◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Deep State in Perspective: The Actual Reckoning In 1975 I did what no one had done before. I pulled back the curtain. The CIA. The FBI. The NSA. What they had done without authorization, without oversight, without accountability to the people they were supposed to serve. I put it in the congressional record. I named it. So when I tell you the deep state is real — I am not repeating a talking point. I am the source. But I want to be clear about something most people on either side refuse to say: The deep state is not a creature of the left or the right. It is what happens to any institution — intelligence agency or welfare office, military contractor or housing authority — when it is left long enough without accountability. It serves itself. Regardless of original purpose or who created it or how good the intentions were. That is the real critique. And I am here to make it — from both directions. The CIA plotted assassinations of foreign leaders — without presidential authorization, without oversight, without accountability to anyone. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover ran COINTELPRO — surveillance, harassment, disruption aimed at civil rights leaders, anyone Hoover decided was a threat to the order he had appointed himself to protect. They wiretapped Martin Luther King. They sent him a letter suggesting he kill himself. The NSA collected intelligence on American citizens without warrant, without law, without their knowledge. I said the NSA's capability could be turned on the American people — that the potential for tyranny lay within the apparatus — and the only protection was law, oversight, and vigilance. I was not wrong. And the same pathology ran through programs my own party built with genuine conviction. The housing projects built to lift people out of poverty became warehouses of concentrated despair, administered by bureaucracies more interested in their continuation than the people they served. The welfare system designed to catch people when they fell became rules so complex and degrading that it punished the behaviors — work, marriage, saving — it claimed to encourage. The regulatory agencies created to protect workers and consumers were captured by the industries they regulated — or became so encrusted with procedure they could not move. The Veterans Administration. The school bureaucracies consuming resources meant for classrooms in the management of themselves. Good intentions do not exempt an institution from the iron law that power, unaccountable, serves itself. That is not a conservative insight. That is not a liberal insight. Here is what is not true. That the answer is one man with the power to dismantle it all by decree. I did not expose the CIA so that a president could fire the inspectors general who catch the next CIA. I did not document COINTELPRO so that a president could build his own surveillance apparatus answerable only to him. The Church Committee's answer to unaccountable power was oversight. Law. Sunlight. The patient unglamorous work of making institutions answerable to the people they serve. Not dramatic demolition leaving nothing in its place except the power of the man doing the demolishing. Demolition is not reform. A man who dismantles oversight in the name of fighting the deep state is not fighting the deep state. He is becoming it. With one difference: The CIA, at its worst, served its own institutional interests. What is being built now serves one man's personal interests. That is not better. That is the thing I spent my life trying to prevent. I came from Idaho. I believed in the farmer who did not trust Washington and was not wrong not to trust it. The answer to Washington that could not be trusted was Washington made trustworthy — through law, through oversight, through the insistence that institutions serve the people they were created to serve. That is the work. Not the bonfire. The work. Share