Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

For the past eight years, up until last week, the official line from the legacy media was that the suggestion of the existence of a “Deep State” was a “conspiracy theory.”

Via New York Times:

“As America closes in on a major election, mistrust is brewing around the mysterious government entity that’s now denounced in scary-sounding terms — ‘the deep state’ and ‘the swamp.’ What do those words even mean? Who exactly do they describe?

We went on a road trip to find out. As we met the Americans who are being dismissed as public enemies, we discovered that they are … us. They like Taylor Swift. They dance bachata. They go to bed at night watching ‘Star Trek’ reruns. They go to work and do their jobs: saving us from Armageddon.

Sure, our tax dollars pay them, but as you’ll see in the video above, what a return on our investment we get!

When we hear ‘deep state,’ instead of recoiling, we should rally. We should think about the workers otherwise known as our public servants, the everyday superheroes who wake up ready to dedicate their careers and their lives to serving us. These are the Americans we employ. Even though their work is often invisible, it makes our lives better.

But if Donald Trump is re-elected and enacts Schedule F, that could change. He would have the power to eviscerate the so-called deep state and replace our public servants with people who work for him, not us.”

In a tandem video coupled with the above article, the Newspaper of Record went out of its way to redefine the Deep State as a do-gooder band of mid-level EPA, NASA, and NHS paper-pushers and engineers who love Pilates and Star Trek and just want to save the peasants from existential asteroids and lead-contaminated water. (No mention, oddly, of the neurotoxic fluoride the government dumps in the water supply; I suppose we’ll be waiting a while for a Deep State Hero to save the day on that front.)

Yesterday the Deep State was a domestic terrorist Deplorable fantasy, probably racist or transphobic or whatever; today, it’s established fact, re-defined as something totally different from its original meaning, and it’s awesome.

This is how these narrative rollouts generally work:

First, the corporate state media simply ignores inconvenient narratives/facts that don’t comport with its own tall tales. The vast, vast majority of official narrative-setting is comprised of what the media doesn’t cover; if it doesn’t get reported on, it simply doesn’t exist in the minds of loyal viewers.

Failing that, if the genie can’t be kept in the bottle, the corporate state media moves on to censorship. This includes, as we learned definitively from The Twitter Files reporting, explicitly or implicitly threatening social media and independent media platforms to comply with demands to suppress or eliminate verboten information — which often, in the case of social media, means threatening to invoke the “nuclear option” of revoking Section 230, which would make these platforms legally liable as “publishers” for all information users disseminate through these media, effectively mandating censorship as a tool of survival.

The next step on the escalation ladder is targeting and smearing individuals and organizations that propagate verboten narratives with civil lawfare, de-platforming, de-banking, and even criminal prosecution. We saw this with the Canadian truckers, the leaders of which had their access to the banking system cut off indefinitely by the state.

The last step is capitulation and reframing in the service of damage control. This is reserved for narratives that won’t die because they are too patently true and the disseminators of them are too many and too dedicated to ever suppress in totality — as also happened in the case of COVID-19 and the so-called “pandemic amnesty” pleas that the Public Health™ authorities began issuing once the damage of lockdowns, forced masking, and forced injections became undeniable.

Related: As Lies Exposed, Lockdown Left Pleads for ‘Pandemic Amnesty’

Ignore, silence, deny and smear, then reframe, minimize, and off-load guilt.

All that to say: I suspect we’ve arrived at the last step in the Deep State narrative: it is becoming increasingly manifest that an entrenched, permanent bureaucracy — with the intent and capability to subvert the popular will — actually runs the state, irrespective of whoever occupies the White House at any given time; electoral politics is mostly a game of Kabuki Theatre to keep the Democracy™ façade viable.

Related: ‘War Is Peace’: MSNBC Claims (Again) That Voting Is Anti-Democratic

And it’s only going to become more manifest as it goes to work this year in an all-out effort to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, simply because he’s somewhat less predictable than the permanent bureaucracy would prefer.

Accordingly, it’s minimization and obfuscation and rebranding season for the Deep State.

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

Follow his stuff via Substack. Also, keep tabs via Twitter.

For hip Armageddon Prose t-shirts, hats, etc., peruse the merch store.

Support always welcome via insta-tip jar.