Watergate has become the ultimate term for powerful abuse and conspiracy, as witnessed by the many terms with “-gate” at the end to describe various political scandals since.

Yet ironically the whole Watergate scandal itself as remembered in history was likely a conspiracy, and so there is much more to unpack from that term than meets the eye.

The term came back into a headline this week when CNN host Jake Tapper offered that the coverup of Joe Biden’s health issues while President “may be worse than Watergate.”

I submit that that is likely true of a lot of issues around us in our online world today. What Orthodox Christian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn called “the permanent lie” is alive and well and facilitated by what is commonly known today as the Deep State.

Attorney Geoff Shepherd, who was a young lawyer in the Nixon administration, has done extensive work in recent years contributing to the revisionist history of Watergate, and a talk by him on the 50th anniversary of the scandal that I helped to host can be found here: https://mediaspace.bucknell.edu/media/1_cx0q3zb7 His revisionist views in his books and blogging link up with historical and journalistic work that has come out in recent decades challenging the consensus pop-culture view of Watergate.

I’ve been an amateur delver into Watergate for a long time, because of memories of it when young and because a disproportionate number of the folks involved were Christian Scientists, members of the way-heterodox denomination that my mother grew up in and that I belonged to at the time, and whom a couple people close to me knew personally.

I remember my Christian Science Teacher (a title in that denomination) had in a place of honor in her beautiful home near Lake Michigan a signed photo of Nixon that she had received from one of his aides. She and another Christian Science Practitioner (another denominational title) I knew well were in touch with the families of those involved. They argued that Watergate was a fake scandal. Years later, having left Christian Science and viewing it quite critically, I would come to much the same conclusion but with different reasons, leading I think to a fuller sense that the real scandal was something both different and more sinister.

Chuck Colson, one of the participants who went to prison, said later that the gnosticism of Christian Science as an influence in the Nixon White House contributed to the inane coverup, with which I can totally agree. In terms of my parents’ constant commentary on the news at the time, despite the religious connection I had mentioned above, actually I was growing up in what had become an anti-Nixon home during the scandal. Since then, over time and with a good deal of research, fwiw as a former journalist and having two degrees in history and who now analyzes texts as an educator, I’ve come to the conclusion that much of the media “Sturm und Drang” narrative about Watergate was not as it seemed.

To put it another way, the whole semiosis or meaning-making of Watergate departed from any relation to its actual environment in terms of the context of facts and relationships that the semiotician Charles Peirce explained was important to making meaningful meaning, which is the basis of the term ecosemiotics referenced in the title of this blog.

In many ways, I believe now that Watergate fits the category of what today we might call a Deep State hoax, and is up there with the JFK Assassination as a pivotal American historical trauma with questions. In fact, based on credible revisionist history of the whole Watergate affair, the two milestones in U.S. history seem to me to have been linked. This is where many may think the revisionist view of Watergate gets woo-woo, but in the White House tapes, Nixon implies knowledge of information about the Kennedy Assassination and the CIA. He seems to indicate that’s something the national security state should be worried about and that could be held over them. It may be that animosity toward Nixon because of that and also because of his perceived attitude toward FBI and CIA establishments (including his handling of the succession to long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, producing a jilted job-aspirant who became the “Deep Throat” informing Woodward and Bernstein to light the flame of the scandal) fueled Watergate in large part. In fact that seems to me now, decades later as more information and revisionist interpretations have developed, to be probable.

Saying Watergate was an early Deep State coup is not the same as saying it was deserving of exoneration for all that was done by the Nixon administration, but to assert that the historical reality was quite different than how it was presented, and that the scandal was largely a virtual reality formed politically by Nixon’s opponents at a time of serious social upheaval in America. Folks will disagree with my historical assessment, but many will still agree that there are things in our current era that make any reality to Watergate pale, often involving U.S. global over-reach such as the invasion of Iraq two decades ago, and the Ukraine situation in the past decade. Many more people have died in those capers than did in Watergate, which had a death toll of zero I believe in terms of the alleged actual original crimes.

Speaking of which, some of my students have the perception from their education in American public schools that McCarthyism in the U.S. was somehow worse than Communism. Compare a death toll of about 0 for McCarthyism versus what the scholars in The Black Book of Communism document as about 80 to 100 million for Communism, in terms of evidence.

Our historiographical sensibilities today, like our elections, are on the TikTok level. There are a lot of delusional meme-like shorthand terms and imagery, such as “Watergate” and “McCarthyism,” that obscure complicated realities, intentionally.

As the Bible instructs us, “put not your trust in princes or in the sons of men.” Just as there is no salvation in political parties so too there is none in systems or deep states and media clouds of virtual reality, which on the contrary can be pernicious and even demonic. Lord have mercy!