by Roger Kimball
The deep state resists exposure—but not forever. Patience, persistence, and power may yet cauterize the Leviathan.
How deep is the deep state? That’s a question I have thought and written about a lot. I had something to say about it recently at The Spectator on the occasion of Abigail Spanberger’s recent election as governor of Virginia. It saddens me to report that every time I think I have taken the measure of the Leviathan that is the deep state, new precincts and vistas open up beyond the boundaries I had delineated.
Sometimes I think the deep state is like an onion. Peel back one layer, and another layer presents itself.
Sometimes I think it is like a basement with an endless procession of sub-basements. Excavate one, and you encounter another below it. It is like that bit of Hindu cosmology that envisions the world resting on the back of a turtle, which rests on the back of a larger turtle, which rests on the back of a still larger turtle. Asked what that larger turtle stands upon, the answer is that it is “turtles all the way down.”
That said, I suspect that the difficulty in surveying the deep state is not its depth but its extent. That is, I suspect that its roots are shallow while its area is both indefinitely large and protean.
The deep state also seems to resemble the Lernaean Hydra of Greek mythology. Hercules was sent to dispatch this multi-headed monster in the second of his twelve labors. Not only did the beast have poisonous breath, but its blood was so toxic that even its scent was fatal. Furthermore, the hydra had this alarming characteristic: if you cut off one of its heads, two grew back in its place. Hercules overcame this problem by having the stump of each head cauterized as soon as he had cut it off.
Another curious feature of the deep state is that exposure often fails to elicit effective condemnation. This is due in part to the propaganda arm of the deep state, sometimes called “the media,” which does not so much report the news as echo the narrative fabricated by the deep state.
Consider the revelations about the Somali fraud in Minneapolis. I thought, and I continue to think, that that massive fraud perpetrated by Democrats will (to continue with Hercules) cauterize one head of the deep state hydra. What is interesting, though, is the alacrity with which the deep state stepped up to replace or at least drown out that revelation with the cacophony about ICE murdering innocent protestors. At the end of the day, I do not think that gambit will work in the court of public opinion. If you drive your car into an ICE agent, you should first be sure that your life insurance premiums are current. The same can be said about carrying a military-grade handgun to a protest and then getting into a fight with ICE agents. It’s not a recipe for longevity.
Nor has the deep state been effective in countering the ongoing revelations pouring out of Georgia about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Democrats have denounced the actions of the Trump administration, going so far as to try to prevent it from investigating election records, ballot boxes, and voting machines across the country. A bad look, that.
Also ham-handed was the attempt by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) to smear Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, over a fake whistleblower complaint. Gabbard skewered that effort like Errol Flynn dispatching a baddie. “It is a hoax,” Gabbard wrote on X. “And they don’t even bother rewriting the script: same deep state, same counsel, same playbook. Democrats in Congress & the propaganda media fall in line every time.”
You can’t blame the Democrats for wanting to shut up Gabbard. She has been one of the administration’s most effective tools for exposing deep state corruption. The latest revelations concern the direct, personal involvement of Barack Obama in the effort to take down Donald Trump in the aftermath of his election to the presidency in 2016. Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary, outlined the findings in a press conference with Gabbard:
While pretending to engage in a peaceful transfer of power, Barack Hussein Obama, in private, went to great and nefarious lengths to sow discord among the public and sabotage his successor, President Trump.
The new evidence released by the Director of National Intelligence confirms that the Obama administration manufactured and politicized intelligence, which was later used as justification for baseless smears against President Trump—an effort to delegitimize his victory before he even took the oath of office.
The truth is that President Trump never had anything to do with Russia, and the Russia collusion hoax was a massive fraud perpetrated on the American people from the very beginning. The worst part is that Obama knew the truth, as did all the other officials involved, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and many others.
I suspect that other stumps are about to be cauterized. Last summer, in another meditation about the persistence of the deep state, I drew upon J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books to describe its astonishing longevity. Voldemort, Rowling’s chief villain, had a clever way of preserving himself. Rightly worried that the forces of good might try to destroy him, the Dark Lord devised a way of infusing living bits of himself into various objects and people. Rowling called the resulting magical charm a “Horcrux.”
“If the body of a Horcrux owner is killed,” we read in a Potter gloss, “that portion of the soul that had remained in the body does not pass on to the next world, but will rather exist in a non-corporeal form capable of being resurrected by another wizard.” Nice work if you can get it. As I said last July,
I have often wondered whether the architects of the deep state have been inspired by Rowling’s tale. For, like Voldemort, they have taken care to distribute their essence in external objects and institutions. Wizards like Donald Trump and Elon Musk pronounce anathema upon their activities. They cast death spells that evaporate the elixir that imparts life—dollars in all their glory—but somehow the deep staters manage to evade death.
One problem is that a Horcrux cannot be destroyed by conventional means. It cannot be destroyed by being smashed, ripped, or burnt, for example. What is needed is Basilisk venom, the Sword of Gryffindor, or a magical, inextinguishable flame. You won’t find any at your local Costco or Walmart.
That’s one bit of bad news. Another is that it is generally difficult to discover where a Horcrux resides. Often, they take up residence in unlikely people or places. How many smiling GOP faces, ostensibly anti-deep state campaigners, are actually hosts for the agents of darkness?
One bit of good news is that Donald Trump and his lieutenants, like Hercules, have unraveled the mystery and the methods of the deep state. Initiatives like the SAVE Act, for example, which requires individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections, will help frustrate the efforts of the deep state to rig elections.
What is needed to destroy the deep state is patience, persistence, and power. Donald Trump, in his second term, has marshaled all three. The deep state is clever. It is insidious. But it is not invulnerable. Trump and his team have assembled an extraordinary range of legal and political weapons to undo the machinations of the deep state. Trump has also managed a sort of economic miracle, bringing down inflation and the cost of many consumer goods while boosting wages, the stock market, and employment.
Will all that be sufficient unto the day? I hope so. I think so. It is not too much to say that the future of the republic depends on its being so.
Roger Kimball
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/02/15/how-deep-is-the-deep-state/
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