Joy Reid on MSNBC is easily as one-sided, hostile, divisive and just plain rage-based as Carlson ever was, although not nearly as popular. Rachel Maddow during the Steele Dossier/Russian collusion fever episode likely set the world’s record for televised lies and insane conspiracies. Joe Scarborough may be the stupidest and assholiest asshole ever on TV.
I’m on the political left, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone who values truth or sanity watch any of the 24-hour “news” networks — especially if you’re looking for news — but pretending Carlson was a unique evil or threat in that world is just ignorant or delusional or pure partisan spin; he was just better at mining the zeitgeist, and it struck a nerve.
The shame of it is that a vast majority watching the 24 hour "news" channels don't realize that almost all of what appears on these channels is *not* news, it is highly opinionated commentary targeting the network's preferred audience. Fox News does not have a monopoly on bloviating talking heads - as you point out this bovine scat is ubiquitous across all of these channels.
Ad revenues from actual news programming is a pittance to what these businesses earn pandering to their preferred rubes - it's all about the ratings and how they relate to the carriage fees charged by cable providers (and actual news does *not* draw the necessary viewership). Referring to any of these twenty-four hour news channels as actual news providers is a complete misnomer.
Indeed, they all essentially shut down their reporting divisions some time ago, and it's now "all commentary, all the time," more modeled on pro wrestling and soap operas than any high-minded journalistic ethos. And since they don't have expensive investigative reporters, the shows are just kind of cheap garbage/political party propaganda arms, with nice lighting and tailored suits, and tiny, broken brains.
David Cross, before he went full broken-brain #resistance, had a funny bit about this: "Entertainment news is neither entertainment nor news." You can certainly apply that to the Fox/MSNBC/CNN model. It's not news and it's not entertaining. What the hell is it? At least wrestling and horror movies and monster truck rallies offer violent catharsis after they get you riled up. Rage news is all build up with no release, ever. No wonder everyone's so crazy now. It's like watching pornography where nobody ever actually gets to have sex.
Anybody can buy a cheap HD camera and a teleprompter and go live and direct to the internet now, and almost anybody with a shred of honesty and decency does it better than than the stuffed suits and hairdos on cable do. They soon won't be able to compete with popular, home-grown, crodw-funded upstarts, so they're trying to shut it down. The hair and the suits and the tiny ids are scared shitless.
--
(Someone commented on my post earlier and then unfortunately deleted his comment, but he mentioned that the audience for these networks is as much to blame for creating this unholy feedback loop as the creators and that's certainly true. He also said that maybe it's good that Carlson won't have the biggest platform in the world to do this anymore, but I question whether he can't have a bigger platform leaving the network. If anything, he may be able to grow it. Maybe not having to feed the hive and the advertisers and executives is better for people like Carlson. I've seen brief clips of Glenn Beck's indie show, and while I don't agree with him on much, it seems kind of normal and sedate, and he was likely the record-holder in cable "news" conspiracies and lies before Maddow came along. Keith Olbermann on the other hand seems to have turned into permanent rage-brain-mush and just yells into a camera for Twitter. Somebody should really check his home for massive levels of dangerous radiation.)
Thank you!!!! People who constantly seethe about Fox News and their various personalities but have not a comment about the insanity that happens day in and day out on MSNBC really let their partisanship show to the point that it damages their credibility.
I don't care for any of it, but the posturing in the last year or so in Dem-aligned quarters (and what's left of neocon-aligned quarters, to an extent) that Carlson is somehow uniquely dangerous and must be censored by the state, while ignoring the partisan spin, outright lies and gross anger from other corners of the post-journalism news world really bothers me. (Seeing AOC claim that Carlson "clearly" crosses the line of incitement two days ago, and now claiming victory and that "deplatforming works" is the real scary thing here. Even the Young Turks that unfortunately were pivotal in creating her with their role in the Justice Democrats have turned on her now. She's more off the rails than MTG, in my estimation, and I supported her in the beginning.)
I don't watch Carlson, and I obviously dislike that kind of broadcasting, but whenever I'd read about an instance of him "crossing a dangerous line," I'd watch a brief clip and it was mostly just him expressing an opinion. I'm sorry, but I don't think opinions are dangerous, but I do find the idea that they are to be the actual danger. To go back to Ms. Maddow, watch a single episode of her show during the height of Russiagate, and it was all now-debunked lies (and it seemed crazy at the time, before we knew they were lies!) presented as stone fact, not opinion. Those lies have reoriented all of western society in a devastating way.
Carlson certainly has some deeply conservative views that I find quite distasteful, but he also seemingly presents an anti-establishment view that's in keeping with the nascent quasi-populist movement that's gaining popularity throughout the west. He also has a fair amount of "old left" voices on his show that used to be regulars on the Young Turks, Democracy Now! and MSNBC who've been blackballed for their "wrong" opinions (mostly because of Russiagate skepticism that turned out to be the right call, or any view contrarian to Democratic Party talking points), and it's the only mainstream outlets for those voices.
I don't think Carlson — or this new populist movement, as messy as it is — is going away. Trying to demonize them, and turn them into "the enemy," will not end well and I for one find it brazenly, horribly offensive. Carlson seems to me bigger than Fox News at this point, and will likely take his massive audience with him. If he goes indie, that's another nail in the coffin of a legacy media enterprise whose trust is at an all-time low. And that's good — it's broken! Speeding up the end of 24-hour cable news rage channels, and party-aligned media apparatchiks that have embraced "advocacy journalism" and stopped searching for truth, will allow news sources that people can actually trust to emerge. Bring it on.
No. They aren’t. They may all suck. And we likely agree that anyone ingesting opinion-based info-tainment on the regular has inoperable political cancer...
But the same? No.
Tucker’s audience night in, night out is far larger.
Tucker (via Fox) has had to admit in Court that nobody should come to his show for facts.
Tucker’s texts show he lies with extra impunity and knows it and doesn’t care a wit. You may THINK that’s the same all around the dial - but only one of them gave us actual receipts.
Tucker knowingly pushed the lie, the abject falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen. (Victims...we are but hapless victims...who...are also the smartest best people?)
Maddow definitely got embarrassing about Trump on many occasions. But compare the words. Compare who is on the receiving end. It was nearly always Trump and GOP politicians.
With Tucker (& Trump) it’s far more a faceless, nameless radical left and migrants and minorities. He knows his audience relishes ‘raging at the others’. It’s bad on the MSNBC’s, etc, but it’s far more focused on bad actors in power. With Tucker & Co, they will take bad actions of any number of people and apply it to everyone in their demographic - every single night.
They’re all poison, I agree.
His is - and will be at his next stop - a far more potent and foul brand. And the ratings tell you which side of this country laps it up in greater numbers.
It seems to me that what happened in the Dominion lawsuit discovery texts actually showed that Carlson was against the whole stupid voter fraud scenario and hated that he had to have guests on that supported it - although he did finally have those guests on — and he had choice words about Trump and the scam and the brass at Fox News, and actually aired segments where he called the whole thing bullshit. Lou Dobbs and others, who gleefully went along with the scam, bear way more of the blame.
This isn't to absolve Carlson of his involvement in the 24-hour rage-cycle, and he was by far the most popular person in that hellscape, but I still think that the almost totally fake Russian thing (and its interrelated atrocities) pushed elsewhere has done way more damage to the entire west. People still haven't come clean about any of that, despite massive amounts of evidence in plain sight.
Look, I don't care for Carlson, and I've seen some clips of divisive fearmongering on his show, but I mostly think the talking points about him are either inaccurate or outright creepy (banned for opinions, etc.). This Carlson-as-big-bad-wolf routine is fully a media creation, and only the deeply partisan-brained actually buy it. (I don't watch any of it, but it's a funny fact that Carlson's show wasn't just the number one cable show with Republicans, but the number one cable show with Democrats!)
Does anyone really think that if some kind of similar discovery came out in a case involving MSNBC regarding Russia and the Steele Dossier and a million related things they wouldn't find copious amounts of people from within the organization voicing similar hesitancies? No, they don't, because we all know it's there. Between this case and events like Clinton's email leaks, Snowden, Assange and the whistleblowers in media coming out almost daily now, you can almost guarantee that there are intelligence tech types working around the clock trying to erase those emails, those texts, and that history. But it will likely still come out in some form anyway, and only certain people will be upset by it at all, which is real bad.
You don’t understand Tucker Carlson, his appeal, or his audience. That’s a shame, because there’s so much that you do see clearly and without the cultural biases that warp what much of the progressive and radical left believes to be real.
Mike, I literally don't understand your reply. Just to settle the question of AI: unlike most people who post on the internet I use my actual legal name. You can easily find me on Facebook and LinkedIn. I do my best to never write anything I wouldn't be willing to also say in person. I strive to be polite and respectful, and I apologize when I am not, which does happen on occasion.
But to return to your comment, which I simply do not understand. By "the level of projection here" are you referring to something I wrote? What do you think I am projecting? And on to whom? Tucker Carlson? Jim Treacher? Carlson's audience? What are you asserting?
Tuckums wasn't fired for his on-air BS, he was fired, along with one of his producers, because a woman is suing the network for being a hostile, abusive environment. Tuckums was part of that, so he went. What scares me is who will replace him, and what rock will the Murdochs dig them out from under? Nick Fuentes is a rising Reich-wing star, maybe this is his time to shine. God help us all.
That woman sueing him, when asked to give an example, was like “the Andrew Tate interview involved too many vis white men with objectionable opinions”. Well duh-that’s what Tate is, and what you ostensibly work for. That’s like a cook at Big Bubba’s BBQ in Tulsa complaint that vegan menu options are an afterthought. What the hell were you thinking when you took the job.
Tucker pivoted from a lot of traditionally mainstream conservative talking points. Just look up his interview with the Amazon unionization leader on Staten Island or wherever in NYC.
He told knee jerk milquetoast libs to actually think about political structures and motivations-and they hated it. He was telling the HR department at work to stuff it-and their basic reaction was “You’re meeeeeeaaaaan”, not “Hmmmm, why are we unquestiongly parroting this stuff?”. His show producer, who also got fired, is gay btw. Doubt he worked for someone who was cool with him living in a National Forest, like a Portland Antifa freak on the run….
>>> "... I think the extent to which media figures drive the conversation is limited."
From a starting point of zero, or completely neutral, I mostly agree. But I think this assertion ignores the longer-term effects of a media outfit regurgitating their audience's more vile instincts, and then constantly repeating, amplifying, and exaggerating those feelings. This reinforces the audience's feeling of being right, and keeps them locked in. And just like a lot of other bad drugs, the ensuing doses have to be made ever stronger (read: more hysterical, and even less truthful) to produce the same warm fuzzies.
I can't claim causation, but there certainly is a strong correlation between the launching of FoxNews™ in 1996 and the descent into madness among the GOP base, and their political leadership, in the time since.
Not sure how your remark is "in contrast" to mine. Please elaborate.
I will stipulate to the FBI's nefarious behavior back in the 1950s, and probably wouldn't quibble with that continuing through the next two decades. My sense is that their excessiveness in this regard started getting dialed back a bit, although I've read no end of reports about their continued surveillance of completely innocuous groups, most of them left-leaning.
I suspect that after terrorism became a bigger problem in the US, from the late 1990s and on, they ramped up their surveillance work. Not sure I'd consider that entirely nefarious, although I am sure there were plenty of Islamic groups and individuals who got way more attention than was justified.
Ditto domestic rightwing extremists, where I'd bet surveillance ramped up, and where I'd also say I'm not sure this was nefarious. Certainly not entirely.
I never know what to say to someone who says "Deep State" in a non-joking way. On one hand, sure, civil service employees keep their jobs from one presidential administration to the next, and as part of that, sure, some friction is bound to be generated. But I can't imagine it doesn't work both ways -- conservatives hampering incoming Democrats, liberals hampering incoming Republicans -- so if you are suggesting that this is a one-way street, I'm going to find it very hard to take you seriously.
When you correlated the “descent into madness” w/ the rise of Fox News, I was pointing out that the behavior many right wingers/critics of this he Deep State criticize had been happening for years, albeit against targets-Black Panthers, radicals-that many on the right would not have an affinity for, although I think the new revelations are cementing a new appreciation of the bi-partisan nature of the deep state/FBI’s actions.
Joy Reid on MSNBC is easily as one-sided, hostile, divisive and just plain rage-based as Carlson ever was, although not nearly as popular. Rachel Maddow during the Steele Dossier/Russian collusion fever episode likely set the world’s record for televised lies and insane conspiracies. Joe Scarborough may be the stupidest and assholiest asshole ever on TV.
I’m on the political left, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone who values truth or sanity watch any of the 24-hour “news” networks — especially if you’re looking for news — but pretending Carlson was a unique evil or threat in that world is just ignorant or delusional or pure partisan spin; he was just better at mining the zeitgeist, and it struck a nerve.
The shame of it is that a vast majority watching the 24 hour "news" channels don't realize that almost all of what appears on these channels is *not* news, it is highly opinionated commentary targeting the network's preferred audience. Fox News does not have a monopoly on bloviating talking heads - as you point out this bovine scat is ubiquitous across all of these channels.
Ad revenues from actual news programming is a pittance to what these businesses earn pandering to their preferred rubes - it's all about the ratings and how they relate to the carriage fees charged by cable providers (and actual news does *not* draw the necessary viewership). Referring to any of these twenty-four hour news channels as actual news providers is a complete misnomer.
fnord
Indeed, they all essentially shut down their reporting divisions some time ago, and it's now "all commentary, all the time," more modeled on pro wrestling and soap operas than any high-minded journalistic ethos. And since they don't have expensive investigative reporters, the shows are just kind of cheap garbage/political party propaganda arms, with nice lighting and tailored suits, and tiny, broken brains.
David Cross, before he went full broken-brain #resistance, had a funny bit about this: "Entertainment news is neither entertainment nor news." You can certainly apply that to the Fox/MSNBC/CNN model. It's not news and it's not entertaining. What the hell is it? At least wrestling and horror movies and monster truck rallies offer violent catharsis after they get you riled up. Rage news is all build up with no release, ever. No wonder everyone's so crazy now. It's like watching pornography where nobody ever actually gets to have sex.
Anybody can buy a cheap HD camera and a teleprompter and go live and direct to the internet now, and almost anybody with a shred of honesty and decency does it better than than the stuffed suits and hairdos on cable do. They soon won't be able to compete with popular, home-grown, crodw-funded upstarts, so they're trying to shut it down. The hair and the suits and the tiny ids are scared shitless.
--
(Someone commented on my post earlier and then unfortunately deleted his comment, but he mentioned that the audience for these networks is as much to blame for creating this unholy feedback loop as the creators and that's certainly true. He also said that maybe it's good that Carlson won't have the biggest platform in the world to do this anymore, but I question whether he can't have a bigger platform leaving the network. If anything, he may be able to grow it. Maybe not having to feed the hive and the advertisers and executives is better for people like Carlson. I've seen brief clips of Glenn Beck's indie show, and while I don't agree with him on much, it seems kind of normal and sedate, and he was likely the record-holder in cable "news" conspiracies and lies before Maddow came along. Keith Olbermann on the other hand seems to have turned into permanent rage-brain-mush and just yells into a camera for Twitter. Somebody should really check his home for massive levels of dangerous radiation.)
Thank you!!!! People who constantly seethe about Fox News and their various personalities but have not a comment about the insanity that happens day in and day out on MSNBC really let their partisanship show to the point that it damages their credibility.
I don't care for any of it, but the posturing in the last year or so in Dem-aligned quarters (and what's left of neocon-aligned quarters, to an extent) that Carlson is somehow uniquely dangerous and must be censored by the state, while ignoring the partisan spin, outright lies and gross anger from other corners of the post-journalism news world really bothers me. (Seeing AOC claim that Carlson "clearly" crosses the line of incitement two days ago, and now claiming victory and that "deplatforming works" is the real scary thing here. Even the Young Turks that unfortunately were pivotal in creating her with their role in the Justice Democrats have turned on her now. She's more off the rails than MTG, in my estimation, and I supported her in the beginning.)
I don't watch Carlson, and I obviously dislike that kind of broadcasting, but whenever I'd read about an instance of him "crossing a dangerous line," I'd watch a brief clip and it was mostly just him expressing an opinion. I'm sorry, but I don't think opinions are dangerous, but I do find the idea that they are to be the actual danger. To go back to Ms. Maddow, watch a single episode of her show during the height of Russiagate, and it was all now-debunked lies (and it seemed crazy at the time, before we knew they were lies!) presented as stone fact, not opinion. Those lies have reoriented all of western society in a devastating way.
Carlson certainly has some deeply conservative views that I find quite distasteful, but he also seemingly presents an anti-establishment view that's in keeping with the nascent quasi-populist movement that's gaining popularity throughout the west. He also has a fair amount of "old left" voices on his show that used to be regulars on the Young Turks, Democracy Now! and MSNBC who've been blackballed for their "wrong" opinions (mostly because of Russiagate skepticism that turned out to be the right call, or any view contrarian to Democratic Party talking points), and it's the only mainstream outlets for those voices.
I don't think Carlson — or this new populist movement, as messy as it is — is going away. Trying to demonize them, and turn them into "the enemy," will not end well and I for one find it brazenly, horribly offensive. Carlson seems to me bigger than Fox News at this point, and will likely take his massive audience with him. If he goes indie, that's another nail in the coffin of a legacy media enterprise whose trust is at an all-time low. And that's good — it's broken! Speeding up the end of 24-hour cable news rage channels, and party-aligned media apparatchiks that have embraced "advocacy journalism" and stopped searching for truth, will allow news sources that people can actually trust to emerge. Bring it on.
So they’re all equally shitty, is that it?
No. They aren’t. They may all suck. And we likely agree that anyone ingesting opinion-based info-tainment on the regular has inoperable political cancer...
But the same? No.
Tucker’s audience night in, night out is far larger.
Tucker (via Fox) has had to admit in Court that nobody should come to his show for facts.
Tucker’s texts show he lies with extra impunity and knows it and doesn’t care a wit. You may THINK that’s the same all around the dial - but only one of them gave us actual receipts.
Tucker knowingly pushed the lie, the abject falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen. (Victims...we are but hapless victims...who...are also the smartest best people?)
Maddow definitely got embarrassing about Trump on many occasions. But compare the words. Compare who is on the receiving end. It was nearly always Trump and GOP politicians.
With Tucker (& Trump) it’s far more a faceless, nameless radical left and migrants and minorities. He knows his audience relishes ‘raging at the others’. It’s bad on the MSNBC’s, etc, but it’s far more focused on bad actors in power. With Tucker & Co, they will take bad actions of any number of people and apply it to everyone in their demographic - every single night.
They’re all poison, I agree.
His is - and will be at his next stop - a far more potent and foul brand. And the ratings tell you which side of this country laps it up in greater numbers.
It seems to me that what happened in the Dominion lawsuit discovery texts actually showed that Carlson was against the whole stupid voter fraud scenario and hated that he had to have guests on that supported it - although he did finally have those guests on — and he had choice words about Trump and the scam and the brass at Fox News, and actually aired segments where he called the whole thing bullshit. Lou Dobbs and others, who gleefully went along with the scam, bear way more of the blame.
This isn't to absolve Carlson of his involvement in the 24-hour rage-cycle, and he was by far the most popular person in that hellscape, but I still think that the almost totally fake Russian thing (and its interrelated atrocities) pushed elsewhere has done way more damage to the entire west. People still haven't come clean about any of that, despite massive amounts of evidence in plain sight.
Look, I don't care for Carlson, and I've seen some clips of divisive fearmongering on his show, but I mostly think the talking points about him are either inaccurate or outright creepy (banned for opinions, etc.). This Carlson-as-big-bad-wolf routine is fully a media creation, and only the deeply partisan-brained actually buy it. (I don't watch any of it, but it's a funny fact that Carlson's show wasn't just the number one cable show with Republicans, but the number one cable show with Democrats!)
Does anyone really think that if some kind of similar discovery came out in a case involving MSNBC regarding Russia and the Steele Dossier and a million related things they wouldn't find copious amounts of people from within the organization voicing similar hesitancies? No, they don't, because we all know it's there. Between this case and events like Clinton's email leaks, Snowden, Assange and the whistleblowers in media coming out almost daily now, you can almost guarantee that there are intelligence tech types working around the clock trying to erase those emails, those texts, and that history. But it will likely still come out in some form anyway, and only certain people will be upset by it at all, which is real bad.
What does Don Lemon have to say about it?
I can’t believe Fox and Tucker scooped me on my own firing?!?!
Stephen Tobolowsky in the continuing adventures of the Comissioner from Yankton would slap!
You don’t understand Tucker Carlson, his appeal, or his audience. That’s a shame, because there’s so much that you do see clearly and without the cultural biases that warp what much of the progressive and radical left believes to be real.
This has to be AI generated, because the level of projection here is inhuman
Mike, I literally don't understand your reply. Just to settle the question of AI: unlike most people who post on the internet I use my actual legal name. You can easily find me on Facebook and LinkedIn. I do my best to never write anything I wouldn't be willing to also say in person. I strive to be polite and respectful, and I apologize when I am not, which does happen on occasion.
But to return to your comment, which I simply do not understand. By "the level of projection here" are you referring to something I wrote? What do you think I am projecting? And on to whom? Tucker Carlson? Jim Treacher? Carlson's audience? What are you asserting?
Police Squad reruns are probably the only thing that would ever get me to watch Fox News. If they ran those, I'd watch the shit out of that channel.
I think it would be really meta for Fox to hire Stephen Colbert to replace Tucker.
Thank you for those of you commenting on other news/ option programs. 👏 Funny how some of these posts are one sided.
Tuckums wasn't fired for his on-air BS, he was fired, along with one of his producers, because a woman is suing the network for being a hostile, abusive environment. Tuckums was part of that, so he went. What scares me is who will replace him, and what rock will the Murdochs dig them out from under? Nick Fuentes is a rising Reich-wing star, maybe this is his time to shine. God help us all.
That woman sueing him, when asked to give an example, was like “the Andrew Tate interview involved too many vis white men with objectionable opinions”. Well duh-that’s what Tate is, and what you ostensibly work for. That’s like a cook at Big Bubba’s BBQ in Tulsa complaint that vegan menu options are an afterthought. What the hell were you thinking when you took the job.
Tucker pivoted from a lot of traditionally mainstream conservative talking points. Just look up his interview with the Amazon unionization leader on Staten Island or wherever in NYC.
He told knee jerk milquetoast libs to actually think about political structures and motivations-and they hated it. He was telling the HR department at work to stuff it-and their basic reaction was “You’re meeeeeeaaaaan”, not “Hmmmm, why are we unquestiongly parroting this stuff?”. His show producer, who also got fired, is gay btw. Doubt he worked for someone who was cool with him living in a National Forest, like a Portland Antifa freak on the run….
>>> "... I think the extent to which media figures drive the conversation is limited."
From a starting point of zero, or completely neutral, I mostly agree. But I think this assertion ignores the longer-term effects of a media outfit regurgitating their audience's more vile instincts, and then constantly repeating, amplifying, and exaggerating those feelings. This reinforces the audience's feeling of being right, and keeps them locked in. And just like a lot of other bad drugs, the ensuing doses have to be made ever stronger (read: more hysterical, and even less truthful) to produce the same warm fuzzies.
I can't claim causation, but there certainly is a strong correlation between the launching of FoxNews™ in 1996 and the descent into madness among the GOP base, and their political leadership, in the time since.
In contrast the Deep State and the FBI were doing documented nefarious shit to outsider elements in the American political scene since the 1950s…….
Not sure how your remark is "in contrast" to mine. Please elaborate.
I will stipulate to the FBI's nefarious behavior back in the 1950s, and probably wouldn't quibble with that continuing through the next two decades. My sense is that their excessiveness in this regard started getting dialed back a bit, although I've read no end of reports about their continued surveillance of completely innocuous groups, most of them left-leaning.
I suspect that after terrorism became a bigger problem in the US, from the late 1990s and on, they ramped up their surveillance work. Not sure I'd consider that entirely nefarious, although I am sure there were plenty of Islamic groups and individuals who got way more attention than was justified.
Ditto domestic rightwing extremists, where I'd bet surveillance ramped up, and where I'd also say I'm not sure this was nefarious. Certainly not entirely.
I never know what to say to someone who says "Deep State" in a non-joking way. On one hand, sure, civil service employees keep their jobs from one presidential administration to the next, and as part of that, sure, some friction is bound to be generated. But I can't imagine it doesn't work both ways -- conservatives hampering incoming Democrats, liberals hampering incoming Republicans -- so if you are suggesting that this is a one-way street, I'm going to find it very hard to take you seriously.
When you correlated the “descent into madness” w/ the rise of Fox News, I was pointing out that the behavior many right wingers/critics of this he Deep State criticize had been happening for years, albeit against targets-Black Panthers, radicals-that many on the right would not have an affinity for, although I think the new revelations are cementing a new appreciation of the bi-partisan nature of the deep state/FBI’s actions.
I don't see any reason to add "Deep State" to what you're talking about, because you seem to be talking about the FBI exclusively.