Will We See the Deep State Playbook Again in 2024?

The October 2020 Hunter Biden laptop letter was a classic operation, both in technique and personnel.

As of a few weeks ago, when the New York Times, 91 percent of whose core readers are Democrats, ran an op-ed video titled “It turns out the ‘deep state’ is actually kind of awesome,” both sides of our political divide acknowledged the deep state’s existence. But they differ sharply about what it actually is. For Republicans, it’s arbitrary bureaucrats enacting policies that limit people’s freedom. For Democrats, it’s the real-life model for the series Parks and Recreation or Space Force, where decent administrators use the government to serve Americans. 

This second model might be more convincing were it not for the fact that, at its upper echelons, the deep state has created a group of Washington-based operators very different from the Parks and Recreation cohort: powerful people working behind-the-scenes to affect policy through connections to debt-funded defense and domestic administrative agencies and their corporate, university, nonprofit, and media outgrowths. These operators’ moves are subtle and hard to trace, predicated not on overt “power plays” but on more modern techniques for control: the manipulation of language and the dissemination of narratives. 

The last time these operators tipped their hand to the public was October 2020, after the New York Post released a report about Hunter Biden’s business activities: an “October Surprise” that could have cost Joe Biden the presidency. The operators’ response to this report has been memorialized by critics with the shorthand “spies who lie,” and there is widespread agreement that it diminished President Trump’s re-election chances. Yet the strategies behind it have yet to be fully examined and linked to a 50-year run of tactics, which, this election year, these operators might use again. 

Read more at The American Conservative.