How do we keep them all straight?
In Jacob Siegel’s forthcoming book The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, the author describes the people, places, and agencies of the deep state that conspired to destroy Donald Trump in the aftermath the 2016 election. Siegel notes that the different agencies and actors of America’s left-wing bureaucracy are so numerous it’s easy to get confused. This confusion, he explains, serves as “a weapon that doubled as a disguise.” They don’t want us to know who they are or what they are doing.
For me, it took a conversation with a friend of mine who studies the deep state to help clarify things. My friend who, like me, grew up in Washington, D.C. and attended one of its elite high schools in the 1980s, noted that it’s amazing how many of these deep state players also went to the same high schools—all located within the same small radius around D.C.—and all at the same time, the 1980s. “It’s like a deep state high school,” he quipped.
Indeed. Just as Santa Monica High produced a remarkable number of our generation’s Hollywood actors (Rob Lowe, Charlie Sheen, Nicolas Cage, and Angelina Jolie), so, too, did the high schools in the D.C. metro area produce our generation’s leading deep state actors. These elite high schools—Walt Whitman, Saint Andrews, Holton-Arms, and St. Albans—are all just a quick bike ride away from one another. These elite schools gave us guys like eBay founder and left-wing philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, former Biden White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, and Graphika’s John Kelly. In other words, it seems D.C. high schools produce bureaucrats the way Western Pennsylvania produces quarterbacks.
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