Hope and Change: The Counterrevolution, and How We Know Trump Means It

Revoking the security clearances of 51 former intelligence officers represents a revolution.

The 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump

by Rod D. Martin
January 20, 2025

Nothing should give more hope for meaningful change than Donald Trump’s decision, widely reported last night, to revoke the security clearances of 51 former senior intelligence officials who used their position to deceive the American people in the run-up to the 2020 election. Their act was the very definition of “disinformation” and “election interference”.

To many, suspending their clearances will seem like a no-brainer. In Washington, it’s an earthquake.

But that bears some explaining.

Sixteen years ago, Barack Obama promised two things: (1) hope and change, toward (2) a “fundamental transformation” of America. He succeeded. He just didn’t finish the job. That was left to Hillary Clinton, a fellow former acolyte of Saul Alinsky who was “inevitably” going to succeed Obama, appointing a leftist Supreme Court majority to rubber stamp the revolution.

First Obama implemented the Alinskyite hope of changing the Democrat Party into a self-consciously Socialist, revolutionary movement. He proceeded, in classic Marxist fashion, to twist government into the enforcement arm of his Party’s agenda and vendettas.

The most essential aspect of that transformation was the creation of two very different classes of Americans: “the oppressors” and “the oppressed”, by which was meant the persecuted and their persecutors. This government-by-vengeance involved everything from the resegregation of dormitories to the weaponization of the IRS against Democrats’ political opponents. In the Biden years this evolved into selective prosecutions, imprisonment of opposition leaders, and a growing censorship complex. Plans to pack the Supreme Court and rule by fiat were hindered, not shelved.

Make no mistake: a government that stokes race and class hatred, deliberately divides people previously undivided, and serves one group against another is just a mafia, a protection racket. “Do what we tell you and no one gets hurt.”

Polls show that most Americans of all races thought race relations were decent and getting better before Obama. Not after. And race is but one way in which Democrats divided us: every day brought a heretofore-unknown “oppressed” class to which we had to toady: as one Woke Southern Baptist leader put it, “sit down, shut up, and listen.” But he got that line from Obama. And Obama got it from Mao.

Obama-Biden-Harris did not seek to “transform” America into a better, safer, more just place. They sought to transform it into Communist China.

I say China with reason, in two parts.

First, China is less Communist today than it is Fascist. Both approaches put the state in absolute control of everyone and everything: they differ in means, not ends. But in Fascism, the government does this indirectly, through regulation and intimidation, leaving the “owners” of the “means of production” with the appearance and feeling of “something left to lose”. This makes them more docile, and easier to control. Think of Darth Vader’s warning to Lando on Cloud City: “Pray I do not change the deal again.”

This is the literal opposite of the Rule of Law, but it works a lot better than mass executions. It also produces a stronger economy than more heavy-handed state ownership, though a poorer one than freedom.

But second, I invoke China because Wokeness — Critical Theory in its various forms: CRT, DEI, SEL, ESG, Queer Theory, Radical Feminism, etc. — is the Americanization of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It seeks to destroy Mao’s “Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. And what is the aim of this but to replace them all with the “new”? This is embodied in transgenderism, the absurd assertion of sovereignty over reality itself. In the words of O’Brien to Winston at the end of 1984, “2 + 2 = Whatever the Party tells you.”

To achieve that endlessly mutable (and state-dominated) reality, whatever once was appreciated and exalted must be demonized and discarded, from family structures to the Founding Fathers. And everyone must be kept on edge at all times, uncertain what might happen to them or why.

As I said, this is the literal opposite of the Rule of Law, as it was in 1960s China. It replaces the Rule of Law with rule by terror.

No wonder Democrats now love Hamas.

This did not and could not work without the left’s dominance of the “Deep State”, that permanent bureaucracy that’s nearly all Democrats, largely unfireable by Presidents, and in every generation pursues its own agenda. Millions of faceless Democrats, unleashed from newly-passé restraints like fairness, due process, and blind justice, quickly realized how much they benefitted from this New Order, the entire purpose of which was and is the multiplication of their already arbitrary power.

How can unelected “public servants” possibly justify the recent polling showing that 42% of them plan to “thwart” and “resist” Trump’s agenda? Do elections not matter? Aren’t they opposing “Our Democracy”?

But even without such open subversion, the Deep State is blatantly unconstitutional. Administrative agencies simultaneously exercise legislative, executive, and judicial power (newly but insufficiently constrained by last summer’s Jarkesy and Loper Bright decisions), a gross violation of the separation of powers. The system FDR built is one of subject-matter dictatorships. It is not vaguely accountable to the voters.

Chevron Attacked the Very Idea of America

Worse still, the Civil Service Act violates Article 2, Section 1: “The executive power shall be vested in [the] President.” But what kind of “executive power” is it that cannot fire people, even people who are actively thwarting the elected President’s agenda?

These things would be terrible under the best of circumstances. But such era of goodwill as may have existed once is long gone now. The only way arbitrary power can be restrained is by its own self-restraint. The institution of such rule was always contra-constitutional. Today it is tyrannical.

These things are rooted in a complex of leftwing beliefs: (1) that the people are too stupid to rule themselves, and that the elite must “guide” them, (2) that the politicians the people elect are inherently corrupt, but “nonpartisan” bureaucrats (an oxymoron) somehow will not be, and (3) that those “experts” should constitute a higher authority than the electorate, with power to decide what’s really right and wrong.

They imagine that a sort of a cosmic kindergarten teacher will make everything “fair”. Too many conservatives have bought that unbiblical lie. And you see this play out, from “Trust the Science!” to “Pack the Court!”: you may not question, you may not dissent, and above all, you may not elect anyone who actually wields power.

This explains the left’s adoration of judicial activism, and also, the instant the Supreme Court opposes their agenda, its loathing of the entire judicial system. This sort of opposition goes beyond partisanship for them: it seems to them a visceral, emotional betrayal. The unelected are supposedly “above politics”, which means suffused with “truth” (an interesting concept in the hands of people who believe truth cannot exist) and therefore on “the right side of history”, which is to say, theirs. For an agency, an administrative law judge, or (Mother Earth forbid!) the Supreme Court to oppose “progress” (by which is meant, progress toward greater implementation of Socialism) is not mere disagreement. It can only be seen as corruption. Indeed, heresy.

The same is true for the voters. The 2016 election result was necessarily corrupt because it was counterrevolutionary. That meant that anyone who voted “wrong” was “deplorable”, even “irredeemable”. They were “bitter clingers”. They were racists and Nazis. They were all things whatsoever the left has defined as evil.

Here too, the Intelligence Community cooked up a hoax, in that case the Russian Collusion hoax, to taint their opponents and destroy them if possible. They used the power of government and the appearance of insider knowledge to destabilize the elected Administration and the country with it. Given their presuppositions, how could they do otherwise?

This way of looking at the world is not normal behavior, at least not in America. This is religious. And as I have long told you, Marxism is a religion, an entire atheology. Nor is it a religion of peaceful persuasion like Christianity. It is a faith of violence, of conversion by the sword. The Communist nations murdered 100 million people in the 20th Century. There’s a reason.

The Administrative (or “Deep”) State always existed in these terms. It just contained itself. Today its gloves are off. It is the Master, you are the Ruled.

And the apotheosis of that Deep State is, and was always inevitably, the various three-letter agencies of the aforementioned Intelligence Community. This bears little explanation: if you spend decades teaching specialists how to spy on people and subvert governments, that’s what they’re going to do.

Eventually they’re going to do it at home, like a modern Praetorian Guard.

Which brings us at last to Donald Trump’s reported plan to revoke the security clearances of 51 former IC officials. Their crime? They signed an open letter in October 2020 attesting to America that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”, based on their “classified knowledge” of the “truth”.

The problem? It wasn’t. The laptop was very real. The FBI had known this since 2019. So did each and every one of the 51 who signed the letter. They used their apparent authority and the full power of the federal government to sway an election, no different than they’d done countless times in Third World countries from Guatemala to Ukraine. And they succeeded: post-election polling showed that as many as 17% of Democrats would have voted against Biden had they known the laptop was real. That would have been a history-making landslide for Donald J. Trump.

Let me repeat: they used their position to steal an election. In America. Whatever other corruption may or may not have taken place that year, this was by itself enough. And it is as a great a betrayal of their oaths as Benedict Arnold’s at West Point.

So you might assume that it would be a no-brainer for President Trump to revoke their security clearances, if not prosecute them all. But this is one of those many things in Washington that simply “is not done”, not least because these people know everything on everybody.

Intelligence officers, especially senior ones, never truly “retire”. And long after they’re supposed to lose access to the country’s deepest secrets, in the real world they keep it, and trade on it. They make a lot of money from it in their second careers, not least as contributors on CNN and MSNBC. They don’t actually divulge classified information (at least not often). They don’t have to. They just give the appearance of knowing more than you do, “the deep knowledge” inaccessible to mere novices, and thus having priestlike unquestionable authority.

How could anyone ask whether the laptop was real, when these men said it was not? How was it not right to censor the New York Post (which broke the story), and all voices on social media, who disagreed? Those voices were obviously un-American, not to mention stupid and uninformed. Deplorable, really. The priesthood had spoken.

The priesthood had lied.

Many have wondered aloud who has been running America in the four years in which Joe Biden was obviously too senile to remember his own name without coaching and drugs. Look no further than these men. His disability was to them a feature, not a bug, which is why they removed someone they could not control in favor of one they could actually puppet. As the Soviet Union became (and Russia is today) a creature of the KGB, the ultimate whip hand in Democrats’ America is held by the leaders, current and “elder”, of its intelligence agencies.

Want to be subject to a secret police? That’s how you become subject to a secret police.

Trump’s act is a revolution, both actually and symbolically. It is a nuclear strike on the true rulers in America.

Dismantling the Deep State, or at least taking huge chunks out of it, is the necessary prerequisite to restoring American liberty and constitutional governance. If the elected branches do not rule, you are ruled. And eventually, the rulers always care more about their own interests than yours, than your rights, or than your physical safety. If the President fails, there will not be another real election in our lifetimes.

Donald Trump was repeatedly thwarted in his first term, but he still got an incredible amount done. In his first year alone he eliminated 22 regulations for every 1 new one. He appointed the first conservative Supreme Court majority since 1937, already greatly consequential. But he also faced more, and more varied, opposition than anyone has ever seen in this country. It is easy to imagine he might not follow through, or be able to, on his bigger goals.

Taking on the IC says he means it. Barring assassination, he has a real chance to succeed. There is legitimate hope for era-defining change.

Consider it a down payment on truly Making America Great Again.

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