How do we keep them all straight?

In Jacob Siegel’s forthcoming book The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, the author describes the people, places, and agencies of the deep state that conspired to destroy Donald Trump in the aftermath the 2016 election. Siegel notes that the different agencies and actors of America’s left-wing bureaucracy are so numerous it’s easy to get confused. This confusion, he explains, serves as “a weapon that doubled as a disguise.” They don’t want us to know who they are or what they are doing. 

For me, it took a conversation with a friend of mine who studies the deep state to help clarify things. My friend who, like me, grew up in Washington, D.C. and attended one of its elite high schools in the 1980s, noted that it’s amazing how many of these deep state players also went to the same high schools—all located within the same small radius around D.C.—and all at the same time, the 1980s. “It’s like a deep state high school,” he quipped.

Indeed. Just as Santa Monica High produced a remarkable number of our generation’s Hollywood actors (Rob Lowe, Charlie Sheen, Nicolas Cage, and Angelina Jolie), so, too, did the high schools in the D.C. metro area produce our generation’s leading deep state actors. These elite high schools—Walt Whitman, Saint Andrews, Holton-Arms, and St. Albans—are all just a quick bike ride away from one another. These elite schools gave us guys like eBay founder and left-wing philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, former Biden White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, and Graphika’s John Kelly. In other words, it seems D.C. high schools produce bureaucrats the way Western Pennsylvania produces quarterbacks.

It can get overwhelming trying to keep track of all the acronyms and agencies that make up the deep state, so it’s helpful to keep in mind their general mission. Just as a high school can have a motto—“Men For Others” was the one at my Jesuit school—Deep State High also appears to have an overarching theme. That theme or motto has been to do whatever it takes to work in opposition to Donald Trump— particularly if the form that opposition takes wastes taxpayer money on dumb projects.

Siegel’s book explores how, in 2016, the governmental security agencies, Silicon Valley technocrats, politicians, and the media had such a violent reaction to the arrival of Trump that they considered him “a threat to American democracy.” This was the justification for the elite class—the cool kids of Deep State High—to organize themselves against Trump, a transfer student loved by the working class. If it had been an ’80s movie, MAGA would have been like a crew from the other side of the tracks.

Trump’s rise, Siegel, writes,

meant that politics had become war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy. With Russian active measures having supposedly penetrated the Internet, anything said online could be attributed to Moscow.

But, in truth, the war was just with them. In short, these D.C. denizens waged war on the American people, trying to control what we read and think, just because they could. The most obvious case of this was their handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

This Hogwarts from Hell was occupied by a number of unsavory characters, and one can imagine as headmistress of Deep State High someone even worse than Dolores Umbridge: Hillary Clinton. Here are a few of the other graduates:

Pierre Omidyar

Omidyar graduated from  Saint Andrew’s in the class of 1984. “At St. Andrew’s,” the website reads, “we know there are many pathways to excellence, achievement, and leadership.” Omidyar Founded eBay and is involved in many leftist causes with his Omidyar Network and Democracy Fund. The Democracy Fund gave millions of dollars in grants to several left-wing organizations, including this list compiled by journalist Hayden Ludwig:

• Arabella’s Media Democracy Fund, which aims to restrict campaign finance and free speech rights;
• The Center for Secure and Modern Elections, a “pop-up” that helped Mark Zuckerberg funnel $350 million into local election offices, effectively privatizing the 2020 election;
• The 2020 Census Project, likely part of the left’s strategy to boost 2020 Census data for blue states; and
• The Trusted Elections Project, spawned to counter supposed Republican “post–Election Day violence” and silence “disputes regarding election results” after a Biden victory.

Ludwig summed it up this way: “Omidyar’s true politics is his massive support for the professional Left, which he disguises as charity.”

Between 2004 and 2020, Omidyar’s grantmaking groups paid out $1.1 billion, Ludwig wrote, most of which (at least since 2014) has been designated to other left-wing groups. The Omidyar Group is an umbrella LLC that controls multiple other investment and holding companies, the exact number of which is unknown. Ludwig calls “this collection of nonprofits and for-profits the Omidyar Nexus, a quiet but potent player on the nation’s political battlefield.”

William Steiger

Steiger graduated from St. Albans in the class of 1987. “Jacket, ties, and bright colorful sneakers,” reads the description of the boys who attend St. Albans on the school’s website. “Boys laugh as they run from building to building. Spikeball is played on the roof while Government Club members discuss the current issues of the world. St. Albans is a place where boys discover who they are and thrive as themselves.” It’s also the place that produced Al Gore.

William Steiger is the son of former Wisconsin Congressman William A. Steiger and the godson of George H. W. Bush. From 2001 to 2009, he was Director of the Office of Global Health Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Steiger, who, according to The Washington Post, lacked “any background,” was the Chief of Staff for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2017-2021. “For decades,” a 2025 release from the White House reads, “the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous—and, in many cases, malicious—pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.” Steiger’s boss at USAID was Mark Green, a former Senior Director at the Omidyar Network. According to journalist Michael Shellenberger, a CIA analyst’s complaint in 2019 that led to Trump’s impeachment relied on evidence created by “a USAID-funded and controlled organization.”

John Kelly

Kelly graduated from  Walt Whitman High School in the class of 1985. He founded and was CEO of Graphika, a “data analytics” firm. Graphika built and ran the Hamilton 68 dashboard, a tracking tool ostensibly designed to detect Russian influence on social media, but in truth was a scam used to go after the real accounts of real Americans with the wrong opinions. Here’s how journalist Matt Taibbi described Graphika:

The crucial idea expressed by Graphika … is that people are too dumb to digest news if not guided by a strong, authoritative figure. This is why anti-disinfo efforts focus not on telling the truth, but eliminating skepticism and enhancing authority.

Kelly dismissed the Kremlin’s repeated denials of evidence that Russian social media campaigns attempted to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “It’s clearly Russia. There’s a lot of data from the Internet Research Agency that’s making its way into the public, and a lot of folks are looking at it, including us,” Kelly told MSNBC. “I’d say it’s pretty incontrovertible proof.”

To show how small this world I’m describing actually is, consider that John Kelly’s sister’s best friend from Whitman was a woman named Erin Egan—the next actor on our playbill.

Erin Egan

Egan graduated from Walt Whitman in the class of 1987. Egan has served as Meta’s chief privacy officer for 15 years. A recent puff piece about her made a big deal about how she still gets dressed up for work every day. In 2018, however, The New York Times reported that in 2014, a professor created a personality-analysis app on Facebook, which caused 270,000 people to give the app permission to access data on them and their friends, exposing 50 million profiles. So much for privacy. Facebook had to pay a $5 billion fine because of it. A Facebook executive and fellow Deep State High member, Jeff Zients, approved that settlement. 

Jeff Zients

Zients graduated from St. Albans in 1984. After a stint at the Office of Management and Budget, Zients was tapped to be President Barack Obama’s fixer in the disastrous rollout of his healthcare.gov website. In 2018, he went to work for Facebook, and in 2021, he joined the Biden administration as the COVID-19 czar. “Zients’s record does not indicate … political sophistication,” journalist Max Moran wrote in The American Prospect at the time. “It primarily shows a talent for making his fellow elites like him, mostly by saying what they want to hear.” 

On a note closer to home for me, while at Facebook, Zients worked with the company’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, who in 2018 suggested a lawyer for Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused my friend, Brett Kavanaugh, of sexual assault and suggested I was also involved in the incident. Blasey Ford is a graduate of Holton-Arms, class of 1984. Founded in 1901 and situated between St. Andrews and St. Albans, Holton’s website says it invites “young women from all over the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area come here to take risks, learn from mistakes, pursue opportunities for leadership, and build lifelong friendships.” They “seek to develop a strong understanding of self, a deep connection to community, and a burgeoning commitment to make the world a better place.”

Blasey Ford’s father, of course, worked for the CIA. Her best friend, who was featured prominently in media reports throughout the 2018 Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, was Monica McLean, a 20-year veteran of the FBI and another 1984 graduate of Holton-Arms.

Also chiming in from Holton-Arms during the Kavanaugh mess was a woman named Sara Corcoran, whose deep state ties are almost too crazy to be believed. Corcoran, Holton-Arms Class of 1990, is a journalist who went all in on the great Russia hoax. She also published two pieces in the Daily Caller that tried to bring down Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.

In a gruesome article, she tried to shame a fellow classmate named Leyland Keyser, who was defending Kavanaugh. In 2020, Corcoran married Anthony Schinella, an American spy. Just weeks after the wedding, Schinella committed suicide. “A top CIA spy killed himself in front of his wife, whom he wanted to take to the ‘afterlife,’” the New York Post reported. “She later discovered a massive stash of bondage and S&M gear, as well as hundreds of sex toys, guns and ammo in their home.”

Corcoran said Schinella kept asking about her grandfather, Thomas Corcoran, who had been a lawyer and a key power broker in implementing FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s and was also a key figure in Roosevelt’s failed attempt to pack the Court with six more justices.

This is just a partial list of some of the nasty Gen X kids you might have met in the 1980s if you had been anywhere near Deep State High. Then, as now, it would have been best to avoid them at all costs while cruising the halls.