The 2016 election revealed many things, but none was more glaring than the reality that America has no real objective media anymore. Members of the Fourth Estate turned Ministry of Truth have swapped their primary mission as government watchdogs for one where they’ve become propaganda organs for the state. Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex. Today, the Deep State-Media Alliance — the one that reeks of felonious leaking by “unnamed current and former officials” and wholly embraces the searing conflicts of interest that arise from hiring former Deep State officials — is arguably the greatest threat this nation currently faces.

Left-leaning columnist Glenn Greenwald has written a withering summary, detailing a scandal of “historic magnitude” perpetrated by the FBI and revealed by the DOJ’s inspector general report. “Just as it was true when the Mueller investigation closed without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, [the] issuance of the long-waited report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds,” he explains.

Americans are wholly familiar with those claims, and somewhat familiar with the cast of former Deep State characters that perpetrated them. Yet when that cast is assembled in a single article, one begins to realize the magnitude of government-media collaboration. CNN has hired Obama administration Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, despite the reality that both men are documented liars: Clapper lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and McCabe lied to the DOJ and the FBI while under oath, as revealed by a previous IG report.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker, also worked at CNN until May 2018. He resigned while the government was investigating his possible role in leaking parts of the Steele dossier to Mother Jones reporter David Corn.

Other CNN hires include former FBI aide to James Comey Josh Campbell, former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa, former CIA Moscow station chief Steven Hall, former FBI and CIA official Phil Mudd, former NSA attorney Susan Hennessy, former adviser to the Obama administration’s National Security Council Samantha Vinograd, and former FBI supervisory special agent James Gagliano. With the possible exceptions of Mudd, who criticized some of the aspects of the wholly discredited Trump-Russia probe, and and Gagliano, who leveled criticism at McCabe and former FBI director James Comey for the damage they did to that agency, the rest of the cast were either anti-Trump or in the tank for the FBI.

It’s no better at MSNBC. That network hired former CIA Director John Brennan, who the IG report revealed also lied to Congress about the agency’s use of the Steel dossier — when he wasn’t busy assuring his audience Trump would be indicted by Mueller, or accusing the president of treason twice, once for revoking his security clearance and again for remarks Trump made during joint a press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He is joined by former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi, who opined that Trump’s decision to lower flags for mass shooting victims until Aug. 8 — as in 8/8 — was a nod to white supremacists because it translates into “Heil Hitler.” Also on board is former chief of staff to James Comey and DEA administrator Chuck Rosenberg, who insisted the Steele dossier’s substance “holds up over time.”

MSNBC also employs former Naval Chief Petty Officer and collusion conspiracy pusher Malcolm Nance, and former CIA Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash, who slammed the president for diverting Pentagon funds to the border wall, and also asserted that “there are a lot of people in America who believe that Donald Trump is either an agent of Russia or at least a useful idiot.”

One suspects there are far greater numbers of Americans appalled by this assembly of former Deep State operatives — operatives with blatant contempt for a sitting president and a vested interest in preserving the Deep State status quo — being presented as legitimate journalists and opinion makers.

None of this is new. In 2018, Politico columnist Jack Shafer noted that many of the aforementioned figures were joined by spooks and “TV Generals” from the Bush administration, whom The New York Times described in a 2008 article as “a Pentagon information apparatus” used to “generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.”

“Standard journalistic contributors — reporters, anchors, editors, producers — pursue the news wherever it goes without fear or favor, as the famous motto puts it,” Shafer writes. “But almost to a one, the TV spooks still identify with their former employers at the CIA, FBI, DEA, DHS, or other security agencies and remain protective of their institutions. This makes nearly every word that comes out of their mouths suspect.”

Suspect is far too kind. When Deep State officials are given airtime to promote their agenda, the corporate media that employ them have made it clear that journalistic integrity takes a back seat to rank propaganda and coordinated disinformation campaigns.

Greenwald notes damning implications of these arrangements. “All of this has meant that U.S. discourse on these national security questions is shaped almost entirely by the very agencies that are trained to lie: the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the FBI,” he writes. “And their lying has been highly effective.”

They’re not alone. In a separate article, Greenwald cites the 10 most embarrassing media failures with regard to the Trump-Russia story. Yet his efforts pale by comparison to Sharyl Attkisson’s list of 106 anti-Trump media mistakes committed over the last three years alone. New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin has chronicled the New York Times’ long descent from credibility, led by editor in chief James Baquet, who became “an errand boy for Comey’s corrupt team of G-men.” James Okeefe’s Project Veritas has exposed the blatant bias of CNN and president Jeff Zucker’s personal vendetta against the president, and Greenwald illuminates the criminal leaking by government officials to the Washington Post and New York Times.

Nor was Trump the only target. As the Washington Examiner reminds us, the media-orchestrated smear campaign against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was breathtaking in both scope and mendacity.

In a letter written in 1787, Thomas Jefferson stated that “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Tragically, it appears they are now one and the same. For exposing the Deep State-Media Alliance, President Trump has endured three years of negative coverage exceeding 90% and an ongoing attempted coup. And while leftists might swoon at the thought of that coup being successful, they might want to consider the reality that a corrupt media aligned with unelected bureaucrats has an agenda entirely of their own — and that targeting a president, or any other government official, might not be limited to those with an “R” next to their names.

Despite The Washington Post’s high-minded slogan, democracy doesn’t “die in darkness.” It dies right out in the open, when those who are supposed to protect it collaborate with those who view the electorate with unbridled contempt.