The Corporate Media is an Instrument of the Deep State

Conservatives seem to have accepted this, while Liberals remain in denial

I was listening to a recent interview with comedian/social commentator Dave Smith and really liked a point he made about the role that the corporate media plays in driving the Culture War. Here’s the clip:

• As Smith and host Andrew Schulz discuss in the clip, the Culture War is used to divide the populace and prevent it from uniting on issues that threaten the imperial agenda of the oligarchy that controls our nation.

• As an example of this, Smith highlights the fact that after the massive Occupy Wall Street protests broke out around 2010, a movement that threatened to unite the Left and Right in condemnation of government corruption and corporate greed, all the sudden in lockstep coordination the mass media began pushing various Culture War narratives. These were cynically designed to divide the population and distract them from the economic and political issues that threatened to unite them. Using this method, the oligarchy was able to prevent any meaningful change from taking place in regards to the rulership of the 1% over the 99%.

• The National Security State was the mastermind of this divide-and-conquer campaign: its think tanks came up with the plan and then the corporate media was put to work implementing this agenda.

In the above clip, Smith makes the point that using the Culture War to neutralize dissent against imperial economic policies is an old strategy. For example, back in the 1960s, similar tactics were used to co-opt the Conservative movement, shifting it away from its traditional base in low government spending and non-interventionist foreign policy and toward an empire-friendly policy framework that supported the build-up of the national security state, a never-ending rise in defense spending, and the preservation of the Federal Reserve’s system of fiat currency.

• One of the chief mechanisms that facilitated this shift was a change in focus to cultural issues over economic ones, with the media riling up the Conservative base with talk about abortion or gay marriage, while downplaying substantive debate about fiscal spending or expansionist foreign policy doctrine.

• Today, the media is used in a similar fashion to co-opt the Liberal faction of the American populace, luring them in with the rhetoric of “inclusion” and “equality” in order to sell them on a policy framework of neverending war, corporate bailouts, government censorship, and medical fascism.

The branding of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is a good example of how the media manipulates the Left by focusing on the superficial rather than the substance. The reality of Biden and Harris’s foreign policy doctrine is one of war. Indeed, their policies are not much different in substance from those followed by the Bush-Cheney administration. But the rhetoric surrounding Harris’s presidential campaign is utterly detached from this reality. Instead, it’s themed around her gender, her race, and her “joyful personality”, with the media organizing in lockstep fashion to push this liberal-friendly framing of Harris. Meanwhile, this public relations blitz completely whitewashes the reality of her neocon policies.

The media is complicit in whitewashing the national security state-friendly policies of Kamal Harris. The branding is “Joy”; the reality is permanent war.

The stated ideals of the Liberals are, on the surface, good. But in large part, this constituency hasn’t integrated the concept of the Deep State into their worldview. As a consequence, they’re prone to look at issues only at the surface level, denying the Shadow side of things, and this makes them easily manipulated.

• In particular, the lack of awareness of the Shadow makes the Left vulnerable to psychological projection. For example, consider Kamala Harris’s recent speech at the DNC. The entire thing was one great Shadow projection, with her lobbing a series of accusations at Donald Trump that the Democratic Party is actually guilty of themselves. Since the Liberal base refuses to acknowledge the Shadow side of their own party, however, they easily fall victim to this type of rhetoric, projecting things they are guilty of themselves (but refuse to acknowledge) onto others and vilifying them for it.

• I’m not saying Trump’s policies are immune to criticism (though that’s not the focus of this article). I think the best thing you could say about his first term was that he didn’t try to start WWIII. I should also point out that emphasizing the shallowness of the average Democratic voter doesn’t necessarily imply that the average GOP voter is significantly more astute. But during this election season I’ve noted that there’s noticeably more critical thinking going on within the Conservative community.

• The emergence of Trump and the Maga movement had the effect of dividing the GOP between the Bush wing and the Tea Party wing, and this has opened the door to an active and somewhat productive quest for sensemaking and critical thinking. One consequence of this division is that the GOP base has developed a healthy cynicism when it comes to the media and government. They’ve also incorporated the idea of the Deep State into their worldview. As a result, they’ve developed a strong resistance to several key Deep State initiatives like war with Russia, government censorship, and the human trafficking operation happening at the Southern Border. By contrast, Liberals, who deny the idea of the Deep State, seem to be in denial about these issues. This ignorance makes them easy victims to propaganda and they end up supporting the perpetuation of these ugly operations, entirely oblivious to the ugly underbelly of them.

I view the sense-making process the Conservative faction is going through as an encouraging sign and wish that a similar process would emerge within the Democratic party. For this to happen, a division would have to open up within the party. The presidential campaign of RFK had the capacity to do this, but the DNP conspired to prevent this from happening and refused to allow him to run his campaign.

• If the Democratic Party is ever going to evolve beyond the status quo it is mired in, one of the key things its base must do is change its relationship with the media. Unfortunately, things are about as bad as they can be on this front, with over 70% of the Democratic base declaring their trust in the mass media. Compare this to 10% on the Republican side:

What makes this situation so dangerous is that the Democrats’ implicit trust in the mass media allows them to be manipulated into supporting all kinds of Deep State initiatives, largely without the Left understanding this is what’s happening. As a result, a large gap has formed between the harsh reality of Democratic policies and the way the voting base supporting these policies sees themselves.

• For example, consider the horrific health consequences of the COVID shots: the Left were easily sold the story of “safe and effective”, but the reality was “unsafe and ineffective”. Since the media (which the Left has declared their trust in) refuses to cover the truth of what happened, the Left still hasn’t integrated the reality of this fraud into their worldview. They haven’t faced the Shadow side of the policies they supported, in other words. Consequently, they still tend to view the lockdown and mandate policies as legitimate - at least, to a much higher degree than their Conservative counterparts.

• Another example comes with the “Open Border” crisis. The story the Left tells themselves is one of compassion, where they’re helping poor immigrants by giving them refuge and resources. The reality, however, is one of human trafficking and social engineering. The millions of illegal immigrants that are being trafficked into the country as a deliberate (albeit covert) policy of the Biden administration are being positioned as a permanent underclass, one that is absolutely dependent on the state. Meanwhile, terrorist sleeper cells, child trafficking networks, and drug smuggling operations are being enabled by this policy. But Democratic politicians and the corporate media don’t discuss the negative consequences of the border situation, nor do they explain why they are letting in large numbers of undocumented military-age men from nations like China or Iran that our government is actively antagonizing and threatening war with. It’s a Trojan Horse operation the government is deliberately doing to itself. But since the Left refuses to face the ugly underbelly of the border crisis and denies the existence of a Deep State who appears to be organizing it, they thus are easily propagandized into continuing to support the policy.

  

In a recent episode of System Update, Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang expand on these criticisms of the Left, illustrating how their tendency toward superficial and non-critical thinking allows their voting base to be cynically manipulated by corporate interests.

• In the clip shared below, these journalists discuss how the Left’s obsession with race gives corporations (like Big Tech) and interest groups (like AIPAC) the opportunity to manipulate Progressives into supporting policies favorable to corporate interests.

• As an example, they discuss how the effort to break up Big Tech monopolies was coopted when these corporations strategically used the politics of race to shift the conversation away from their monopolistic overreach and towards the question of “who’s a racist”.

Right now, the most significant difference separating the Left and Right is that the Right has explicitly incorporated the idea of the Deep State into their worldview and the Left has not.

• If you listen to a podcast from an influential commentator on the Right - someone like Tucker Carlson or Vivek Ramaswamy - you’ll definitely hear them reference the idea of a Deep State, even if they can’t quite pinpoint what it is or how it works.

• By and large, the Left has not realized this truth, and consequently are still prone to dismiss any legitimate analysis of the Deep State or its operations as “Conspiracy Theory”. This is a dangerous mindstate to be in, because it allows this constituency to be easily manipulated by the Deep State and the various factions that comprise it, including the national security state, the corporate cartels that it controls, and the intelligence agencies like the CIA that do its bidding.

• As the old saying goes, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is convincing mankind he doesn’t exist. A steadily increasing segment of the Right is waking up to the existence of the Shadow and are revolting against it, but the Left remains asleep and is therefore dangerously vulnerable to possession from it. Something must be done to awake them from their stupor, but I don’t know exactly what it will take or what form this awakening will come in. Perhaps the genocide in Palestine will be the catalyst of it - it seems to be having the effect of dividing the Democratic base. Time will tell.