President Trump made headlines last week for his statements admonishing social media companies’ leftist bias and their censorship of conservative and alternative media.

“I think that Google and Facebook and Twitter … treat conservatives and Republicans very unfairly,” Trump said, speaking to reporters at the White House.

Trump even went to so far as to hint at possible legal action against tech companies censoring political speech. “I think it’s a very serious problem because they’re really trying to silence a very large part of this country, and those people don’t want to be silenced,” Trump stated. “It’s not right. It’s not fair. It may not be legal, but we’ll see.”

This week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg showed up in Washington, D.C. They testified during the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on “Foreign Influence Operations’ Use of Social Media Platforms.”

Alex Jones also made his way to D.C., and went viral for confronting various Silicon Valley acolytes during the hearing. “At the press conference in Washington, D.C. to face those who are trying to censor me online,” Jones noted on Twitter.

However, unremarked upon in the mainstream and alternative press alike is the extent to which the censorship of alternative media content creators by the tech companies is being driven by the coordinated efforts of various Deep State actors both outside and inside of government.

As Jack Dorsey recently revealed during a bombshell interview with CNN’s Brian Thtelter, the Pope is Catholic, the bear shits in the woods, and Silicon Valley leans hard left. Yet, when the rest of Silicon Valley moved to purge Alex Jones and Infowars in early August, Twitter initially refused to cooperate. Dorsey explained the decision in a tweet, stating that being a right-wing ideologue was not a violation of Twitter rules.

Then Dorsey was hauled before congress. During the hearing, officially supposed to be about Russian propaganda on social media, Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich instead made cryptic statements about Alex Jones and appeared to level veiled threats against Twitter if they continued to provide Infowars with a platform.

The next day Twitter purged Alex Jones.

Under the pretense of stopping so-called “malign foreign influence operations,” (read: the Russians), the Deep State has spent the last two years developing its plans to silence the alternative press, widely recognized as having played an important role in aiding Trump’s political rise.

These plans rely upon the use of a dizzying array of self-referential government reports and private think tank research, all designed to mask the insidious agenda behind a neutral veneer. The Deep State has manufactured a narrative that Russian state propaganda is undermining the foundations of our free and open society. The scant evidence corroborating this narrative has then been conflated with legitimate alternative media outlets pushing the pro-freedom agenda.

The goal is to convince the sheeple that to advocate individual liberty and the rule of law is actually to parrot malign foreign propaganda. Once this big lie gains acceptance, the Deep State will have the cover it needs to purge these voices and retake control.

Prior to the 2016 election cycle, the establishment largely ignored the alternative press. But with the mainstream prestitutes rapidly losing market share to the overwhelmingly right-leaning alternative media, the Deep State found lots of inconvenient truths escaping.

The establishment’s response was to attempt to make a mockery of the alternative press, labeling it “fake news.” That approach backfired when the right was instead able to popularize the “fake news” moniker as a reference to the mainstream media.

Trump’s election awoke the establishment to the realization that they had lost control of the narrative. The Deep State entered panic mode.

First, ignoring the alternative press didn’t work. Then, mocking the alternative press didn’t work. So, the Deep State now seeks to silence and purge the alternative press. For, as the old saying goes, “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then [hopefully] you win.”

While there were earlier grumblings about Russian meddling during the 2016 election cycle, it wasn’t until early 2017 that the Deep State began to push the narrative as cover for the coming purge. It was then that analysts from the NSA, FBI, and CIA crafted an intelligence assessment purporting to expose the Russian government’s propaganda war on the American psyche. The analysts had been hand-picked to predestine the conclusions, and from the outset the document was drafted with eventual public consumption in mind.

The document claimed the Russians had a preference for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. To action this preference, Russia had used alternative press outlets and social media to amplify the messaging themes of the Trump campaign in particular and the political right in general. According to the report, Russia’s goal was to “denigrate Secretary Clinton” and “help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” The report was designed to plant the seeds in the minds of the American sheeple that pro-Trump and pro-freedom messages — if not always being directed from the Kremlin — were, at the very least, helping to further Putin’s agenda.

In congress, Democrats and their never-Trumper allies have done their part to reinforce and amplify this big lie. Consider the “Honest Ads Act,” introduced in the Senate in late 2017 by two Democrats and their pal John McCain. The bill opens with a discussion of the intel report on Russian propaganda efforts, repeating the claim that the Russians have infiltrated the alternative press. However, the bill avoids directly mentioning the Russians as being pro-Trump. Instead, it points to Russia’s spread of so-called “divisive social and political messages.” That turn of phrase shifts the narrative to allow the Deep State to call for censorship of wrong-think without having to make explicit reference to right leaning alternative media.

The Honest Ads Act calls on social media companies to “make reasonable efforts to ensure” no Russian propaganda is disseminated on their platforms. It then threatens these tech companies with onerous and expensive requirements for demonstrating compliance.

Since then, other members of congress have signaled their willingness to support such legislation. In February 2018, in the wake of Mueller’s indictment of a handful of Russian trolls, Bernie Sanders called for more action from the social media companies to crackdown on wrong-think. “We have got to get to Facebook and Twitter and all of these platforms and say, ‘Sorry, you have not done a good job,’” Sanders told NPR. “And you’re going to have to change what you’re doing.”

Last month, Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy echoed these sentiments while relishing the purge of Alex Jones. “Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website,” Murphy wrote on Twitter.

Notice Murphy’s use of the phrase “hate and lies” that “tear our nation apart.” We can see the narrative shifting in real time towards an emphasis on censoring anything that can be labelled “divisive.” These public statements send the message to the tech companies to voluntarily censor wrong-think or face government mandates to do so.

Many prominent members of the Deep State currently working broadening assignments in the private sector are also aiding in this mission to use the threat of foreign propaganda as a pretext to silence the right-wing alternative press. Last summer, Clinton disciple John Podesta, Neo-con never-Trumper Bill Kristol and more than a dozen other Washington insiders formed the political advocacy group Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). Their motto? “Putin Knocked. We Answered.”

ASD claims to “develop comprehensive strategies… to defend against… foreign state actors’ efforts to undermine democracy.” Their main project is called “Hamilton 68 Dashboard,” which purports to provide real-time tracking of Russian influence operations on Twitter. Yet, they list FoxNews.com as the top domain “promoted by Russia-linked influence networks” on the platform, with Breitbart and ZeroHedge also in their top 10. On any particular day, the dashboard will list in their trending URLs such sites as Hannity.com, TedCruz.org, and even WhiteHouse.gov.

In recent months, ASD has been given a large platform to peddle this false narrative of right-wing alternative press as Russian propaganda. Representatives from the group have spoken at the Aspen Security Forum and MisInfoCon. ASD Director Laura Rosenberger even testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Foreign Influence Operations’ Use of Social Media Platforms.

Prestitutes in the mainstream media promote the ASD narrative with such Hamilton 68 Dashboard derived headlines as “Breitbart, other ‘alt-right’ websites are the darlings of Russian propaganda effort,” and “How Russian bots used Mollie Tibbetts’ death to distract from Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.”

While ASD’s monitoring of Twitter occurs at arm’s length, Facebook has decided to directly partner with the Deep State. This spring Facebook announced it was outsourcing monitoring and censorship of malign foreign propaganda on its platform. That task is now performed by the non-partisan, NATO affiliated think tank the Atlantic Council and their Digital Forensic Research Lab. The founder and current head of the lab is former Obama administration National Security Council advisor Graham Bookie.

The timing of the Facebook/Atlantic Council partnership was particularly interesting, coming as it did less than four weeks after Mark Zuckerberg appeared before both houses of congress to answer for Facebook’s supposed failure to prevent Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. To atone for past sins, Facebook also made a sizeable donation to the Atlantic Council. While the exact amount of the donation has not been disclosed, it was reportedly enough to make Facebook the Council’s single largest donor.

That is what a shakedown looks like.

The Deep State finally bludgeoned the major tech companies into compliance, and just in time for the midterms. After two years of planning the narrative, testing the methodology, and priming the general public, the conditions were set to silence wrong-think and retake control.

To coordinate efforts, officials from the FBI and Homeland Security held a secret meeting with tech industry leaders at Facebook’s headquarters in late May. In July, the Department of Justice published a report from their Cyber Digital Task Force, laying out the framework for the coming purge. FBI and DOJ leadership then toured the country speaking at security and technology conferences telling social media companies it is their responsibility to censor wrong-think or face consequences. In early August, FBI Director Chris Wray acknowledged the Bureau is now providing routine classified briefings to social media companies, sharing “specific threat indicators and account information, and a variety of other pieces of information so that they can better monitor their own platforms.”

Next up, in Part 1 of this report, we look at the role of the FBI and the DOJ as the enforcement arms of the Deep State initiative to purge the alternative press.