… just because the administration hides the risk from conflict using cutouts and proxies doesn’t actually mean the risk goes away. It only means the risk is hidden “off the books”. It only means you can’t easily measure it.

There’s a conservation law at work here, which is always a positive sign of realist seriousness. To publicly promote a political profile of peculiarly self-congratulating moral earnestness it is simultaneously necessary to feed the shadows. What happens unseen is essential to the purification of the image. The Obama Administration is only significant here insofar as it grasps the deep political logic of democracy — and its subordination to sovereign PR — with such exceptional practical clarity. Better by far to indiscriminately drone potential enemies to death on the unmonitored periphery than to rough up a demonstrated terrorist in front of a TV camera. It’s the future you wanted (Xenosystems readers excepted). To imagine anything fundamentally different working under democratic conditions is sheer delusion.

Adam Garfinkle has a thoughtful commentary on the US Senate torture report that wanders into the same territory.

Everyone seems to take for granted now that this was a “natural” CIA assignment of some sort, but it is passing strange that this should be the case. Not to belabor the background with a primer, but for those who have been watching too much crappy, self-righteous fiction on TV and in the movies, the CIA — before 911 at least — was a pretty small organization with a very minor percentage of its budget, personnel, and activity devoted to “operations” — dirty tricks, false-flagging, whacking people, and so forth. The Agency did wander off the reservation back in the day, which is what the Church Committee hearings and subsequent reforms were meant to set right. The vast bulk of CIA activity before and certainly after the mid-1970s concerned what is called collections and analysis, some of which falls under the rubric of (human) spying, but much of which is just fancified library work. As the morning of September 12, 2001 dawned, did the CIA have any significant experience with interrogating Islamist insurgents and terrorists? No. Did it have any experience with interrogating bad guys of any kind? Some; for example in Central America back in the 1980s, but nearly all of those involved in that business — and there were only a few — had long since departed the Agency. […] … So … why was the CIA anointed for the task after 911 …?

In its essentials, his answer is the same Fernandez gives. Rumsfeld’s DoD simply refused to accept it. US Mil. is a public institution, and there was no way they were going to handle people outside Geneva Convention protections, with the responsibility to extract critical intelligence from them. That would all have to happen off the books. The CIA picked up the tar baby.

As the Cathedral becomes ever more holier than Jesus, it produces — through systematic administrative necessity — a dark twin. This is a basic structure of social reality that NRx is uniquely positioned to acknowledge (although it is far more widely recognized). As democracy ‘matures’, reality is processed increasingly in secret. That, at least, we understand.

Dreher’s post is seriously interesting. One immediate hook:

Steve Sailer says that the Shallow State is a complement to the Deep State. The Shallow State is, I think, another name for what the Neoreactionaries call “The Cathedral” …

As a State Church, the Cathedral is essentially bound to publicity. Its principal organs — media and education — are directed towards the promulgation of faith. It tends towards an identification with its own propaganda, and therefore — in Mike Lofgren’s words — to the full manifestation of visible government. Perfect coincidence of government with the transparent public sphere approaches a definition of the progressive telos. Since Neoreaction is particularly inclined to emphasize the radical dysfunctionality of this ideal, it naturally presupposes that real government lies elsewhere. In this respect, NRx is inherently destined to formulate a model of hidden or occult government — that which the Cathedral runs upon — which inevitably coincides, in all fundamentals, with the deep state.

What then? Has there been a direct NRx address to the quesion, what do we make of the deep state? Moldbug even declares: “… the United States does not in fact have a ‘deep state.'” In context, this is a complex and suggestive evasion, but it is an evasion nonetheless. There can be no call upon neoreactionaries to articulate their relation to something that does not exist.

In contrast to the Master, I am thoroughly convinced that a US deep state exists, and that the problem of articulation is a very different one. Public articulacy is — at least — not obviously appropriate to the deep state, for transcendental philosophical or occultist reasons (which are the same), since it is the very nature of hidden government not to be a public object. Public representation of the deep state is exposure — an intrinsically political, antagonistic engagement. It’s Wikileaks. This is not to denounce such an operation, reactively, but merely to note that the question has thereby been missed. The righteousness of state sublimation into the public sphere is assumed (and this, to repeat, is progressivism itself).

Under the name of the Cathedral, Nrx depicts the state phenomenon as a degenerative abomination. The deep state (or state-in-itself), in contrast, poses a far more cryptic theoretical and practical problem. It’s worth puzzling over, for at least a while.

“We’re seeing more and more cases where we believe significant evidence resides on a phone or a laptop, but we can’t crack the password,” FBI Director Jim Comey said during a speech in Washington. “If this becomes the norm … justice may be denied.” […] Specifically, Comey said he is “deeply concerned” about what’s known as “going dark” — operating systems being developed by companies such as Apple and Google that automatically encrypt information on their devices. And that means even the companies themselves won’t be able to unlock phones, laptops and other devices so law enforcement can access emails, photos or other evidence that could be crucial to a case …

Comey, however, didn’t place full blame with companies like Apple and Google for creating devices with such encryption. They were “responding to what they perceive is a market demand” from the general public, which has grown “mistrustful of government” in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures of secret government surveillance. […] Encryption “is a marketing pitch,” Comey said. “But it will have very serious consequences for law enforcement and national security agencies at all levels. Sophisticated criminals will come to count on these means of evading detection. It’s the equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be cracked. And my question is, at what cost?”

A process of Exit-in-place is underway, automatically, and it’s not easy to imagine how it could be stopped. With message management disintegrating on one side, and the public sphere eroding into dark nets on the other, it must seem to the State in the age of Internet runaway that the walls are closing in.