American democracy is under outrageous assault by classic operational warfare and the most likely replacement for that democracy is the 21^st-century surveillance state. The intelligence community may want to concoct an alibi.

Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen

January 5, 2022

Less than a week into 2022 and already a theme has emerged in American politics: This will be the year when democracy as we know it will either live or die.

If that seems dramatic, it’s because the stakes in this year’s November midterm elections have been raised to nosebleed levels by both a pro-democracy side attempting to mobilize public alarm and an anti-democracy side attempting to make the outcome seem as irreversible as possible.

Mind you, the same thing was said at the beginning of 2020, when Donald Trump’s re-election narrative was already showing signs of weaponization by the lovely and talented operational Andy Hardys and content curators who brought us the entire 2016 presidential campaign, Brexit, and assorted other goat rodeos, clusterf**ks and chaos operas of the past five years.

Two major facts have become overwhelmingly obvious since 2020; the war on American democracy is part of a much larger global war on democracy and Donald Trump is not its evil mastermind. If he were, he’d know how to spell his own wife’s name. Trump is a narrative tool, not a Napoleon.

We’ve also seen unsolved a major mystery. Why has the US intelligence community, which, in the aftermath of 9/11 became the most technologically advanced, colossally resourced covert warfare behemoth in history in order to protect America from the scourge of Islamic extremism, not been able to protect America from a bloviating game show host, a treasonous political party and a bunch rampaging astroturfers?

It can’t be because the intelligence community is afraid of using its impressive surveillance and hacking capabilities against elected politicians. That norm was broken with the CIA’s hacking of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014 as it was investigating the agency’s torture or “enhanced interrogation” program.

It can’t be because the intelligence community is suffering from performance anxiety based on a fear of failure. The list of intelligence failures since the turn of the millennium includes the failure to prevent 9/11, the fraudulently contrived casus belli for the Iraq invasion; the intelligence community’s self-described “sleeping” through China’s two-decade industrial, economic and geopolitical rise since 2000; the CIA’s internal 2016 hack of its own top-secret anti-hacking tools; the massive hack of the US government during the Biden transition in 2020; and, the January 6th 2021 ransacking of the US Capitol. The intelligence community’s 21^st-century failures have all been successes for the enemies of democracy.

Since the most popular – among new world order puppets – alternative to democracy is the 21st-century surveillance state, the cui bono element of the war on democracy includes the intelligence agencies whose unprecedented powers of disruption are apparently no match for Donald J. Trump, an unabashed asset of that war.

It can’t be because the intelligence community doesn’t have the surveillance, hacking, disruption and deception capabilities to thwart a coup by a reality show personality and pageant impresario. As the Snowden leaks revealed and worldwide anecdotal evidence on journalists and other high-value targets being hacked, tracked, bugged, hounded — and, depending on the government, killed — attests, intelligence agencies across the globe can now intercept any communication, colonize any device, hack any plan and therefore disrupt any plot any lunatic can cook up.

Since the most popular alternative to democracy among new world order puppets is the 21st-century surveillance state — or, as Freedom House calls it, digital authoritarianism — the cui bono element of the war on democracy includes the intelligence agencies whose unprecedented powers of disruption are apparently no match for Donald J. Trump, an unabashed asset of that war.

Over the last 20 years, from the fabricated, Colin Powell-exploiting case for the Iraq invasion to the operationalization of journalism to every performative hour of every day of the Trump presidency to the current propaganda and narrative warfare siege of Joe Biden’s presidency, covert ops tactics have been the weapon of choice in this assault on American democracy. Recent American history reads like a series of deception, disruption, infiltration, corruption and degradation operations, complete with mass propaganda, contrived chaos, narrative engineering and systemic sabotage with all the curated BS, wardrobe, hair and makeup that implies.

It would surely help to clarify matters if the intelligence community explained what it’s been doing to fight the relentless degradation of the system of government it is meant to be protecting, mostly using the technological tools and reality-misrepresenting tactics that are, also, the purview of the intelligence community.

In an age of weaponized treason, it might help distinguish the intelligence operators of western democracies from so many of the stupidity operators currently cluttering the landscape if the covert community let us in on what surely must be an ingenious deception operation to save democracy.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.