Thread by @caitoz

Unelected Officials Override The President To Continue Wars (But Only Kooks Believe In The Deep State):

"That is the direction we should all be looking. Not at who's president, but why things stay the same no matter who's president."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/unelected-of…

Outgoing US envoy to Syria James Jeffrey stated in a recent interview with Defense One that US officials have been "playing shell games" about the number of troops in the region to deceive the Trump administration into thinking there has been a military withdrawal.

Some mass media propagandists find it hilarious that the US war machine used deceit to thwart the president's attempts to withdraw from its illegal occupation of Syria.

https://twitter.com/LizSly/status/1327137565288378370

This would not be the first time that Jeffrey, a foreign policy insider with the past three presidential administrations, has admitted to deceiving the public about what's happening in Syria.

https://twitter.com/27khv/status/1260488599486836736

This would also not be the first time we've heard reports of the US war machine hiding the facts from the elected commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force ever assembled.

Mainstream liberal discourse has been engaged in some serious doublethink on the idea of an unelected power structure running things behind the scenes. On one hand there've been nonstop Daily Beast articles saying only crazy conspiracy kooks believe in it,
thedailybeast.com/the-deep-state…

, but on the other hand there's also been constant praise for the insider "adults in the room" who ensure from within the administration that Trump doesn't demolish America's precious norms while in office.

The understanding of a deep state in America has become even more obfuscated by the other side of America's fake partisan divide, with Trump supporters now using that term to essentially mean "anyone who doesn't like Donald Trump". It's become an almost useless term now.

In reality the term deep state is meant to refer not to anyone who opposes Trump, nor to a secret cabal of baby-eating Satanists, but simply to the tendency among government agencies and plutocrats to form loose alliances with each other and collaborate toward common agendas.

It's a term used for political analysis to describe large-scale power agendas that are largely playing out right out in the open, hidden in plain sight.

It doesn't take a ton of investigative reporting and WikiLeaks drops to understand that there's been a collective of operatives mostly running the Trump administration while the actual elected president yells at the talking heads on Fox News and tweets.

The US government simply is not what Americans were taught it is in school, and it is not what they tell you it is in the news. It's a mostly unelected power establishment which operates in the interests of imperialist expansionism and oligarchic control.

That unelected power establishment runs things, with the official elected government operating sort of like the unplugged video game controller you hand your kid brother to keep him from whining for a chance to play.

All this fuss over who really won the election is missing the point.

That is the direction we should all be looking. Not at who's president, but why things stay the same no matter who's president.