Disappearing The President, Lee Smith’s newly released current affairs work, has a protagonist and an antagonist. Smith’s protagonist is Donald Trump, the Builder, the man who spends his life creating things and surrounds himself with similarly-minded people. However, the thrust of the author’s inquiry is on the antagonist, Barack Obama, and what he calls his “Shadow Network,” the organization subverting the will of the American people and demolishing institutions of our republic.
The Shadow Network is distinct from Deep State — the latter term emerged in Kamal Ataturk’s Turkey to describe a behind-the-scenes military-civilian alliance to preserve secularism. Not unlike it, the former is the comprised from a wide array of individuals in public service, media and corporate elites, circulating between different sectors, implementing their agenda.
Given the mental state of the individual currently occupying the White House, we have two potential answers to the question “who is in charge of the executive branch?” One is the Deep State, and the other is Barack Obama. Although he spent considerable time outlining how generational changes, bribery and coercion corrupted our institutions, Smith, citing the former California Congressman and the CEO of Truth Social Devin Nunes, believes that the number of decision makers surrounding Obama is small, just 20-30 people.
This core of Obama apparatus is fundamentally un-American. Smith explains:
[T]he majority of Americans want to lead normal lives and enjoy the blessings of peace and prosperity that generations dating back to the founders fought and died for. The minority is a committed revolutionary faction keen to replace the constitutional order with a new form of government, one that seeks to regulate the thoughts and behaviors of American citizens and strips us of our sovereignty on behalf of the ruling party, Obama’s Shadow Network.
Disappearing The President is the first comprehensive account of the Shadow Network systematically undermining the American republic and supplanting democratic institutions. Smith draws upon interviews with politicians, journalists, scientists, an FBI leaker, and a family member of a January 6 protester driven to suicide, as well as previous works of investigative journalism. He explains how, before leaving the office in 2017, Obama made sure to weaponize intelligence agencies against Trump. Having got away with Russiagate — election interference by intelligence services — Obama operatives realized they were above the law.
The 2020 election-rigging and information warfare scheme fused the “soft coup” experiences abroad, like the Ukrainian Euromaidan, with California-like election procedures. For the fear of a novel virus, American citizens were sequestered and bombarded with Shadow Network-approved information, first about the medical topics, then the election. Americans were told that voting in person is dangerous and the country was flooded with unverifiable ballots. These ballots were harvested by Democrat operatives, including after Election Day when the counting mysteriously stopped.
President Trump was held incommunicado by Twitter for protesting the handling of the rigging. Following the Stop The Steal rally, not just Trump or his inner circle, but his voters — ordinary people — have been prosecuted with vengeance.
To assure that Trump would never return to the White House, the Shadow Network turned to lawfare. When that failed, the former president was denied adequate security on campaign trail. What awaits him next?
Disappearing The President is not a conspiracy theory — it’s not at all speculative, but is well-documented and nuanced. Smith recreates the machinations of the Shadow Networks while giving a learned opinion on a wide range of topics. For instance, of Ukraine, he says:
By tying itself to an American administration that had proven to be reckless and dangerous, the Ukrainians made a geopolitical blunder that statesmen will study for years to come: a buffer state had staked its future on a distant power that had simply seen it as an instrument to annoy its powerful neighbor with no attachment to any larger strategic concept.
The book invites many questions about the future of our republic. How can we, as a country, overcome what was done to us? How come we accepted unfreedom so dutifully?
Smith points out that the Shadow Network lawlessness was triggered by the self-assessed invincibility of the individuals involved in Russiagate. Likewise, no politician, scientist or bureaucrat complacent with the shelter-in-place coronavirus regime has faced any consequences — and that’s after keeping the entire country on lockdown, in some places for over a year.
Americans have been profoundly affected by the bureaucratic anarchy armed with pseudoscientific directives. For instance, in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, some residents — most of them women — have permanently adopted facial coverings. It’s a vivid reminder of the mental toll and disruptiveness of the pseudo medical regime — and so are the permanently blocked streets, originally designed to provide space for social distancing and the San Francisco downtown that stands empty to this day. Our children continue dealing with learning loss, loneliness and alienation are rampant and suicides, especially among the youth, are on the rise. Yet the people who got every prediction wrong and who, as Smith pointed out, discarded their own guidelines in order to force healthy people in quarantine, are walking among us as if nothing has happened. Not an apology was offered.
Are we going to likewise pretend that there was nothing unusual about the censorship regime imposed by the Shadow Network on social media platforms — or the 2020 election itself? Or the fact that the current ostensibly president of the United States is more far gone than your average Soviet general secretary circa 1982?
In 2008, Obama ran on the hope and change platform. Amorphous as it was, it got tens of millions of Americans emotionally invested in his persona. But Obama, Smith tells us, has no love lost for the country and destruction of our every institution may well be his ultimate goal.
Because so many people fell for his promises and because they are the types that consider themselves sophisticated and wield considerable power, they will resist any revelation about the their idol. Any attempt to publicly discuss what happened to our nation since 2008 will open an oozing wound.
Yet the very real conspiracies against Trump, Smith is showing us, are not merely extraconstitutional actions taken against the opposition leader. They are a crime against our republic and the American people. These are the kind of questions the author has been probing on social media.
It now looks like Trump may win the election. What should happen to the Shadow Network if that will be the case is an excellent question.
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