Biden's Incompetent Deep State Lost Some Documents That Showed Them Up As Liars.
They Have a Solution For That: Inescapable Round-the-Clock Surveillance of Everything Americans Say On the Internet.
Plus: The New One-Party State

NBC News @NBCNews

EXCLUSIVE: The Biden administration is looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence failed to realize classified Pentagon documents circulated online for weeks, officials briefed on the matter say.

These documents are only "explosive" because they explode the lies the Biden Administration has been telling us. But the public doesn't have the right to the truth; we only have the right to officially-approved propaganda.

Jimmy Dore does an amusing riff about a New York Times CIA stenographer who claims that, unlike the Snowden Wikileaks documents, these documents are really dangerous and really bad. Both he and Glenn Greenwald, whose analysis he cites, emphasize that the CIA is currently trying to downplay what the Snowden leaks revealed. They seem to to think that this effort is only about denigrating the past leaks, which Greenwald is egotistically invested in (having helped Snowden leak the material).

But that's not why the CIA stenographer is downplaying the importance of the new leaks. The CIA is downplaying the importance of the new leaks because they know that the only group in America that feverishly supports the National Security State are "progressive" neoliberals, and they know that these same progressive neoliberals supported Snowden for leaking Defense Department documents. The left loved those leaks, as they reduced support for the War in Iraq and for Previous Trump, by which I mean George W. Bush.

The security state is now claiming that those leaks were not so damaging and were pretty much okay, because they know their progressive shitlib fans -- again, the only bloc in America who still trusts them -- thinks those leaks were "helpful." And they want to provide the shitlibs with an easy mental construct for explaining to themselves why those leaks were good for America, but these new leaks are Right-Wing Terrorism and Literal Genocide.

You know how liberals claim they had a secret respect for pastRepublican presidents, just to establish their credibility in claiming the new Republican president is the Worst Republican President Ever?

They're doing the same thing with leaks. Oh, the Snowden leaks were empathetic and rational; we can see how some people liked the Snowden leaks. But the new Republican leaker, he's the Worst Republican Leaker Ever!

The Biden Administration wants the shitlib population of the country demanding that we execute this new leaker, while easing their sense of hypocrisy and inconsistency about supporting Edward Snowden.

Some riots, insurrections, and leaks The Regime supports or tolerates. Some riots, insurrections, and leaks The Regime despises and wants punished by death.

The Regime wants you to know that it's okay to consider Snowden a hero while frothing at the mouth to get your hands on the new leaker and murder him by ripping his limbs from his body.

And they want to inflame the already maddened shitlibs about this leak, and get them onboard the Biden Administration's plan to put America under permanent 24-hour-per-day surveillance by AI -- he wants to convince them that the Right-Wing Insurrectionary Forces are so menacing that his shitlib supporters will bless his plan to go Full Soviet.

And of course they will.

David French and the rest of the hardcore authoritarians of NeverTrump will be right there to cheerlead for this. They can't wait for Big Brother.

Big Brother will protect them from the Dangerous Right-Wing Meme-Makers and Twitter shit-posters.

A couple of weeks ago, I linked Jacob Seigel's magisterial essay on the "disinformation" pretext to empower the Ruling Class to rule in defiance of the desires of the people.

Given The Regime's newest surveillance-state product roll-out -- the call for 24-hour-a-day surveillance of all Americans to stop any further exposure of its lies through leaks -- this piece is worth re-reading.

XI. The New One-Party State

In February 2021, a long article in Time magazine by journalist Molly Ball celebrated the "Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election." Biden's victory, wrote Ball, was the result of a "conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes" that drew together "a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election" in an "extraordinary shadow effort." Among the many accomplishments of the heroic conspirators, Ball notes, they "successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears." It is an incredible article, like an entry from the crime blotter that somehow got slipped into the society pages, a paean to the saviors of democracy that describes in detail how they dismembered it.

Not so long ago, talk of a "deep state" was enough to mark a person as a dangerous conspiracy theorist to be summarily flagged for monitoring and censorship. But language and attitudes evolve, and today the term has been cheekily reappropriated by supporters of the deep state. For instance, a new book, American Resistance, by neoliberal national security analyst David Rothkopf, is subtitled The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation.

The deep state refers to the power wielded by unelected government functionaries and their paragovernmental adjuncts who have administrative power to override the official, legal procedures of a government. But a ruling class describes a social group whose members are bound together by something deeper than institutional position: their shared values and instincts. While the term is often used loosely and sometimes as a pejorative rather than a descriptive label, in fact the American ruling class can be simply and straightforwardly defined.

Two criteria define membership in the ruling class. First, as Michael Lind has written, it is made up of people who belong to a "homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta." America has always had regional elites; what is unique about the present is the consolidation of a single, national ruling class.

Second, to be a member of the ruling class is to believe that only other members of your class can be allowed to lead the country. That is to say, members of the ruling class refuse to submit to the authority of anyone outside the group, whom they disqualify from eligibility by casting them as in some way illegitimate.

Faced with an external threat in the form of Trumpism, the natural cohesion and self-organizing dynamics of the social class were fortified by new top-down structures of coordination that were the goal and the result of Obama's national mobilization. In the run-up to the 2020 election, according to reporting by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein for The Intercept, "tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives ... to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election."

Historian Angelo Codevilla, who popularized the concept of an American "ruling class" in a 2010 essay and then became its primary chronicler, saw the new, national aristocracy as an outgrowth of the opaque power acquired by the U.S. security agencies. "The bipartisan ruling class that grew in the Cold War, who imagined themselves and who managed to be regarded as entitled by expertise to conduct America's business of war and peace, protected its status against a public from which it continued to diverge by translating the commonsense business of war and peace into a private, pseudo-technical language impenetrable to the uninitiated," he wrote in his 2014 book, To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations.

What do the members of the ruling class believe? They believe, I argue, "in informational and management solutions to existential problems" and in their "own provi­dential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures." As a class, their highest principle is that they alone can wield power. If any other group were to rule, all progress and hope would be lost, and the dark forces of fascism and barbarism would at once sweep back over the earth. While technically an opposition party is still permitted to exist in the United States, the last time it attempted to govern nationally, it was subjected to a yearslong coup. In effect, any challenge to the authority of the ruling party, which represents the interests of the ruling class, is depicted as an existential threat to civilization.

An admirably direct articulation of this outlook was provided recently by famous atheist Sam Harris. Throughout the 2010s, Harris' higher-level rationalism made him a star on YouTube, where thousands of videos showcased him "owning" and "pwning" religious opponents in debates. Then Trump arrived. Harris, like so many others who saw in the former president a threat to all that was good in the world, abandoned his principled commitment to the truth and became a defender of propaganda.

In a podcast appearance last year, Harris acknowledged the politically motivated censorship of reporting related to Hunter Biden's laptops and admitted "a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump." But, echoing Ball, he declared this a good thing.

"I don't care what's in the Hunter Biden laptop. ... Hunter Biden could have had corpses of children in his basement, and I would not have cared," Harris told his interviewers. He could overlook the murdered children because an even greater danger lurked in the possibility of Trump's reelection, which Harris compared to "an asteroid hurtling toward Earth."

With an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, even the most principled rationalists might end up asking for safety over truth. But an asteroid has been falling toward Earth every week for years now. The pattern in these cases is that the ruling class justifies taking liberties with the law to save the planet but ends up violating the Constitution to hide the truth and protect itself.

posted by Ace at 03:12 PM

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