deep state | Tom Mullen Talks Freedom

“Trump Ratchets Up Threats on the Media” reads a New York Times headline this morning. It refers to Trump’s suggestion that CBS should lose its broadcasting license over its editing of an answer Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris gave to a question during her recent 60 Minutes interview.

During the interview, Harris was asked pointedly whether the U.S. government has any sway over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu given the massive financial support it has given him in fighting Hamas. Based upon footage 60 Minutes released to Face the Nation, Harris responded with one of her signature word salads that failed to answer the question. However, what aired on the 60 Minutes broadcast was a succinct, one sentence answer that also failed to answer the question or really mean anything at all, but which made Harris appear less like the babbling nonentity her detractors say she is.

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Whether the edit was intended to help Harris or not is anyone’s guess. Of course, CBS denies its edit was misleading or so intended. And while Trump’s general complaint that the media treat him and his campaign with a completely different standard than they do Harris and hers, the 60 Minutes interview of Harris did not come off that way at all. Interviewer Bill Whitaker asked Harris challenging questions and pressed her with follow-up questions when her answers were unclear.

While Trump and his supporters have every reason to suspect there may be footage even more damaging to Harris than what was aired on the 60 Minutes broadcast, the interview was nevertheless a train wreck for Harris. The real question here isn’t whether CBS violated FCC regulations and should therefore lose its broadcasting license. It is, “Why is there a five-member board of bureaucrats who can make this decision at all?”

Trump and his surrogates have said things encouraging to libertarians and terrifying to the media about their supposed intention to dismantle the administrative state. In a video speech, he Trump promised to “dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption.”

Those words in a vacuum would suggest he had a plan to undo the unconstitutional transfer of legislative power from Congress to the executive, born in the early Progressive Era and institutionalized by the New Deal, as well as reclaim executive power also usurped by federal agencies. However, what follows during the speech significantly waters down the promise of its opening statement.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Another day, another set of classified documents found in President Joe Biden’s possession. Just in case anyone missed the first two times that this is an inside job by the Democratic Party to ensure somebody besides Biden heads the party’s presidential ticket in 2024, a third cache of documents was revealed on Saturday.

They’re so committed to making this an ongoing news story they’re even working weekends. It’s a old but effective trick to make one event that happened years in the past seem like multiple events recurring in the present. “Breaking! Five more classified documents discovered! Gasp! Red alert!”

The most important thing to remember about all of these classified documents scandals is what they are not. And that is they are not any real concern for the public. The media and interested political operatives would have you believe these documents contain information so sensitive that their falling into the wrong hands could result in us all speaking Russian or Chinese. They don’t.

The truth is there are very few secrets national governments try to keep that allies and adversaries alike haven’t stolen. The government likes to portray itself as secretly protecting the public from all sorts of unseen danger, both state-sponsored and otherwise. “If you only knew what goes on behind the scenes, you’d be terrified,” they’d like you to think. Many of the bureaucratic rank and file believe this themselves.

In reality, most of what even the national security state does is cooked up nonsense to justify legions of government drones and billions per year in wasted spending. The histrionics over the discovery of compromised classified material is usually just political posturing. If it weren’t, then we’d have seen some significant consequences by now from the classified documents stored on Hillary Clinton’s infamous private server, which even podunk governments in Eastern Europe and Africa probably have their hands on by now. We haven’t and we won’t.

When the alarm over mishandling of classified documents is genuine, it isn’t for fear of any danger to the public. Everyone should realize that’s the last thing these people are concerned about. What they are concerned about is the real reason most of these documents get classified in the first place: the embarrassing to themselves or potentially incriminating information the documents may contain.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?