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Comment by d4nt | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this what we mean when we talk about democracies with "well established institutions". In other words, isn't it a feature not a bug? The public institutions wield power just like the press, the judiciary, the legislature etc. And policy that does not meet with a broad acceptance by all sections of society gets blocked one way or another.

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There is no such thing as a "war institution". All the above institutions are meant as a check against Presidential power, all of whom operate in the open, whereas we're talking about a state within the state that only follows its own rules, gets to operate outside of the spotlight, and has unlimited power (can you imagine Trump explicitly criticizing the deep state? There's a reason he hasn't done that yet, you don't attack those more powerful than you).

Kennedy did. Go look up some of his speeches. They took care of him. They would do the same for Trump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdMbmdFOvTs

Exactly. Not that those Twitter chickenhawks who support a coup would mind.

On a completely unrelated note, a few days ago @Jack compared Twitter usage patterns in the US as similar to that before the Arab Spring. Huh.

Military junta it is.

Quote from that speech: "And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security--and we [the Kennedy administration] intend to do it"

It's amazing how prescient he is of the mounting conflict between full transparency and full privacy and the battle over who should conform to one or the other.

I've also been reminded of Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex: "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience... We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

The President has explicitly disparaged individual judges and the Intelligence Community from his personal Twitter account. Does he need to say the phrase "deep state" to qualify under your guidelines?

Judges are not even remotely part of the deep state, and Trump never directly attacked the IC (do a Twitter search for "cia from:realdonaldtrump" and sort by Latest). The "Nazi Germany" just evokes a witch-hunt, and could refer to anybody.

Huh?

"Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017

Ok, interesting. I didn't follow the news so closely the past few weeks, you can probably understand why.

Trump, Dec. 9, 2016: These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

> can you imagine Trump explicitly criticizing the deep state?

He has many times. As examples: He has openly and frequently attacked the intelligence community over their conclusions about Russian hacking and election interference. He said the military was doing a terrible job, IIRC, in the ISIS fight.

A hidden state that sets its own agenda and has its own politics defined by its own economic and power structure is definitely a bug. Because who controls that state? Usually it's run by the people for their own personal goals which usually includes profit and power, i.e. the CIA being a great example of a system that was growing in that direction but was impeded over time. Do you want tyranny like that having an undue influence on the government?

I mean, maybe it's a feature. It probably depends on whether or not you think they're doing a good job.

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