It all depends on what you call “proof”.
The key to whether the Deep State has colonized your mind—or not—is your default view of the world.
If you accept the mass media version of events as that default the Deep State owns you.
My default view is that the mass media is lying about everything—and the burden of proof is on them, not “conspiracy theorists”, to make their case.
Again Occams Razor usually does the trick
And some people have a “conspiracy theory”
default view of the world. I do not.
If you think the media is lying about everything then you have to concoct more and more outlandish alternative set of “facts”
aka as conspiracy theories to support your believe that everything is a lie.
I tend to believe until proven otherwise. Again, Occams razor. I also beleive the more extaordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence is needed.
As a computer programmer that is how I work. When I am trying to debug a program, you look for the most obvious reasons before the most arcane and of the wall reason.