The purpose of the United States government changed, almost imperceptibly at first but now with flashing red lights.
There is a very bright fellow by the name of Mike Benz. I had never heard of him before I saw an interview Tucker Carlson had with him. After that, I watched several of his more recent lectures/presentations. Benz focuses on the history of the administrative and intelligence states. While the U.S. was taking over South American countries and installing fruit companies to run them already in the 19th century (thus, “banana republics”), the major change to the focus of the U.S. government came around 1948. George Keenan, the famous author of the “X” memo on how to contain the Soviet Union, authored a secret memo on the need for political war against America’s enemies. His broad view of how to keep America safe and advance her interests meant using everything from media to U.S. aid and “dirty tricks” to keep foreign governments as friendly to U.S. interests as possible. $250 million was spent to make sure that the communists did not win the 1951 Italian elections. Even the Pope was recruited to excommunicate communists.
The arrangements involving the CIA, CIA-run media companies and even supposedly innocuous bodies like Voice of America and USAID continued from the times of Truman forward: advance U.S. interests but keep plausible deniability available if discovered. There were ebbs and flows, as during the 1970s when Congress began to look at covert U.S. actions and did not like what it found. Jimmy Carter fired one-third of the CIA staff in one night and was hated by the intelligence community. Ronald Reagan restored much of what had been either lost or tamped down, and the great success of the program was the demise of the Soviet Union without a direct full-scale war to make it happen. The intelligence monster seemed to be justified as the final result was what the U.S. had wanted since the early days of the cold war: the end of communism in Europe.
After the fall of the Soviet empire, the intelligence agencies should have become consumed with budding Islamist terror organizations. It was harder to penetrate these closed groups and we oftentimes did not understand their way of thinking. Their near-backwards ways often made advanced satellite and signals intelligence useless. The failures leading up to 9/11 and the attacks that day showed that the same intelligence apparatus that could take apart a regime with thousands of nuclear warheads could not stop Mujahideens with a plan.
The unique feature of Benz’s presentations comes much closer to our period. There is something called “democracy” that the vast intelligence network run out of the State Department was set up to protect. When the Soviets were the clear threat to said democracy, the U.S. could support those opposed to Soviet rule and use propaganda, bribes, and covert military action to weaken the greatest threats to the U.S. and more generally the West. But what happens when this massive Robocop-type structure determines that the enemy is not some external threat but comes from within? The Tea Party movement that sprang up during the Obama administration was the first taste of a new populist movement. Its energy continued in the form of Donald Trump coming down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015. His surprise victory the following year was a direct threat to the entire apparatus that had been set up to protect the U.S. from foreign threats. He and others like Orban in Hungary and Bolsonaro in Brazil were considered extreme threats to the system as they threatened to change it or take it apart. “Democracy” as defined by a near uniparty in which Republicans and Democrats are all in for foreign wars and big business interests needed to be protected from this populist virus. And thus, all of the levers of state, once wielded against our external enemies, were focused internally on Donald Trump and his supporters.
Because President Trump had the power to shut down or significantly change the workings at the CIA, FBI, State, the Department of Justice (DoJ), etc., he was considered no less an enemy than the Soviets two generations earlier. When one listens to Benz, a lot of what’s going on today makes sense. You hear endless shrieks about Trump being a threat to democracy, even though during his four years in office, he took no action that could be considered to be unconstitutional. Even though he railed against the 2020 election, he left office on time. The FBI opened a nonsense “Russian interference” investigation. Democrats in Congress impeached Trump not once but twice. General Milley stated publicly that he had told his Chinese counterpart that he would give the latter a heads-up if Trump planned any military action against China. Members of the permanent bureaucracy gloated how they did not do what Trump had legally commanded them to do. The Congress did its all to prevent completion of a wall on the southern border.
The concept of “democracy” that needed saving from the Soviet Union was turned into a pretzel to mean an amalgam of Democrats, media personalities, billionaires, corporations, Hollywood types, and the military. Donald Trump and his supporters, in wishing to continue the direction of the country pre-2012—when Obama’s IRS intentionally worked against Tea Party nonprofits to help the incumbent retain power—needed to be stopped. Thus, a lot of what goes on makes sense. It does not matter if the candidate is old Joe Biden or clueless Kamala Harris: the system needs to win and whoever is on top must be the one who appears more likely to win. Even now, we see a government on auto-pilot. Joe is showing advanced symptoms of dementia, his wife runs cabinet meetings, and Harris does not want to take Joe’s job so as not to be burdened by all of the failures of their joint administration. Election rules are bent, identification is optional, voting times are widely expanded, and absentee ballots are offered to all: whatever gives a better chance of keeping the status quo and leaving Trump and his populist movement shut out is considered OK. Thus, news organizations can give the Harris people questions prior to debates (as they did for Hilary Clinton). Google can make the Trump assassination attempt disappear from search results. A decrepit president can be swapped out via a process never before heard of in the U.S.: Pelosi, et al. told Biden that he was finished, even though he held 14 million primary votes and Harris had none. Anything that can keep Trump away from the White House is kosher, however unseemly, illegal, immoral or potentially lethal.
Democracy, Inc. is in self-preservation mode. In 2016, a confident Barack Obama said that there was no way Donald Trump could be elected. Then he won and became a threat to the system. In 2020, new voting procedures suddenly caused relatively small states four days to determine the winner, and all of them went from Trump-leaning on election night to Biden winning by the end of the week. In 2024, the Secret Service nearly let Trump get killed through a series of blunders. The DOJ helpfully released a part of the more recent attempted assassin’s manifesto in which he offers $150,000 to anyone who actually kills Trump. The blob that George Kennan helped to create feels threatened, and it is using every tool and trick at its disposal to make Donald Trump and his populist supporters disappear. They are a threat to their power and their control of the country’s direction (trans, DEI, open borders, international weakness, etc.). They will do everything they can to make sure that Trump never again becomes president, though he did not prosecute his political enemies or engage in any illegal activity when in office.
Donald Trump needs to win and clean up Washington if the U.S. is to continue as a constitutional republic and not just a plaything for the rich and connected. Recently, the Harris camp has trotted out a letter signed by no less than 741 former military leaders and intelligence wizards, all saying that Kamala is the one to choose. These are the people who see Republicans and not Iran, China or uncontrolled immigration as the greatest threats to America’s future. Some of them lied to the American public and signed the letter claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was the work of Russian disinformation.
The intelligence blob and the permanent government have become too powerful and are acting against the actual interests of the American people. The time has come to clip their wings during a second Trump presidency and return the government to the people.