Who Is The Deep State?

Short answer: not who you think, and not the team you think.

Forget the cabal talk. Here’s what’s actually on the record.

Start with the people you can vote for — senators, governors, state legislators. Pick a party, pick a name. They’re not the deep state. They’re the foot soldiers. They show up, they cast the vote, they take the heat on cable news while everyone argues about them by name. That’s the job. It’s also not where the power lives.

The power lives in the room before the vote — the room you don’t get invited to no matter who you voted for.

Room One

The American Legislative Exchange Council puts corporate representatives and state lawmakers on the same task forces, and its own rules give private-sector members a seat and a vote on model bill language — each task force is co-chaired by one legislator and one corporate representative, and the corporate co-chair holds a veto over what gets sent forward. But the vote that actually adopts a bill as an official ALEC model belongs only to ALEC’s board, which is legislators, full stop — corporate members don’t get a vote at that last step.

ALEC does publish its board, its leadership, and a library of its adopted model policies — that part isn’t secret. What stays closed is everything upstream of adoption: the full roster of who sat at which table, what got said, and the paper trail connecting a specific model bill to the specific state legislation it became.

In 2019, a nonprofit sued the Arizona Legislature over exactly this — arguing that sending enough lawmakers to an ALEC summit to form a quorum of several legislative committees, to privately discuss and draft bills there, broke the state’s own open-meeting law. A trial court threw the suit out as a political question. An appeals court revived it in 2022. But the Arizona Supreme Court had the last word, that December: it vacated the appeals ruling and sided with the trial court, holding that the open-meeting law does apply to the Legislature — but that whether lawmakers actually violated it is for the Legislature to police, not the courts. The suit stayed dismissed. No court has ever ruled that an ALEC meeting broke the law. The closest any court came was ruling that it isn’t theirs to decide.

Room Two

Historically, twice a year, the Koch donor network has gathered under heavy private security at seminars like 2014’s “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” in Dana Point, California — sitting U.S. senators (Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio) were there that year, and a separate 2014 Koch donor summit was keynoted by then-Governor Chris Christie.

According to a 2023 ProPublica investigation — built on interviews with former network employees and donors, and since summarized by other outlets, including Axios — Justice Clarence Thomas attended a 2018 Koch donor summit in Palm Springs, flying there on a private jet he never disclosed, on top of a personal relationship with the Kochs going back roughly two decades through the Bohemian Grove retreat.

One claim we won’t present as settled: that Justice Scalia also personally sat in on a 2007 Koch strategy seminar. The Supreme Court’s own spokeswoman said at the time that Scalia only spoke at a separate dinner that January — one Charles and Elizabeth Koch happened to sponsor — and never entered the actual strategy sessions. The watchdog group Common Cause later said it couldn’t find any record of that dinner in the Federalist Society’s own archives, either. Nobody’s nailed this one down cleanly in either direction, so we’re not asserting it.

Room Three

Same floor plan, other team. Founded in 2005, the Democracy Alliance built the same architecture — private security, confidentiality rules, and, per one 2015 eyewitness account, on-site shredders for sensitive material — around a membership that has historically included George Soros and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes (membership turns over; treat any one name as a snapshot, not today’s roster). Reporting from 2013 put the money it had steered at roughly $500 million since founding; the Alliance’s own site now claims more than $2 billion mobilized.

What’s actually undisclosed: not where the money goes in general — the recipient organizations and funding portfolios are largely public record — but who gave how much. Individual donors and check sizes stay private.

Three rooms. Two parties. A strikingly similar playbook in both, even though the two networks differ in size, structure, and exactly how they’re run — and even though nothing here proves the three rooms ever coordinated with each other. They didn’t need to. Money looking for the same thing — access, and the privacy to protect that access from the public it’s used against — tends to build the same kind of room to get it, left or right.

That’s what we’d call the deep state. Not a party. Not an ideology. A method — buy the room, not the team, and let the foot soldiers argue about jerseys while you keep both exits covered.

We’re not telling you who to vote for. We’re telling you who isn’t on the ballot.