Publisher’s note: This past week, mainstream so-called liberal news outlets – NPR, The Nation, and the New York Times among them – have suddenly discovered the “Deep State” in our midst. The term seems to be surfacing everywhere. Here’s Clusterfuck Nation columnist and LONG EMERGENCY author Jim Kunstler connecting the dots, along with help from cartoonist Ben Garrison. We in the Vermont independence movement have been reporting on the U.S. Empire and the Deep State for years – good to see the MSM catching up. Free Vermont, and long live the UNtied States!

The bamboozlement of the public is nearly complete. The Deep State has persuaded 80 percent of Americans that all news is propaganda, especially the news emanating from the Deep State’s own intel department. They’re still shooting for 100 percent. The fakest of all “fake news” stories turns out to be… “Russia Hacks Election.” It was reported conclusively Saturday on the front page of The New York Times, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Deep State:

Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds

WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directed a vast cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary Clinton the presidency and installing Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office, the nation’s top intelligence agencies said in an extraordinary report they delivered on Friday to Mr. Trump.

You can be sure that this is now the “official” narrative aimed at the history books, sealing the illegitimacy of Trump’s election. It was served up with no direct proof, only the repeated “assertions” that it was so. In fact, it’s just this repetition of assertions-without-proof that defines propaganda. It can also be interpreted as a declaration of war against an incoming president. The second civil war now takes shape: It begins inside the groaning overgrown apparatus of the government itself. Perhaps after that it spreads to the WalMart parking lots that have become America’s new town square. (WalMart sells pitchforks and patio torches.)

Did the Russians make Hillary Clinton look bad? Or did Hillary Clinton manage to do that herself? The NSA propaganda was designed as a smokescreen to conceal the veracity of the Wikileaks releases. Whoever actually rooted out the DNC and Podesta emails for Wikileaks ought to get the Pulitizer Prize for the outstanding public service of disclosing exactly how dishonest the Hillary operation was.

The story may have climaxed with Trump’s Friday NSA briefing, the heads of the various top intel agencies all assembled in one room to emphasize the solemn authority of the Deep State’s power. Trump worked a nice piece of ju-jitsu afterward, pretending to accept the finding as briefly and hollowly as possible and promising to “look into the matter” after January 20th — when he can tear a new asshole in the NSA. I hope he does. This hulking security apparatus has become a menace to the Republic.

Whether Trump himself is a menace to the Republic remains to be seen. Certainly he is the designated bag-holder for all the economic and financial depravity of several preceding administrations. When the markets blow, do you suppose the Russians will be blamed for that? Did Boris Yeltsin repeal the Glass-Steagall Act? Was Ben Bernanke a puppet of Putin? No, these actions and actors were homegrown American. For more than thirty years, we’ve been borrowing too much money so we can pretend to afford living in a blue-light-special demolition derby. And now we can’t do that anymore. The physics of capital will finally assert itself.

What we’re actually seeing in the current ceremonial between the incoming Trump and the outgoing Obama is the smoldering wreckage of the Democratic Party (which I’m still unhappily enrolled in), and flames spreading into the Republican party — as idiots such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain beat their war drums against Russia. The suave Mr. Obama is exiting the scene on a low wave of hysteria and the oafish Trump rolls in on the cloudscape above, tweeting his tweets from on high, and perhaps it’s a good thing that the American people for the moment cannot tell exactly what the fuck is going on in this country, because from that dismal place there is nowhere to go but in the direction of clarity.

It won’t be helped by the official organ of the Deep State, The New York Times. Just look at the way they played the other big story last week, the one about the disabled man tortured by four young people in Chicago. Can anyone say what’s wrong with this picture?