The Deep State has existed in the US since at least the end of World War II, just as it has existed for many decades in every free country. It comprises unelected bureaucrats and regulators, wealthy and influential political operatives – both inside and outside of government – and those elected officials who work and legislate on its behalf to perpetuate the establishment’s control. Then, of course, there is the Intelligence Community (IC), which has become an ever more influential component of the Deep State.
The troubling expansion of this powerful element of government into the private sector has escalated over the past few years. This expansion has evolved to the point where it has all but enveloped the technology sector – specifically social media – through the movement of personnel from government intelligence agencies to tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
After examining the LinkedIn profiles of senior tech company executives, Just the News found that at least 200 of these job-jumpers came from the so-called alphabet agencies that make up America’s security and intelligence apparatus. LinkedIn is the premier online professional networking platform. Users can post their resumes into their profiles, which is how Just the News was able to connect these individuals to their former positions at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Homeland Security, Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council.
According to usafacts.org, the government in the US – federal, state, and local – employs 23.7 million people, full- and part-time. Just 6% of those are active-duty military, so that’s a pretty frightening statistic on its own. Almost 7.5% of the population of the US works in government. What this means, of course, is that thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands of people leave government employment every year for jobs in the private sector. Is it any surprise, then, that a couple of hundred former Intelligence Community officials would have ended up working for social media companies? Surely drawing nefarious connections between the tech sector and the IC is nothing more than another right-wing conspiracy theory.
There exists, in the private sector, almost countless very lucrative avenues of employment for people leaving senior positions in government intelligence agencies. From lobbying to consulting to corporate espionage to training and more, the list goes on and on. So, at some point, one need not be the kind of person whose preferred fashion accessory is the tin-foil hat to start connecting the dots – especially when so many of these former Deep State officials land positions that focus on social media content moderation.
Deep State Players Show Their True Colors
(Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
Just the News highlighted a few specific people in a report published on Jan. 24. There’s Aaron Berman, a veteran CIA analyst, who joined Facebook parent Meta as product policy manager for disinformation. Another is James Baker, the former FBI general counsel who was a central figure in the Bureau’s investigation of the debunked Trump-Russia collusion affair. He was fired from Twitter not long ago by Elon Musk because he was trying to filter what Musk was releasing to the public about the social media platform’s censorship efforts.
Also, we have Nick Rossmann, a senior manager of “Trust and Safety” at Google, who once tweeted, in 2020, that Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, should be strangled and, on another occasion, described anti-vaxxers as “Nazis.” On a side note, it is amusing to point out that one cannot be both a Nazi and an anti-vaxxer. Nazis were very big on vaccination and stringent laws regarding public health. It makes one wonder how Rossmann could ever have become a CIA analyst with such a poor education – but that’s what he was before he landed at Google.
Jacqueline Lopour also worked in Trust and Safety at Google after a decade in the CIA. Lopour was a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. A video posted to Facebook in November, 2016, featured the former intelligence analyst describing Clinton as the “ultimate Washington insider” – and it was clearly intended to be a compliment.
There’s a pattern here, and it’s difficult to ignore if one is willing to put aside personal political opinions and just look at the trend: Intelligence officials who have made no attempt to conceal their own political biases are migrating to positions in social media companies that enable them to influence who can say what on these platforms.
Are these former IC employees merely capitalizing on their training and experience, or are they a part of some coordinated effort by the Deep State to control social media and the flow of information to the American public? Or is this a wave of former government employees with left-wing educations who decided to make it their mission to suppress conservative and libertarian thought? One can only speculate, but it’s a trend that every American who believes in freedom of speech and unrestricted political debate should find most disturbing.
