Constitution
Deep State Diaries
Seven months ago, America First Legal (AFL) – no stranger to legal controversy – took the Department of Homeland Security to court. Two months earlier, that Department had formed a Homeland Intelligence Experts Group, ostensibly tasked with finding politically motivated murderers and/or saboteurs operating within the United States. A mission like that would naturally evoke memories of suspected “Fifth Column” activity during the Second World War. But this group had a mission straight out of movies like Fahrenheit 451: to spy on Americans and detect dissidents. Toward the beginning of last months, AFL announced victory: the Department had to shut down the Homeland Intelligence Group. But the game did not end there. Now AFL is releasing the Deep State Diaries, now in their fourth installment. The reading is even more chilling than the Twitter Files ever could have been.
Origin of the Deep State Diaries
Again: in September of 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) formed the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group (HIEG). Its ostensible mission: “to provide advice and perspectives on intelligence and national security efforts.” But why homeland intelligence? Even at its most charitable, such a group and mission proceeds from the tired assumption of governments everywhere. Which is: private subjects (or “citizens”) are not qualified to detect or defend against groups planning sabotage or mass murder. Such things are public hazards and require a public response.
But HIEG was worse. First, DHS formed it in violation of the Federal Advisory Committees Act. Second, SecHomeSec Alexander Mayorkas hand-selected its members and chose them for their partisanship. It had no former Trump Administration members – and at least two of them were among the fifty-one “intelligence professionals” who signed a letter denouncing the Hunter Biden Laptop as a Russian-planted fraud. These were John Brennan, former director of the CIA, and James Clapper, Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence.
Outraged, AFL sued the Department in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. They listed Ambassador Richard Grenell, former Acting Director of National Intelligence, as co-plaintiff. When they did, they dropped this thread:
The thread names a few other names, all with a history of almost-all Democrat political campaign contributions.
This so-called “Experts Group” is another example of partisan lawlessness at DHS. It is an effort by the Biden Admin to cover their tracks and obfuscate their ongoing efforts to censor the online political speech of Americans, maintain an open border, and target law enforcement at political opponents rather than criminals and illegal aliens.
A year ago, AFL had sued the Department of Education and won an injunction to shut down the equally partisan National Parents and Families Engagement Council.
Disbanding the group to dismiss the suit
On May 3, AFL triumphantly announced that DHS agreed to disband HIEG in order to dismiss the lawsuit. Why they folded their tent so abruptly, AFL did not speculate. But another part of the “Stipulation of Dismissal” was for DHS to turn over all internal HIEG documents to AFL.
This thread reviews the material in the thread announcing the lawsuit. It also includes a letter from Senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), and Roger Marshall (R-Kansas). That letter demanded rescission of all appointments to HIEG. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) separately demanded disbanding HIEG, as did Reps. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) and August Pfluger (R-Texas). Rep. Pfluger, as Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence, introduced a bill (H.R. 5729) to defund HIEG or any group like it.
The Deep State Diaries are the internal documents AFL wrung from DHS in their Stipulation of Dismissal.
Finally, on June 20, AFL released the first installment of the Deep State Diaries to Platform X.
Deep State Diaries – their true purpose
This installment revealed the true purposes of HIEG, which were to:
- Encourage Americans to report their dissident neighbors to federal agents, authorities, and officials, and:
- Reclassify political dissent as a public health hazard.
They proposed the second part to encourage mothers and former teachers to “come forward.” The phrase “public health catcher’s mitt” appears in one of the photographed documents.
When DHS announced HIEG, this group had already been meeting for four months. But in their September 2023 meeting, its members knew they had a problem. They had no credible mandate to encourage the cooperation of State or local officials. But those documents also reveal that “support” for this mission escalated after the January 6 Event. Even so, HIEG members knew that Americans didn’t like to tell on one another. They had seen this during the “See Something, Say Something” campaign after the Attacks on September 11, 2001.
That’s why they decided to couch the problem as a public health hazard. The public health hazard was mental – in other words, dissent from the government was a problem of paranoid ideation. Paranoid (literally, “beside one’s mind”) means believing that one is more important than he is – and a target.
And if that did not suffice, say the documents, the Group would turn to “corporate America.” That presumably includes customer data that large consumer-oriented corporations always collect on their customers.
We are domestic terrorists?
The next day, AFL released the second Deep State Diaries installment.
This relatively short thread reveals that DHS now considered supporters of President Trump to be domestic terrorists. Or at minimum, they were going to treat Trump supporters as such. In addition, DHS suspected active-duty or discharged military and “religious” people to be their enemies.
Once again, this is typical tyrannical boilerplate. It now begins to resemble Ned Young and Matt Rapf’s failed pilot, Shadow on the Land (1967). In that project, inner-city riots have led a panicked American populace to embrace the “Leadership” of a neo-Nazi regime. Or consider Blue Thunder (1983), featuring the deliberate fomenting of inner-city riots to justify creating an airborne SWAT force. Imagine helicopter gunships “restoring” order – in American cities.
Yesterday AFL released the third installment of the Deep State Diaries.
According to this, HIEG used two events that the government itself created to justify surveillance of political dissent. The first of these was, of course, the January 6 Event – which we can confidently regard as a false-flag pseudo-operation. That Event convinced many career analysts to accept political surveillance as necessary to good civil order. From that day forward, the FBI and other agencies cast aside all doubts about the scope of their authority.
Using the Mar-A-Lago Raid
And the second? That was the Mar-A-Lago Raid. We now know that the FBI “staged the scene” of the mess of “classified documents” on a floor. These documents show “concern” about a “violent reaction” to the raid.
They need never have worried – if they really did worry. Republicans are polite to a fault; Democrats are brazenly rude. Furthermore, many of their nominal constituents are as violent as they are rude. All the riots have been by Democrat nominal constituencies. Yet this group took no action in response to them. Nor did they respond to multiple shootings in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, Ill. And perhaps these spooks know this. What they really worried about was how to distinguish political hyperbole from real plans for sabotage or an armed strike.
Today AFL released their fourth installment, focusing on a favorite HIEG catch phrase: “quietly making democracy work.”
The documents in this fourth part reveal that these Deep State minions embraced their dubious distinction. They also specifically identified supporters of Donald Trump as domestic terrorists. Indeed they reveled in the initials “DT” which could stand either for “domestic terrorism” or for Donald Trump.
A far cry from The Washington Post’s longtime slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the Deep State now appears to claim that darkness and secrecy are necessary parts of “making democracy work.”
Analysis: the Deep State Diaries reveal paranoia
So now who are the paranoiacs? The trouble with spinning a narrative about your opponents indulging in paranoid ideation, is that you yourself start falling into paranoid ideation. That goes double when your actions, or the policies you support, induce paranoid thinking. (The difference is that, in this case, those who think they are targets, really are targets.)Such seems to be the case with these career intelligence types.
Indeed such has been one of two possible weaknesses of the security apparatuses of tyrannical governments everywhere. The other is that those whose stock-in-trade is live-action roleplay and similar fiction, can no longer tell fact from fiction. Neither can they really know whom they can trust.
No doubt some Americans remain who could never imagine that their government – of the people, by the people, and for the people, to quote Abraham Lincoln – was capable of such action as America First Legal reveals. That is, until today. But a certain civilization set the precedent for it thousands of years ago.
Historical perspective
Emperor Augustus, or so the late Colleen McCullough theorized, invented the concept of organized military espionage. He had “agents” in the camp of his target Marcus Junius Brutus, and also of his nominal ally, Mark Antony. This led to victory at Philippi, and eventually in Alexandria. But it also set the most dangerous precedent the United States ever inherited from the Roman Republic and Empire.
Most people look to the old Soviet Union with its Ministry – later Committee – for State Security. Or they look to Nazi Germany with its Gestapo and Schutzstaffel (SS). But this kind of spying has been with us at least since ancient Rome.
Another historical precedent should help make sense of the Deep State Diaries. Those who, like the Deep State, set out to ruin large numbers of lives, live in constant fear of their targets finding them out. That fear is now realized, and the evidence laid out here – with more to come – is all we need to know to tell us how we must vote. But Joe Biden seems unable even to plan to see to his bodily needs. Therefore this did not come from Joe Biden, and perhaps not even (originally) from Barack Obama. It comes from other, hidden authorities, who will simply discard their failed operatives and recruit new ones. Defeating them will require imagining doing for ourselves, what the Deep State promises to do for us – while doing it to us instead.
Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.
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