The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect | Hacker News Reader

The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect

theintercept.com

37 pointsbainsfather18 comments

I noticed something similar. In that there is a lot conspiracy theory being thrown at Trump. In the past the establishment would've kept quiet even if they knew something. This sort of politics is dangerous and polarizing. But it seems as if the elite don't know what else to do. Maybe they are hoping they can impeach him.

Tump's refusal to do things such as releasing tax returns to prove no conflicts of interests exists fuels the conspiracies, not some political elite plot to undermine him.

And the conspircy theories are not unique to Trump: Obama had calls of being a Muslim, born outside of the US and worse. The current alt-right partially believe in a child trafficking pizza parlor.

It was not the political elite calling Obama a Muslim, it was the fringe. This is different. You could argue that Obama not releasing his Birth Certificate until 2011 only fueled the fringe, but it was the fringe. In this case the official opposition is making claims and not backed up by any real evidence. Just claims made by anonymous sources. I meant I could concoct a document like that in a few months. Without any real evidence it's really a conspiracy theory, nothing more. Just because it comes from a former official, does not mean shit. There have been officials that have mouthed off about conspiracies before, they are completely ignored.

Anyone has a good reason not to release private documents like your tax returns if you are doing business. It could be used by numerous sources to attack you. You don't want to open yourself up to that kind of liability, ever... just to please some people who don't like you and never will like you.

> It was not the political elite calling Obama a Muslim, it was the fringe.

It included Trump. For years.

> In this case the official opposition is making claims and not backed up by any real evidence. Just claims made by anonymous sources.

The document you're referring was compiled during the Republican primary and election. It wasn't compiled after he was elected. It being finally leaked because it's circulated for months with no one willing to print it is evidence against an elite conspiracy against Trump, not for.

> Without any real evidence it's really a conspiracy theory, nothing more.

No one is arguing otherwise.

> Anyone has a good reason not to release private documents like your tax returns if you are doing business. It could be used by numerous sources to attack you. You don't want to open yourself up to that kind of liability, ever.

Though I appreciate you not using Trump's official line of being audited by the IRS prohibiting him from releasing his tax returns, this claim is curious because other nominees running for president have all released their tax returns, many of them also businessmen.

> You could argue that Obama not releasing his Birth Certificate until 2011 only fueled the fringe

If you ignore the fact that his official birth certificate was released in 2008; what was released in 2011 was the internal record stored at the Department of Health which Obama could not himself release.becaise he did not have access to, as the Department did not, by policy, release.such records to anyone, with or without the consent of the subject, and the continuing controversy was itself the basis for the exception which Obama asked the department to make to release it.

You're kinda right, it was Donald Trump with the loudest megaphone on that one.

this piece seems to be conflating the more measured reporting from the mainstream press with the careless (and criticized) dump by BuzzFeed (and throwing in some cheering liberals for good measure). Trump did the same thing at the news conference. In his case it was a tactic to hand-waive away the entire news industry as fake.

i get the article's point, but i think we need to be very precise lest we stumble right into Trump's narrative (he and his team are clearly very good at this)

A UK view here. The Guardian newspaper had this [0] on their front page yesterday [1]. I would not call it measured reporting.

In contrast the FT and Economist were much more measured - they presumably still care about their reputation for sober reporting. It's a poor state when the financial/business press is what I must read to find the truth on this topic.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/10/fbi-chief-gi... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2017/jan/11

> conflating the more measured reporting from the mainstream press with the careless (and criticized) dump by BuzzFeed

I'd say it is using the former to criticize the latter. Will you expand on the analysis that informs your interpretation?

This is a seriously terrible headline. 1. "Deep State" Is this a vague meme he's forcing? 2. "goes to war" is this what war looks like, or even considerable effort?

How is this headline not clickbait? Analogy "Evil thing which doesn't really exist does extreme crazy thing to President-Elect"

What did you think of the article?

About the headline - it does summarise what the article is about. I doubt anyone clicked through expecting tank battles between Trump and the CIA.

'deep state' seems to be a variant on 'state within a state' or maybe 'military-industrial complex' the latter a meme 'forced' on us by Eisenhower.

This is the kind of damaging presupposition that is the definition of Russian information warfare (disinformation)...

What's the deep state? Does it include a deep judicial branch? Is there a deep military? Where's the deep congress? To assume a cabal of mutinous member of an organization that are hard to find (deep, not surface), is inflammatory and should be have a higher bar.

If the CIA and the democrats colluded here, how is that either deep, or wide enough to be warrant be called the "state" ? We have specific names for these specific branches for a reason. The military is not the CIA, and is not the Democrats.

Who is more a member of the military industrial complex? A. Donald trump that wants to increase military spending. B. Everyone else.

If Russia didn't hack the DNC, and Rex Tillerson wasn't their pick, and Trump wasn't on Howard Stern getting called out on his Russian Hooker usage in 2001, and he had a blind trust, and he released his tax returns, and wasn't a birther, and didn't have trump steaks, airline, university, the art of the deal he didn't write, and like to invite your wife furniture shopping with tictacs in hand, then people wouldn't care about anonymously sourced reports.

Listen to president himself speaking about taking a guys girlfriend from him, like a piece of property, while getting called out on his Russian ties in 2001: http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/314891/trump-russia-girls-ho...

p.s. Panama Leaks reveals Rex Tillerson was director of Bahamas-based US-Russian oil firm, and didn't the FBI help him get elected via Comey? Are we in upside down world?

"This is the kind of damaging presupposition that is the definition of Russian information warfare (disinformation)"

Apparently I have just defined Russian information warfare? (Will you inform the Russians, or should I?)

I'm afraid you have lost me, was that a reply or should it be a new comment?

The presupposition that I'm referring to is that there is a "deep state." It is similar to a lawyer asking if you've stopped beating your wife. If you say no, you lose. If you say yes, you lose. Because you accepted the frame, or premise of the question.

Thus frame control and accepting presuppositions is a dangerous game. It is also how you win the war of disinformation. Nearly any event, honest or not, can be spun through framing to appear crappy. Example. "Hey honey, I love that dress you're wearing." "What, you didn't like my last dress? Why don't you always complement me like that? I bet you'd like this dress better on my sister. You're only saying that because you didn't take out the garbage."

So a simple complement can be converted by framing, into an act of confession. If you've never studied forum sliding or all the other tricks the Russians use every day with 100's of paid internet propagandists spreading their message, it's harder to see.

Why Glen Greenwald would be using such tactics is quite beyond me. You would think that an honest journalist would put front and center who the likely humans are in this deep cabal of evil doers, or at least get us as close as he could. But he doesn't. So this piece must have some other goal, if not to expose the cabal. What it is, I am not sure.

So as much as I'd love to ignore the headline, and tell you what I thought of the article separate from it, there's not much else interesting there. Except for the doublespeak.

Sorry if it sounded like I was calling your post disinformation. Was only addressing the article.

disinformation guide: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

Accepting the frame that there is a "deep state" without requisite evidence is harmful to critical thinking. Thinking that Trump is being screwed by the Industrial military complex, instead of being their man, is reversed. Thinking the CIA screwed Trump somehow here, while the FBI hooked him up, is also cloudy. I thought leaks could happen by single people, why is it an entire "deep state" organization?

I would say that the accusation of a "deep state" is more inflammatory than Trump having hookers pee on each other or him. I'd prefer a world of watersports to shadow governments.

Right. Orange is the new black. Liberals are a threat to democracy. Putin's the good guy. Trump's a victim.

Your response seems to imply you missed the major points of the article:

"[...] there is no bigger favor that Trump opponents can do for him than attacking him with such lowly, shabby, obvious shams, recruiting large media outlets to lead the way. When it comes time to expose actual Trump corruption and criminality, who is going to believe the people and institutions who have demonstrated they are willing to endorse any assertions no matter how factually baseless, who deploy any journalistic tactic no matter how unreliable and removed from basic means of ensuring accuracy?"

Greenwald, who has been a consistent and vociferous critic of Trump, is arguing that falling in line with the CIA is as big a mistake for the left now as it was back in '03 when they lied us into the Iraq War. The CIA is not your friend, and there are much more effective and powerful ways to handle Trump's obvious corruption:

"Beyond that, the threat posed by submitting ourselves to the CIA and empowering it to reign supreme outside of the democratic process is — as Eisenhower warned — an even more severe danger. The threat of being ruled by unaccountable and unelected entities is self-evident and grave. That’s especially true when the entity behind which so many are rallying is one with a long and deliberate history of lying, propaganda, war crimes, torture, and the worst atrocities imaginable.

[...]

There are solutions to Trump. They involve reasoned strategizing and patient focus on issues people actually care about. Whatever those solutions are, venerating the intelligence community, begging for its intervention, and equating their dark and dirty assertions as Truth are most certainly not among them. Doing that cannot possibly achieve any good, and is already doing much harm."

The Democrats are a threat to our democracy. Less so than Republicans, but still. One only need to see the deregulation under Bill Clinton, the war machines of Clinton and Obama, the explosive growth of the surveillance state, the war on whistleblowers, and hell - even how Democrats manage their own primaries by rigging townhalls, the party itself treating it's own candidates unfairly, and having a system of super-delegates in place just in case all else fails. So quit acting like they are somehow sacrosanct.

The article never stated Trump is a victim - in fact, it advocates opposing him.

The article never claimed Putin was a good guy.

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