On May 10, 2024, Jonathan Cook published an article on Substack entitled “Biden’s war on Gaza is now a war on truth and the right to protest. The media’s role is to draw attention away from what the students are protesting – complicity in genocide – and engineer a moral panic to leave the genocide undisturbed”.  The topic was timely and essential, but for me, it raised another issue, a political reality that is utterly ignored, one that deals with the fact that the relevant political division today is not between right and left, or between liberals and progressives versus conservatives, but between Deep State minions and tools, and the populists who oppose them.  Two definitions are essential in understanding the foregoing, the definition of what we mean when we use the terms “Deep State” and “populists”.

The Deep State is an informal but profound alliance between the military industrial complex (against which president Dwight David Eisenhower warned us in November of 1960); the intelligence agencies of the United States, the United Kingdom and the State of Israel, plus their counterparts in diverse NATO member states; the traditional mass media in the United States and in US allies; the Democratic Party; and, traditionalist members of the Republican Party such as the Bush Family, the Cheney family, the McCain family and their political allies.  The Deep State has riddled the federal government at all levels with moles, i.e. unelected bureaucrats, especially in the Department of Justice and its state and local level analogues, and throughout the federal judiciary; moles who carry out the orders of their billionaire masters rather than those of the people we elect to run our government, unless, of course, those interests coincide.  Populists, from both the left and the right wings of the political spectrum, are individuals and organizations who believe deeply in democracy and liberty, but believe that the formal governmental institutions responsible for guaranteeing such concepts are inept and corrupt, and thus, they have little faith in the traditional political castes.

The Deep State manages to hold unto dictatorial power (i.e., control of legislative, executive, judicial, police and electoral functions) by keeping the populists divided based on fringe issues, most notably abortion and the right to bear arms, and by focusing attention on polarizing issues such as race, gender, sexual preferences, national origins, religion (and its absence) and the fake war on terror.  Under the Biden administration, the Deep State has criminalized the right to protest, unless, as in the case of the Black Lives Matter rights, the protests serve their domestic political aspirations.

It is obvious that the Deep state profoundly manipulated the 2018 congressional elections and the 2020 presidential elections and that such manipulation had a profound impacts on the results.  It is also at least possible and possibly likely, that the use of mass mail-in ballots without requiring the voters themselves to turn them in facilitated electoral fraud, possibly enough to have impacted the 2020 presidential election.  Many of those who protested those results, whether violently, peacefully or through the legal process have been subjected to the full weight of federal and state penal systems in clear violation of the most fundamental principles of what used to pass for democracy in the United States, and that includes not only Republicans, but independents and members of smaller political parties.  Many people who despised the GOP candidate in that election had no problem with the subversion of the civic rights involved as it helped their “team” to win, despite that such victory proved utterly hollow (where is health care for all, world peace, economic wellbeing, equity, equality, etc.?).  But now, in a sense, the precedents they applauded have come back to haunt at least some of them, actually, the very best among them.  I refer to the current police and legal attacks against students, faculty members and others who dare to protest against Israeli genocide.

As in the case of the Deep State machinations in the 2020 presidential elections, it is clear that the students, faculty members and others protesting against Israeli genocide have an existentially valid point.  Everything they demand involves what the Nuremburg trials following the second war to end all wars prohibited and sought to punish by invoking the death penalty against the leaders involved and forever outlawing their political movements, outlawing them everywhere, but that has not proved to be the case as neo-Nazis rule the Ukraine, with full Deep State support, as well as Israel.  And those who dare to point that out, to protest against it either violently, peacefully or through legal actions, find themselves persecuted, both civically and legally, with their futures placed in serious jeopardy, as is the case in the series of trials against protesters and critics of the results of the 2020 presidentai election.

It is profoundly ironic that the issues involved in both cases are so similar, while those involved feel that the two principle issues are completely different, and that the members of each group have nothing in common, when in reality, they are, in fact, so similar.  Each group is comprised of deeply committed individuals who profoundly believe in truth, justice and equity, and who are willing to risk their “lives, property and sacred honor”, a phrase once attributed to United States founding father Patrick Henry”, to see justice done.  They have a common enemy, the Deep State which adroitly manipulates them and uses each of the groups against the other in order to maintain the dictatorial power that permits it to abuse police at all levels and the penal laws such police and departments of justice are sworn to uphold, in order to continue the very profitable state of perpetual war, to continue to overthrow governments and to keep the truth under wraps, as it does, for example, though the imprisonment of one of the world’s only real journalist, Julian Assange.  All actions which maximize the profits and minimize the risks of the wealthiest and least honorable among us.

How ironic that Trump supporters, to whom it is obvious that he is being persecuted through abuse of power in order to prevent his return to power, and that the corporate media has made a mockery of the truth in order to assist in that process, trust that same media when it calumnies against those who oppose genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, deeming them domestic terrorists, the same label it applies to those who expressed their outrage at what they perceived to be massive electoral fraud, in their protests at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.  And how ironic that the students, faculty members and their supporters who are being subjected to high handed mass media and police abuse and abuse of legal processes to stifle their protests against obvious genocide, with tactics all too similar to those used against the s called January 6 terrorists, don’t realize that they not only have a commonality of interests in the legal process, but that many of their goals are compatible rather than antagonistic.

It is irony such as this, it is our own civic incoherence, which permits the worst among us to attain and maintain power, while the lives of the best and most courageous among us are destroyed.  Something for all of us to consider as we vote this November and to consider that there are at least five candidates running for president, not just two, and that many political parties and movements are fielding candidates for the Senate and the House of Representatives, not just two.  And that the same is true at the state and local levels.  And that the only wasted votes are those we decline to cast for the things in which we believe and which we instead cast based on induced fears and in support of purportedly lesser evils.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, an intermittent commentator on radio and television, and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.