“The Deep State is really just a collection of unaccountable bad actors at the highest levels of the federal bureaucracy, the media, elected office, corporations, and cultural institutions, who abuse the power they have been given and the institutions they were hired to serve in order to protect themselves and manipulate politics in their favor. And they are aided and abetted by staff in the government who are either in on the game or too afraid to speak up.
I regularly used to tell people that the fastest way to move up in the government is to just screw up, and the bigger the screwup, the bigger the promotion. Every person implicated in your mistakes has an interest in covering up what they did, so they will promote you. That means the people at the very top are usually the most immoral, unethical people in the entire agency.”