Exposing the Personnel of the Military Corporate State, Part One of Two: The Democratic play and the players who move it
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted here with permission.
In a recent report, Restoration News revealed the ways that America's military corporate operators are securing their positions by twisting Donald Trump's public peace agenda to their advantage. This is a repeat almost to the letter of how the military corporate apparatus handled the second term of Trump's peace-focused predecessor, Ronald Reagan. But there is a new wrinkle this time as the play is being run. Democrats are seeding directly into electoral politics a phalanx of operators who made their careers inside the deep state.
In July, Restoration News reported on the two most prominent of these politicos: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin and Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, ex-CIA agents operating in plain sight. But the play reaches much wider and deeper, to more subtle operators with quieter agendas: U.S. Representatives from New York and California Pat Ryan and Jimmy Panetta as well as the new Mayor of San Antonio, America's seventh most populous city, Gina Ortiz Jones.
Ryan, Panetta, and Jones have run successful campaigns predicated on local ties, commitments to "good government," and social issues dear to their bases while relying for their funding and support on powerful military corporate entities whose hold on power they never challenge. They are, in many ways, a microcosm of the Democratic Party in the Age of Trump: Not bent on reforming the deep state but on using its support to gain office to then keep the balance of power the same.
Moderate Liberals Tread Water for the Military Corporate State at Home…
Pat Ryan began his political career in 2018 with a run for Congress; he was part of the slate of intelligence officers who ran that year explicitly to combat the threat to the intelligence apparatus's autonomy posed by President Trump. Ryan narrowly lost the race, was elected the Executive of Ulster County New York in 2019, won a special election in the same New York congressional district he had competed for in 2018 in 2022, then won a general election later that year in a new district based on redistricting, and was re-elected in 2024. In Congress, he assumed positions on the Committee on Armed Services and on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. He is part of, among others, the Congressional Equality Caucus; the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force; the Monopoly Busters Caucus; and the New Democrat Coalition. This last acts as a vehicle for "re-centering" the Democratic Party to favor tech corporatism, monopoly finance and foreign intervention along the lines that Bill Clinton did in 1992. Probably his most successful bill has been the "Expanding Home Loans for Guard and Reservists Act", which passed along bipartisan lines.
From his recent CV, Ryan appears to be a small city Democrat focused on defense and social issues who is also committed to cleaning up government. This is certainly how Ryan portrays himself. His website emphasizes that he is a fifth-generation resident of Ulster County. Elsewhere he speaks of "Patriotic populism" and emphasizes breaking up big tech companies—an alliance with Democrats more to his Left. But his CV before 2018 suggests something very different.
He served as an Army intelligence officer from 2004 to 2009, then parlayed this into a position as deputy director of a subcontractor for the defense-tech company Palantir. He went on to serve as vice president of the AI platform Dataminr, a CIA-backed social media tracking company which has been on the radar of national security watchdogs like the investigative website The Intercept since at least 2020 for tracking protests via social media for the LAPD, NYPD, FBI, and DoD. Emails from Dataminr during Ryan’s time there obtained by The Intercept show Dataminr avidly courting the LAPD for a contract to provide the police information on protests before they happened. Other emails also obtained by The Intercept show Ryan, during his time at the Palantir subcontractor, strategizing about surveilling and digitally attacking a labor union which was in negotiations with one of the subcontractor's clients:
[Ryan's] proposal initially included steps to track the online activities of chamber critics using Palantir's powerful data analytics tools. The proposal also included a plan to counter the most vocal critics by planting a "false document" and creating "fake insider personnas [sic]"…
Ryan also advises New Politics, the nonprofit which, as Restoration News has reported in the past, seeds former intelligence officers into politics with the backing of major security-defense and corporate players. These military corporate connections appear to be the real basis of Ryan's political support. In 2018, "Palantir executives and employees [were] among Ryan's largest campaign donors, having collectively donated $33,400." In 2024, three of Ryan's top five donors in the 2024 cycle were security or security consulting-focused: AIPAC, Palantir, and Bain Capital (the management consulting company which contracts with American military beneficiaries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).
…And Support its Ventures Abroad
Akin to Ryan, in both substance and style, is Jimmy Panetta, a former deputy district attorney for Monterey County, California. Jimmy Panetta is the son of and holds the congressional seat once held by Leon Panetta: The former White House chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, and CIA director and Secretary of Defense for President Obama. And Panetta Jr. is a veteran of Naval Intelligence who serves on the Budget and Ways and Means Committee. He is also a member, like Pat Ryan, of the New Democrat Coalition.
Jimmy Panetta's political backers come from the world of national security conquered by his father. At least three of Panetta's top five donors have links to the Pentagon or to foreign nations reliant on America's military, beginning with AIPAC, his top donor. There is also Apollo Global Management, which both benefits from Pentagon spending via its deals with smaller Pentagon contractors and has links via its founder, Jeffrey Epstein funder and confidante Leon Black, to the Pentagon's most reliable client, Israel. And there is an "independent and connected" company of the risk-mitigation firm Aon, which has dealings in countries under America's security blanket including Costa Rica, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, and is none too careful about how it invests in them. (Among other controversies, it has run afoul of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.)
Panetta, probably not coincidentally, has become known as one of the most ardent Democratic champions of funding for wars abroad, especially Ukraine, and he has won an award from Ukraine's Parliament for "services to the Ukrainian people." He co-sponsored two pieces of recent legislation to streamline sales of weaponry and sales of drones to foreign nations. But, like Ryan, Panetta hides his priorities adroitly. Many of the pieces of legislation he introduces are notably non-military ("the Retirement Simplification and Clarity Act"; "Taxpayer Protection and Preparer Proficiency Act of 2024"). This creates an interesting illusion of a purportedly "moderate" politician interested in the "nuts and bolts" of government even as he relies for funding on military corporate interests. Sometimes this reliance surfaces, as with Panetta's vote against a measure in 2022 to curb anticompetitive behavior by corporations. But, as of now, Panetta, like Ryan, is running his military corporate operation effectively under the radar.
Progressive Liberals Use Identity Politics to Mask a Military Corporate Play…
Equally under the radar is Gina Ortiz Jones, who ran for Congress along with Ryan and lost in 2018, lost again in 2020, and in 2025 won the election for Mayor of San Antonio, her hometown, on a progressive platform "to expand early-childhood education to more children and increase affordable housing and work programs for unskilled workers." Jones also campaigned on her pro-LGBTQ+ and anti-gun stands: She is, the New York Times reported, "the first openly gay leader of the seventh-largest city in the country." So far, so local and progressive—but a closer look at Jones's career shows that it actually represents something else.
Her career began, in her own telling, "as an intelligence officer in the Air Force and deployed to Iraq." She then "advised on military operations in Latin America while working at Fort Sam Houston, and joined the Defense Intelligence Agency as an inaugural member of U.S. Africa Command supporting missions across the continent." In 2021, after her two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress, she was appointed by President Biden to be under-secretary of the Air Force. Jones held the position at a time when corporate-bureaucratic bloat had set off a chain reaction of undermanned bases, unprepared pilots, and tragic crashes—trends Restoration News reported on at the start of this year. Her decampment to San Antonio after this unsuccessful tenure might seem like a strategic change of scenery, but there is more of a continuity between San Antonio and Northern Virginia than meets the eye.
In an interview before she was elected with the Boston University student newspaper The BU COMmunicator, now not accessible but viewed several times in the past two months by Restoration News, Jones took care to note that "[San Antonio is] very proud of the fact that a lot of people in our community serve in the Army or in the Air Force or in the Navy. You don't see that really in other big cities." After her election, she and other representatives of what she calls "Military City" (San Antonio’s commonly used nickname) made a pilgrimage to Washington to work out the details of a Pentagon memo involving a merger of army bases that would move a small number of military jobs from San Antonio. This trip gave Jones, who regularly touts her military bona fides, a chance to use her expertise publicly on an issue of concern (the removal of jobs from Texas) to not just Texas Democrats but Texas Republicans like Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn. She brought the Pentagon a "target list" of "very specific" military assets that could be relocated to San Antonio: Command positions, contracting positions, and medical positions to "tap into [San Antonio's] world-class medical footprint."
In this context, the backing of Jones by powerful Democrats seems not like a heartwarming story of a local girl made good; it seems more like a strategic play to put into office someone on good terms with the Pentagon, from which San Antonio's wealth flows. And other facts specific to San Antonio suggest that, far from responsibly working with the Armed Forces to benefit her community, Jones will use the military's presence in the city to drive her own agenda.
…and Use the Trump Administration's Military Policies to Push their Own Agenda
According to reports by even Liberals sympathetic to the city's blue politics, San Antonio is "one of the country's most economically stratified, and one of the poorest." The city's poverty rate is at almost 18 percent, while the country's is 11. The percent of residents between 20 and 79 who have type 2 diabetes is 16 percent (the national average is 10 percent), which has set off what has been called "an amputation crisis" among the city's Latino men. And the city is sharply divided between rich and poor, making it even more reliant on its military bases. Past leaders of San Antonio have speculated that
with then four (now three) bases in the area, as well as the Brooke Army Medical Center and, later, various cyber warfare commands . . . [the military] could be used as a springboard for tech-based industries such as biomedicine and cybersecurity.
The taxes of military and military-adjacent employees are what, in this schema, will allow San Antonio to "grow." Specifically, they will allow Gina Ortiz Jones to push forward her spending on affordable housing and early childhood education, the purportedly progressive policies she ran on. But high-spending social programs that give a leader progressive credibility, supported by taxes from a narrow economic base, do not actually help residents attain economic stability. And San Antonio reporters and residents are well aware of this fact. According to one report:
Many of the [newly] available jobs [in San Antonio]—aerospace, cybersecurity, and financial services are highlighted alongside construction and warehouse work—do not fit the lower skill level of most San Antonio applicants . . . ."We grow simply to grow," [said one observer], "without questioning what that means and who benefits and who pays."
Military spending, in other words, is not a project for widespread prosperity or social reform or government spending, but it is being treated as such by Jones and her backers. And this is not just the case when it comes to promoting a tax base for progressive social programs. It is also the case when it comes to bringing military operations to San Antonio citizens via policing. According to one recent report,
San Antonio police plan to test out a network of city and private security cameras in downtown San Antonio, which could be monitored around the clock by both police and artificial intelligence. The city has been discussing the idea of an integrated camera network for months with Centro San Antonio, the nonprofit that oversees downtown operations.
The Silent Influence of Military Corporatism…
Ryan, Panetta, and Jones are not the only Democrats playing the military corporate game. Previous Restoration News reports have focused on presumptive Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger and U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin, who also come from the intelligence world; as well as on a Democratic cohort of rising military veterans who are well funded by the military corporate complex. These include New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill; U.S. Representative from Maine Jared Golden; and U.S. Representatives from Massachusetts Jake Auchincloss and Seth Moulton.
But Ryan, Panetta, and Jones are the subtlest players. Their intelligence work stays in the background, they are not actively dismissive of the Party's progressive wing, and their focus appears to be good government, the expansion of welfare, or liberal-progressive social reforms. In this sense they are a road map for the strategy Democrats will likely pursue in 2026 and 2028 (say, with the-ever-more-apparently-centrist presumed 2028 presidential frontrunner Gavin Newsom). They will emphasize good government, bipartisanship, and "patriotic populism" while running an agenda that quietly reinforces underlying military corporate power dynamics in Washington, D.C.
This suspicion is strengthened by a recent report from WIRED showing the machinations in 2025 of the Democratic nonprofit Chorus, which has been secretly paying progressive Democratic social media influencers to become its de facto employees while not disclosing the arrangement to the public:
According to copies of the contract viewed by WIRED, creators in the program must funnel all bookings with lawmakers and political leaders through Chorus. Creators also have to loop Chorus in on any independently organized engagements with government officials or political leaders.
…and the Liberal-Progressive Operators it Co-Opts
Chorus is administered by Arabella Advisors, the dark money Democratic group which is represented by the Elias Group, which in turn was instrumental in the "Russiagate" scandal of the 2010s. Arabella Advisors is funded, among others, by Mark Zuckerberg and (until recently) Bill Gates, both of whom have been putting extraordinary efforts into appealing to the Trump White House to secure Pentagon contracts, as Restoration News has reported in the past. Arabella's entry into the social media politics of purportedly progressive influencers via Chorus is hard to read as anything other than a military corporate effort to secretly control the Democratic Party's agenda so that it does not harm their bottom lines. Arabella's and Chorus's price for these influencers' selective silence is $8,000.00 a month, which is $96,000.00 in guaranteed income a year—which, in the uncertain world of social media, is a lottery win.
The influencers approached who said yes to Arabella's and Chorus's offer included "a public defender and reality TV star"; "an education creator with 1.4 million followers on TikTok"; and the host of "an independent progressive show on YouTube covering news and politics." These are content creators, in other words, who style themselves as experts on education or the law or as just plain independent voices, all of them closer to their audience than to structures of power—but who, unknown to their listeners, have been co-opted by money and authority.
This is a microcosm of the play being run on voters by Pat Ryan, Jimmy Panetta, and Gina Ortiz Jones, and it is also a microcosm for the Democratic Party they are helping shape: The smear of lipstick on the animal that is the deep state.