THE DEEP STATE

That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the twenty-first century.

             Mike Lofgren, Anatomy of the Deep State,                2014

In the last two posts (‘Truth and History’, and ‘The Truth Deficit’) I’ve tried to show that while our nation’s history teaches us to feel good about our membership of it, conspiracy theories perversely do the opposite.  Yet even as we recoil from them they are assaulting our received historical narrative as never before.  They are, in fact, challenging us to reappraise our relationship to the very authorities and opinion makers we trust, and the mass media through whom they shape our collective beliefs. 

These shared opinions and beliefs, shaped as they are by what we receive from our authorities (whomever we may determine them to be) define our membership of our community. Evidence that challenges them thus creates acute cognitive dissonance.  Our cultural immune system will reject or ignore more fundamental truths – such as proofs of logical inconsistency, or even the laws of physics – in order to preserve the loyalties on which we have come to depend as a community.  Recall that the members of the Inquisition refused to look up Galileo’s telescope, for fear of the damage it would do to their beliefs. A movie which challenges the man-made global warming paradigm will have the same effect today.

Reality, I have said, is not ‘out there’.  We make sense of the world, that is, of the myriad sensory inputs that constitute the continuity of our experience. What we continually therefore seek from our fellow men is confirmation that our experience tallies with theirs. If it does, we have community, if it doesn’t, we have strife. Education is very largely the effort to get all members of a given community on the same page.  One community’s education is another’s propaganda. Truth, therefore, isn’t something ‘out there’, it’s an agreement.  Trust is the cement in this creative endeavor. Without trust the whole edifice collapses. (‘Trust’ and ‘truth’ come from the same Indo-European root dru, from which we also get the word ‘durable’.  What is true is that which endures.)  Since we can only trust that which is true, blind loyalty seems to me a dangerous option in our present situation.

So I need to hammer a bit more on the evidence that says we are being duped, big time.  That evidence unfortunately can’t come from the sources we wish to investigate, but then other sources are not our authorities.  This provides a credibility gap that our cultural immune system will waste no time exploiting to justify doing nothing.  However, there are a few authorities who come pretty close to bridging that gap, and in this post I want to focus on one of them.  

In The Secret Government - a gripping, ‘personal essay’ researched and narrated thirty years ago by the incomparable Bill Moyers - the then-current preoccupation of an America in the throes of the Iran-Contra scandal was the unwarranted power that had accumulated in the hands of President Ronald Reagan and his advisors. Then Senator Daniel Inouye described the so-called ‘Enterprise’ which channelled money from operations in Iran to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, as

a shadowy government with its own air force, its own navy, its own fund raising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest free from all checks and balances and free from the law itself. 

Moyers exposed a culture of profits-before-patriotism, and the evolution of conflict into a money making business of perpetual war. The Constitution, he concluded, was being ‘shredded’, and We the People must be somehow alerted to set things right again.  I provide a link below to the broadcast, from which here are a few more quotations (Moyers is the speaker, unless otherwise attributed):

“Secrecy is the freedom zealots dream of. No watchman to check the door. No accountant to check the books. No judge to check the law. The Secret Government has no Constitution.  The rules it follows are the rules it makes up. So [CIA Director] William Casey could dream that the Enterprise would take on a life of its own; permanent, and unaccountable.”  

“… the only people fooled are the American people. But consent is the very heart of our Constitutional System. How can people judge what they do not know, or what they are told falsely?”

And, chillingly, in view of what we know now

“Just imagine that William Casey’s dream came true. Suppose the Enterprise grew into a super-secret, self-financing, self-perpetuating organisation.”

“We’ve turned the war powers of the United States over to, well, we’re never really sure who, or what they’re doing, or what it costs, or who is paying for it. The one thing we are sure of is - this largely secret global war, carried on with less and less accountability to democratic institutions, has become a way of life. And now we’re faced with a question, brand new in our history: can we have the permanent warfare state, and democracy too?”

“The secret government had been given the license to reach all the way to every mailbox, every college campus, every telephone and every home.” [And this was back in 1987!]

We start out breaking foreign rules, since every country has laws against secretly overthrowing their governments, and then you end up breaking the law at home and coming to feel a contempt for the law, for your colleagues and associates, for the Congress and the public, and for the Constitution… Precisely because they cannot get their way in public debate they are driven to seek to subvert the democratic process.  

               

     Morton Halperin, then Director of the                Washington Office of the American Civil          Liberties Union. 

Moyers: Do you think that what we’ve seen of the secret sale of arms to Iran and the private war in Nicaragua is on a par with what we saw at Watergate?

Prof. Edwin Firmage, Univ. of Utah: Oh, the substance of it is far above Watergate. You have the sale of armaments to terrorist groups, which can only foment more kidnapping and more terror, and finance it. You have the doing of this by the armed forces; a very scary thing. You have the government a part in this, doing things that Congress has forbidden: direct illegality. You have constitutional abuses that are enormous… The whole fight is over means, not ends. Every president, with every good intention, and every tyrant… has used precisely the same argument, that is “Don’t constrain me by means and I will get you there safely and well.” And I think any time we accept a reason-of-state argument to justify means that are totally incongruent with the values of state we are on the highroad to tyranny. And we deserve to be there.

“The ‘national security’ argument [i.e. invoking the National Security Act of 1947] now interferes with every American’s right to understand its government. That’s what secrecy’s all about these days.”

                      Scott Armstrong, Director of the                                National Security Archive.

And towards the end we hear a small-community activist –

We have a hymn that the words go to something like ‘I wish that my eyes had never been opened, because if they’d been opened I’d have to do something about it’, and I think that’s a problem with a lot of people in this country. They don’t want their eyes to be opened, because they’re very comfortable, very secure, and if their eyes are opened they’re going to have to do something.

Thirty years on all this sounds sickeningly familiar.  Fourteen years after this broadcast, on the eve of 9/11, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced to a stunned Congress that the Pentagon had lost track of $2.3 trillion.  Another 14 years after that the amount is estimated to be more than $8 trillion.

In 2014 Bill Moyers broadcast The Deep State. By now it’s clear that a much more diverse group of actors is involved. Still broadly arrayed under the rubric of ‘national security’ – and still very much protected by the smothering blanket of the National Security Act of 1947 – we now have Homeland Security, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts, the Treasury Department, and, bizarrely, Wall Street, in addition to the more than 3000 secretive government-funded organisations mentioned in my last post.

Moyers: If, as you write, the ideology of the Deep State is not democrat or Republican, not Left or Right, what is it?

Lofgren: It’s an ideology; I just don’t think we’ve named it. It’s a kind of corporatism… The actors in this drama tend to steer clear of social issues. 

They pretend to be merrily neutral servants of the state. Giving the best advice possible on national security or financial matters. But they hold a very deep ideology of the Washington consensus at home, which is deregulation, outsourcing, deindustrialisation and financialisation, and they believe in American exceptionalism abroad, which is boots on the ground everywhere; it’s our right to meddle everywhere in the world, and the result of that is perpetual war… A government within the government that operates off the visible government and operates off the taxpayers, but doesn’t seem to be constrained in the Constitutional sense by the government. 

Pablo

THE TRUTH DEFICIT

I think the American public is not aware their opinions are being manipulated.  But they are, and there are powerful forces, especially in this town [Washington DC] who spend an enormous amount of time and money trying to figure out how to manipulate American opinion towards their own objectives.

Former Congressman Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission

That’s an understatement, if ever I saw one. The term ‘fake news’, concocted to discredit the alternative media, applies with far greater force to the mainstream media that promulgated it, because the mainstream is supposedly us. The claim on which their reputations stand is that they tell us the truth. Yet, on matters of the gravest importance they do not. They are mouthpieces for an elite whose agenda they unquestioningly support, regardless of what is actually happening on the ground. The invasion of Afghanistan; of Iraq; of Libya; of Syria? It was all mapped out before 9/11. We are so enmeshed in their lies that we simply will not believe the extent to which we are being hoodwinked.

Inevitably, my latest post – of which this is the second in this short series - has generated one or two polite rebukes, principally that, if I’m suggesting alternative truths, my chosen links are insufficiently authoritative. 

This is entirely to be expected. Connecting dots is what we all do, incessantly, to make (note that word) sense of our world. We all connect our dots in different ways, depending on our prior experience and what we’re looking for. The fact that two people will look at apparently the same evidence and yet come to different conclusions is what got me started on this entire blog.  The view that reality is in some meaningful sense objective is a very useful theory, but people are at last coming to realise that it is without empirical foundation.

The bedrock claim of critical philosophy, going back to Kant, is simple: We can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power.

These ideas animate the work of influential thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida, and they’ve become axiomatic for many scholars in literary studies, cultural anthropology and sociology.

From these premises, philosophers and theorists have derived a number of related insights. One is that facts are socially constructed. People who produce facts — scientists, reporters, witnesses — do so from a particular social position (maybe they’re white, male and live in America) that influences how they perceive, interpret and judge the world.

Casey Williams, “Has Trump Stolen Philosophy’s Critical Tools”, The Stone, NYT, 17 April, 2017

What you see as the truth must in many significant ways be different from what I see as the truth.  There is no objective arbiter to decide who is ‘right’.  There is, at best, only informed opinion, i.e. our authorities.  

This proposition doesn’t sit well with the scientifically minded. Without an objective world, how would we communicate at all? they ask. Well, we communicate solely by means of what we have in common. We constantly seek confirmation from those around us that we see what they see. The rest is simply terra incognita as far as communication is concerned.  What we disparagingly label ‘indoctrination’ is in large part essential to enjoying the advantages of cooperation, and it’s what governments do – perhaps have to do - all the time, principally through the organs of our recognised authorities, which of course include the mass media as well as the schools. We consequently call our own indoctrination ‘education’, because we know which side our bread is buttered. Our resistance to ideas contrary to our indoctrination is what Robert Pirsig calls our ‘cultural immune system’.  ‘Conspiracy theories’ are examples of such ideas, and the condescension with which the term is used demonstrates one way our immune system counteracts them. The mainstream media will not and indeed cannot treat such subjects with fairness. Instead, they must mark off the borders of acceptable belief with the guideposts of ridicule. At least instinctively, we are all aware of this. And thus the charade – the conspiracy, in fact - of a single, one-is-for-all ‘truth’ continues.

So when one critic offered me a list of ten ‘reliable’ news outlets, I applied the litmus test that interests me most: their take on 9/11. As  expected, they all confined themselves to criticising government actions that occurred after the event (handling of dust inhalation victims, the rush into Iraq, the escalating cost of the war against terror, etc), thus safely skirting the need to challenge the core of the official narrative, which they all accepted completely uncritically.

Yet the government version of the 9/11 event is as full of holes as a cheese grater.  How could they possibly claim to be objective, fair and impartial, and yet all see it exactly the same way?  We the public are not invited to examine the evidence (all of which was anyway spirited away as quickly as possible); everything is laid out as incontestable fact.

The long-delayed report on the collapse of Tower 7 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) does essentially the same thing, ending the analysis at collapse initiation, “just”’ - as ex-NIST senior mathematician Peter Michael Ketcham complains – “as it’s getting interesting”.

“We didn’t examine the collapse sequence” defends study chief Shyam Sunder, “because there was nothing there to explain. Once initiated, collapse was inevitable”. But it’s only in the nature of the collapse itself that controlled demolition – the elephant in the room - is graphically and incontestably revealed! So NIST spent three years rigging an unconvincing computer model which would explain the collapse without looking at it.  The entire report screams cover-up!

Four years before 9/11 Noam Chomsky revealed that

The elite media set a framework within which others operate. If you are watching the Associated Press… there is something that comes along every day that says “Notice to Editors: Tomorrow’s New York Times is going to have the following stories on the front page.” … if you’re an editor of a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio and you don’t have the resources to figure out what the news is… this tells you what the news is… These are the stories that you put there because that’s what the New York Times tells us is what you’re supposed to care about tomorrow... If you get off line, if you’re producing stories that the big press doesn’t like, you’ll hear about it pretty soon… So there are a lot of ways in which power plays can drive you right back into line if you move out. If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long. That framework works pretty well, and it is understandable that it is just a reflection of obvious power structures.

                          ‘What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream’,                                            Noam Chomsky, 1997

                                  

A classic case is the global warming narrative. Al Gore did an excellent job getting everyone on the same page about that. His authority, as the United States President manqué, was unassailable. The until then little-known field of climate science suddenly became a magnet for funds and, just as for 9/11, all interpretations of the data which contradicted the mainstream version were ridiculed and silenced. Consequently your own view, I am sure, is unassailably that purveyed by the mainstream media, namely, that global warming is largely a man-made phenomenon.

Watching the video linked below will therefore provoke your cultural immune system. The title alone will turn you off. Please resist this.  You will be rewarded – as I was – with some real climate science, as well as getting a glimpse behind the scenes at how science is massaged into the shape that the elite want. Food and health ‘science’, as you may be aware, are following exactly the same path.  Here’s the movie.

“But wait a minute!” I hear you object. “Who is to say that this stuff is more truthful than what Al Gore told us?” Ok; the manipulation of belief primarily takes the form of the suppression, or misrepresentation of evidence. The Al Gore warming argument is captivatingly simple, as all effective messages to the masses must be: global temperatures and CO2 appear to move in lockstep though the millennia. In fact, as you saw, he got it backwards, and it is anyway considerably more complicated than that. So Gore didn’t give us all the ‘facts’, only those which supported his case, and he distorted those.  The juggernaut of the mass media then did the rest. How were we to know? To call the alternative the ‘better’ argument is to be persuaded first by its refutation of the Al Gore narrative, then by its greater comprehensiveness and consequent explanatory power, together with the combined, legitimate authority of the distinguished scientists who put it forward, and their reputations courageously on the line. There is also much wry irony, even as there is a significant absence of ridicule. But celebrity trumps science in the public mind, so Al Gore, with the united backing of the mainstream media, wins.

How long has all this been going on? Well, I began this series with a quote from then CIA Director William Casey, who back in 1981 announced that the aim of The Firm was to completely enmesh the American public in a web of fiction. Clearly he wasn’t just getting started (Casey, BTW, drowned under extremely suspicious circumstances in the Potomac River.  He who lives by the sword dies by the sword). I gave links in the first post of this series to the most conspicuous of the government fairy tales, and attach them again here - 

The Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 

the Roswell incident (1947),

the assassination of JFK (1963), 

the Gulf of Tonkin incident (1964), 

the death of Princess Diana(1997),

the 9/11 event (2001), 

the invasion of Iraq (2003),

the 7/7 bombings in London (2005); 

the bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City(1995), 

the TWA Flight 800 disaster (1996), and 

the Sandy Hook massacre (2012). 

And we can I think with confidence add the Assad Syrian ‘sarin gas attacks’ ‘of  2013 and just the other day  (also linked at the top).    

Ok, these particular links aren’t everyone’s choice, but I put it to you, have our mainstream authorities provided in any of these cases even a small fraction of the evidence to support their position that has been amassed here to refute it? The JFK assassination link alone, though arguably overstating Kennedy’s virtues (not a criticism we would level at the mass media, so why here?) and regardless of the sketchiness of some details, lays out such a wealth of evidence it would be evasive in the highest degree to complain that it therefore fails to overthrow the findings of the infamous Warren Report. The evidence it presents, like that for 9/11 and indeed for 7/7 (regardless of the source), is overwhelming.

So when did it all start? After WW1 America was becoming formally more democratic, more diverse, less manageable. It was “going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think,” continued Noam Chomsky in the above-quoted lecture. “In 1928’, he went on, “Edward Bernays wrote Propaganda”.

This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala. 
     His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke…  He got enormous praise for that. 

                                 ‘What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream’, 

                                  Noam Chomsky, 1997

Then, in 1932 Aldous Huxley published his Brave New World. The novel anticipated developments in reproductive technology, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning, but, though prescient, it was set in a safely distant, utopian future (London, in 2540).

Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of The Worlds was broadcast over the radio in 1938, and caused a public outcry. Its news-bulletin format – apparently announcing an alien invasion - was thought deceptive by newspapers and public figures, and led to calls for regulation. It also again demonstrated the potential power of mass media in molding public opinion and behaviour, and money began to pour into government research on the role of mass media in that endeavor. Suddenly the mass media became an instrument by which the elite, who had always (as Chomsky notes) run things to their own advantage, could manipulate the beliefs of their populations.

In 1949 George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four, some 35 years before the putative arrival of the fictional dystopia it depicted. Even when the actual year was reached and Casey had by then announced the disinformation objectives of the CIA the public in general was still far from convinced that what Orwell warned about was happening, except of course in the ‘indoctrinated’ societies of the USSR and China.

Back in 1961, then outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower had himself warned

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. 

    

But his warning went unheeded. What was he referring to, people wondered? After all, by its very nature, the manipulation of public opinion and knowledge is a secret undertaking. And therein lies our dilemma: how are we to awaken to something that is run in secret by the very people who manage us? What if the manipulation involves lies? With all the secrecy, how are we the public ever to know? We have to trust our authorities! The integrity of the source of information is paramount in the operation of a democracy. Yet the Center for Public Integrity lists no fewer than 935 lies told to the American public by senior government officials (Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld, Fleisher, Wolfowitz, Rice, Cheney, and McClellan) in the run up to the invasion of Iraq – an event the Neo-Cons in the Bush cabinet wanted, and were prepared to go to any lengths to obtain. 

   The National Security Agency Headquarters

Aside from the cover-ups and false flag operations linked above and in my previous post, what other monstrous secrets affecting our future might the U.S. Government be hiding? Where there’s smoke there’s fire. During his administration then President Ronald Regan publicly mentioned no fewer than three times war with aliens from outer space as a way of settling our international animosities. War with aliens?

Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared the day before 9/11 that $2.3 trillion dollars had gone missing from the Pentagon budget, and ‘could not be accounted for’.  The amount has since grown, vastly. To fund what? ‘The books are cooked routinely, year after year after year,’ explains Franklin C. Spinney, DOD Analyst.

In its 10-year search-and-destroy mission against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, the United States has spent more than $450 billion primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

That does not count the price tag of the war in Iraq, where Americans footed the bill for another $800 billion since the 2003 invasion.

Nor does it include the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on improving homeland security at airports, ports and other facilities. Nor mammoth increases in the yearly defense and intelligence budgets. Nor the massive projected costs of two wars that have already left some 50,000 American troops killed or wounded.

While symbolic, the death of bin Laden is likely to do little to slow down the costs of war. “If the overall war FY2012 request of $132 billion is enacted,” concludes the Congressional Research Service, “war funding since the 9/11 attacks would reach $1.415 trillion.”

                                                        Source:  Center for Public Integrity

In 2010 the Washington Post published a series entitled Top Secret America. It began with the following statement –

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no-one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

It listed 1,271 government organisations and 1,931 private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in 10,000 locations across the United States. It said an estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearances.

In the executive summary of the U.S. House of Representatives’ 2004 investigation into secrecy in the post 9/11 world ushered in by the George W. Bush administration, we read

…laws that are designed to promote public access to information have been undermined, while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded. The cumulative result is an unprecedented assault on the principle of open government.

Did this picture change one iota during the Obama Administration?

The self-described “most transparent administration in history” declined to say how much it seeks to bill taxpayers for individual spy agencies as part of President Barack Obama's final budget request to Congress.

Disclosing any agency-specific information -- such as whether the controversial National Security Agency or lesser-known National Reconnaissance Office won backing for a raise or a cut -- “could harm national security,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Tuesday in a press release.

                                                                   U.S..News, Feb.9 2016

Taken altogether, this is a picture of government shrouded in such secrecy that it has become all but unaccountable to the tax payers who unwittingly fund it. 

The Government which routinely betrays your trust on vitally important issues is now completely out of your hands. Why all this secrecy? You might be forgiven for suspecting that we are the uninformed participants in a vast, unfolding social engineering experiment.

Pablo

TRUTH and HISTORY

We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.                   

            William Casey, CIA Director (from first staff meeting, 1981)

History, it has been said, is written by the victors. It trumpets our nation’s excellence.  It glosses over the atrocities war often entails because they were, self-evidently, committed against our inferiors.  Nor are the disasters of Gallipoli, or the Holocaust, exceptions to this rule, because each was also employed to unify a nation, which suggests simply that history, regardless of what it records, is ethnocentric. One way or another it makes us feel good about our membership of a particular community.  In many ways it defines for us what is good. (I've explored this in greater detail here.)

Perhaps this helps explain our revulsion at certain recent attempts at revisionist history. Like Holocaust denial, we recoil from conspiracy theories because they invariably attack our foundational belief in ourselves as representatives of the true and the good. Instead, they invite us to feel alternately ashamed of, and angry at the very authorities we have little choice but to trust.  In a word, they make us profoundly uncomfortable. One of the common early accusations levelled at 9/11 ‘truthers’, for example, was that they were unpatriotic. 

But now a vast upheaval is under way in the West, involving nothing less than a wholesale reappraisal of the morals and motives of our leaders, and the media through which they reach out to us.  A largely internet-driven, no-holds-barred, unflattering reinterpretation of many recent, momentous events is gaining traction in the popular mind.  The Pearl Harbor attack (1941), the Roswell incident (1947), the assassination of JFK (1963), the Gulf of Tonkin incident (1964), the death of Princess Diana(1997), the 9/11 event (2001), the invasion of Iraq (2003), the 7/7 bombings in London (2005); also the bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City(1995), the TWA Flight 800 disaster (1996), and the Sandy Hook massacre (2012): for each and every one of these seminal events the government explanation has been investigated, and, in every case, roundly rejected by intelligent people who, had they agreed with the government version, would have been hailed as reliable sources of information. That they came to the opposite conclusion labels them conspiracy theorists, madmen, and traitors, because our view of ourselves, supported by our view of history, is that we are the good guys and only nutters and bad people would do wicked things like this, or believe in such absurdities. 

He who controls the past controls the future.  The cumulative disinformation which these and other media falsifications represent is creating a serious distortion in our apprehension of what is true; a kind of truth deficit. If we ignore the mounting evidence that things are not as they should be in our received historical narrative, we are in great danger of being blindsided by what is to come. False flag events, many of stunning audacity, are becoming the order of the day. Where is this leading?  

Many will argue that politics today is beyond our control, and under such circumstances burying your head in the sand is a rational response if it preserves your peace of mind. Hard to disagree with that. But are we really to envy those Jews, for example, who ‘chose’ to remain in the Berlin of the late 1930ies, despite the ominous rumblings of advancing Nazism? Is it choice we are defending, or inertia? Fortune favors the prepared.

Here's a news clip from Russia Today (RT) relating to an incident that occurred in September, 2013.  It reveals, once again, the on-going collusion between our supposedly 'objective', 'truthful' media - in this case the once venerable BBC - and those who are shaping our perception of the world events they claim to report. It is evidence like this that is compromising the credibility of the mainstream media, leading to a catastrophic decline in their viewers and readership. We are losing our collective faith in the historical narrative being laid out for us by the traditional news apparatus, and, by extension, our leaders. People are simply tuning out. The term 'fake news' has been seen to apply, not to the 'alt media' at which it was originally aimed, but more devastatingly to our organs of authority, who have quietly dropped the phrase.  

The BBC faking news? What the hell is going on? We have just been exposed to toxic news about a further Syrian chemical attack. Who is now to say who caused that atrocity, or even that it occurred at all? This is a very deep rabbit hole. I intend to explore some of its implications further over the next couple of weeks, culminating hopefully in a new and much-anticipated movie, as yet unreleased, which I shall download on or around 25 April, and somehow circulate or provide links to (it may only be available as a paid-for download) for anyone interested. 

Pablo