The term “deep state” remains a popular way for newly awakened normies to think of how their government operates. It is not the people on the ballot at election time who are running things, but a shadowy cabal of people who operate outside the bounds of the political system. Whenever something goes wrong, they naturally assume it is the work of the deep state. The problem is that the deep state, as most people imagine it, does not exist. It is a useful fiction.

The dismantling of USAID is a good example. The reporting on it in the unofficial media made it seem as if this entity was controlling large swaths of the government, when in fact it was just a money laundering scheme. Instead of cleaning cash acquired through illegal means, it put government cash in the hands of media activists, lobbyists, not-for-profits, and policy shops tied to permanent Washington. It was a clearing house and networking hub for permanent Washington.

In a way, the economy of permanent Washington is something like the economies of ancient city states. Those city states operated what is called palace economies where agricultural products flowed into the palace of the ruler and were then distributed back to the populace as needed. Farmers, craftsmen, and traders maintained their own economy, but a substantial portion of their economic output flowed into the palace to be redistributed as the ruler saw fit.

That is how USAID functioned. It got tens of billions from Congress and used some of that to draw in tens of billions more from other sources in the government and private donors, which it then directed to friendly sources. This was not a formal scheme where they sat around in a hollowed-out volcano figuring out how to use the money to further their evil agenda. It was more like an extended network of friends who networked within this large community, underwritten by tax money.

Imagine if the Church of Scientology had infiltrated the government. Members got positions in the administrative state and the political system. They then directed money to organizations run by fellow cult members. Those organizations then used some of the money to lobby for more money from the system in the form of government contracts, but also by influence peddling to private actors. They would then organize these resources to control public policy.

That is the nature of the “deep state.” The people in it do not think of themselves as part of the deep state. From their perspective, they are just normal people working in the media, government, politics, and policy. Everyone they know is a normal person working in one of these areas. This is how they know they are normal and the people talking about the deep state are not normal. All the normal people they know agree with them that the deep state is a conspiracy theory.

As an example, look at the LinkedIn profile of Maggie Mitchell Salem, the current Executive Director of something called IRIS. That stands for Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services. It is an open borders not-for-profit located in Connecticut with a fifteen-million-dollar budget. According to the organization’s website, “IRIS inspired and is one of the seven organizations implementing a new national resettlement program, Welcome Corps.” They want your town full of Somalis.

Now, if you scan down Mx. Salem’s resume, you see that open borders is a new advocation for her. Five years ago, she was the Executive Director of something called the Qatar Foundation International. According to their website, they promote learning the Arabic language, using donations from the Qatari government. That is nonsense, of course, as its real purpose is to buy influence in Washington. They hire people like Mx. Salem to put their money in the right hands.

We know this from a story in the Tablet. According to that report, Mx. Salem was writing anti-Saudi stories for a man named Jamal Khashoggi, who was supposedly a Saudi journalist working for the Washington Post. He was a dissident, in that he did not like new ruler of Saudi Arabia. The Qataris do not like the Saudis, so they paid Mx. Salem to handle Mr. Khashoggi to place anti-Saudi material in the hometown newspaper of the Imperial Capital, the Washington Post.

If you scan down further in Mx. Salem’s resume, you will learn that she started out in life as a foreign service officer, stationed in Tel Aviv. You will note that technically, USAID was under the supervision of the State Department. Mx. Salem used her government job to cultivate friendships in the Middle East and in Washington, so that one day she could get one of those good jobs at good wages in the deep state. By all accounts, the Qataris are very generous with their American friends.

Eventually, the Saudis grew tired of seeing anti-Saudi material in the hometown newspaper of the Imperial Capital, so they kidnapped Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul and then chopped him up in their consulate. One of the reasons the Saudis are planning for a post-America world is they have grown weary of the perfidy of the deep state, which will fink on anyone for money. This is a feature of managerialism. Everyone is for sale, so anyone can buy what they want from the deep state.

This level of bungling by Mx. Salem in the dreaded private sector would have resulted in termination and banishment from the industry, but in the deep state where everyone knows your name, it is a minor bump in the road. She bounced over to the immigration rackets before getting a job in the Biden years running a not-for-profit in Tunisia and then back into the immigration rackets. The lines between the government and those who lobby the government are never very clear.

What you see in this one example is how the managerial state operates like a community that rules over the country. It is why voting does not matter, as the people running the thousands of entities that make up the system are always going to be people who have as their top priority the preservation of their class. It is not a deep state so much as a broad state that overlays everything. Every silo of power is controlled by people who believe the same things.

This is why the first bullet out of the Trump barrel this time was at USAID. It is also why they are attacking elite colleges like Harvard. These are important nodes of a system that organized the antibodies against him the first time. It is why they have systematically broken up the media connections within the government. The point is to destabilize and dismember this broad community of people who operate as the unofficial government of the American empire.

It sounds like an impossible task, given the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people who make up this blob. The Khashoggi story, however, points to something else about this system. It is has grown increasingly incompetent and corrupt since the end of the Cold War. Hard times breed hard men and easy times breed perfidious women incapable of maintaining the structures of power. Trump is a symptom of a system that is collapsing in on itself.

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