The crisis is upon us, and yet hardly anyone outside of a few old-fashioned liberals sees it. Their view is obscured by the Brobdingnagian figure of Donald J. Trump towering over us all as left and right battle it out in his shadow. Yet the real battle, and the actual combatants, are obscured by this spectacle.

The Deep State – i.e. the constellation of national security agencies and private actors who have directed and maintained our globalist foreign policy since the end of World War II – would have targeted Trump in any case, due to his hostility to their interventionist foreign policy. And yet I believe they would’ve gone after him anyway due to his populist outsider persona, which the self-appointed guardians of the Empire consider dangerous per se.

The bottom line is that the intelligence services of the United States, and top officials of the FBI, have indeed launched a regime change operation comparable to the dozens carried out by these very same spooks over the years from Latin America to the Middle East. Like most of these campaigns, it’s a multilateral effort, with the intelligence services of at least three “allied” countries involved. Co-authored with the Clintonistas, the Russia-gate hoax is their invention: it was the perfect pretext to conduct surveillance on a rival presidential campaign. For all the talk of “collusion,” the real colluders were the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign organization who utilized the British “former” MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, and his infamous dossier. This fake intelligence was used by the Justice Department to justify spying on Carter Page, George Pappadapoulos, and other Trump campaign contacts.

There’s your collusion.

The regime-changers are operating on several levels at once. At the lowest level: suddenly black-clad “Antifa” dromedaries appear in the streets, attacking Trump supporters – and, in one case, Trump himself. The assaulter is later treated to a lionizing interview with CNN.

At the highest level, top FBI and CIA officials deploy the assets available to the most powerful government on earth to harass, undermine, and betray a sitting President, subverting the constitutional order and establishing a fateful precedent. For the goal of this regime change campaign isn’t just to get rid of Trump – that’s just the icing on the cake. The primary goal is to establish the Deep State’s veto over who can – and cannot – inhabit the White House.

What’s interesting is the international dimension of all this. If we’re looking to see who originated the Russia-gate narrative, all roads lead to London. Not only Christopher Steele and his “private” intelligence-gathering agency made up of “ex”-MI6 spooks, but also the roles played by the Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in his interactions with Pappadopolos: why would the former Australian high commissioner to the UK seek out a low-level youngster peripherally involved with the Trump campaign?

Carter Page was also sought out by professor Stefan Halper, of Cambridge University, whose longtime links to Western intelligence sources are not due to just a scholarly interest. This was clearly an attempt to penetrate the Trump campaign and plant the earliest seeds of Russia-gate, as Halper reported to the FBI and his British overlords.

And what about the role played by the mysterious Joseph Mifsud, whose fake-thinktank located in the UK provided a cover for luring Pappadopolos into his orbit. It was “professor” Mifsud who first suggested to his young protégé that the Russians had incriminating emails from the DNC. Is anyone surprised that Mifsud has since disappeared – and that the authorities have shown little interest in finding him?

In short, Russia-gate was a setup.

The principal players – the FBI, the Clinton campaign, the Clinton-allied Fusion GPS, the “intelligence community” – were pawns in a game coordinated and directly largely by foreign actors. Not only the British, but also the Australians, the Ukrainians, and the Estonians all played some part in a disinformation campaign designed to bring down the Trump administration.

Why the foreign involvement? The American Empire is a cash cow for many overseas interests: as the Euro-weenies huddle under the American defense umbrella, they can well afford to maintain extensive welfare states. And there’s also an ideological rationale: the Atlanticist conception of the “Anglosphere,” which sees the continuation of the old British imperium in a US-led international order.,

On another level, this regime-change operation is being waged in the media – or, rather, by the media, since 95% of the “mainstream” news outlets have been turned into anti-Trump propaganda outfits, emitting straight polemics 24/7. It’s no different from what they did in Chile, in 1973, when the CIA overthrew Salvador Allende, using clandestine contacts with the media to target the government with black propaganda, false flag incidents, and a general atmosphere of instability and crisis.

If it wasn’t Donald Trump, the Deep State would’ve eventually targeted some other populist figure who dares dissent from the foreign policy consensus of perpetual war for perpetual peace. The coup plotters are fortunate in that the President presents such a ready-made diversion from the Deep State’s assault on the constitutional order.

This isn’t about Trump. The stakes are much higher than the fate of his presidency and political fortunes. It’s about preserving what’s left of our old republic. So long as “The Resistance” can obscure this stark reality with emotional appeals, and diversionary tactics, they’ll succeed in setting the cornerstone of a new American political system – one in which an unelected permanent bureaucracy rules the roost and makes the rules.

The Deep State must be defeated. After we do that, we can argue about Trump.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).

You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.