Since the Frank Church Committee investigations of the 1970s, the deep state’s information control structure remains functional. The FBI, CIA, DHS, and other agencies have been shaping the narrative and replacing news with information warfare for decades. Americans’ minds are the battlespace.

But as media continue to decentralize, the deep state is starting to lose control.

Now that new Church-style investigations have begun, one wonders if it’ll do any more good than the last one. The overall warping of our collective intelligence has been helped by countless stories on TV and movies portraying our alphabet-soup agencies as heroes—despite real-world mission creep and deep corruption.

Nicolas Schou details this whitewashing phenomenon in his 2016 article and related book, Spooks.

In 1996, the CIA hired one of its veteran clandestine officers, Chase Brandon, to work directly with Hollywood studios and production companies to upgrade its image. “We’ve always been portrayed erroneously as evil and Machiavellian,” Brandon later told The Guardian. “It took us a long time to support projects that portray us in the light we want to be seen in.”

But as revelations surrounding NSA spying on American citizens surfaced due to the Edward Snowden leaks, it has become clearer that deep-state players are, indeed, Machiavellian. Their objective is to maintain social coherence around their power. Their mantra is Exitus acta probat. Along with long-standing corruption, partisan contagions now infect their ranks—with agencies being more thoroughly politicized, weaponized, and turned on ordinary Americans. 

Revealing the Rot

Recent work by indie journalists, such as those working on the Twitter files and others that reveal details of various leaked DHS documents, offer proof of deep-state actors willing to pull out all the extra-legal stops. The efforts are meant to keep the herds timid and credulous—with the deep state firmly in control. The blue-check Twitterati's response to suspicions had been “Conspiracy theorists!” right up until the evidence dropped, whereupon it was a “Nothingburger!” 

Groupthink meets gaslighting.

But what happened to journalism as a check on power? Armies of j-school grads had gone from modeling themselves after Woodward and Bernstein, questioning authority, to modeling themselves after Pravda—with a dash of Judith Butler thrown in for good measure. Activists captured newspapers of record. Readers craved team sports over truth, and the j-school activists served it up.

The proverbial March through the Institutions continued in the deep state, as well, until corporate media crawled into bed with the g-men. What monstrosities nurse in Langley and Quantico?

Mainstream journalism went from speaking truth to power to shouting power over truth. This shift put several veteran truthseekers in the unpleasant position of admitting that Donald Trump was right, at least in part: The 2020 election had been “stolen,” at least in the sense that the U.S. government actively interfered. Not the Russians. Americans. (See receipts in the box below.)

But a few independent reporters, many of whom are on the Dissident Left, revealed a bizarro world of allegations against the Biden family’s corruption in China and Ukraine. “Bizarro” because Americans had spent years listening to hollow accusations of Russian collusion, which had all along been a contrivance of the DNC in collaboration with the FBI. This scheme included the likes of former FBI attorney Jim Baker, who journalist Bari Weiss figured out was the fox guarding Twitter’s henhouse. 

Whether and to what extent unconstitutional actions by the deep state are justifiable has now become a partisan shuttlecock among the Twitterati. However, this is a significant seachange from a people who once understood themselves as united in principles of accountable authority. For far too long, deep-state actors such as FBI agent Elvis Chan had been able to evade accountability and shape narratives to reinforce Americans’ faith in the Church of State. 

The mainstream media are now cheerleaders in such efforts, confusing partisanship with patriotism. Worse still, agents and spooks have been able to infiltrate all the major social media companies by paying or pressuring proxies to disappear truth-tellers and send dissent down the memory hole.