Deep State Conspiracy to Dark State for Real

Facing Facts to Choose a Better Way Forward

One aspect that threads through the rightwing narrative is the concept of the Deep State. This is a conspiracy theory alleging that a covert network of federal government workers (especially within the FBI and CIA) are working in conjunction with the financial industry and certain corporations to exercise power apart-from and beyond elected U.S. governmental leaders. This concept appeared in the 1990s in reference to an anti-democratic coalition within the government of Turkey and later began to be used to refer to the U.S. government as well.

The theory caught fire under Trump who repeatedly blamed the Deep State for working against him and his agenda. Rightwing media seized on the term and the conspiracy spread. The Deep State is a central tenant of the QAnon pro-Trump conspiracy movement.

Now I suspect there certainly were government insiders who did what they could to thwart Trump’s agenda. There were likely similar folks who tried to thwart Obama. In fact, Republican members of Congress openly stated that doing so was their main goal. Whether or not there is any truth to the Deep State concept it has been powerfully used by the rightwing to undermine trust in government, drive anti-tax sentiment, and shift more public aid to private fundraising efforts.

Meanwhile, while certain conservatives have been pushing a Deep State theory, behind the scenes they have been installing a Dark State. This consists of dark money, dark media, and dark tech.

Dark Money generally refers to money that comes from groups that aren’t required to disclose their funders. A donor can give millions of dollars to a nonprofit, completely anonymously, and that money can then be cycled through many other organizations, enabling them to inflate their budgets and further disguise the sources of their income. These groups can then spend many millions of dollars supporting Super PACs, or directly spending for campaign ads and other political services, which are hard to track. In 2010 the Supreme Court approved Citizens United, which removed election funding restrictions. The justices voting in favor justices held that, “independent political spending” did not present a substantive threat of corruption, provided it was not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign. This blew wide open the floodgate to dark money.

Dark Media. I use this term to refer to the massive take-over of media by the rightwing and ultra-wealthy. Republicans realized that the key to power was to control public opinion. Starting in the 1970’s Republicans built a series of institutions such as the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and many others with a sole purpose of influencing public opinion to support the GOP leadership agenda. These organizations create policy papers, write op-eds for newspapers, provide “expert” guests for TV, radio, and podcasts, and post to a plethora of social media outlets. They also lobby Republican elected officials about policy and nominees to executive and judicial positions.

In addition to creating powerful, well-funded groups to influence policy and policy-makers, conservatives began taking over the media. Reagan undid the Fairness Doctrine which required media that held broadcasting licenses to cover both sides of controversial issues. He also fast-tracked the citizenship of Rupert Murdoch who then started Fox “News” and launched Rush Limbaugh. Right-leaning Sinclair Media Group and billionaires like John and Lew Dickey purchased hundreds of local TV stations. Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital purchased Clear Channel and took progressive Air America programming off their channels. Wealthy conservative televangelists and rightwing Hispanics purchased over a thousand radio stations nationwide.

There are now approximately 1500 radio stations that play only rightwing talk, almost a thousand religious stations that push rightwing politics, and several hundred rightwing Spanish-language stations.

More recently rightwing billionaires have ventured into the newspaper business. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the LA Times, Rupert Murdoch bought the NY Post and The Wall Street Journal, and New York City-based hedge funds run by rightwing billionaires own approximately half of all local newspapers in the country.

Finally, enter social media, with Elon Musk taking over Twitter and allowing it to become a cesspool of rightwing conspiracy claims and hate rhetoric and Mark Zuckerburg recently announcing Facebook would stop fact-checking and start allowing hate speech.

For more detail see The Hartmann Report.

Dark Tech. Dark Tech refers to political operatives using data to sway public opinion and voters. It is related to dark media but is a beast of its own. The strategy is to use comprehensive data sets gathered from people’s online engagement to create targeted ads to sway voters. Combining behavioral neuroscience and computer and political sciences, political operatives amass, sort and analyze user information to create hyper-specific voter profiles and subpopulations. These subpopulations are then targeted repeatedly with tailored messages to reshape the voter’s mind on issues, candidates, or parties. Without disclosures of microtargeting, recipients often remain unaware the ad they see is different from what others see. Over time, people’s views can be reshaped for political gain.

Dark tech operatives often focus on exacerbating political fringes, increasing division and conflict. While anti-democratic, dark tech campaign strategies are some of the most effective to date. Recently, with help from Vladimir Putin’s Internet Research Agency and Wagner Group trolls, GOP operatives, politicians, talkshow hosts, podcasters, influencers, and cyberbullies began to saturate social media and podcasts with messages blaming Democrats for everything that’s wrong in America. An indictment filed last September alleges a media company linked to six conservative political influencers was secretly funded by Russian state media employees to churn out English-language videos that were “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to Russian interests, like its war in Ukraine.

With all of this in play, just days from now we’ll see a regime of billionaire oligarchs take control of the U.S. federal government. Using the Deep State claim, the regime has already begun purging governmental workers. The Trump team has begun interrogating White House national security staff about who they voted for.

Yesterday, at Trump’s behest, Speaker Mike Johnson removed Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Though Turner was a veteran member of Congress and respected committee, Johnson cited “concerns from Mar-a-Lago” as justification for the removal. Trump has made no secret of his desire to purge the federal government of anyone he and his inner circle consider to be less than die-hard loyalists to his agenda.

One of the first moves autocrats often make is to get rid of people who are known to be free-thinkers or have opposing viewpoints. They then replace those positions with loyalist lackeys. Remember the last attempt to add fake electors?

Autocrats also blatantly lie. We already know this about Trump. While campaigning he claimed to know nothing about the Project 2025 plan put together by the rightwing Heritage Foundation because even many conservatives found it far too radical. However, the purge currently rolling out is a strategy straight off the pages of Project 2025.

In this world of illusory mis and disinformation we’ll keep hearing about the Deep State. I believe it is imperative we need to keep exposing and opposing the Dark State that is here now. We do this with our voices and choices.

Action Steps:

Question what you hear from those in charge.

Be media saavy – support independent media, avoid rabbit-hole silos.

Have courageous conversations and point out the disinformation. Speak truth to power and to friends.

Recognize when conversations with certain people will do no good and save your energy. The current regime had a tiny majority of voters of less than 2%. We don’t need to convert a bunch of folks, but just to mobilize those who already want a better world.

Keep the faith. In the field of possibilities it is absolutely possible that the upheaval to come will crack open into much brighter ways forward.

I know this post is longer than most, but I felt strongly compelled to put it out there. thanks so much for reading and possibly sharing.

I’ll be hosting a live chat on the Substack app to discuss this and more on Wednesday, Jan. 22, at 4pm. It will be my first and I sure hope some of you will join me.

Much love and let’s get it done,

Cylvia