Thanks to the dog-and-pony impeachment show that assuredly is the product of the Democrat’s desperation to find a suitable candidate to oppose Donald Trump in the 2020 election, the reality has become obvious that the government is not the government of, by, and for the people. Rather the government is of, by, and for the “Headless Fourth Branch of Government”. The Fourth Branch of Government is composed of hundreds of thousands of Federal employees, divided into numerous departments and agencies, but most prominently those in the intelligence and military surveillance services who are answerable to no one. Their sacrosanct status is inherent in their business model based upon secrecy and incantation of inviolate, line-in-the-sand, “national security”. Everyone has a file, a longer file if one questions authority or participates politically. The surveillance service coupled with state department apparatchiks constitute the 800-pound gorilla of government within the government. The state department relies upon surveillance as surveillance relies upon the state department. The two go together, as the song says, like a horse and carriage.
My personal experience with the surveillance state occurred in 1960 at an election rally in San Francisco’s Union Square. Richard Nixon who was running for president against Robert Kennedy was the feature speaker. As a healthy young liberal, I joined a picket line around Union Square because I supported Kennedy. This was an orderly, quiet, gentlemanly picket, no name-calling, no pushing, shoving, cursing, swearing or any of that. Two days later, a friend at the college I attended, the University of San Francisco, told me that I was included in an FBI file. The FBI was covertly filming with a telephoto lens the picketers from the Saint Francis Hotel which overlooked Union Square. This was before facial recognition, so the FBI paid informants from Bay Area schools, including my friend, to identify persons who had been photographed. I was flattered, but not surprised. The business of the surveillance business is surveillance, but what may be surprising is that this is almost 60 years ago and the quarry were peaceful college students. The fact is that the Dark State has been a long time in the making, and since 1960 has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled many times over.
Like any expansive enterprise, I surmise that the surveillance business has expanded vertically and horizontally. Vertical expansion is represented by the coordination of the 22 or so agencies under the Department of Homeland Security, and horizontal expansion by the capture of selected personnel of the State Department, as illustrated in the congressional impeachment hearings by state department personnel finger-pointing at Trump for alleged quid-pro-quo deal-making. Horizontal expansion also appears evident at some of the news services where former and current CIA, FBI, and military officials are lionized for their expertise. The one-voice nature of current reporting by major news networks makes one wonder if horizontal expansion also might include news agencies to render news compatible with deep state aims. As Edward Barnays, the father of modern public relations, noted in his 1922 classic book, Propoganda, “… being dependent, every day of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources.”
The same tentacles may be spreading to search engines and social media. Public entertainment and publishing are largely dominated by a few corporations. Higher education has become suffused with relativism, role confusion, racial and gender bias toward white males, and promulgation of self-doubt and guilt. The result is a hostile minority, a passive plurality, and a paralyzed democracy.
The idea is to control opinion, so all vehicles that form public opinion must be unified in effective propaganda. The strategy seems to follow an axiom embraced by authoritarian regimes throughout the 20th century, “Define, repeat, inundate, do not deviate.” The recurrent cant is like the air one breathes. It’s everywhere, the common coin, and premise for public discourse. As Bernays wrote, “Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints.” And he concluded , “In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” Finally, Bernays reveals who pulls these wires, “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.” Apparently it is no longer the executive arm, but the Headless Fourth Branch of Government.
Note: I am grateful Ryan McMaken for his exceptional analysis of the roots of the Deep State in historical perspective.