Being Woke to the Praetorian Guard

Praetorian Guard

The Praetorian Guard was an elite unit of the Imperial Roman army whose members served as personal bodyguards and intelligence for Roman emperors…  the first emperor, Augustus, founded the Guard as his personal security detail. Although they continued to serve in this capacity for roughly three centuries, the Guard became notable for its intrigue and interference in Roman politics, to the point of overthrowing emperors and proclaiming their successors.

The Praetorian Guard had the power and ability to spy, using the most advanced tools with an enormous budget, to learn the truth and the secrets and to use any means necessary to "safeguard the realm" from institutions with continuity beyond a single generation.

Being Woke

From the NY Times:

wokeness, itself a freighted term, originally derived and then distorted from the Black vernacular “woke,” which invokes a spirit of vigilance to see the world as it really is. (The experimental novelist William Melvin Kelley may have been the first to introduce “woke” to the mainstream as an adjective, in his 1962 essay on Black idiom, “If You’re Woke You Dig It”)

So being "woke" is understanding that the world may not be how it seems according to the mainstream conventional wisdom.  Noam Chomsky describes a related concept in Manufacturing Consent:

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky arguing that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1] The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922).[2] The book was honored with the Orwell Award.

I see the United States political elite as being driven from behind the scenes by the CIA and various sister intelligence agencies in much the same manner as the Praetorian Guard controlled the very top ranks of the Roman Empire.

Evidence

●       Missle Gap

●       Cold war assassinations and coups

●       JFK Assassination

●       Vietnam War

●       MLK Assassination

●       RFK Assassination

●       Watergate

●       Iranian Revolution and Reagan Presidency

●       Roy Cohn and Jeffrey Epstein

●       Iran-Contrar Affair

●       Iraq 2003 War

●       Trump-Russia Collusion Allegations

●       Skripal Affair

●       Trump's First Impeachment

●       Wars in Syria and Afghanistan

Beyond the Bullets

Mainstream media on Republicans and Democrats:

In my understanding, there is quite a bit of similarity in what Trump is doing this year to what Hillary did in 2016-2019.  Here's Matt Taibbi:

Do I personally believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump? No. However, I also didn’t believe the election was stolen from Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the Internet was bursting at the seams with conspiracy theories nearly identical to the ones now being propagated by Trump fans...

Unrestrained speculation about the illegitimacy of the 2016 election had a major impact on the public. Surveys showed 50 percent of Clinton voters by December of 2016 believed the Russians actually hacked vote tallies in states, something no official agency ever alleged even at the peak of the Russiagate madness. Two years later, one in three Americans believed a foreign power would change vote tallies in the 2018 midterm elections...  

What makes the current situation particularly grotesque is that the DNI warning about this summer stated plainly that a major goal of foreign disruptors was to “undermine the public’s confidence in the Democratic process” by “calling into question the validity of the election results.”

 Our own domestic intelligence agencies have been doing exactly that for years now. On nearly a daily basis in the leadup to this past Election Day, they were issuing warnings in the corporate press that you might have reason to mistrust the coming results: ...

In fact, go back across the last four years and you’ll find a consistent feature of warnings about foreign or domestic “disinformation”: the stern scare quote from a bona fide All-Star ex-spook or State official, from Clint Watts to Victoria Nuland to Frank Figliuzzi to John Brennan to McMullan’s former boss and buddy, ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden. A great many of these figures are now paid contributors to major corporate news organizations.

What do we think the storylines would be right now if Trump had won? What would those aforementioned figures be saying on channels like MSNBC and CNN, about what would they be speculating? Does anyone for a moment imagine that YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook would block efforts from those people to raise doubts about that hypothetical election result?

We know the answer to that question, because all of those actors spent the last four years questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s election without any repercussions. The Atlantic, quoting the likes of Hayden, ran a piece weeks after Trump’s election arguing that it was the duty of members of the Electoral College to defy voters and elect Hillary Clinton on national security grounds. Mass protests were held to disrupt the Electoral College vote in late December 2016, and YouTube cheerfully broadcast videos from those events. When Electoral vote tallies were finally read out in congress, ironically by Joe Biden, House members from at least six states balked, with people like Barbara Lee objecting on the grounds of “overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in our election.”

In sum, it’s okay to stoke public paranoia, encourage voters to protest legal election results, spread conspiracy theories about stolen elections, refuse to endorse legal election tallies, and even to file lawsuits challenging the validity of presidential results (Judge tosses DNC’s election-hacking lawsuit against Russia, WikiLeaks, and the Trump campaign), so long as all of this activity is sanctified by officials in the right party, or by intelligence vets, or by friendlies at CNN, NBC, the New York Times, etc.

Here we see the intelligence community's influence on domestic politics extends beyond issues of national security to derivative questions about the legitimacy of our democratic processes and elected officials.

Conclusion

As wrote 2 years ago in The Intelligence Community Tells Us What's Happening:

The United States has by far the biggest intelligence budget of any country in the world.  The annual budget is about $70 billion dollars, with 70% of this going to defense industry contractors.  The overall defense budget is about $700 billion dollars per year.  By comparison, Russia spends about $60 billion per year on defense as a whole, less than one tenth what the United States spends.  The United States spends more on intelligence alone than Russia spends on its entire military.

It would be naive to believe that all this money is neutral with regard to politics, or that amoral actors in the United States and elsewhere in our sprawling global empire do not attempt to manipulate the public discourse and political decisions.  It would be naive to believe the mainstream media is beyond this influence of this money and the secret information gathered using tools available only intelligence agencies and laws exempting these agencies from accountability.