In his televised Farewell Address delivered on January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower encouraged the American people to be wary of the establishment of a Deep State.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist” [my emphasis].
Eisenhower knew what he was talking about. The “military-industrial” might of the nation was used to crush Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II and General Eisenhower was at the center of it. His eight years in office (1953-1961) were witness to a massive production of military hardware that had metastasized into an arms race with the Soviet Union. Whether at peace or at war, the United States has directed something like 10-25% of its annual expenditures toward the production and development of the military. Of course, this also included the production of thousands of nuclear warheads; a thoroughly unprecedented moment in the history of humanity.
In his Farewell Address, he also challenged the citizenry that, in a democracy, it was the people’s responsibility to understand and monitor this threat.
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Six years later, Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace was presented to the American people at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and as hundreds of thousands of American GIs were fighting in Vietnam. The Report, from a government-sponsored Special Study Group set up by the Kennedy Administration, concluded that war was a necessary condition to maintain a stable society. In essence, Eisenhower’s warning of the presence of a “military-industrial complex” had come to pass and an elite group of military, economic, and technological powers were actually running the country.*
Many Americans failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning to be “alert and knowledgeable” because they did not see this best-selling publication for what it was; a satire written by Leonard C. Lewin. There was no Special Study Group. There was no report. The Report is fiction. As in all fiction, a bit of truth gets the story going. Iron Mountain is a massive underground bunker in Pennsylvania that is reportedly ready to house an elite group of Americans in the event of a global crisis such as nuclear war.
The story of The Report is told by writer and documentarian Phil Tinline in Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals about America Today (2025).
At the time of its publication in 1967 The Report was compared to George Orwell’s 1984 indicating that the Deep State of Stalinist Russia had taken hold in America. With cold calculation, the fictional Special Study Group was tasked with evaluating the repercussions of global peace and told to “write about war and strategy without getting bogged down in questions of morality…” The result was a recommendation estimating the number of war deaths necessary to maintain a stable society. The group also determined the amount of air and water pollution necessary to cull, and therefore control, the population in times of peace.
During the middle of the largest anti-war movement in American history, The Report was seen as proof that nefarious forces were prolonging the Vietnam War for economic reasons. In a decade that also witnessed the assassinations of several prominent figures such as John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the idea that the country was being managed by sinister forces was not difficult to fathom. Since the book was written as a secret government report leaked to the public, it was received with an aura of credibility.
Adding to this credibility in 1971, the Pentagon Papers were published by the New York Times and this was no satire. These documents proved that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson had systematically misled the American people about what had been happening in Southeast Asia.
So, in 1972, when Leonard C. Lewin admitted that he had written The Report from Iron Mountain as satire, many people concluded that he was claiming it was a hoax only because he had been threatened by the CIA. By the time President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, the American people were fully aware that the government had betrayed them once again. With all that nasty behavior from elected officials, it was no stretch of the imagination to believe in the unsavory machinations of nefarious and powerful figures behind the scenes.
Ironically, a book originally written as the American left was challenging the government’s legitimacy, especially in regards to the Vietnam War; the book was republished in the 1990s by right wing extremists who cited The Report as evidence of the existence of a Deep State. Many left-wingers continue to harbor imaginings of a Deep State but during the last 30 years, this sentiment has been deployed consistently and effectively by the American right. Indeed, Tinline argues that the chaos of the world we now live in is the accumulative reaction of the fear of the Deep State; a fear originally manufactured in a fictional book.
Conservative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh regularly referred to The Report to attack liberal entities for decades. The premise of The Report has been propped up as evidence debunking the prevalence of global climate change; attacking the mainstream media; accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of murder and pedophilia, and of operating a global sex-trafficking ring; questioning the secret motivations of 9/11; challenging Barack Obama’s American citizenship and accusing him of being a Muslim.
Phil Tinline makes an extremely credible argument that the current state of affairs in the United States today—including a Republican party that has seemingly lost its mind —is a result of the widespread belief that a Deep State exists.
The assertion of The Report has been heralded by Donald Trump for more than a decade. It was cited by many who claimed that the COVID pandemic and subsequent vaccines were being deployed as engines of fear and tools of control exercised by the Deep State.
While Trump continues to deny knowledge of, or support for, the Conservative agenda produced by the Heritage Foundation in a report called Project 2025, he is parroting its mission to justify massive firings, the appointment only of those loyal to him; all under the “patriotic” banner of dismantling the Deep State.
His military deployments within the country are justified by the Deep State; as is his crackdown on immigrants or those that look like many immigrants do. His blatant abuse of power is not only justified, he claims repeatedly, it is absolutely essential for democracy in order to destroy the Deep State.
This is no clandestine effort by Donald Trump. He openly and regularly wails against the Deep State. “At rally after rally,” Tinline writes, “[Trump] told a story about how the state had become a malign, even demonic force.”
As a result, and even as The Report is not specifically cited in every instance of this conspiracy theory madness, it is clear that the fear of a Deep State has motivated tens of millions of Americans.**
It seems to me that an innate characteristic of the human condition is the struggle to make sense of chaos, to bring a sense of order to the world, a meaning for one’s life. Much like the mythmakers of old, it doesn’t really matter if the story is true or not… just so long as it comforts, or at least, settles the mind.
This is the essence of The Report. War is necessary to keep people in a general state of fear. And, if there were to be a world at peace, what would become of the nation-states whose purpose is to breed nationalistic feelings at odds with the nationalistic feelings of other countries.
This is why Trumpism rejects global institutions like the United Nations and the World Health Organization. If these institutions lived up to their missions, there would be a transformation of the very nature of power as it exists in the world today.
This Deep State mentality serves an odd purpose for those subsumed by it. At its core, the presence of a Deep State becomes the default explanation for everything that ails a person. Many take smug comfort in the knowledge they hold and a sick kind of pleasure in lording this over ignorant liberals. As Fintan O’Toole has recently written in The Atlantic, “Trumpism is all about… the wallowing in self-pity, the horror-movie thrills of imagining American carnage, the terror of invasion by migrant hordes. Even the pleasures that Trump offers his followers are sadistic ones, predicated on his invitation to enjoy the pain of others.”***
As Tinline writes in his opening pages, “How do we get to the point where many of us, on all sides of politics, are convinced that our opponents are evil and mean to destroy us?” In my view, the trick is to start with a kernel of truth, inflate its meaning into previously held beliefs and then make sweeping pronouncements and judgments primarily in the company of like-minded and equally gullible and eager bedfellows. Tinline adds that tens of millions of Americans have “descen[ded] into a kind of omnipresent paranoia – crucially, a paranoia tinged with truth…”
The Forward to Tinline’s Ghosts of Iron Mountain is written by Kai Bird, an author and columnist who wrote American Prometheus about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb. He describes The Report from Iron Mountain as “a brilliantly conceived spoof that has quite unintentionally changed the course of history, feeding a frenzy of conspiratorially minded narratives that have poisoned the electorate and threaten our civic discourse. The spoof would be hilarious if it were not so dangerous.”
Unfortunately, I’m still struggling to see the light at the end of a long dark tunnel, so laughing at the absurdity of all this may be all we have left.
*Report from Iron Mountain (1967) by Leonard Lewin
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_ironmountain0.htm
**https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/npr-misinformation-123020
