It turns out the “deep state” is not bad – in fact in consists of “some of the best of us…hard at work making America great.”
In what can only be described as bureaucrat porn – “oh baby, stamp form A-HM-892 again! And AGAIN!” - the New York Times shared with the world a student council-level/can we please join? video last week that makes the case for the deep state being “awesome.”
Here’s the video and do actually watch it: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000009356253/trump-deep-state.html
Besides featuring bureaucrats literally laughing in the faces of those Americans who believe the government has become far too powerful, it also aggressively and intentionally misses the actual discussion surrounding the deep state.
Interviews with CIA or FBI or NSC workers? Not a one. A chat with censors over at the National Endowment for Democracy or in Homeland Security ? Nope.
Instead, the video features an engineer at Marshall Space Flight, an EPA administrator in charge of making water safe, and a Department of Labor employee whose job it is to make sure people get paid fairly. As to that last position, her job title is so long she actually had to take a breath while saying it. Said it before, say it again: the longer the job title, the less likely that job actually has to be done.
We find out these eminently pleasant people have hobbies and families and spend their day simply helping people and they really don’t understand what the fuss is about.
The vid adds that Donald Trump’s threats to cut government workers is evil and stupid and that he only wants to do so because right now “they work for you and he wants to replace them with people who will work for him.”
This was not a puff piece or even a fluff job – this was the Times actively trying to convince people that the deep state is made up of your friends and neighbors, going to work each day to make your life better and safer.
But that is exactly not what - or who - the public means when it talks about the deep state. No one – save schizophrenics – believes that the lady you meet with at the Social Security office, your postman, your USDA farm agent are all members of the shadowy cabal that controls the nation.
They are NOT the deep state . The lifers at the intelligence agencies, the foundations they work with, the companies they contract with, the lobbyists, the lawyers, the public relations people, the spies, the misdirection artists, the people who brought you MK-Ultra, the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Gap, the censorship-industrial complex – that is the deep state people, very rightly, fear.
The Times’ vid – with a straight-ish face – literally tells the public that even their conception of the definition of the deep state is wrong and stupid and wrong and only caused by Trumpyism and wrong.
It was like a reporter going to a terrible car accident and interviewing the EMTs on scene about their kids’ soccer league.
And the vid strongly implies that Trump’s “attacks on public servants” are especially -and personally – dangerous.
In other words, a potential bloodbath.
Speaking of bloodbaths, we have breaking news: Trump’s campaign has just announced that, going forward, he will not use any word that could possibly be intentionally misconstrued by the press.
He’s speeches from now on will be “Hi, I’m Donald Trump. Thank you for attending tonight.”
And then he’ll get off the stage.
It was going to be “thank you for coming out tonight” but that phrase is far too fraught with implications – outing people leads directly to suicide as you know.
For all of the progressive obsession with “context,” it amazes that just when you think the media could not go any further it does. And in “bloodbath” it really really did.
Literally no one could honestly have thought Trump meant anything other than the auto industry was going to suffer even more in a second Biden term.
The brouhaha over the word was actually very funny/sad. It was a 2+2=4 moment and the media came up – and for the most part stuck with - an answer of negative pi.
By the way, this is just a foretaste of the next seven months. If you still do not think there is a coordinated effort to get Trump, count how many times in the last few and next few days you will see earnest reporting on how humor is an evil tool of dictators and only an evil tool of dictators used to disarm the public.
Apparently, Hitler was a laugh riot.
Speaking of riots, if the kids who flooded Congress phone lines with pleas and threats over the potential TikTok ban actually put their phones down for a damn second there could have been one.
TikTok is bad and collects vast tranches of data on the people who use it. Although how valuable that data is beyond marketing purposes is not quite clear – the kid who is too fried on the drugs the school gives him to make it through an 11 minute YouTube video and needs everything to be even shorter and shinier and louder and peppier to hold his attention may not be the kid who will grow up to be someone with access to the state secrets China wants to steal.
Well, maybe…
TikTok is boring and stupid and pointless, but it is also an avenue of public expression, so flat banning it is most likely not terribly constitutional. The worries over China hoovering data are legitimate, but the possibility that a president - as the bill states – could simply ban/takeover any social media service is terrifying.
Defenders say such a president would have to have a good reason to take that action so not to worry.
Um, the pandemic?
Pretty sure there are already reasons in filing cabinets at the NSA ready to go.
Hence the misgivings, though it seems the TikTok bill will make it to Joe Biden’s desk and, after he talks about how great those things are for freshening breath and that one time, in 1974, maybe? whenever, I was about to meet the president of Suriname – nice guy, good golfer, loved cars so I took him for a ride in the ‘vette even though the car really needed a tune-up that day – he had to ask his wife Jill, or was Neilia still a round then? – she was a dish, so sad she passed in boating accident – had to fish through her purse to find them and her Kleenex fell out right there on the ground in front of president of The Gambia, no less. Can you believe it? Where’s my pen? he will sign it.
And now the thanks for subscribing epigram:
A finger is worth a thousand words.
Thanks again!