was very clear that there was nothing there, and the publicly appointed leadership (Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, etc) badgered them until they gave in and made some wishy-washy statement that Powell could pretend was real.
The war was led from the top - Sec Def and VP. That Bush was a moron and appointed liars to Sec Def and VP is on him. Cheney and Rumsfeld had a long history of making things up, going back to the 70s.
4 replies →
You've got it backwards, at least in your description.
They went after the intel they wanted to find to justify their position. It didn't matter if it was real or true, it just needed to come from the intelligence apparatus.
"littered with deep state plots"
My argument is that these are not deep state plots, these are just plots. This are plots that states are doing. This is the state. This is an organization of millions of people. There is no deep state. The state is just like any other large organization.
Take for example the eBay stalking scandal.
"The eBay stalking scandal was a campaign conducted in 2019 by eBay and contractors. The scandal involved the aggressive stalking and harassment of two e-commerce bloggers, Ina and David Steiner, who wrote frequent commentary about eBay on their website EcommerceBytes"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
The CEO was not involved.
There is no "deep eBay", there is just eBay. We don't use the phrase "deep eBay" for a reason. And in the same way "deep State" does not make any sense.
> There’s incredible utility to the term.
It’s a red flag, so there’s that.