How The Deep State Captured America

How venture capital investments transformed intelligence networks into the US government itself

There was a profound discovery in a recent post by fellow Substacker

Dissent in Bloom

. She exposed how closely enmeshed the people who administer our vote-counting system are with the defense sector. It’s the type of discovery that in normal times would make sense — but these are entirely abnormal times — and so the discovery is much more than the first smoking gun that our own military-industrial complex is manipulating our elections; it’s the first sign that the Deep State — not the people — now runs the United States of America.

A few years ago I was reading an article about Turkey's slide into authoritarianism and one thing really stood out. The definition of “Deep State”. In the US we generally use the term to mean a network of interlinked bureaucrats, but the original definition was the intersection of organized crime, terror groups and intelligence networks that often created a quasi-legal state within a state. For intelligence agencies, organized criminals and terror groups are an effective way to operate against adversarial countries without detection. The CIA did this to bring down the Soviet Union, and Russia and China have used it to harness control of US democracy.

Foreign intelligence was able to create a ‘Deep State’ in America by co-opting organized criminals like Charles Kushner and Donald Trump, and by funding a burgeoning new defense tech sector through venture capital firms acting as fronts. And much of it was funded by your tax dollars.

The Money Trail That Built the Network

The evolution traces directly through venture capital flows into Silicon Valley. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, began investing in tech companies in the 1990s, focusing on data analytics, satellite communications, and surveillance technologies. Peter Thiel's Palantir emerged from this ecosystem with direct CIA funding. SpaceX and other "private" space companies received massive government contracts that functioned as disguised subsidies. But as with any private business, investors came from home and abroad—which is why Sequoia and other funds backed the tech companies that appear to be American-held but are beholden to foreign intelligence agencies and even criminal syndicates.

The flow of money into these sectors transformed the traditional adversarial nature of state foreign relations into business partnerships. This is how the new oligarch elite finds itself in bed with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping while still claiming to do the work of America's national security.

Current Evidence of Complete Merger

At a time when every type of public spending is being slashed, there is one noticeable exception: defense. We recently witnessed four defense tech executives sworn directly into US military leadership. Pentagon spending has surged. NATO defense spending doubled. War drums beat in Ukraine, Taiwan, and throughout Europe. The clear winners are defense manufacturers—the traditional big five but also the newcomers Starlink, SpaceX and Palantir, companies that appear to be American-held but are beholden to foreign intelligence agencies and even criminal syndicates.