Abby Martin: Deep State and US Empire | Doomscroll

ELI5/TLDR

Abby Martin has been an anti-empire journalist for two decades, since the days when “questioning power” was a left-coded thing rather than a right-wing thing. She walks through how that conspiracy-culture energy got hoovered up by Trump and the right, why Israel can’t be reformed from inside, and why the US military is the world’s biggest single polluter — burning fuel to fly fuel around the world. Her new film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, is about that last point.

The Full Story

When 4chan and Occupy were on the same side

Martin started in alternative media around 2005, when the only options were Amy Goodman on one end and Alex Jones on the other. The internet then was, in her words, “egalitarian” — no recommendation algorithm, you had to hunt for things. The Zeitgeist documentaries and Loose Change were the most-watched videos on Google Video. Anti-war Ron Paul libertarians, 9/11 truthers, Occupy Wall Street types, and 4chan all sat in roughly the same anti-establishment soup.

Twenty years later that soup got separated. The right-wing built a big tent that absorbed conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and generic conservatives. The liberal tent closed off everything to the left of center. The Tim Pools and Luke Rudkowskis of that early era are now standard Trumpers. Tucker Carlson — once the bow-tied propagandist for the Iraq war — now puts out segments on cattle mutilation and floats the idea that Israel did 9/11.

“That was the Bannon strategy — to big-tent everyone.”

Tucker as a “scop”

Citarella keeps poking at whether Tucker’s right-wing dissent is real or theatre. Martin doesn’t buy it. Polling shows Trump’s actual base supports the war on Iran and the genocide in Gaza. Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene aren’t representative — they’re aberrations, or seeds being planted for some future presidential run. If Tucker were really an anti-war populist, what is he doing in the White House next to the oil executives bidding on Venezuelan oil after Trump moves on Maduro?

Her diagnosis: every flavour of right-wing dissent eventually folds back into MAGA. There’s no real critique of the underlying power structure on offer.

The Democratic husk

Martin grew up a Clintonite — “hoodwinked by the New Democrats.” She later realised the rhetoric didn’t match the material reality. The Berlin Wall fell, Fukuyama declared the end of history, the 90s felt like a relief for her parents’ generation, and people mistook a temporary middle-class housing-and-job moment for a working political project.

Now the Democratic Party is, in her phrase, “Republican lite” — a husk. Neoliberalism survived by absorbing every real 60s and 70s movement, hollowing them out, defanging them. There’s nothing left to revive.

She points to two recent tells from the liberal commentariat. Francis Fukuyama writing that North Korea was right to want nuclear weapons — because that’s the only thing that prevents the US from invading you. And Ezra Klein finally admitting that the two-state solution was always a fantasy. The left, she says, is “right too early,” which is also why it loses.

Israel, in plain terms

Asked the right framing for Israel, Martin picks “apartheid state” over “ethnostate” or “theocracy” — though she thinks all three apply. Her argument: Zionism requires an artificial Jewish majority, and an artificial majority requires ethnic cleansing to maintain. The “does Israel have a right to exist” question is really “does an apartheid state have a right to exist.”

She points to government policies against Ethiopian Jews — birth control administered without consent, sterilisation, segregated bomb shelters, refugees from Darfur held in Negev desert facilities — as evidence that even the “safe haven for genocide survivors” framing collapses on contact with the data.

On whether Israeli society can reform itself: she thinks no. Polling shows 80–95% of Israeli Jews support the starvation policy and the bombing of Iran. Anti-Zionist Jews inside Israel “all know each other” because there are only a few hundred. Their houses get raided. Change has to come from outside — which is why she sees BDS as the lever that actually exists.

”If the US turned off the tap”

Citarella asks the productive version of the existence question: if US funding ended tomorrow, could Israel survive? Martin says yes, but not in current form. Israeli officials themselves said during the height of the genocide that if the US cut off weapons, the war would end the next day. Biden circumvented Congress roughly a hundred times to keep the supply going.

But Israel isn’t apartheid South Africa — it’s deeply integrated into the global economy through surveillance and weapons exports. You can’t isolate it the same way.

Pegasus and the AIPAC misdiagnosis

On the question of how Israeli influence actually works in US politics, Martin pushes back on the standard “AIPAC owns Congress” narrative. Her version: AIPAC doesn’t pay people to lie. It funds candidates who already hold its positions. You can’t ascend in the political establishment without already being a Zionist. The Marco Rubio line about the NRA — “they don’t pay me to lie, they buy into my agenda” — applies here too.

The real horror is the export tech. Pegasus, the Israeli-made spyware, doesn’t decrypt your data — it just records the entire interface of your phone. Everything. The half-paranoid feeling that “Siri is listening to me” is the actual reality of how Pegasus works.

“If you think too much about it you’ll go insane.”

The deep state, defined down

Martin tries to rescue “deep state” from the Q-flavoured swamp. Useful version: there’s a permanent bipartisan apparatus — military bases, think tanks, the foreign-policy “blob” — that doesn’t change between administrations and dictates US policy regardless of which party wins. Provably true. Unhelpful version: Freemasons, Jesuits, child-sacrifice rituals, the Epstein files as a master decoder ring. That, she says, flattens everything until real critique becomes impossible.

The military as the world’s largest polluter

This is the spine of her new film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy. The US military:

Has 800–1,000 installations worldwide.
Has a bigger aircraft arsenal than the next five countries combined.
Burns roughly 270,000 barrels of oil a day, on paper.
Pollutes more than 150 countries combined.
Is exempt from the emissions counting at global climate conferences.

The Boeing Pegasus is a flying gas station. One mission of one Pegasus equals 42 years of the average American’s driving emissions. Most of the fuel the military burns is spent transporting fuel.

China has one overseas military base, in Djibouti. The US has up to a thousand. When Citarella asks how many of those are actually justified by national security, Martin says zero — because accepting any overseas base means accepting the premise of extraterritorial empire.

Camp Lejeune

The film’s most affecting story: Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the worst water contamination in US history. The military knew the wells were poisoned in the 60s and 70s and covered it up for years while service members and their families kept drinking. About a thousand babies died. One mother had three miscarriages in four years and thought it was her body that was broken. Fifty years later the military is still denying claims, hearing them one at a time so the payouts stay small. A judge said it could take a hundred years to clear them all.

“These are the so-called heroes — these are the people that we launder. And then we just leave them to rot and die after we use them as cannon fodder.”

Key Takeaways

The 2005-era anti-establishment internet was a politically mixed coalition (Ron Paul libertarians, 9/11 truthers, Occupy, leftists, 4chan). The right-wing successfully absorbed all of it; the liberal tent closed off, and that asymmetry is why MAGA is now the only home for anti-establishment energy.
“Deep state” is rhetorically useful when it means the permanent bipartisan foreign-policy and military apparatus. It becomes useless when it means secret cabals and rituals — that flattening is the actual goal of right-wing capture of the term.
AIPAC doesn’t buy politicians’ positions on Israel — it funds politicians who already hold them. Same logic as Marco Rubio’s NRA line. Selection, not bribery, is how ideological monopolies sustain themselves.
An Israeli official admitted during the genocide that if the US cut off the weapons tap, the war would end the next day. Biden circumvented Congress about 100 times to prevent that.
Israel isn’t isolatable like apartheid South Africa was. Its surveillance and weapons exports — Pegasus is the example — make it structurally embedded in the global economy.
Pegasus records the entire phone interface, not just decrypted data. The folk paranoia about phones listening is roughly accurate when you swap “Instagram” for “Israeli state-grade spyware sold to other states.”
The US military emits more CO2 than 150 countries combined and is statutorily exempt from global climate accounting. Most of its fuel consumption is fuel being transported to other fuel.
China has one overseas military base. The US has 800–1,000.
Camp Lejeune killed ~1,000 babies through covered-up water contamination. The military’s payout strategy is to hear claims one at a time over a 100-year timeline.
“If they don’t spend it, they don’t get it next year” — military bases like Guam do open detonation of ordnance just to burn budget. The for-profit-corporation incentive structure runs straight through the war machine.
The neoliberal turn (Reagan/Thatcher) shows that political common sense can flip in one generation. Martin doesn’t expect a Democratic-Party absorption of left energy this time because there’s no material wins left to launder.

Claude’s Take

Martin is a partisan and she’d be the first to tell you. She has a thesis (US-led global empire, capitalist hegemony enforced by the military) and most of the evidence she brings is in service of it. That’s fine — most journalism worth listening to has a thesis. The question is how much of what she says checks out, and most of it does. The Pegasus claims are well-documented. The military emissions number is uncontroversial. Camp Lejeune is a matter of public record and a 2022 federal law. The polling on Israeli Jewish support for the war is broadly accurate.

The most useful idea here is the AIPAC reframing — that the system selects for compliant beliefs rather than buying them, which is a much sharper analytical tool than the cartoon “Israel lobby owns Congress” version on offer from both Q-adjacent and tankie corners. The Tucker-Carlson-as-controlled-opposition argument is more conjectural; she may be right but she’s working backward from what she wants to be true.

The conversation drags in places — Citarella keeps offering frames and Martin keeps mostly agreeing — and Earth’s Greatest Enemy gets less film-talk than it probably deserves. But the segment on the military as a polluting institution is genuinely new information for most viewers and worth the runtime alone. Score 7: solid, opinionated, sometimes loose, occasionally sharp.