Against previous assumptions: Shark and ray diversity is declining, not increasing

Surprising long-term decline reveals urgent conservation priorities: preserving and restoring diverse coastal habitats

University of Vienna

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Fig. 1: A young whitetip reef shark (Triaenodon obesus) rests under a table coral off the coast of Indonesia.

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Credit: Manuel A. Staggl

A team of international researchers led by the University of Vienna investigated the development of shark and ray biodiversity over the past 100 million years. Their surprising results show a continuous decline in diversity since the Eocene, 45 million years ago, which contradicts previous assumptions that biodiversity was either stable or increasing. This study, recently published in the renowned journal Scientific Reports, provides crucial insights for modern marine conservation.

What can fossil sharks and rays tell us about today's biodiversity crisis? This was the question posed by Manuel A. Staggl and his team at the Institute of Palaeontology at the University of Vienna. "Cartilaginous fish, which include today's sharks and rays, have existed on our planet for over 400 million years. They have survived several mass extinction events during this time, yet today, over a third of neoselachians (i.e. modern sharks and rays) are at risk of extinction," explains Manuel Staggl. "To develop effective conservation measures, we must understand which environmental factors have influenced their diversity in the past."

Past insights reveal current threats

The researchers analysed extensive fossil data and compared it with historical environmental conditions, such as temperature, carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels, and habitat availability. The surprising results shed a completely new light on the evolutionary history of these successful marine Predators.

Dinosaur extinction was less drastic for sharks and rays than previously thought

Sharks and rays have proven to be particularly resilient in the face of past catastrophes. Perhaps the most astonishing finding is that the famous mass extinction that followed the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, which wiped out large dinosaurs and many other species, had only a minor impact on sharks and rays. "These animals proved to be amazingly resilient and recovered quickly from the catastrophe," explains early career scientist Staggl. The biodiversity of sharks and rays peaked later in the Eocene, around 45 million years ago, at a time when the climate was significantly warmer than it is today. Since then, their biodiversity has declined, and the study identifies several causes of this decline.

Shallow coastal areas are biodiversity hotspots

Habitat availability has proven to be a decisive factor in the evolution of new species of shark and ray over the past 66 million years. Shallow, species-rich coastal habitats have been particularly important in this regard. "The more diverse the shallow marine habitats, the more species emerged," explains Jürgen Kriwet, head of the Evolutionary Morphology Research Group at the Institute of Palaeontology. However, he adds that this is also a worrying trend, as these very habitats are now under severe threat from coastal development, global warming, pollution and unsustainable fishing.

The role of carbon dioxide (CO₂) proved to be more complex than previously assumed.  Surprisingly, the analyses showed that moderate CO₂ levels in the atmosphere tended to have a positive effect on the biodiversity of sharks and rays: "In simple terms, CO₂ promotes photosynthesis in algae and seagrass meadows. This has a positive effect on the entire food chain and ultimately on sharks and rays," explains Kriwet. However, if CO₂ levels rose too high, marine ecosystems as a whole would be damaged, as Staggl and his team had already shown in a previous study. "In a nutshell: moderate CO₂ levels were beneficial for shark and ray biodiversity in the past, but excessive levels were harmful. This highlights the danger posed by current ocean acidification caused by human-induced climate change," says Staggl.

Present-day changes leave species with no time to adapt

The current biodiversity crisis, which is caused by a combination of overfishing, habitat destruction, and rapid climate change, differs fundamentally from all previous threats. "In the past, sharks and rays had time to adapt to changes or migrate to other areas. However, the current changes are happening far too quickly. In this respect, the situation today is unprecedented," says Staggl.  Highly specialised species, such as deep-sea sharks which are adapted to stable cold environments, cannot keep pace with rapid changes and are therefore particularly vulnerable to warming according to the findings of Staggl and his team.

Overall, the findings provide important insights for effective conservation strategies: preserving and restoring diverse coastal habitats must be the top priority. At the same time, it is imperative to drastically reduce CO₂ emissions in order to limit ocean acidification. "Our study shows that marine conservation is not just about fishing quotas – we need to adopt a broader perspective that considers entire habitats and the climate system," concludes palaeobiologist Staggl.

Summary:

• An international research team led by the University of Vienna has investigated the development of shark and ray biodiversity over the past 100 million years.
• The surprising results show a continuous decline in diversity since the Eocene epoch 45 million years ago – contrary to the previous assumption of stable or even increasing biodiversity.
• One of the most astonishing findings: the famous mass extinction following the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, which wiped out the large dinosaurs and many other species, had only a minor impact on sharks and rays.
• The availability of habitats proved to be a decisive factor in the development of new shark and ray species over the past 66 million years. Flat, species-rich coastal habitats are particularly important in this regard – but these are precisely the habitats that are under threat today. 
• Overall, the findings provide important pointers for effective conservation strategies: preserving and restoring diverse coastal habitats and drastically reducing CO₂ emissions.

About the University of Vienna:
For over 650 years the University of Vienna has stood for education, research and innovation. Today, it is ranked among the top 100 and thus the top four per cent of all universities worldwide and is globally connected.
With degree programmes covering over 180 disciplines, and more than 10,000 employees we are one of the largest academic institutions in Europe. Here, people from a broad spectrum of disciplines come together to carry out research at the highest level and develop solutions for current and future challenges. Its students and graduates develop reflected and sustainable solutions to complex challenges using innovative spirit and curiosity.

Fig. 2: The young spotted eagle ray (Aetobatus narinari) visits a "cleaning Station" in the sun-drenched coral reef in the north of the Red Sea, where it is cleaned of parasites by cleaner fish.

Credit

Manuel A. Staggl

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Journal

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-025-25653-6 

Article Title

Global environmental drivers shape cenozoic neoselachian diversity and identify modern conservation priorities

Article Publication Date

20-Nov-2025

Oldest modern shark mega-predator swam off Australia during the age of dinosaurs

Swedish Museum of Natural History

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A gigantic 8 m long mega-predatory shark stalks an unwary long-necked plesiosaur in the seas off Australia 115 million years ago. 

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Credit: Polyanna von Knorring, Swedish Museum of Natural History

Around 115 million years ago, the seas off northern Australia were home to a gigantic ancestor of Jaws. Fossils of this ancient mega-predator reveal that modern sharks experimented with enormous body sizes much earlier in their evolutionary history than previously suspected, and took the top place in oceanic food chains alongside massive marine reptiles during the Age of Dinosaurs. This study presents a new interdisciplinary analysis to reconstruct size evolution in ancient sharks.   

Sharks are iconic predators in the oceans today, and can trace their ancestry back over 400 million years. However, the evolutionary history of modern shark lineages began during the Age of Dinosaurs, with the oldest known fossils dating from around 135 million years ago. Known as lamniforms, these early modern sharks were small, possibly only about 1 m long, but over time would give rise to giants, such as the famous ‘Megalodon’ that may have exceeded 17 m in length, and the living Great White shark, which is an apex-predator in today’s oceans and tops the scales at around 6 m.

Sharks have cartilaginous skeletons. Therefore, their fossil record is mostly represented by teeth, which sharks shed continuously as they feed. Shark teeth are subsequently very common in rocks that were laid down as sediment at the bottom of the sea, and occur alongside the teeth and bones of other animals, such as fishes and gigantic marine reptiles, which the dominant predators in most marine ecosystems during the Age of Dinosaurs.

The rocky coastline fringing the city of Darwin in far northern Australia was once mud from the floor of the ancient Tethys ocean, which stretched from the southern shores of Gondwana (now Australia) to the northern island archipelagos of Laurasia (now Europe). The remains of sea monsters, including plesiosaurs (long-necked marine reptile resembling the popular image of the Loch Ness monster), ichthyosaurs (‘fish-lizards’), and large bony fish have all been found. Yet most spectacularly, a handful of enormous vertebrae have turned up that reveal the presence of an unexpected predator — a gigantic lamniform shark.

The five recovered vertebrae were partially mineralised, which enabled their preservation, and are virtually identical to those of a modern Great White shark. However, whereas adult Great Whites have vertebrae that are around 8 cm in diameter, the vertebrae of the fossil lamniform from Darwin were over 12 cm across. They were also morphologically distinctive enough to identify them as belonging to a cardabiodontid — huge mega-predatory sharks that roamed the world’s oceans from about 100 million years ago. Significantly, however, the Darwin lamniform is some 15 million years older and had already clearly achieved the hallmark massive body-size of cardabiodontids.

To accurately estimate the size of this earliest modern shark mega-predator, and international team of interdisciplinary scientists was assembled, including palaeontologists and tomographic from the U.S.A. Sweden, and Australia, and ichthyologists from South Africa and the U.S.A.

The paper is published in the Nature portfolio journal Communications Biology. Ancient shark fossils from the Age of Dinosaurs are on public display at the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

 

Reference

Bazzi, M., Siversson, M., Wintner, S., Newbrey, M., Payne, J.L., Campione, N.E., Roberts, A.J., Natanson, L.J., Hall, S., Blake, T. & Kear, B.P., 2025. Early gigantic lamniform marks the onset of mega-body size in modern shark evolution. Communications Biology, 8(1):1499.

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115 million year old sea floor deposits exposed near Darwin in northern Australia. These rocks produce fossils of an ancient marine ecosystem that included the earliest modern shark mega-predator.

Credit

Benjamin Kear

115 million year old gigantic shark vertebrae

Credit

Mikael Siversson

Journal

Communications Biology

DOI

10.1038/s42003-025-08930-y 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Early gigantic lamniform marks the onset of mega-body size in modern shark evolution

FINALLY!

What is ball lightning? Rare weather phenomenon caught on camera in Alberta

A rare and mysterious weather event was caught on camera in Alberta. Ed and Melinda Pardy stepped onto the back porch of their home near Rich Valley, Alta., just before 7 p.m. on July 2, 2025 to get a closer look at a storm passing through which featured fierce lightning.

What is ball lightning, a reality or myth

The mysterious phenomenon has been reported for centuries. Are scientists any closer to figuring it out?

by Fionna Samuels
April 15, 2024 | 

A version of this story appeared in Volume 102, Issue 12
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING NEWS


Credit: World History Archive/Alamy
Engineer Louis Otto and three friends observed ball lightning entering a window of the Hotel Gorges du Loup, near Nice, France, in 1901.

Aflash of lightning. A thundering boom. And then a curious light floating through the air, illuminating the dark room, and bouncing off surfaces. “I was so terrified, I hid under my blanket,” says Millie Drozda, my grandmother, “as if that would do anything.” It was thirty-odd years ago, and she was more than 20 floors up in her Chicago apartment when she witnessed a deeply mysterious yet well-documented phenomenon: ball lightning.

People have been swapping stories about ball lightning for hundreds of years. An illuminated manuscript written by an English monk in 1195 may be the oldest report. It describes a “sort-of fiery globe” descending from a storm cloud and falling into the river Thames (Weather 2022, DOI: 10.1002/wea.4144). Nearly 600 years later, scientist Georg Richmann was killed inside his Saint Petersburg lab by “a Globe of blue and whitish Fire” that struck his head while he demonstrated a lightning-probing experiment to an engraver from the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts in Saint Petersburg.

In more recent years, pilots flying through both clear and stormy weather have reported watching flickering balls of light appear in the cockpit and then meander down the inside of the plane (J. Atmos. Sol.-Terr. Phys. 2021, DOI: 10.1016/j.jastp.2021.105758). A quick web search will find people in every corner of the internet telling their own ball lightning stories.

“There’s a consistent core of information that people from all over the world report,” says Karl Stephan, an engineering professor at Texas State University who has been investigating ball lightning for decades. Most often, people see ball lightning when a storm rages nearby, though Stephan says folks rarely see it form. Instead, people simply notice a strange, roughly spherical white, yellow, red, or blue light drift into their vision. From there, it may drift out of sight, wink out, or explode. “The key things are that it lasts more than a second,” Stephan says, “and it’s not clear where the energy is coming from to make the illumination.”

These qualities make ball lightning a riddle for scientists, one that some are keen to solve.

If ball lightning was easy to make, we would have made it.

Martin Uman, emeritus distinguished professor, University of Florida

“If ball lightning was easy to make, we would have made it,” says Martin Uman, emeritus distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida. Uman directed the University of Florida’s International Center for Lightning Research and Testing from 1994 until the closure of its triggered lightning facility in 2022. When the center was active, he and his colleagues shot rockets carrying long lines of wire into storm clouds. If conditions were right, the scientists could trigger a lightning strike and study its properties.

“Ball lightning is often seen by observers right after a lightning strike,” Uman says, so some scientists theorize that the phenomenon is created by the material that a bolt strikes. The question Uman’s team aimed to answer: What substance generates ball lightning?

When Uman received funding from the US Air Force specifically to create ball lightning, he saw it as the perfect opportunity to hit a plethora of materials with triggered lightning strikes. Members of his team put out a call asking for test suggestions from every lightning researcher they knew. Over the course of several experiments, the team triggered eight lightning bolts, which struck a tower that was stacked with materials such as silicon wafers and powder, a freshly cut pine tree, a pool of water, and various metal sheets. The researchers even included bat guano in their experiments “for no reason except we had some lying around.”

Credit: Dustin Hill/Scientific Lightning Solutions); 

Martin Uman and Doug Jordan/University of Florida
Martin Uman triggered a lightning strike that generated two simultaneous ball-lightning-like phenomona. In the first 112 ms of the phenomena, the top bright sphere (initially ~71 cm wide) hovered over a steel plate while the bottom bright sphere hovered over a freshly cut pine tree stump.

Of the 100 or so materials that were struck by lightning, only four responded in a way that looked like ball lightning. A flame appeared above a kiddie pool filled with salt water; a shower of glowing particles erupted from two silicon wafers; a soft, persistent glow rose from a pine stump mounted in salt water; and a well-defined, persistent glow hovered a few inches above a wet sheet of stainless steel (J. Atmos. Sol.-Terr. Phys. 2010, DOI: 10.1016/j.jastp.2010.04.009).

Of these four observations, the ball that appeared over the metal sheet looked the most like ball lightning, Uman says. Even so, it wasn’t quite right. Although the ball did fully separate from the steel plate, it hovered there for only a couple hundred milliseconds before falling apart into smaller pieces and disappearing. “That might have been on the right track,” Uman says, “Maybe if we had more money and more time, we would have struck 100 pieces of wet steel with different kinds of lightning, and one of them would have made ball lightning. Who knows?”

Plasma is a state of matter in which atoms or molecules are excited to the point that some of their electrons are stripped away. Collisions within the resulting mixture of excited ions and neutral particles, and between the plasma and surrounding gases, release energy in the form of photons. This emission gives plasmas their characteristic glow, the color of which depends on the chemical species present.

Credit: Max Planck Insitute for Plasma Physics
In an experiment performed by Ursel Fantz, plasma balls are generated by discharging an electric current just below a watery surface (top left and right). When the current is turned off (bottom left), the plasma rises and forms a ball (bottom right).


To create a plasma ball, Fantz runs an experiment seemingly inverse to Uman’s triggered lightning. Rather than inciting an electrical discharge like a lightning strike from above a watery surface, she sets up a submerged electrode to spark just below the water’s surface. She discharges a current up of to 100 A—“not recommended to be done at home,” she says with a laugh—which rapidly evaporates and excites a small amount of salt water into a plasma state. When the current is cut off, the plasma rises from the water’s surface and forms a ball (IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. 2014, DOI: 10.1109/TPS.2014.2310128).


“You see a phenomenon that has similarities to what is reported about ball lightning,” Fantz says. Specifically, the size and color of the plasma are similar to those of ball lightning. Fantz says her group used spectroscopic analysis to determine that the yellow color that they often observe arises from the sodium chloride in the water. The white light that they simultaneously observe comes from radicals generated from water (J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 2020, DOI: 10.1088/1361-6463/abc918). Changing the type of salt or its concentration changes the ball’s color, she says.

What the researchers do not see is the ball hovering or moving laterally like a ball lightning. Instead, it rises like any hot plasma and swirls into a loop as it loses its energy, indicating that a vortex forms within the center. Like all plasmas, Fantz’s plasma balls are unable to pass through a piece of paper unless there is a hole to squeeze through, counter to reports of ball lightning traveling through solid walls.

Credit: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics
Ursel Fantz's experiment shows that generated ball plasma is unable to pass through an intact sheet of paper.

The lifetime of the plasma balls is what really fascinates Fantz. They persist for about half a second before disappearing: a much shorter existence than what is reported for ball lightning but orders of magnitude longer than what is expected for a plasma, she says. She and her students attribute the long lifetime to ongoing chemical reactions within the plasma balls.

Although her experiments lend credence to the idea that balls of plasma can form in lab settings, Fantz says they do not prove the existence of ball lightning. Lightning striking a natural body of water is a natural parallel of her experiment, but she points out that the energy from such a strike would dissipate across the surface of the water rather than concentrate in a single spot. She also questions the reliability of anecdotal evidence. For Fantz, she’ll need to see a reproducible and explainable experiment before she embraces ball lightning as anything more than the Loch Ness monster of lightning phenomena.


“Eyewitness accounts are notoriously inaccurate, but they’re not totally useless,” says Walt Lyons, former president of the American Meteorological Society. He points to another historically dismissed weather phenomenon: red sprites (Weatherwise 2022, DOI: 10.1080/00431672.2022.2116249). These ethereal lights, which look red from nitrogen emission, flash in the mesosphere and stratosphere above storms when powerful positive lightning bolts strike Earth.

Eyewitness accounts are notoriously inaccurate, but they’re not totally useless.
Walt Lyons, former president, American Meteorological Society

For more than a century, people reported sightings of sparks above thunderstorms, but the reports weren’t taken seriously. Then, in 1989, a trio of researchers testing a new low-light video camera accidentally captured an image of lights above a distant storm. One of the scientists contacted Lyons, who at that time was running a lightning-detection network at the University of Minnesota, to find out whether he could explain the phenomenon. Lyons correlated the video still to a powerful storm and soon went out in search of red sprites himself. On his first night out, Lyons says he caught 250 red sprites on camera—they’re surprisingly common.

Whether ball lightning will ever be captured reliably on camera remains to be seen, but Texas State’s Stephan hopes that by collecting anecdotes he can piece together the kinds of conditions required to create ball lightning. To this end, he and a colleague launched an online form in 2020 to collect reports from citizen scientists (J. Atmos. Sol.-Terr. Phys. 2022, DOI: 10.1016/j.jastp.2022.105953). “We’ve gotten about 800,” he says. “I’m not saying all of them are ball lightning, but certainly a good fraction of them are.”

Until there’s definitive evidence of ball lightning either gathered experimentally or caught on camera, Stephan is content to be a skeptical believer and “wet blanket” when it comes to theories and experiments designed to explain the phenomenon. He recently read a preprint in which the authors hypothesize that ball lightning might be some kind of wormhole. “I don’t put a lot of credibility in that theory,” he says. “But it does have that one attractive feature: that if the other end of the wormhole can go anywhere it wants, it might as well show up in somebody’s bedroom.”

CRYPTOZOOLOGY

Could this be the cause of the Loch Ness Monster sightings?

Sarah Hooper
 December 1, 2024

Alan McKenna believes ‘standing waves’ could be mistaken for the mythical creature (Picture: Pen News)

A natural phenomenon could be behind countless sightings of the elusive ‘Loch Ness Monster’ over the years, an expert has said.

Alan McKenna, founder of Loch Ness Exploration (LNE), believes ‘standing waves’ might explain alleged sightings of the mythical monster.

He said: ‘A standing wave occurs when two boat wakes of the exact same frequency and amplitude are moving in opposite directions on the loch surface. When the two boat wakes finally meet and interfere with one another the results have the potential to create a standing wave.’

The peaks of these standing waves, rising above the otherwise calm waters, could be mistaken for ‘humps’ above the surface.


Footage captured by Mr McKenna shows the phenomenon occurring where a river meets the loch on its southern shore, at Fort Augustus.

But capturing a standing wave caused by boat wakes out on the open water is a greater challenge.

One of the most famous photos of ‘Nessie’ was taken in 1934 (Picture: Getty)

Alan said: ‘The waves and the boat wake need to be identical. So with all that in mind, there’s now a lot more to consider here such as the boat itself, its size, the direction of travel and its current speed.

‘A small boat with a smaller engine will most definitely produce a wake different from a much larger boat. It’s a complex procedure, especially in open water, but it can happen.’

Mr McKenna now hopes to record the phenomenon happening out over the deep heart of the loch.

He said: ‘Ali Matheson, skipper of Deepscan, frequently reports standing waves, but more so in the small marina within Urquhart Bay also known as Temple Pier. That’s all fine and well, but it’s more difficult to capture a standing wave in open water.

‘We know that standing waves exist and they have been reported but what we don’t have is the footage showing a natural standing wave in motion.’

Mr McKenna helped to launch LNE, and follows daily reports by locals to find out what’s behind the sightings.

Standing waves in the lake could easily be mistaken for something else 

(Picture: Pen News)

When it comes to the existence of the fabled beast, however, Alan is keeping an open mind.

The 37-year-old said: ‘If there are any unknown animals in Loch Ness then they certainly don’t play by the rules. It’s the perfect habitat for a shy animal with 23 miles of cold dark water and around 750ft deep.

‘You could be swimming next to a 200ft submarine below the surface and not even notice it right in front of you, it’s that dark!’

Over the years, some have believed giant eels, long-necked seals, Greenland sharks, large sturgeons and other animals could be mistaken for ‘Nessie’.

Mr Mckenna said: ‘Truth be told, none of us have the correct answer and that’s what keeps this mystery going.’

LNE is an independent voluntary research group focused on Loch Ness, its natural environment, and its ecology, as well as the mythical monster.

In America’s gripping political chess game, what is really at stake?

As Harris and Trump go head to head in November, the fate of Empire hangs in the balance.

Faiq Zafar 

DAWN

Published November 1, 2024 

Said Lord Byron famously, “While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls — the world.”

As America’s high-octane presidential race makes inroads into its final stretch, it invokes many of Byron’s apocalyptic overtones.

“In this election, your freedom, your democracy, and America itself is at stake,” Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris said at an event in Greensboro, North Carolina. “This is the one. The most existential, consequential, and important election of our lifetime.”

As they brace for the great November showdown, Democrats have garnished their political rhetoric with similar allusions to the apocalypse should Trump take the White House in November. Of course, these clichéd talking-points don’t really explain some of the truly damning developments in their own camp. And there have been quite a few.

One such moment came gunning for Harris as she interacted with voters at a supermarket in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was asked to comment on an endorsement she had recently received.

In a move that had flabbergasted political pundits, journalists, and voters alike, former vice-president Dick Cheney, once vilified by Democrats, backed Harris for the top job, putting his weight behind a campaign he initially seemed to share little common ground with. Surprising still was a visibly excited Harris celebrating Cheney’s endorsement as if he was Santa Claus:

“I am honoured to have their endorsement. I think that leaders who are well-respected are making an important statement. (That) it’s okay to put country above party.”

The “well-respected” leader in question is the decorated and unapologetic architect of the illegal Iraq War, a self-described ‘Darth Vader’ who notoriously signed off on the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ [read torture] programme, is liable for prosecution under every anti-torture and war crime statute known to man, and who, during his tenure under the Bush administration, crossed off murderous atrocities against the Global South like items off a grocery list. For Harris, however, there’s more to a person than the war crimes they commit.

At the time of writing, Harris is currently touring the country with his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, in a bid to tap into the conservative GoP base.

Democrat VP Kamala Harris campaigns alongside former Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) in Ripon, Wisconsin. Source: NPR

Arriving on the heels of more than 200 Republican endorsements, the Cheneys’ patronage of the Harris/ Walz ticket signals the latest development in a wider pattern of explicit bipartisan reshuffling, the likes of which Washington has seldom seen before. Legacy conservatives like the Bush family, Mike Pence, Stephanie Grisham, Olivia Troy, Geoff Duncan, and Jeff Flake, to name a few, have disavowed a second Trump presidency as a ‘unique threat to democracy’, thereby accentuating a burgeoning chasm within the GoP camp.

In a country where bipartisan consensus on any given issue is generally inconceivable, Republicans and Democrats have banded together amidst hollow slogans of ‘Country Above Party’ in unprecedented fashion, hoping to insulate the Oval Office from Donald Trump by any means necessary. To this end, nothing is off-limits. Goalposts will shift, ideologies and dogmas, hitherto uncompromisable, will be forsaken, bitter adversaries shall embrace like star crossed lovers, and once impregnable party lines shall be permeated with relative ease.

People who view the labyrinth that is American politics through a partisan lens don’t know how to make sense of these glaring contradictions. They tend to perceive these shifts as occasional glitches in a political simulation underpinned largely by a two-party system.

Thus, they are confused when more than 700 current and former national security officials from either side of the political aisle flock to endorse Harris as someone with the “temperament and values needed to serve as commander-in-chief”. They are bewildered at how politicians who profess to stand for global peace and prosperity, human rights, and individual liberty, bring themselves to ally with imperial hawks like the Cheneys, the Clintons, and the Bushs.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum

For political theorist and professor at the University of Chicago, Dr John Mearsheimer, such people miss the forest for the trees. Per Mearsheimer, the segmentation of American politics into a Republican and Democratic orientation is a game of smoke and mirrors — a remnant of a bygone era in American political life.

“I like to refer to the Republicans and the Democrats as Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” he said in a panel discussion with economist and Columbia professor, Dr Jeffery Sachs. “There is hardly any difference between the two parties.”

For many, this taps into a kind of Jungian dream — it reinforces something about America most people have known to be true for the longest time, but just didn’t quite know they knew it yet. Take for instance, the presidency of Democratic sweetheart Barack Obama. Voted into power amidst slogans of hope and change, Obama’s campaign had vowed to do away with many of the ills that had plagued the Bush years. However, incessant GoP filibustering ensured much of Obama’s domestic agenda never saw the light of day. Not only was the President unable to get many of his innocuous appointees into office, Republicans relentlessly impeded progress on issues like immigration reform, minimum wage increases, gun reform, climate change, and any domestic issue that would have aided in the real life amelioration of the American working class.

The GoP obstruction, however, did not seem to stop Obama from picking up the threads on many of his predecessor’s more controversial policies, all of which he had spent an entire campaign run deriding.

The Obama years saw citizens liquidated without due process, prisoners detained without charge, dragnet surveillance on the American people, and unprecedented witch-hunts against federal employees through the Insider Threat Programme.

Obama also spearheaded an increasingly deceptive recovery of the stock market after the 2008 financial crash, during which individual stock ownership plummeted to record lows, while cash-rich corporations lined their pockets via stock-buybacks. National economic inequality skyrocketed, GDP growth outran wage growth, and Wall Street remained unreformed, creating highly leveraged markets which were increasingly susceptible to breakdowns.

On the foreign policy front, Obama, who had run on the promise of putting an end to Bush’s forever wars, orchestrated regime change operations in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, without so much as a peep from the adversarial Republicans that packed both Houses of Congress. When it came to capitulating to the status quo, Obama’s answer was always, “Yes We Can!”

A relatively unknown Obama embraces superstardom at the 2004 DNC keynote address. Source: Politico.com

To the uninitiated, this bipartisan convergence on issues of international governance, economics, and war but never on domestic issues like healthcare, infrastructure, gun reform, and education would appear to be somewhat of a random coincidence. But Mearsheimer’s thesis points to a larger pattern at play — a deeper collusion than what meets the eye.

If this hypothesis does hold true, and the Republican/ Democrat divide is just mere political theatre, what is it about Trump specifically that disrupts this script? What remarkable threat does he pose that makes him such an anathema to the American political class?
Pied Piper

Trump first burst onto the political scene in 2015 as little more than a second-generation plutocrat with a discernable last name, a flamboyant flair for showmanship, and no political experience save for an ill-advised interest in Obama’s birth certificate. His initial bid for the presidency commanded little, if any respect, least of all from his eventual rival, Hillary Clinton.

In a leaked memo published by Wikileaks, it was in fact Clinton who intentionally orchestrated the elevation and propulsion of Donald Trump to the party nomination as part of what she termed the “Pied Piper” strategy — a concerted effort by the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to deliberately encourage media coverage of far-right Republican candidates, such as Donald Trump, in the Republican primary. The prevailing theory was that these candidates — seen as extreme or unelectable — would be easier for Clinton to defeat in a general election.


Leaked memo by the Clinton campaign calling for the implementation of the ‘Pied Piper’ strategy in 2015. Source: WikiLeaks



Few things in history have backfired with such ferocity. Not only had the Clinton campaign grossly miscalculated just how despised Hillary was to an enormous chunk of the American population, the timing of the strategy did not do the campaign any favours. 2016 was a turbulent time in American history. The forever wars, the 2008 financial crash, and the advent of the culture wars had pushed America to the brink of political exhaustion. In a climate sullied by such volatility, the ‘Pied Piper’ strategy essentially sought to put out fire by drenching it in gasoline, and up until this point, Trump was actually the DNC’s accelerant of choice.

Fast forward to 2024 and the same DNC now assails him as a parousia of Hitler, a “threat to our democracy in a way we have not seen,” as per Harris’ running mate Tim Walz during the vice-presidential debate on October 1. Of course, Walz’s derision of Trump would demand a lot more credibility had he not been running on the same ticket as Kamala Harris, who secured the party nomination in what can only be described as a blatant disregard for democratic procedure at best, and a palace coup orchestrated within the party’s elite ranks, at worst.

Widely regarded as one of the most unpopular vice-presidents in American history with a dismal favourability rating of 16 per cent as of June 2024, Kamala was nobody’s first choice to lead the Democratic presidential bid. When President Joe Biden was forced to withdraw from the race in July following an embarrassing night on the debate stage, he merely passed the baton to Harris, snubbing the conventional primary process wholesale. Harris then relied on the elite cadre in the Democratic Party to garnish her nomination with the requisite legitimacy. A candidate whose unpopularity rendered her unable to secure a single delegate in the 2020 primaries now leads the Democratic party ticket in 2024, bypassing any primary polling whatsoever.

Eight years on from the Pied Piper strategy, what danger does a political outsider like Trump pose to the Democratic establishment for them to feel compelled into such extremities?

When Trump took the national stage against Clinton in 2016, his populist, ultra-nationalist rhetoric against immigrants, Muslims, women, minorities, and people of colour was not only expected, it was welcomed by a DNC which saw his far-right slants as easy conquest for a relatively moderate Clinton.

However, often the most dangerous lies are those interspersed with the truth. In a political masterstroke that eventually killed Hillary’s presidential aspirations, Trump punctuated his radical outbursts and far-right jingoism with something far more potent. Americans were angry. And Trump showed them exactly who to blame. His cries of ‘Drain the Swamp’ (“swamp” being a metaphor for entrenched political interests) instantly appealed to an enraged conservative mob that had found itself relegated to the peripheries of globalisation for far too long.

His characterisation of Washington as a corrupt cesspool of self-serving careerists carved him more than 304 electoral votes amidst a political storm no one predicted. In a bid for political relevance, Trump’s populism inadvertently tapped into something astoundingly powerful. Was he merely throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks? Or did he inadvertently stumble upon some kind of fourth wall?

Democrats have branded Trump’s rhetoric as the unhinged chauvinism of a power-hungry populist bent on destroying America’s democratic infrastructure. Such terms of endearment, however, are hardly surprising. In American political lore, the deep state has largely occupied a kind of mythological status, an enigma akin to that of the Loch Ness monster. Questions about its existence rarely evoke a serious answer, whistleblower accounts are laughed off as heresy, and any analysis with respect to its existence rarely breaks into the news cycle. Beneath the deflections and the distractions, the veneers and the illusions, the pertinent question remains: is the deep state real?
The Loch Ness monster of Washington

October 16, 1962 — a day that has lived on in America’s public consciousness in infamy. At 8:45am on a chilly autumn morning, a pajama-clad John F Kennedy breezed through a copy of the Washington Post when he was interrupted by a flustered McGeorge Bundy. The national security adviser apprised the 45-year-old president of an ominous escalation in the Cold War: photographic evidence from U2 flight missions over Cuba had unearthed Soviet nuclear-tipped missile installations in secret launch sites across the island, setting into motion a geopolitical chess game that would later claim notoriety as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In frenzied cabinet Room deliberations, panic-stricken members of Kennedy’s inner circle locked horns on what the best response to Khurshchev’s betrayal might look like. All diplomatic gloves had come off, and the iron fist dictated the order of the day. Secretary of State Dean Rusk sought the president’s green light for a ground invasion into Cuba, an escalation that would most certainly bring the country into direct military confrontation with a nuclear-armed foe, one which could very well wipe the US off the face of the Earth. The cabinet was deadlocked, leaving Kennedy with a political dilemma of potentially world-ending implications. The sheer gravity of the moment was not lost on attorney-general Robert Kennedy, who passed a note to his brother, reading: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbour.”

As the cabinet ran the arduous calculations of a potentially apocalyptic fallout, an indecisive Kennedy took leave, effectively breaking the meeting. Instead of staying with his aides in the West Wing to calibrate a policy response, the president found himself at a cocktail party on the other side of DC, at the Georgetown residence of famed columnist Joseph Alsop. On the eve of a possible nuclear war, when the fate of the world rested in his hands, the American president was photographed amongst friends, eating, drinking, laughing.

President Kennedy at the residence of Joseph Alsop on October 16, 1962. Source: Politico Magazine

It was a move that perplexes Cold War historians to this day. When America stood one misstep away from nuclear Armageddon, why did its commander-in-chief forego his war room for a dinner date in Georgetown?

Conventionalists attribute this seeming erraticism to the president wanting to maintain a guise of normalcy, for fears of prematurely revealing his hand to White House watchers in the press. For the careful observer, however, the night provides one of those unique momentary glimpses behind the veil of political pageantry, when power, in its most unabashed and unadulterated, stripped of all theatrics and veneers, effervesces to the surface of history long enough to be palpable.

Much like Kennedy, many of Alsop’s guests that night were people who dominated the Georgetown scene and similar high-end neighbourhoods in DC in the 60s. According to Gregg Herkins’ groundbreaking book, ‘The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington’, at this party were people Kennedy could not afford to ignore, people who commandeered true power in the Beltway during that time.

Men of importance like the far-east chief and future director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) William Bolby, former ambassador to the Soviet Union Chip Bohlen, the CIA’s longest-serving director Allan Dulles, one of the CIA’s founding fathers Frank Wisner, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among others, joined Kennedy at the Alsops’ on the night of October 16. It was here, at a small domicile two-and-a-half miles from the Capitol, that the policy response to the missile crisis was brokered.

The idea of faceless, conspiratorial cabals maneuvering the political and economic trajectory of a polity from the cold, dark corners of government can probably be traced back to the dawn of the nation-state itself. Indeed, it was this rudimentary conceptualisation that fuelled political rhetoric during the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, when the concept of the deep state was first operationalised. In the case of America, however, the deep state is anything but.

In his book, ‘The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government’, former Republican Congressional aide Mike Lofgren draws on decades of political experience to recount first-hand run-ins with the American deep state. Born, not out of some clandestine conspiracy but a natural evolutionary process of Empire, the American deep state is not so much sinister (although it possesses menacing aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched.

Unlike its Ottoman counterpart, agents of America’s deep state operate in broad daylight, playing by a set of neo-conservative dogmas rooted in the triumphalism of the Cold War. For these operatives, America is the indispensable nation, the city upon a hill whose vast military aptitude affords it the moral imperative to establish its footprint across the globe. It is an incredibly robust consensus incentivised by an intimately connected network of money, a collective ideological subscription to global American primacy, and cutthroat careerism to specific and powerful elements of corporate America.

Over the years, it’s come to be known by many names. Some have called it the “military-industrial complex”. Others have called it names like “the Establishment” or the “the Blob”. Neither do justice to the elaborate, sophisticated, oft-times impressive machinery that is the deep state.

As per Lofgren’s detailed account, the deep state is underpinned by the Department of Defence, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, and the Justice Department. It also envelops critical areas of the judiciary, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are an enigma even to most members of Congress, and certain federal trial courts like the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The metaphorical fort is held together by a rump Congress, consisting of the congressional leadership and some members of the defence and intelligence committees.

One of the principal actors greasing the wheels of this elaborate machinery is the department of the treasury, owing to its unilateral jurisdiction over financial flows, its extensive bureaucracy devoted to enforcing international economic sanctions, and its natural symbiosis with Wall Street. Over the years, the treasury has quietly become the mecca of a new kind of national security operation, with some of its day-to-day execution outsourced to American financial institutions, including but not limited to major banks, investment firms, and payment processors, in almost the same way that the Pentagon has outsourced military logistics in war zones to private contractors.

Under regulations like the Bank Secrecy Act and partnerships with agencies like the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), these institutions are on the frontlines of financial surveillance, and help monitor, enforce, and comply with government directives of sanctions, anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) measures.

In a special series in the Washington Post called ‘Top Secret America’, Dana Priest and William Arkin described, in addition to its public sector arm, the staggering scope of the privatised deep state. As of 2024, there are more than one million contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number far greater than that of cleared civilian employees of the government. This is supplemented by the capital and grandeur of Wall Street, which injects the cash needed to keep the political arm of the deep state quiescent as an illusory puppet show. Should an over-zealous politician forget his place and threaten the status-quo, Wall Street floods the streets of Washington with cash to help hired hands remember exactly who runs their town.

This inverted relationship is also true of the visible government and Silicon Valley, defined by Lofgren to include not only quintessential hardware and software companies, but the telecommunications infrastructure that enable these devices to work. Following the dotcom revolution of the late 1990s and the industry’s explosive boom during the 21st century, the Valley has largely outgunned traditional smokestack industries as a credible generator of unimaginable wealth. Its research-and-development capabilities are essential to the clandestine operations of the deep state — from globe-spanning surveillance technology to the avionics, sensors, and guidance systems in every military plane, ship, tank, missile, and drone, the Valley has proven to be the deep state’s crown jewel.

In terms of its scope, financial resources, and sheer global reach, the American deep state is a truly anomalous phenomenon. That said, it is hardly an optimal design. Its predisposition to expensive, futile wars, its sheer incapacity to forecast and respond to the 2008 stock market crash, and its manifest blindness to the blowback of its own policies are, in fact, rather routine. The lofty castle of the deep state has long stood upon pillars of salt and sand; were it not for a perverse incentive structure that rewards failure and redresses it as success, it would have collapsed long ago.
A ‘benevolent’ world empire

It would be pertinent to note that the deep state was not always a staple in American politics but has mutated over the years as an unintended consequence of a specific kind of political dogma. In fact, the isolationist years before 1941 saw the US maintain only the 17th largest military force in the world — impressive nonetheless, but nowhere near the nuclear-powered merchant of death it is today.

A product of the gruesome realities of the Second World War, the attainment of workable nuclear weapons was almost certainly the deep state’s moment of conception. The Manhattan Project and the Office of Strategic Services were the most expansive government projects in recorded history, shrouded in cabbalistic secrecy. Entire sequestered cities ranging from Oak Ridge in Tennessee to Los Alamos in New Mexico sprung up in a matter of months. As Lofgren put it ever so eloquently, “If the deep state is an evolved structure, nuclear weapons were the genetic mutation that gave it the key characteristics it possesses today: a penchant for secrecy, extravagant cost, and a lack of democratic accountability.”

The deep state is born — the ‘Trinity’ bomb at Los Alamos. Source: National Park Service



By 1945, what Time magazine publisher Henry Luce heralded as the ‘American Century’ was at hand. With the power of the Gods in the palm of their hand, Washington was entranced by an overwhelming sense of destiny to uplift the world from the ruination of war. In the decades following the War, the administrative state quietly waded through the waters of the Cold War, augmenting its influence on American political life, one silent victory at a time. With the National Security Act of 1947 and the establishment of the Department of Defence, the CIA, and the president’s National Security Council, there was an institutionalization of a permanent national security apparatus for the first time in American history. Ideological support for this apparatus soon followed with NSC-68, a 1950 White House policy document sketching out a grand strategy for containing communism by means of a permanent peacetime military buildup. As America locked horns with the Soviets, the deep state festered beneath the murky waters of Pennsylvania Avenue, slowly infecting and intellectually corrupting the American political class.

A copy of Henry Luce’s infamous article ‘The American Century’ in Time Magazine. Source: Time Magazine

Kennedy was as good an exemplar of this intellectual corruption as any. In one of the most conveniently misremembered ironies in American history, it was Kennedy, the darling of American liberalism, who campaigned on an imaginary “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. He accused the incumbent Dwight Eisenhower — chief organiser of American victory in Europe during the War — of being weak on defence, taking baby steps towards the Missile Crisis in Cuba which would later go on to define his legacy.

In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower, cognisant of the dangers of a permanent war mentality, famously warned about the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” embodied by a new “military-industrial complex.” By that time, however, America had long crossed the Rubicon, and there was no turning back. The war machine’s new sweet tooth for the glacé of conflict gave rise to the Domino Theory — an idea that the spread of communism in one country would trigger a chain reaction in others. As history would have it, American troops laid waste to Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Grenada, and Panama, among countless others, lest the first domino fall.

When the Supreme Soviet voted to dissolve itself in ‘91 in a death knell to the USSR, America, left without a worthy adversary on the global stage, was caught completely off-guard. For decades, the Cold War had provided balance to international relations, with the United States and the Soviet Union representing a clear global dichotomy: capitalism, democracy, and free markets versus communism, state control, and authoritarianism. With the death of the Leninist dream, communism as a credible global ideology, a hedge against America’s vulture capitalism, essentially died as well.

This left America crippled with a national identity crisis. With no grand villian to justify its foreign policy, military posture, and global strategy against, the US and its allies were left without a clear narrative for global engagement. For the first time ever in recorded history, the world was, in the truest sense of the word, truly unipolar.

The Malta Summit 1989 — President George W. Bush and President Gorbachev shake hands, signaling the end of the Cold War. Source: The Malta Independent

Realising the gaping ideological vacuum created by what Charles Krauthammer famously called ‘the unipolar moment’, a budding group of neo-conservative thinkers saw gold in the streets. Rooted in a nationalist history of American exceptionalism that advocated for aggressive military and political assertions of democracy and liberalism, the neo-conservative revolution chalked out a new approach for international engagement.

The founding group for this new policy approach was the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a think-tank formed in 1992 on the “fundamental propositions that assert the belief that American leadership is good for both America and for the world”. In full cognisance of the unimaginable military might that lay at their feet, William Kristol, who acted as Project Chairman for PNAC, and Robert Kagen, co-founder of the PNAC, authored a critical policy document which was to later become the ideological foundation for the American Empire.

The document, titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” called on the United States to realise the moral imperative of its military prowess and assume its role as a “benevolent global hegemon”, a world empire which would use its military might to promote, and if need be, impose, liberal ideals of democracy and freedom. For the neo-cons, the unipolar moment was a stabilising force in international relations, a moment truly unique in human history and one wherein America needed to strike whilst the iron was hot. As authors of the Empire’s origin story, the neo-cons advocated maximum military and diplomatic engagement to ensure US values and influence dominate the international system.

In the decades that followed, the neo-conservative revolution slowly infiltrated the highest levels of government. In the Clinton administration especially, necons like secretary-of-state Madeleine Albright espoused a kind of hubris many have since come to know all too well: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

Sure enough, wherever there was danger, the wrath of Empire, ruthless and swift as it is, made sure to follow. Where danger didn’t exist, it was simply manufactured all the same.

The phenomenon of cooked intelligence is best embodied by the summer of 1996 when American neo-conservative thinkers Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and others authored a policy document for the new Israeli Prime Minister at the time — a young hardliner who went by the name of Benjamin Netanyahu. The document, titled ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ reflected a broader neo-conservative vision for Israeli dominance in the Middle East, with Israel functioning as the Empire’s guard dog in the region. The Clean Break papers advocated brute military engagement, regime change in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and strong deterrence capabilities for Israel. During the Bush Jr years, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser, along with other neo-cons like Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, occupied key strategic positions in the administration.

The 9/11 attacks presented the neo-conservatives with a unique opportunity to realise their foreign policy agenda and impose American ideals of democracy and freedom in the Middle East. At a time when American sentiment was at its most vulnerable, Netanyahu was called in to testify before Congress in 2002 as a “regional expert”. Realising his one shot at securing the realm, Netanyahu’s testimony was perfectly in conjunction with the Clean Break papers. Addressing Congress, Netanyahu laid the groundwork for a regime change operation against Saddam Hussein, claiming that doing so would rid the region of Islamic fanaticism and usher in a new era of peace and stability.

“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

Suspiciously enough, intelligence reports citing the existence of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq popped up in the media soon after, with the United States putting boots on the ground in Iraq less than a year later. The Clean Break was finally underway, and the neo-cons’ insatiable thirst for war quenched at last — until the next one, of course. For more than three decades, the “benevolent hegemon” stoked war and violence across the world, leaving destruction, instability and despair in its wake. Little did it know that its day of reckoning was not too far off.


Benjamin Netanyahu testifies before Congress in 2002. Source: Vox.com


Red Caesar

Over two millennia ago, Rome stood somewhat of a similar inflection point. At the time, the Empire had already become an imperial force and was overstretched militarily across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. As a result, domestic resources flailed thin. Economic inequality ran amuck, with Roman senators, bureaucrats, and patrician families hoarding exorbitant amounts of wealth as the plebeians and slaves were left fighting for scraps.

From within this cesspool of ideological corruption, political rot, and economic inequality rose a charismatic populist who vowed to return the dying empire to its former glory. His explosive rhetoric found an audience amongst an increasingly discontented polity. He galvaniSed the public against an entrenched aristocracy that commanded real power behind the toga-wearing mules of the Senate, and threatened to tear the very fabrics of the state apart. His ascendency was challenged at every step by the oligarchic structure that ruled Rome. When this populist finally grabbed hold of the reins of power, he never let go. And Rome chose to follow him every step of the way. So goes the story of Julius Caesar.

More than 2,000 years later, America finds itself at a crossroads similar to that of the great Republic it has modeled itself after. The neo-con revolution of the 90s and its subsequent infiltration into the Bush Jr and Obama administrations empowered the deep state, tossing America into the throws of the forever wars, overstretching its military and economic resources to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Presently, the US maintains more than 750 military bases across 80 different countries, increasingly at the cost of domestic infrastructure, social programmes, and other pressing needs. The repulsion of the Glass-Steagall Act through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which allowed commercial banks to engage in investment banking, coupled with the overall deregulation of Wall Street, upped the risk prevalent in the financial system; this culminated in 2008 with the worst financial crisis in the US since the Great Depression. As working-class Americans lined up to cash unemployment checks, Obama, in lockstep with his hawkish secretary-of-state, spent trillions in wars of choice in the Middle East, all the while lining the pockets of cash-rich corporations and the military-industrial complex back home.

With Americans seething with frustration, something had to give. In September 2011, protesters chanting “We are the 99pc” flooded the streets of New York City in what is now known as the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. A protest against the wealthiest 1pc, it derided the rampant economic inequality, corporate greed, neoliberal economics, and large financial institutions for causing the 2008 financial crisis.

On the opposing side of the political aisle, festering discontent amongst the public culminated in the Tea Party movement. A grassroots conservative response to the federal government’s actions post the 2008 financial crash, the movement called for limited government, fiscal conservatism, lower taxes, and a reduction in the federal deficit.

A grassroots consensus against the cistern of corruption and greed in Wall Street on both sides of the political aisle spooked the dark agents of the deep state, sending its extensive machinery into overdrive. With liberals and conservatives coalescing around the shadow state’s cash cow, danger to the status-quo was palpable. There was a need to break this overwhelmingly powerful consensus at the roots with something relatively superficial, but rooted in just enough reality to fragment society back into their ideological camps. Enter the culture wars.

Around the same time as the Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movements, the media dramatically ramped up coverage of racism, embracing novel theories of racial consciousness hitherto unheard of in American political discourse. Brilliant reporting by Zach Goldberg in Tablet magazine uncovers what appears to be a clear trend in liberal newspapers around the consequential 2011 mark, when the OWS and the Tea Party movements were galvanising the youth in droves. Around 2011, there was a notable surge in terms like “racism”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, and “racial inequality” among others, reported in some of the most widely read newspapers in the country. Take for instance the following graph, which displays the usage of terms “racist(s)” and “racism” as a percentage of all words in four of the nation’s largest newspapers from 1970 through 2019.






Around 2011, instances of the word “racist/racism” shot up considerably. Similar trends are apparent for other culture war mainstays, suspiciously around the same 2011 mark.






To be clear, racism undoubtedly permeates American society as an incredibly serious problem. However, did American society coincidentally grow more racist in the aftermath of the OWS and Tea Party movements than it was in the 1990s, when Bill and Hillary Clinton labelled young people of colour “superpredators” from behind the Seal of the President of the United States? This apparent shift in liberal reporting in 2011, amidst inflammatory rhetoric by American politicians and pundits, fractured American society in ways it still hasn’t quite healed from. Post 2011, the fracture was graphically evident.






In December 2006, 45pc of white Democrats and 41pc of white Republicans reported knowing someone they considered racist. By June 2015, this figure surged to 64pc for white Democrats but stayed at 41pc for white Republicans. Surprisingly enough, among Black and Hispanic Democrats, the trend was in the opposite direction. By inflating a very real social issue and manufacturing a culture war, the media created a political playing field ripe for a populist demagogue.

In 2016, with political frustration at fever pitch, the threads of Empire finally gave way at the seams. On the Republican side of the political aisle, a culturally disenfranchised conservative mob nominated a populist in Donald Trump to the GoP ticket. In the Democrat camp, it took a socialist like Bernie Sanders to energise a young progressive base increasingly disillusioned by Obama’s capitulation to the establishment. The 2016 moment was truly unique, with two anti-deep state candidates across the political aisle galvanising an incredibly angry base.

The Democratic party establishment successfully quashed the Sanders threat by stacking the deck in favour of dedicated neo-con and deep state darling, Hillary Clinton. In July 2016, WikiLeaks published a trove of DNC emails, revealing that party officials had discussed ways to undermine Sanders’ campaign in favour of Clinton.

Additionally, in a deliberate effort to minimise Sanders’ exposure, the DNC scheduled a limited number of debates on weekends or holidays, at times fewer viewers would tune in. This played right to Clinton’s advantage, who had a higher name recognition at the time. Superdelegates — party officials who can vote for whomever they choose at the convention — cast their vote for Clinton uncharacteristically early in the primary process, curating an impression of inevitability around her candidacy and thereby discouraging potential Sanders supporters.

The Republican camp was far less successful in dealing with Trump, who was already a known commodity and had a flair for waddling through media attacks unscathed. There was something about a non-traditional renegade lambasting legacy neo-cons in the Republican primaries that was like a breath of fresh air for an incredibly frustrated conservative base.

“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction; there were none. And they knew there were none … obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We all make mistakes. But that one was a beauty.”

Such outbursts were virtually unheard of in Washington. The fact that the barbs were clearly aimed at Jeb Bush, brother of former-president George W Bush Jr, who stood a couple of feet away from Trump on the debate stage, was cathartic for a conservative base that had grown increasingly disillusioned with the war-crazed neo-cons that dominated the GoP at the time. Like a Red Ceasar rising from the ashes, Trump’s brash insults and radical jingoism, supplemented with Hillary’s Pied Piper strategy, radically reconfigured the boundaries of acceptability in modern US politics, threatened to “demolish the deep state”, and usher in a new era in American politics.

Trump had a radically different foreign policy agenda than many of the neo-cons he railed against. Though not strictly an isolationist, Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda hinted at a voluntary disbandment of Empire. Corporate America’s dealmaker extraordinaire, he hoped to foster better relations with the deep state’s cardinal foe Vladmir Putin, renegotiate the establishment’s prized NAFTA, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific partnerships, reevaluate US engagement with NATO, and pivot US foreign policy away from the neo-conservative thinking of yesteryears toward a more non-interventionist approach.

During his first presidency, however, Trump’s efforts to renegotiate the terms of political power with the administrative state were mitigated by the ‘adults in the room’, a trope popularised by an anonymous 2018 submission to The New York Times by a former White House staffer. In an op-ed titled “I am the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, the staffer reassured readers that the president did indeed face substantial internal resistance within the West Wing.

“The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.”

This time around, the Trump threat is far more dangerous. With deep state stalwart Joe Biden out of the running, his protege Kamala Harris has been forced to take off the training wheels and enter the race with the backing of the entire deep state machinery behind her.

From assassination attempts to a cascade of civil and felony indictments, all efforts to prevent another Trump run have yet failed. What the establishment has celebrated as deserved prosecution against a rogue former president has been decried as ‘lawfare’ by bipartisan legal experts — selective justice, lacking any sound legal foundation or precedent.

The hush-money case in New York City, for instance, is almost laughable, especially when predators like Bill Clinton strut across Democratic National Conventions to rapturous applause, and are paraded as one of its greatest Democratic exports to the White House. The Georgia ‘election interference’ case calls into question the First Amendment rights of a former president to voice concerns regarding the integrity of an election — a right the Democrats seemed to have no qualms with when Hillary Clinton attributed Trump’s 2016 victory to “Russian interference” without any evidence or proof.

With respect to Trump’s prosecution in the ‘classified documents’ case, the Democrats seem to forget that Joe Biden was exonerated by a special counsel for virtually the same transgressions. From gag orders limiting Trump’s ability to comment on his own prosecution to the imposition of absurd fines to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in what can only be perceived as an open effort to enforce personal bankruptcy, the legal machinery of the state seems to have been deployed in a nakedly partisan fashion. However, it only seems to have pushed Trump toward a harder line of attack.

Courtroom sketch of Donald Trump during the Georgia election interference proceedings. Source: Reuters

At a rally in Waco, Texas, Trump framed his onslaught against the shadow government in apocalyptic terms.

“Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state”

However, much like Caesar, Trump’s defiance of the old Gods stems, not from an ideological commitment to democracy, but from a misplaced belief in his own divinity. He has successfully tapped into the rampant disillusionment with the status quo to rack up currency for his own political ambitions.

This time, Trump carries a blueprint for amassing unprecedented power, developed by a constellation of ‘America First’ conservative organisations. Under Project 2025, a policy document developed by the Heritage Foundation, Trump is expected to install loyalists into key appointment positions, staving off any more “adults in the room”. In fact, the former-president has noticeably recruited a more radical inner-circle. Unlike his previous stint, the Republican party now constitutes a much deeper bench of Make America Great Again (MAGA) loyalists as compared to 2016, with deep state sceptics like JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Pompeo, and Stephen Miller expected to take critical cabinet positions.

Trump is also expected to reimpose the Schedule F order, which would be one of the most profound changes to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Under the order, presidents may increase political appointment positions from 4,000 to more than 50,000, making almost every major federal programme subservient to the Oval Office, effectively disintegrating the deep state.

However, Trump’s animosity towards the administrative state has attracted unlikely and dangerous allies. This time, the GoP campaign is backed by one of the richest men on the planet — Elon Musk, who up until March 2024 publicly disavowed any affiliation with Trump, has grown to become a valuable arrow in the former president’s quiver. From dedicating near unilateral algorithmic support for the Republican hopeful on his platform X to promising a $1 million giveaway for registered voters in key swing states, rarely has someone of Musk’s stature thrown themselves so explicitly behind a political candidate.

Though he may hide behind the kind of inflammatory rhetoric and far-right conspiracy theories typical of MAGA rednecks, Musk is no ideologue. In fact, his patronage of Trump is as close to a marriage of convenience as it gets. Trump’s bid to harness over-expansion of the administrative state provides Musk with a golden opportunity to realise his own political designs. On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly earmarked the tech boy-wonder as his “efficiency” czar, a potential head of a new ‘government efficiency commission’. If this pans out, Musk shall have tremendous sway over the very government institutions that regulate his companies, institutions Musk has an adversarial history with.

Musk joins Trump at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Source: The Atlantic

Therefore, as Harris and Trump lock horns in November, the fate of Empire hangs in the balance. The election confronts Americans with two radically different paths. One, of a deep state candidate representing a decades-long entrenchment of global American primacy, and the other of a populist demagogue who threatens to tear the Empire down to its last shreds and build it anew in his image. November 5 is truly a contest between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

Exactly who will win this high-stakes game of thrones is not known. What is known is that the losers will be the American people.


The author is a student at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, and is interested in political, historical and social affairs.