The Deep State, its propáganda and the CBC

Michael Moriarity wrote:

There is no need to use the neologism "Deep State" to describe what has long been called the ruling class. And, to answer your question, in my opinion yes, the CBC is mostly a tool of the Canadian ruling class, although most of the employees actually think they are independent thinking journalists. It just so happens that only the ones whose opinions are closely enough aligned to the ruling class propaganda model get hired by any major media company, including the CBC.

Exactly, great precis of Manufacturing Consent.

The Deep State. lol. oh fuck.  Calling all tin foil hatted Alex Jones groupies. lol.

I think there is a useful distinction between the "Deep State" and the "ruling class" (or what Chomsky would call the "masters of the universe").

I don't agree with the description of the Deep State given in the opening post though --  in my experience the "Deep State" is more commonly used to refer to a subset of the ruling class, that is more formally, permanently and intimately involved with government and the political process.   So civil administraters, powerful bureaucrats in the intelligence agencies, foreign policy planning bodies, and most crucially the military command (in the American context, the Pentagon and it's massive unaccountable spending).

The deep state is much more knowledgeable  and powerful than most other elements of the ruling class, and while it acts in the ruling class' interests most of the time, it may have a different interpretation of what is in the interest of the ruling class than what the rest of ruling class does.    And on issues where the ruling class is divided, or even fragmented, the Deep State asserts it's own interests first.  

Personally I don't mind the term.   I sometimes will substitute it for "military industrial complex".

An example -- Part of Trump's "mandate" was to pursue warmer relations with Russia and pick a fight with China.   I think it would be fair to say the American ruling class was split on this, some elements are happy to do business with China and Russia, and others benefit from a trade war (or actual war through proxies).   But the military and geopolitical issues at play are the primary consideration for the deep state, and it determines the path actually taken, which was to pick fights with both China and Russian.   Elements of the ruling class gained or lost by that choice.

I generally agree with Mobo on the definition of Deep State, and I have posted to that effect in the past. However, rather than get into that discussion in this thread, I simply pointed out that what was defined in the opening post was actually nothing more than the ruling class. Using this distinction, I think it is much more the ruling class that controls the media than the Deep State.

The ideas of ruling class and deep state are actually quite different. The deep state references operatives in the government tied to the bureaucracy that is seen as trying to protect itself from change. The ruling class are the ones the system is designed to benefit.  deep state is meant to point to those individuals who act behind the scenes. The ruling class are the beneficiaries.

I do not really buy much of the deep state conspiracy stuff. The ruling class do rule and get what they want. the minions who bring it to them are interchangeable and disposable. The emphasis on deep state rather than ruling class is a distraction of the ruling class and designed to focus on the functionairies rather than the beneficiaries. 

Deep state: think of a bureaucrat.

Ruling class: think the Koch brothers

"Deep state" is not really a neologism having been around as a US descriptor nearly 30 years (Turkey, before that). 

Unfortunately, though a valid term, both the Trumpist and anti-Trumpist media bubbles have reduced it to their  viral doofus dog whistles. 

For Trumpists, it means a pro-Democrat elite cabal against some ludicrously alleged independent Trump trying "to make America great again".

For the #Resistence-fed, the Trumpist definition of deep state is regurgitated as constituting a "conspiracy theory"--flip sides of the same debased coin by sequestered factions. 

Prior to Trump, and the subsequent use and abuse by the duopoly factions, it was mostly used by the left-leaning and academics to describe the clandestine, unelected control of the state despite the illusion of democracy.  "Deep", ie below the surface, does not quite equate with "ruling class" since in overtly authoritarian regimes, government and the ruling elite are more obviously co-joined without the lipstick of "democracy". 

Though the term has been around only a few decades, as previosly noted the core realities have been articulated much longer by many, such as in Wolin's "Managed Democracy" and in Chomsky's "Manufacture of Consent".  Though Chomsky generally refrains from the term he is not spooked by it, as noted in his praise for Kovolick's book "The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin  by Dan Kovalik 

This review of critical incidents of recent history is a treasure trove of information that Americans should know, but scarcely do, and a very valuable corrective to prevailing mythology about our innocence threatened by the evil enemy. Deeply informed, it could hardly be more timely or urgent.”—Noam Chomsky

The supreme irony of both factions of the Dem/Repub, corporate/imperialist state using the same term to attack each other is that Trump is very much part and pusher of the pool of controlling, behind the scenes, interests. An additional twist to that is that Trump has caused some uneasiness by often undermininng the sham cover stories for imperial interventions which has historically relied on reassuring lies such as "humanitarian intervention" "pro-democracy" and "WMD".  Instead we get explicit pronouncements from Trump, such as for Syria: "We are going to keep the oil!", of which:

This whole scheme is illegal. In fact, it’s a war crime. It violates nearly a dozen international codes and agreements, including the Fourth Geneva Convention....

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/trump-syria-oil-war-crime.html

The departure from previous US presidents is less in action than in Trump's unrestrained imperial expression. International law has long been an ignored, attacked, or merely employed as a tool of occassional convenience by the only superpower. The depredations of the "deep state" interests are exposed as desirable by promoting them without the cover stories. Trump's promotion of Sec of State ex Exxon CEO Tillotston might well be compared with Bush's  VP Cheney: Cheney, Halliburton and the Spoils of War https://corpwatch.org/article/cheney-halliburton-and-spoils-war

The fact that Trump can get away with making unabashedly explicit the criminal intent of the US with very little direct criticism is a worrying sign that what Wolin called "Inverted Totalitarianism" (dependent partly on public illusion of "America the Good") is becoming acceptably overt rapacious imperialism. Note that the corporate liberal "newspaper of record", the NYT, when discussing Trump's avowed criminal intent only gives a passing suggestion of the criminality to when discussing the practicality of pilaging Syria:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/us/politics/trump-syria-oil-fields.html

Again, Trump though an extremely vile manifestation of the right wing of the Republican party, is very much part of the imperial continuum, and the contention that he is a major departure, displays the deep state maintained public illusion of a non-existent democratic state:

US Foreign Policy of Chaos under Trump: the Wrecker and the Puppeteers Pierre Guerlain

....Trump carries a big stick and talks furiously, but like his predecessors, he has toed the line of what Obama calls the “Washington playbook” or the “blob” that others, including Edward Snowden, call the Deep State 67, the National Security State or “double government” to use Michael Glennon’s expression borrowed from the English political theorist Walter Bagehot.68 The formula of this undemocratic form of unelected power was given by Samuel Huntington in 1981: “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”69 With Bolton and Pompeo, “super-hawks replacing hawks”70, and torturer Haspel (also confirmed by the Senate with some Democratic votes) at the head of the CIA, the decline and chaos are reaffirmed. Lewis Lapham expressed the core view of this paper eloquently: “To regard Trump as an amazement beyond belief is to give him credit where none is due. He is undoubtedly a menace, but he isn’t a surprise.”...

https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/10208

CBC News: Calls For U of A Lecturer to Be Fired For Denying Holodomor

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmacdonald-holodomor-1.5377661

"...Images, first shared online by the Ukrainian Canadian Students Union, show a post by Dougal MacDonald with the title 'The Myth of the Holodomor,' which claims the event was a Nazi fabrication. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress, The Ukrainian Students' Union of the local Ukrainian Studies Society are calling for Macdougal to be terminated from the University. A statement posted to the Jewish Federation of Edmonton Facebook page called it 'irresponsible and deeply dishonest' to deny the existence of Holodomor."

New Cold War - Mark Tauger on 'The Holodomor'

https://www.newcoldwar.org/archive-of-writings-of-professor-mark-tauger-...

"The proponents of 'Holodomor' posit a genocide equivalent in numbers to the Holocaust of WWII. Tauger argues strongly against this thesis..."

"The Ukrainian diaspora in the West (especially in Canada) was responsible for the 'fighting and suffering regime' in which the OUN and UPA were portrayed as brave heroes who died for an independent Ukrainian state and Holodomor was constructed into a major Ukrainian national trauma. The construction of this memory discourse included creation of narratives focusing on monumental 'national' traumas and building of monuments to commemorate the Holodomor and resistance fighters. For example, a monument to Roman Shukhevych in Edmonton, Canada, and a monument to the Ukrainian war veterans [SS Galizien] also in Edmonton..." - Prof. Per Anders Rudling, 2011

Interesting post contrariana although I think the equal comparison between Trumpist and Democrat use of the term is a bit problematic. The Trumpidt faction co-opted the term and turned it into a conspiracy theroy and I think this is correct and does not deny that it had meaning before that. The definition you use for the Trumpist use of the term essentially makes the case for the Democrat use. I think there may be a false equivalency embedded in your argument.

I hate to criticize the post otherwise because there was such good stuff but the problem here is that the Democrats are definitely worth criticizing the the right in the US is moving to such extremes that equivalency becomes a problem in itself. This is in fact a tactic of the right -- move so far over and claim that as middle ground to define the other side not as the centre right that it may really be but some left extremism. Then we come and condem both sides and deliver the right the new definition of centre that they were seeking. Then we wash and repeat so that the centre shifts step by step over in terms of left right and in terms of what is reasonable.

As difficult as it is we must find a way of condemning both sides without allowing a move of the centre to accomodate the extreme that one side is using exactly for that purpose.

I think that the extreme right in both Canada and the US is using in many cases lies and extremism not becuase they expect to convince anyone of that but to move the centre of the discussion over. It is like a rhetorical bargaining. We fall for it at our peril.

The challenge is to manage the right wing tactic without delivering the conversation to the Democrats who must be criticized for their own rightward movement and rightward origins. 

The Democrats are not left and never were but it is this acceptance of the right tactics of using extreme responses that define them as such. 

We can never lose sight of the centre of a society and of an idoeology -- they are not in the same place either. I am reminded of a conversation I had in the last election where a person placed Scheer on the left and Bernier on the right. 

John Pilger: Dividing China and Russia with the aim of weakening both is a venerable American game. Henry Kissinger played it.

While Kissinger certainly exploited the division between China and Russia, I don't think it was him, or any other American, who forced Zhou En-lai to lay a wreath at Stalin's tomb in 1961, several years AFTER Khruschev's Secret Speech had been revealed to the world.

“A great Marxist-Leninist” – Inscription on wreath for Stalin brought to Moscow by Chou En-lai.

https://tinyurl.com/rtbq6kv

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

.... although I think the equal comparison between Trumpist and Democrat use of the term is a bit problematic. The Trumpidt faction co-opted the term and turned it into a conspiracy theroy and I think this is correct and does not deny that it had meaning before that. The definition you use for the Trumpist use of the term essentially makes the case for the Democrat use. I think there may be a false equivalency embedded in your argument....

Thanks for reading, Sean, but I differ on your point here. The Democrat faction of the duopoly with its own factional media bubble only acknowledges the mockable Trumpist definition of deep state. It is certainly correct to attack the laughable Trumpist "anti-deep state" claims--but not through assertion the term itself as "conspiracy theory".

In saying this, I don't see that as a false equivalency.  How likely would it be likely that the Democrat elite, like their Repbulican cohorts in  Congress and Senate,  would attack those interests which personally feed them in their office and,  often, revolving door careers? The tyranny of "double government", the behind the scenes regime control by unelected actors which buy influence and votes of the elected representitives of BOTH parties.

This is not to claim some invariably coherent force since the security state agencies, corporate interests, foreign lobbyists, and oligarchs sometimes have differing favorites for their own advancement and continuance, but there is a good deal of party overlap in funding and lobbying by the US regime's unelected managers. The in-house fights of Dem/Repub gang for the perks of "leadership" do not much change the rapacious domestic policies of the 1%  or the international direction of the corporate/security state regime and its unstinted imperial aggression.

I just found Caitlan Johnstone's piece from 2018 which echos my own sentiments, and makes some of my initial post redundant.  Here is the last bit:

Deep State Swamp Monster Says There Is No Deep State
....
This would be the same Mike Pompeo, by the way, who promised that he would make the depraved, lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering CIA into a "much more vicious agency." The same Mike Pompeo who just the other day stood before a plutocrat-funded DC think tank declaring an effective regime change policy against Iran, citing its government's human rights violations while ignoring the human rights violations of the Saudi Royals which were making headlines that same day.

I hardly ever use the term “deep state” anymore. For a time it was a sensible label to use within smaller, well-informed circles to refer to the unelected power structures which remain in America regardless of the shifting tides of its official elected government, but ever since it became a mainstream household term it’s been rendered meaningless by partisan hackery.

Republicans, who spent the last week defending CIA torture as “Bloody Gina” Haspel ascended to Pompeo’s old office, insist that President Trump is “fighting the deep state” due to some shady intelligence community behavior two years ago. This would be the same President Trump who has authorized unprecedented black budget funding for that same intelligence community. The same President Trump who has advanced longstanding deep state agendas against Syria, Iran and Russia, the same President Trump who has continued Bush and Obama’s Orwellian surveillance program, government opacity and persecution of whistleblowers, the same President Trump who said he supports the US Department of Justice in its prioritizing the arrest of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange.

Democrats meanwhile proclaim that talk of a deep state in America is a baseless conspiracy theory, which is an innately absurd position. Deep state is not a conspiracy theory, it’s a concept used in political analysis to describe the ways that unelected power structures like multinational plutocrats and intelligence/defense agencies tend to collaborate with one another in order to advance their own agendas. The fact that such plutocrats and agencies (A) exist, (B) have power, (C) are unelected, (D) tend to form alliances with each other and (E) try to advance their own agendas is not disputable; the only thing you can dispute is the nature and extent of their operations.

These would be the same Democrats, by the way, who have spent the last year and a half fanatically defending US intelligence agencies and canonizing J Edgar Hoover heirs James Comey and Robert Mueller as living saints.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/05/23/deep-state-swamp-monster-says-th...

Sean I have to disagree with your conclusion. The difference between Trump and previous oval office crooks, and there have been many through the years, is part of his grift has always been the role of outrageous, in your face, showman. I think his act is a shell game which is why I call him the Orange Herring.

I don't much care what label you use the reality as I see it is that someone other than elected politicians are in charge of the largest military security system ever developed by humans. Damned if I can claim to know who they are but I know it is not Trump and it was not Obama or the Bushes. I generally tend to revert to terms like oligarchy but find them inadequate as well.

Imperialism seems to bred governments captured by interlaced webs of private interests, some even with their own military. All the oil wells that NATO has captured are being guarded by private armies paid for by the oil industry oligarchs. We live in a facade where people are fed constant propaganda to convince them that they actually live in a democracy where somehow someday their interests will be heard above the industry shills that roam Ottawa with bags full of "goodies."

Israel Launches Fierce Attack on CBC's Michael Enright Over Erekat Interview

https://twitter.com/4noura/status/1201908870148448263

"Seriously? The CBC led a totally hostile interview with me that prompted an overwhelming audience response criticizing the host. But because I stayed standing (& some!) opponents are attacking him. This is why you don't see/hear enough Palestinians on the air."

If the South African apartheid regime had been allowed to prevail, as Israel was, and had a large, organized, well-funded and militant support base, with Canadian media and  politicians subservient and in their pocket also, a CBC interview with  an apartheid resistor like Nelson Mandela would have elicited the same response. Canadians need to root out and smash Israeli Apartheid and its promoters here now,  just as they did South African Apartheid then.

Well interesting article from Chomsky even though it does not speak AT ALL to the conversation here.

The term deep state in the present discussion is not reduced to a GOP conspiracy it is one. Any recognition of the issues of deep state possible here have nothing to do with the kind of deflection theya re undertaking.

No, you cannot dismiss all the people who are coming to the fore here as all being part of a grand conspiracy to damage Trump. To do so is to pass judgement that he is right and they are wrong when they are speaking about the reasones for their opposition.

You are in fact the one blurring an essential difference between career senior public servants who are being maligned as deep state by the Trump adminsitration with what the deep state really is: the power behind the politics. The real power behind politics in the US is the vast army of lobbyists and capitalists who bend the ear of politicians of all parties. These people do not have formal accountability. They are the ruling club. It is false to suggest that these real power brokers are one and the same as the senior career diplomats and public servants we are seeing. These people are certainly elite in their careers and in their positions but they are not the same as the Koch brothers etc as I identified. These are the people who are asked to follow the rules and are horrified when the rules are not followed by people senior to them. They are not the people who make those rules. 

It is a complete misunderstanding of the power system in the US if you think the people testifying to Congress are the actual power-brokers in the US. These are the poeple with handsome three figure salaries but not the billoinaires who actually go around them to make and remake policy. Despite the games being played by Trump -- those people are the poeple hwo designed the system, whoe the system is meant to benefit and who have the actual power. The rest is smoke and mirrors.

NDPP wrote:

I'll go with Hedges (#7) et al. Chomsky sometimes refers to the deep state as the 'permanent state' and there are of course other equally acceptable and applicable terms for this elite management layer used by others. Whatever one calls it, it would be a mistake to dismiss it - as some msm and their gulls suggest -  purely as a delusion of the right-wing, tin-foil hat, deplorables. 

I am not dismissing that it exists. I am dismissing it as the GOP describes it and as the people that are accusing Trump and as the motivation for the accusations.

There is a difference.

I was going to quote the end of a CBC News broadcast from last week.

https://cbchelp.cbc.ca/hc/en-ca/articles/217732877-Can-I-get-a-copy-or-t...

I would need to pay a private company for access to the canadian broadcasting corporation transcript, and even then I could not display it publicly.

I think it was a "comment" at the end of the morning news to the effect that if Canada were to do anything about climate change, and Canada is not doing anything effective about climate change, that If I Remember Correctly they said "that would be ugly."  I am not sure exactly what "that would be ugly" means on the news, they didn't go into it or provide any source for "that would be ugly."

I agree with most of the comment posted in this thread about deep state propaganda and the cbc.  From what I see in "the news", the small number of people who control the organizations, deep state -- whatever you wish to call them, have conspired to take over most of the media.

There are items that are posted in "the news" for one day, for example:   https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fish+farming+blood+pipe&iar=news&ia=news and then there is the steady drum beat of drival repeated everyday in "the news."

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

contrarianna wrote:

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

....No, you cannot dismiss all the people who are coming to the fore here as all being part of a grand conspiracy to damage Trump. To do so is to pass judgement that he is right and they are wrong when they are speaking about the reasones for their opposition....

A more floundering, inane misrepresentation of what I have said is hard to imagine.

a more content free post would be hard to imagine.

A  sad, "No, you're one!" ploy.  To spell it out it: is you who are making smears without a shred of evidence to back them up,  that is. me allegedly claiming "a grand conspiracy", and "passing judgement that Trump is right".

Your preceding paragraph proclaiming the acceptable range of the "the present discussion" is equally inane:

The term deep state in the present discussion is not reduced to a GOP conspiracy it is one. Any recognition of the issues of deep state possible here have nothing to do with the kind of deflection theya re undertaking.

What "present discussion" are you talking about? Certainly not this thread which ranges, by multiple posters, beyond any "GOP conspiracy theory". Or are you referring the range provided by the Trumpist/anti-Trumpist media camps? Your attempt to  limit  "the present discussion" to that puts you very much on the flip side of the facile Trumpist media bubble.

..you can find that interview here:

Israel violates international law with impunity, says human rights lawyer

eta:..well worth the listen. and noura erakat was brilliant.

epaulo13 wrote:

..you can find that interview here:

Israel violates international law with impunity, says human rights lawyer

eta:..well worth the listen. and noura erakat was brilliant.

This reminds me of the interview from years ago with Castro and a young Canadian reporter. She tried to play gotcha with him and fell flat, he then mopped the floor with her, intellectually.

contrarianna wrote:

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

....I had responded constructively and in detail to your posts until your rude and content free at which point I said something no worse than you. You turned a civil disagreement into an insulting confrontation by your post and then want to accuse me of smearing. Nothing I said was any less reasonable than you up to that point. Go buy a mirror.

Nothing I said was an atttack until your post. You like to dish it out but have a problem getting a plateful back.

Ah, my mistake.

I somehow missed that you "had responded constructively and in detail to your posts" and I also missed:  "Nothing I said was an atttack until your post".

I guess I misinterpreted your previous post addressed to me which claimed I was a conspiracy theorist of "a grand conspiracy" and passed "judgment that Trump is right"

Shame on me for saying that was inane and evidence-free, and for imagining it was a baseless attack.

The quote from me was:

"No, you cannot dismiss all the people who are coming to the fore here as all being part of a grand conspiracy to damage Trump. To do so is to pass judgement that he is right and they are wrong when they are speaking about the reasones for their opposition."

- Yes my argument is that you are dismissing them in your post 29 and I am saying what the implications of that is. Notwithstanding your sarcasm, your reaction is grossly over the top in this context. 

In your post 29 you called my objection to what deeps state has come to mean (and how the term is being used) as my reductions. They were not. The GOP redefined the term to be what it has come to mean publicly. In post 29, you numbered arguments to suggest agreement with the definition that these people are in conflict with Trump for some deep state reason as opposed to being revolted at what he is doing as most observers in and out of government are.

Your listed arguments 1-4 in post 29 do serve to suggest that there is a deep state motive to the opposition to Trump. I disagree with this explanation which I think is a dismissal of their real motivations.

It is a fair argument that your post 29 serves to present motivations of the people appearing before impeachment hearings as being about this deep state involvement rather than a revulsion of career officials to what the leadership is doing.

I have also stated that the real deep state -- the ones who are calling the shots -- are very much supporters of Trump. They tolerate his excesses because of what he delivers to them. Trump himself is part of the deep state -- the business elite who are used to bending politics to serve them. Trump took a different path and became a politican whn he was used to just being part of the group who influenced them. To suggest that these people now opposing Trump are the deep state really denies what Trump is, why he is kept in place by the GOP and who actually wields power.

It is not these witnesses.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

No, you cannot dismiss all the people who are coming to the fore here as all being part of a grand conspiracy to damage Trump. To do so is to pass judgement that he is right and they are wrong when they are speaking about the reasones for their opposition."
....
To suggest that these people now opposing Trump are the deep state really denies what Trump is, why he is kept in place by the GOP and who actually wields power.

It is not these witnesses.

The last line I posted, before your first silly accusation I was a conspiracy theorist, was Chomsky's stance, which I had previously bolded: Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by the operation of rational self-interest. (This might be dubbed, Chomsky's Razor). 

Dismal alignments of the elected and unelected elite of the US regime, along with occasionally rival security agency interests, entails rational, often common, self-interests is something obvious to many. One would have to enlarge the meaning of "conspiracy theory" to include pointing out any aligned strategies and what that entails: business (money), careerism, and partisanship--as usual.

Your illusion that unelected government actors are involved in a selfless saving of the "democracy" from (the obviously vile, but elected) Trump is very much derived the current MSM narrative about the "deep state", which initially denied it as Trumpist conspiracy theory, and then more recently embraced and narrowly defined it as the unelected "civil service" saviors of the great republic. That is summed up here: 
 
USAToday
As the deep state attacks Trump to rave media reviews, don't forget its dark side
The deep state has a long history of betraying the trust of the American people. They aren't our friends just because we share a common enemy
James Bovard

“Thank God for the deep state,” declared former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin recently while appearing on a panel at George Mason University. A year ago, the deep state was routinely reviled as a figment of paranoid right-wingers’ imagination. But much of the news media are now conferring the same sainthood on the deep state that was previously bestowed on special counsel Robert Mueller. 

A New York Times article last month gushed that “over the last three weeks, the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials, past and present ... and provided evidence that largely backs up the still-anonymous whistleblower” on President Donald Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine. Times columnist James Stewart declared: “There is a deep state, there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law ... protecting the American people.” Times editorial writer Michelle Cottle proclaimed that “the deep state is alive and well” and hailed it as “a collection of patriotic public servants.”

Intelligence agencies gone rogue

Former CIA Director John Brennan, appearing on the same panel as McLaughlin, declared, “The reason why Mr. Trump has this very contentious relationship with CIA and FBI and the deep state people ... is because they tell the truth.”

Much of the news coverage of the Trump impeachment is following that storyline — even though it is astonishing as an overheated Trump tweet.

Five years ago, Brennan’s CIA ignited what should have been a constitutional crisis when it was caught illegally spying upon the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was compiling a massive report on the CIA torture program. After 9/11, the CIA constructed an interrogation regime by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods,” The Times reported in 2007. Secret Bush administration torture memos “set the CIA loose to slam suspects’ heads into walls up to 30 times in a row, to deprive suspects of sleep for more than a week straight, to confine them to small dark boxes for hours at a time ... and to suffocate them with water to induce the perception that they are drowning,” Georgetown University law professor David Cole noted. But the only official who went to prison was John Kiriakou, a former CIA operative who publicly admitted that the CIA was waterboarding....

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/11/13/donald-trump-deep-stat...

To reiterate, Chomsky has said that Trump is impeachable "100 times over" and is "a major crook" but said the current impeachment it was likely a strategic "mistake" that would likely backfire.   He also noted that:

However, “they’re going after Trump not on his major crimes but because he went after a leading Democrat,” he points out, before relating the situation back to Richard Nixon, asking, “Does that remind you of anything? Yes. Watergate. They didn’t go after Nixon on his major crimes. They were off the record. It was because he had attacked the Democratic Party.”...

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/noam-chomsky-were-actually-facing-a-co...

Accepting this observation apparently makes one a conspiracy theorist. 

Again, to take the major figure of the current impeachment game, the probable CIA "whistleblower". He is strenuously being protected from testifying when it goes to the Senate trial of Trump, and from poossible cross-examination through the pretense that he is unknown and must remain so, though his name has been out there for months: 

Facebook and YouTube remove posts naming CIA impeachment whistleblower
By Kevin Reed
11 November 2019 
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/11/face-n11.htm

The abilty to cross-examine accusers is manditory in normal trials, but not necessarily so in the Senate impeachment trials, even though it is Republican dominated. Setting the rules will be a farcical brawl between the dueling Swamp Things of the Trump/unTrump factions:

Trump’s Impeachment Is A Foregone Conclusion In The House. What A Senate Trial Looks Like Is Anyone’s Guess

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/paulmcleod/senate-impeachment-trial...

Under the state/media's selective pretense of revering whisteblowers, the acting CIA officer's much published identity serves as justification would prevent questioning of his alleged links to the Democratic Party and the Biden/Ukraine involvement: 

Contrast that with what happens to real whistleblowers who expose the bipartisan criminalities of the empire:

The ‘Whistleblower’ Probably Isn’t
It’s an insult to real whistleblowers to use the term with the Ukrainegate protagonist
By MATT TAIBBI 
....
The unnamed person at the center of this story sure didn’t sound like a whistleblower. Our intelligence community wouldn’t wipe its ass with a real whistleblower.

Americans who’ve blown the whistle over serious offenses by the federal government either spend the rest of their lives overseas, like Edward Snowden, end up in jail, like Chelsea Manning, get arrested and ruined financially, like former NSA official Thomas Drake, have their homes raided by FBI like disabled NSA vet William Binney, or get charged with espionage like ex-CIA exposer-of-torture John Kiriakou. It’s an insult to all of these people, and the suffering they’ve weathered, to frame the ballcarrier in the Beltway’s latest partisan power contest as a whistleblower.

Drake, who was the first to expose the NSA’s secret surveillance program, seems to have fared better than most. He ended up working in an Apple Store, where he ran into Eric Holder, who was shopping for an iPhone....

With that in mind, let’s look at what we know about the first “whistleblower” in Ukrainegate:

He or she is a “CIA officer detailed to the White House”;
The account is at best partially based upon the CIA officer’s own experience, made up substantially by information from “more than a half dozen U.S. officials” and the “private accounts” of “my colleagues”;
“He or she” was instantly celebrated as a whistleblower by news networks and major newspapers.
That last detail caught the eye of Kiriakou, a former CIA Counterterrorism official who blew the whistle on the agency’s torture program.

“It took me and my lawyers a full year to get [the media] to stop calling me ‘CIA Leaker John Kirakou,” he says. “That’s how long it took for me to be called a whistleblower.”

Kirakou’s crime was talking to ABC News and the New York Times about the CIA’s torture program. For talking to American journalists about the CIA, our federal government charged Kiriakou with espionage. That absurd count was ultimately dropped, but he still did 23 months at FCI Loretto in Western Pennsylvania.

When Kiriakou first saw the “whistleblower complaint,” his immediate reaction was to wonder what kind of “CIA officer” the person in question was. “If you spend a career in the CIA, you see all kinds of subterfuge and lies and crime,” he says. “This person went through a whole career and this is the thing he objects to?”

It’s fair to wonder if this is a one-person effort. Even former CIA official Robert Baer, no friend of Trump, said as much in an early confab on CNN with Brooke Baldwin:

BAER: That’s what I find remarkable, is that this whistleblower knew about that, this attempt to cover up. This is a couple of people. It isn’t just one.

BALDWIN: And on the people point, if the allegation is true, Bob, what does it say that White House officials, lawyers, wanted to cover it up?

BAER: You know, my guess, it’s a palace coup against Trump. And who knows what else they know at this point.

That sounds about right. Actual whistleblowers are alone. The Ukraine complaint seems to be the work of a group of people, supported by significant institutional power, not only in the intelligence community, but in the Democratic Party and the commercial press.

In this century we’ve lived through a president lying to get us into a war (that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and the loss of trillions in public treasure), the deployment of a vast illegal surveillance program, a drone assassination campaign, rendition, torture, extralegal detention, and other offenses, many of them mass human rights violations.

We had whistleblowers telling us about nearly all of these things. When they came forward, they desperately needed society’s help. They didn’t get it. Our government didn’t just tweet threats at them, but proceeded straight to punishment....

The argument that’s supposed to be galvanizing everyone right now is the idea that we need to “stand up and be counted,” because failing to rally to the cause is effectively advocacy for Trump. This line of thinking is based on the presumption that Trump is clearly worse than the people opposing him.

That might prove to be true, but if we’re talking about the treatment of whistleblowers, Trump has a long way to go before he approaches the brutal record of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, as well as the cheerleading Washington political establishment. Forgetting this is likely just the first in what will prove to be many deceptions about a hardcore insider political battle whose subtext is a lot more shadowy and ambiguous than news audiences are being led to believe.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/whistleblower...

So no, your partisan adoption of the delimited political world of Democrat/Republican fractious infighting does not make you a conspiracy theorist, just a normal camp follower of the drominent media narrative.