There are no Maginot Lines in politics, no permanent positions. Politics is swordfighting, a swirling dance of thrust and parry. Before JFK, the Democratic Party was the home of Southern racists. Republicans started as the party of Lincoln. More recently, liberals used to be FDR New Dealers, before they became Clintonite corporate neoliberals. My point is that, in the current world, political labels are meaningless (if not downright misleading), policy papers and talking points are meaningless. It is by their actions that you know politicians.

But the vast majority of voters do not have time to follow all the little actions that make up a shift in policy. Voters rely on labels, and that is why the media is so important. The media is there to document and analyze all those little actions; and in the process they either reinforce or weaken the labels that voters use. People on this board are long familiar with the corporate media, the Mighty Wurlitzer controlled by the CIA. People here are aware of the media moving steadily in the direction of a pure propaganda machine, especially on the subjects of Russian "interference", Identity Politics, and rampant militarism. But, importantly, on those topics, even the overworked voters are not buying the propaganda line.

Progressive Democratic voters are aware that the media sold the Clintons as genuine liberals, despite the opposite being true. Republican voters are aware that their country, especially the rural parts, are going to hell while we spend a fortune blowing up and rebuilding places like Iraq and Afghanistan. So, the "old-fashioned" media technique of merely polishing the good parts and ignoring the bad parts of politicians background is not going to fly - and the propagandists are well aware of that.

Hence, the media seem to have taken the next step: outright gaslighting voters about Deep State candidates. A few months back, I posted about such candidates - the CIA Dems. At the time, I thought that these folks were merely going to be supported by the "old fashioned" media techniques of only reporting on candidates who had lots of money - freezing out lefties low on funds. I was wrong.

A few weeks ago, one of those CIA Dems, a certain Jeff Beals, running in NY-19, was the subject of an entire, hour-long episode of "This American Life", a popular corporate media show noted for its cerebral study of emotionally fraught topics. I listened to this show, did a little internet research, and came away feeling that I had just witnessed an attempt to gaslight me.

The rest of this OP is about the story the corporate media is telling about Jeff Beals and the facts buried deep on the internet. (Just FYI, Beals lost his primary; but his cover story, his "legend" remains intact.) It is a tale that highlights exactly how difficult it is for voters to make an "informed" decision about a candidate in the face of a CIA-controlled media.

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Jeff Beals is a most improbable progressive Democrat. By the public record and by his own admission, he graduated Harvard and went straight into the CIA. He went to Iraq, where he transferred to the State Department. He worked at the highest levels under the regime imposed by Bush's neocon cabal. He was involved in selecting the corrupt Maliki to be President. He worked with the oil companies. He admits all this. The media folks running his gaslighting campaign admit all this.

Beals’ qualifications for elected office are both impressive and uncommon, although over the course of a dozen-plus house calls his work as a CIA analyst, which included writing for the daily presidential intelligence briefing for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, came up exactly once.

Beals began working at the CIA as a graduate fellow in 1997 (he earned graduate and undergraduate degrees from Harvard simultaneously). His assignment had no spying or paramilitary aspect and largely involved synthesizing Arabic-language media and diplomatic cables into analysis for policymakers.

Beals left the State Department in 2007, when he was barely 30 years old—if he had stayed, he would likely be an ambassador or an undersecretary right now. It is almost inexplicable that someone of his abilities would leave behind the life of power and influence that he had more or less guaranteed for himself. It is so inexplicable that the more peaceniky people in the district suspect Beals never actually left the government, or that he didn’t really spend his first few post-State Department years overseeing his family’s farm in Putnam County or making a film with his brother or working on a book about his Iraq experiences or teaching in a private school in Woodstock. “Some of the progressive Democratic voters up here consider Jeff a spook,” Sajaa Tracy noted. “There’s a lot of activists up there. … They’ll go, oh, the CIA guy.”

In addition to being an unfounded conspiracy theory, the idea that Beals’ departure from State was some kind of cover story badly misunderstands both the candidate and human nature in general.

Armin Rosen, That Bernie Sanders CIA Guy Running for Congress from Woodstock

Yeah, its inexplicable. Therefore (sarcasm) anyone who presses Beals too hard about his road-to-Damascus (ha. bad pun.) conversion from CIA agent to progressive domestic politician must be a conspiracy theorist. (I say "domestic" because, just like almost all politicians, he would rather not discuss limiting the US military.) Even Matt Taibbi is following that party line:

Beals began his professional life as a CIA intelligence officer and diplomat.

This part of his bio has been something of a millstone around Beals' neck, as Internet sleuths and opponents alike have used it to portray him as everything from a deep-state plant to an outright "manufactured, faux-progressive candidate" surreptitiously inserted into the race by forces loyal to Hillary Clinton.

According to a theory espoused in Counterpunch, Beals was designed to so perfectly imitate a progressive campaign that evil Clintonites are "using the Beals campaign as a laboratory for a strategy of winning elections without raising millions of dollars."

If Beals is really in deep cover, trying to look like a broke-ass history teacher running a threadbare campaign in order to undermine progressivism by failing to raise money or national party support, he's doing a hell of a job. The motive for such a plan seems elusive, but such is life in the conspiratorial 2010s.

Matt Taibbi, The Battle of Woodstock

And that is all Taibbi has to say about the CIA connection. To which, the author of the Counterpunch piece, responded:

Why did a good journalist like @mtaibbi write a puff piece abt @JeffBealsNY19 without asking even 1 hard question? Taibbi even linked to my @NatCounterPunch piece exposing Beals as managed by Clinton lobbyist & proxy Bennet Ratcliff and completely ignored the evidence/conclusions

https://twitter.com/stopimperialism/status/998559422006923264

Taibbi explicitly accepts and recites Beals' story of his growing disenchantment with American foreign policy and his role in it. (Beals tells the story of his encounter with the DNC to Taibbi word-for-word identically to his appearance on This American Life. DNC corrupt. Jeff Beals honest. Got it?) Taibbi accepts and recites Beals' account of how he came to be in the NY-19 race - supposedly after almost a decade of living quietly, and eventually washing up in the iconic town of Woodstock, NY.

Ten minutes of internet research blows this story to pieces.

From 1997 to 2002, Beals served as a CIA intelligence officer. He served as a U.S. diplomat from 2002 to 2007 and was an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign’s foreign policy team from July to November 2016.

-The Daily Freeman, Potential Faso challenger Jeff Beals says diplomatic experience sets him apart from other Democrats

So, Beals worked for Hillary in 2016 - but he's really a Bernie kind of guy. Right. Sure. Bridge. Brooklyn. But that's not the only connection:

10:21: There's a flicker of hope as Beals moves into a tie for third, according to the New York Times tracker. Leader Delgado's percentage total keeps dropping, but probably not enough. Beals campaign adviser Bennet Ratcliff shakes his head as he looks at the totals from Duchess and Ulster Counties. Beals isn't making his targets in either place.

Matt Taibbi, The Battle of Woodstock, Part IV: Money Is Still Money

Are we clear here? Bennett Ratcliff is the guy that the Counterpunch article was pointing to, the guy the very same Mr. Taibbi refused to even discuss when he trashed Counterpunch. And one can see why Mr. Taibbi refused to discuss him:

...Beals’ campaign has been, and continues to be, directly managed in nearly every respect by Bennett Ratcliff, a longtime friend and ally of Hillary Clinton. Ratcliff is not mentioned in any publicly available documents as a campaign manager, though the most recent FEC filings show that as of April 1, 2018, Ratcliff was still on the payroll of the Beals campaign. And in the video of Beals’ campaign kickoff rally, Ratcliff introduces Beals, while only being described as a member of the Onteora School Board in Ulster County. This is sort of like referring to Donald Trump as an avid golfer...

One of Ratcliff’s most infamous, and indefensible, acts of fealty to the Clinton machine came in 2009 when he and longtime Clinton attorney and lobbyist, Lanny Davis, stumped around Washington to garner support for the illegal right-wing coup in Honduras, which ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in favor of the right-wing oligarchs who control the country today...it was Ratcliff and Davis who enabled Clinton’s coup in Honduras by acting as a bridge between powerful interests in Washington, and actors on the ground in Honduras and the region broadly. As Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in the LA Times in 2009, just weeks after the coup:

“[Lanny] Davis is working with Bennett Ratcliff, another lobbyist with a close relationship to Hillary Clinton who is a former senior executive for one of the most influential political and public relations firms in Washington. In the current mediation effort hosted by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the coup-installed government did not make a move without first consulting Ratcliff, an unnamed source told the New York Times.”

Eric Draitser, How Clintonites Are Manufacturing Faux Progressive Congressional Campaigns

Draitser's characterization of Ratcliff is easily confirmed. Here is something from 2009, when Democracy Now hadn't sold out yet:

Supporters of the coup in Honduras have begun hiring advisers and lobbyists with close ties to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an attempt to strengthen support in Washington for the coup. A Honduran business group has hired lobbyist Lanny Davis, who served as White House counsel for President Bill Clinton. The coup government has also hired Bennet Ratcliff, a public relations specialist with ties to former President Bill Clinton.

US Lobbyists with Clinton Ties Hired to Defend Honduran Coup Regime

Beals has accumulated many more "dubious" assoiciations that are documented in Draitser's articles. You should read the article. But for this OP, all that is really important is that Beals is pretending to be a progressive while he has a coup-facilitating Clinton lobbyist on staff, and he worked on foreign policy for Hillary's 2016 campaign. If Bernie Sanders (whose organization Beals touts endorsements from) is a sheepdog; Beals is a wolf in sheepdog's clothing.

Given all I just recited, I cannot swallow the concerted attempt to claim that Mr. Beals has had some kind of anti-war, pro-progressive epiphany. It is complete gaslighting, supported by supposedly left-friendly journalists like Taibbi, and by classic Identity Politics liberals like Ira Glass of This American Life. If one were one of those too-busy voters, who has been deluded into thinking they will get a left wing take from corporate outlets like NPR or faux-rebellious rags like the Rolling Stone, no facts will be learned in either place that contradict the gaslighting story about Beals.

Conclusion

When I have to do this much work to discover where a minor candidate is coming from, I know that our democracy is on its last legs. Because what I discovered here is that the Deep State has the money, the people, and the media power to pull off stunts like this in minor, rural places in America. And, judging by the WSWS CIA Dems article, they are doing this all over the country. This is deep penetration espionage, sleeper agent territory - sorta like "The Russians "The Americans", only the agents are from the CIA, not the Soviet Union.

This story about disinfo for the masses pairs up with my most recent post about QAnon, which I believe to be disinfo for political sophisticates. The bottom line here is that TPTB has infinite money and the long-term outlook that infinite money brings. It does not matter if this or that scheme (like Jeff Beals or QAnon) succeeds or fails. They are just out there always and everywhere looking to build up their domination a little bit at a time. Slowly, deniably, imperceptably, until one day you wake up and the democracy is just gone. That's my opinion. You may disagree.

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END NOTES: I just want to point out the garden variety hypocrisy, so prevalent in today's politics, involved in selling Beals' life story. He portrays himself in speeches to NY-19 as someone whose "parents waited tables in Ellenville". He is more expansive in his website's biography:

My father spent years in his youth waiting tables in Ellenville in Ulster County at the old Catskills resorts along Briggs Highway before graduating Queens College and going on to medical school in Valhalla.  I was born in Manhattan while he was in his residency there, and we lived in Queens as he continued his training and my mom taught math in New York’s public schools.  We moved around Westchester as he built his practice, and I attended schools in Tuckahoe and White Plains before graduating in 1994 from Scarsdale High School...

- Beals website, Jeff Beals LIfe Story

Poor Jeff, his father was only a doctor in Westchester County. He only graduated from Scarsdale high, an infamously toney suburb of NYC. The bio is not a lie. Its merely defendable hypocrisy. As a college bound kid, I also waited tables as a summer job in the 1960s. Those resort jobs were jobs for kids in the 1960s - not for Eastern European guest workers like they are today.

Many articles reference his current teaching job. One says: "He is a teacher at the Woodstock Day School and has lived in Woodstock since August 2016."

Let's take a look at Woodstock Day School:

Tuition:

Nursery school (5 full days)...$11,025
Preschool (5 full days)........$10,920
Kindergarten...................$13,231
Grades 1-4.....................$15,453
Grades 5-6.....................$16,059
Grades 7-12....................$17,187

Source: Woodstock Day School

$11,000 a year for nursery school. $17,000 a year to attend high school. I'm sure Mr. Beals rubs elbows with working folks every day on that job. Besides, he had enough of an unstated income source to help his brother make a movie (that never got released) - all while having a wife and kids. Something tells me the "poor, struggling teacher" shtick is another costume from central casting.