by James Corbett
TheInternationalForecaster.com
January 5, 2016

It goes by many names: The shadow government. The deep state. The secret team. Whatever it is called, the idea is simple: there is an unelected, unaccountable, largely unknown group behind the facade of the visible government that wields power and works toward long-term agenda goals no matter which political party or puppet politician holds office.

Long the domain of the dreaded “conspiracy theorist” community, the idea has surfaced here and there over the years. The JFK assassination has given rise to many inside accounts and outside exposés of The Secret Team. The Iran-Contra scandal led to a Bill Moyers documentary on The Secret Government that is still worth watching 19 years later. It was even openly acknowledged that a “shadow government” had kicked into operation on 9/11.

But an odd phenomenon has taken place in recent years and intensified in recent months: the idea of a “deep state” or a “shadow government” controlling politics, even in the US, is becoming mainstream.

It has graced the cover of any number of recent books, including “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry” and “The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government.”

It has found its way into the online political media from both the left (Salon) and the right (The American Conservative) ends of the controlled political spectrum.

It has been invoked by mainstream financial analysts to describe the actions of the Federal Reserve.

It has been revisited by Bill Moyers on his website.

It has found its way into the headlines of The Boston Globe (“Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change“) and The New York Times (“America’s ‘Establishment’ Has Embraced ‘Deep States’“).

Heck, it has even been talked about on the World Bank’s blog.

This onslaught of attention begs the question: why now? Why are so many mainstream outlets suddenly shining a light on something that has barely been acknowledged in the past?

To be sure, some of this recent coverage is a whitewash, as you would expect. The World Bank blog, for instance, pawns the concept off as something to be found in “newish democracies” in “Latin America, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and so on,” i.e., not in the West. This qualification–that the “deep state” idea is something only to be found in foreign, backwards polities–harkens back to the origins of the phrase. The term “deep state” itself is a translation of a Turkish phrase, derin devlet, that rose to prominence after the Susurluk incident exposed the Turkish secret government and its NATO/Gladio/drug running/terrorist associations. It has become increasingly allowable for opinion makers in the MSM to cite the Turkish or the Egyptian “deep state” as a real phenomenon (or at least a real possibility) while simultaneously deriding the possibility that it exists in the West.

However in recent years researchers like Peter Dale Scott have developed and expanded the concept to explain how Western political institutions function. This seems to have been picked up by people like Mike Lofgren, a retired Congressional staffer who has described how the American deep state involves a cross-party consensus on key political issues, or Philip Giraldi, the former intelligence agent whose recent musings on the American deep state received copious attention from the mainstream press.

One way to look at this development is as an extension of a phenomenon that I noted several years ago: a process of indoctrination that has begun to inform the public that there is a shadowy elite in control of the world stage and prepare them to accept that fact. Nearly a decade ago Kissinger mini-me David Rothkopf came out with his book “Superclass” revealing the group of 6,000 or so non-state actors with the ability to enact policies and further agendas across state lines. Since that time a remarkable number of conspiracies-that-dare-not-be-mentioned from the CFR to the Bilderberg Group to the Bohemian Grove are now banal political talking points. Whereas mainstream radio hosts once played Twilight Zone music when callers tried to discuss the CFR, now Hillary Clinton blithely admits that the State Department receives marching orders from them; whereas the Bilderberg Group was once subject to a complete media blackout, it now has its own website and press releases.

But again: why now?

Partly this has to be due to the fact that in the post-9/11, post-Iraq, post-bailout, post-Hope and Change world, it has become impossible to maintain the illusion that it is the political front men who are running the show. No one believes this lie anymore, and it shows.

Even scientific studies are now demonstrating that the United States is not run by political parties but by pockets of special interest.

Truly the conspiracy toothpaste is out of the tube and there’s no point in trying to put it back. While in many ways this represents the crowning achievement of the tireless efforts of generations of conspiracy researchers who have toiled in relative obscurity, it is not an unmitigated good. As we will see in the 2016 prospective this weekend, the revelation of the ruling elite coincides with a meltdown of social cohesion that is giving rise to dark forces that portend a very tumultuous year.

In the meantime, I’m interested in your thoughts on this subject. Why do you think the “deep state” idea is being taken up in the mainstream now? Do you think there is a strategy to these revelations or is it a rearguard effort to whitewash the undeniable? Corbett Report members are invited to leave your comments below.