Attorney Robert Barnes joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about his first article for Breitbart, “The Media, Obama, and the Deep State.”
Barnes, who not only predicted Trump’s 2016 election victory but actually flew to Ireland to bet big money on it, explained that the media do not understand the populist energy driving the Trump phenomenon.
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“A lot of my friends from college that ended up in the establishment press – the editor of the Daily Beast, and other places like that – they’ve just grown up in such a tiny bubble within a bubble,” he said. “Their insularity is so intense. They only talk to one another. Their echo chamber is on surround sound. The effect of that is that most of them don’t know many working-class people or Middle America people. Most of them don’t have friends in that community, family in that community, don’t have any personal history in that community.”
“I even remember, I went to both conventions as sort of my political scouting for the purposes of placing the bet, and what was striking was that both in Cleveland and in Philadelphia, they never got out and about,” he recalled. “I mean, here you had two swing communities. You had the big blue-collar parts of both towns. And they just stayed in their tiny little part near the convention, didn’t even like to interact or interface with people around the convention, which was very apparent and manifest, particularly in Cleveland.”
“They weren’t even curious to meaningfully engage ordinary people,” he marveled. “So they could convince themselves of whatever they wanted. A lot of the so-called data journalists or polling journalists were just talking to one another. Pollsters have for many years had problems, but since 2012, there’s a wide range of systemic issues with polling as it currently exists.”
“The mainstream media so much wants its own world to believe, their own ideas, rather than what’s actually happening in the country. The net effect of that was that the odds were probably the most off, the most incorrect, that they’d ever been in the history of American presidential politics, since at least 1948,” Barnes concluded, having wagered and won hard cash on that proposition.
Marlow noted some warm words for Barnes from his old Yale classmate Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics, who praised Barnes for understanding populism: “It was more than just seeing what he wanted to see. It was seeing what other people weren’t willing to see.”
Trende, on the other hand, was spectacularly wrong about the outcome of the Trump-Clinton race, having confidently predicted a huge Clinton victory just hours before the polls closed. Barnes said Trende’s election miss reflected two important factors: “One, I think even some of Trump’s people were telling him he was in trouble that day, when he was not, and it’s a reflection of the inadequacies of polling, which the media’s trying to use to manipulate narratives.”
“But also, it’s a reflection of the errors of exit polling,” he continued. “Exit polling has been bad for forever. It’s mostly built to tell a false story, like the 2012 ‘autopsy’ was. Trump was one of the very few people to, at the time, question that and point out its inadequacies, just like Steve Bannon was. But everybody else was on board with it.”
“It was mostly based on bogus polls. It was based on fake information,” he said of the post-2012 election analysis, noting that he was still receiving warnings about Trump’s inevitable defeat based on that four-year-old analysis, even as he was winging his way to Ireland on Election Day 2016 to place his bet.
“They wanted to believe it so bad, it led them to believe things that were just never credibly true,” he said of 2016’s polling analysis.
“I remember after the Access Hollywood tapes broke, and I talked to Sean and other people, and I was like, ‘Americans aren’t going to really care about that when it comes to the voting booth time,’” Barnes recalled. “They just didn’t want to believe it, so they didn’t believe it, or they get caught up in the sort of day-to-day minutiae of the soap opera that the media likes to do.”
“The media creates its own little soap opera. They talk to each other about their soap opera. They tweet back to each other about their soap opera. It’s just not the American people’s soap opera,” he elaborated. “That’s why they’re constantly out of touch, constantly disconnected, constantly creating fake and false narratives that just don’t resonate and work with the American people, of which the Clinton campaign was the ultimate culmination.”
Marlow asked Barnes for his idea of what the “Deep State” is and what it wants.
“Over the weekend, CNN, the New York Times, the Economist, published opinion articles or their own pieces claiming that the Deep State didn’t really exist, that everybody was crazy to believe there is such a thing as a Deep State, and the only place it ever existed was Turkey some years ago – which is all ludicrous,” Barnes noted.
“The idea of the Deep State originated from a British theory in the mid-19th century about the rise of a double government, due to the rise of an administrative bureaucracy within an empire at that time in the U.K.,” he said. “It really sort of developed in the U.S. in the 1940s when a German emigre was trying to figure out how did fascism rise to power in Europe. What they found was there was this internal state, this parallel security state that didn’t respect the law, didn’t respect democratic institutions, that started to develop in the post-World War II and right up to World War II era, that became capable of doing terrible things.”
“The Deep State, this double state or dual state, was the great threat to democracies around the world,” he continued. “That sort of developed in the 1950s when a professor noted that the United States State Department was becoming like a Deep State or a dual state. People were able to implement policies without regard to what the public wants, implement policies without regard to democratic election. They were effectively immune institutionally from it.”
“That led Eisenhower to warn about it in 1959, in a famous farewell address where he coined the term ‘military-industrial complex.’ This was Eisenhower – moderate Republican, a general, so it wasn’t like he was against security. He just recognized there was a Deep State starting to build within the infrastructure of the government at large, and that that posed a serious and direct threat to the democratic institutions that we cherish,” said Barnes.
“Kennedy himself in 1961, after the failed Bay of Pigs, raised it again in the context of totalitarian governments and particularly at the time, Communist governments. The media likes to talk a lot about fascist governments. You see a lot from the Left and academia, a lot of talk about the threat of fascism – but they forget the people who killed the most people were, of course, Communist totalitarian governments. And the Communist governments practiced the art of the Deep State to its ultimate ‘T,’” he observed.
“American scholars have discussed it. In the early nineties, people started calling the dual state ‘deep politics.’ That’s where you started to integrate the two terms, and that’s where the Deep State started being used in the mid-nineties,” Barnes concluded.
“So the attempt by CNN, the Economist, and others – in fact, it was actually an Economist editor from the mid-19th century who created this term, and yet they’re out there trying to say over the weekend that it doesn’t exist as an idea,” he said.
“It’s simply an attempt by the media to cover up its existence, which does reflect the long history of the media being in bed with the Deep State, institutionally and culturally,” he charged.
Barnes argued that the “untold story of Watergate” perfectly demonstrated the media’s relationship with the Deep State.
“There was a lot of bad things that Nixon did, but the untold story was the actual motivations and relationship of Deep Throat to Bob Woodward and who Deep Throat really was,” he explained. “Deep Throat was a Hooverized FBI guy who ran COINTELPRO, which was the sabotage efforts on domestic politics throughout the sixties and seventies. When he was passed over by Nixon to be head of the FBI after Hoover’s death, he went about becoming Deep Throat and trying to take out a democratically elected president as payback. He was later indicted and convicted for his activities related to COINTELPRO.”
“COINTELPRO will give you a template for how they are treating Trump today. If you go back and look at the techniques used, the tactics used, the methods used – disinformation campaigns, smear campaigns, illicit intercepts, illegal leaks – all of them were part of the pattern of how they built COINTELPRO. What you have now is a Deep State operation doing a de facto COINTELPRO against the president himself,” he warned.
Barnes finished up with his predictions for the Netherlands election: “I think Wilders will win. I think it will be very, very close, but I think he’ll pull it off.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Listen to the full audio of the interview above.