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March 13, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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SPOOKY SPOOKS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep789
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Coming up, I'm going to chronicle Special Counsel Jack Smith's desperate efforts to force a Trump trial in Washington, D.C. before the 2024 election.
Author J. Michael Waller, actually an old buddy of mine from Washington, D.C., in the old days, he joins me.
We're going to talk about how cultural Marxism has infiltrated the FBI and CIA, creating a woke intelligence complex that poses a real danger to our basic liberties.
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There are many ways to try to rig an election.
In 2020, it was the unleveling of the playing field through COVID regulations.
It was mail-in drop boxes.
Later on, it was mules.
It was the infiltration of election administration through a massive infusion of funds by It was the censorship of the Hunter Biden story.
In 2022, it was the suppression of the Republican vote on Election Day in Maricopa County in Arizona.
So what will it be in 2024?
Well, we can ask this question, but we know partly the answer to that.
There is a novel form of election rigging going on right before our eyes.
And what is it?
It's the Trump criminal cases.
It's the effort to bring Trump to Harlem before a sympathetic, well, an unsympathetic, I should say, jury.
It's an attempt to make a case that, however preposterous, results in a guilty verdict.
even if that verdict is overturned later it might be too late and what you need for this is a ruthless single-minded prosecutor that we have special counsel Jack Smith and you need a cooperative judge who's going to make it easy for Jack Smith to deliver on that kind of an outcome. Now Jack Smith does not have a sympathetic judge in Florida and this is the that's the Mar-a-Lago search that's the confidential documents it's the
classified documents case so that case is kind of going nowhere because it's a Trump judge that is administering that case But in D.C., Trump has the worst luck.
He has the worst judge he could possibly get.
He has a judge, Tanya Chutkin, who actively hates him, and in fact is trying her best to engineer the trial so it occurs really close before the election, precisely so Jack Smith can deliver that infamous guilty verdict.
This is a judge, by the way, that has said in other cases, like, I wish I could be the one getting Trump.
So she's presided over January 6th cases, and she says, quote, she says that she's telling a January 6th defendant that he is showing, quote, blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.
What's the implication of that?
I wish we could incarcerate that guy.
Who is that guy?
Donald J. Trump.
And then she goes on to say, in the same context, that it's really unfair that this January 6th defendant is taking the brunt of it because she says, quote,"...the architects of that horrific event will likely never be charged." Again, who are the architects of that horrific event...
She has in mind Donald Trump.
So this is the judge that Trump is dealing with in Washington, D.C. Now, interestingly, the judge and the prosecutor are both acting as if the election has absolutely nothing to do with this.
The judge has, in fact, said,"...this trial will not yield to the election cycle." But what she means by that is the opposite of what you think or the opposite of the plain meaning of the words.
What she means is, I'm going to have this trial before the election and the fact that we have an election isn't going to stop me.
Now the reason that she says this, or the reason that she needs to make this clarification, is because the Department of Justice has had a long-standing policy.
This is not a law, but it's a policy of the DOJ. We don't try politicians right before an election.
Because it is too obviously an effort to affect the election.
The guy is running, and obviously if he's indicted, if he's charged, we're going to haul him up.
not only is he not in a position to really campaign, because he's got to focus all his attention on the trial, but it also gives all the voters the impression that this guy's a criminal, the government thinks he's a crook, and so he doesn't have a fair shot in the election itself.
So it's too prejudicial to do that.
And then you have to ask, well, if that's the case, why don't they defer all these Trump cases and have them after the election?
Well, the answer is quite obviously, because the Democrats on the left, the people bringing these charges, want it to be a form of election interference.
This is the unspoken understanding between Jack Smith and Tanya Chutkin.
This is also an unspoken understanding with the media that cheers on the process.
And so Trump is being singled out.
And the reason we know this is because normally trials take much, much longer.
Let's think about this.
When did Jack Smith indict Trump?
Less than a year ago.
Now, if you look at the D.C. courts, there's a massive backlog.
In fact, there are, according to a recent article, 770,000 pending cases for about 100 district courts.
So the backlog has, which has, by the way, only been growing, creates a trial schedule that is usually a minimum of two years.
And that means that Trump would be charged somewhere in the middle or late 2025.
But clearly that's not happening.
Why? Because Judge Tanya Chutkin, in cooperation with the special counsel, have accelerated the schedule.
They accelerate the schedule in part by saying things like, okay, let's keep the case kind of narrow.
Let's give very limited time to reply.
And limited time to reply when there are massive amounts of documents involved.
And so... The only reason to rush this case is that Jack Smith wants voters to consider the outcome of the trial before they cast their votes in the 2024 election.
Now, this is all very creepy.
It's all very creepy because quite obviously you have the leading candidate of the Republican Party, the de facto nominee, who is being charged by whom?
By a special counsel appointed by the DOJ of the other nominee.
So the guy who's running against Trump is...
Is the one pushing the criminal charges against Trump.
And the blatancy of this is obviously not lost on the American people.
In fact, polls now show that many people are very well aware that these are political, political prosecutions.
Very recently, Judge Tanya Chutkin made this really clear when she said, in a different case, she was telling the lawyers, hey, listen, you know, we better kind of get this moving because I'm not really going to be available in August.
I'm going to be traveling.
And then she paused and added, and I'm now paraphrasing, I'm not quoting her, she said, essentially, unless I get to try Trump— Now she has to do a bit of an unless because the immunity issue involving Trump is in front of the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court is going to hear that case and render a verdict sometime in June.
But Tanya Chutkin's plan is that once you get that verdict in June, let's like scurry This whole case loses its entire point for the Democrats.
It loses its entire point.
Its entire usefulness for Biden is gone if it doesn't occur before November of 2024.
And so, the goal here is not only, by the way, to have the voters go, oh my gosh, am I going to vote for some guy who was just declared to be a criminal?
The press, of course, will be able to go around telling every Republican, do you support a convicted criminal being at the top of your ticket?
This is what they are setting up for 2024.
And on top of that, and even prior to that, what they want is a trial that could very well occur, at least according to Judge Tanya Chutkin's schedule in August and September.
The trial could be going on in the days and weeks leading up to the election.
So think about it. Here's Trump.
He is fighting for his freedom in court.
While Biden is out there speaking, campaigning, meeting with potential voters.
So this is a very twisted approach to democracy.
Again, as far as I know, no precedent for it in American history.
They are forcing Trump in a position where he's choosing between essentially defending his liberty or campaigning for the highest office in the country.
There's no doubt that this is going on for one reason alone, and that is because the defendant is Trump.
If you remove Trump, put somebody else's name in there, this whole thing would be handled completely differently.
And that's the definition of living in a lawless society.
Because in a lawless society, the way in which a criminal prosecution is handled...
Depends upon who it is that is in the dock.
Depends upon who it is that is being charged.
So justice, far from being blind, has not just one eye, but both eyes open.
Justice is sort of, in this case, pointing its finger at Trump.
And that's, in the end, not justice at all.
In fact, it's the gravest injustice.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast somebody who is an old friend, but someone I've lost touch with over the years.
It's J. Michael Waller.
And let me tell you a little bit about him.
He's now a senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy, president of Georgetown Research, which is a private intelligence company in Washington, D.C., He worked under CIA Director Bill Casey going back to the Reagan years.
He holds a PhD in International Relations and Communication from Boston University.
We're going to be talking about his new book called Big Intel, How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.
You can follow him on X. His handle is jmichaelwaller.
Mike, welcome to the podcast.
Boy, it's been a long time.
We go way back to the Reagan years.
I don't remember even when we first met.
It might have been when I was at Policy Review at the Heritage Foundation.
Now, that would have been 1985-86, because I know I joined the Reagan White House in 87.
It was even before then.
It was when you were at the Dartmouth Review.
Oh my gosh!
And I invited you down to Central America, and so you sent some other people from your paper to go down instead.
So it was probably 84.
Absolutely. And I remember even in those days, you were very interested in foreign policy, in the Reagan doctrine.
Ultimately, you became interested in intelligence, the FBI, the CIA. Talk about how your career took a turn that led you right down that path.
It started in high school.
So the big thing at the time in my home state of New Hampshire was building the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant.
So this was the late 70s.
I was 15, 16 years old, and my teacher got me involved.
He'd been a Viet Cong supporter just a few years earlier.
He got me involved in the anti-nuclear movement, and through one thing and another, I got more and more involved in it just for environment concerns.
And then I got separated by these California professionals who came in, and they put me through what I later learned was a struggle session.
And then they ridiculed me for caring about the environment, saying that this movement is all about overthrowing American capitalism.
So at that point, I realized, I'm a dupe.
These people are communists.
They're out to destroy our country.
I'm going to fight these guys.
That's fascinating. And then, as you were telling me a moment ago, in the Reagan years, through people we know in common faith, Whittlesey, who worked in the Reagan White House, I think in the Communications Department, if I'm not mistaken, Constantine Menges, who was a military strategist, they introduced you to the world of intelligence and put you on the path where you ended up working with CIA Director Bill Casey.
Right. So at the same time, you at Dartmouth and me at George Washington University, you had the more eyebrow-enduring outlet.
We just had a smash-mouth kind of outlet.
But we were always going after the commies and infiltrating the leftist groups and exposing their stuff.
And I was going to go to Afghanistan with Soldier Fortune magazine as a student journalist back when you had the resistance fighting the Soviets.
This is with the Northern Alliance people.
And Faith said to me, you can do better.
You speak Spanish.
Why don't you go to Central America?
So she introduced me to Constantine Menges, who was the National Intelligence Officer for the Western Hemisphere on Reagan's National Security Council staff.
And we got along great, and he took me under his wing, and then he sort of set me up to go where I ended up going.
That's pretty remarkable.
And now, the story that you're telling in your book, Big Intel, is the story of how the FBI and the CIA, which we have traditionally thought of as patriotic institutions, institutions devoted to protecting American security, I mean, I suppose we wouldn't classify them politically per se, but if we had to, I think in the Reagan years we would have seen both the FBI and the CIA as right of center.
One, of course, the FBI focusing domestically, the CIA focusing internationally.
Now, was that perception that we had in those days an accurate one?
I would have thought so at the time.
It ended up not being that way.
The FBI was pretty much apolitical at the time in the early 80s.
It had had a rather conservative legacy from J. Edgar Hoover, but he was really a New Deal man.
He came out of the first Woodrow Wilson progressivism and then FDR New Deal, but he was pretty bipartisan up until the later part of his life during the Vietnam War period.
But still, you had that legacy left over from him.
The CIA was a little different.
When we were involved with President Reagan, you had Bill Casey running the CIA. He was a veteran of the OSS during World War II, so he had a great intelligence background.
But he had a difficulty with the CIA because it was a pretty much liberal institution.
So it was like a secret State Department in many ways.
And so you had people from the ball stripes within the agency, but it generally leaned liberal.
And that was part of the problem and why people were brought in from the outside to find intelligence, to find hard information that the CIA somehow could not provide concerning Soviet support for international terrorism.
So that's where I came in and others like me to find this kind of information and bring it to the surface.
You describe in the book, Mike, that the CIA's very peculiar sort of left-leaning tendency was an inheritance from the CIA director going back to the aftermath of World War II, Hickok, and that this was a guy who saw foreign threats But he didn't see a threat to America from within.
And as a result, is that the reason that there was a kind of a blind eye at the CIA? You could have people coming in who were left-wing, hated America, but the CIA was like, no problem, you are an American citizen, you're welcome over here, not realizing that the CIA itself was importing a subversion, perhaps of a different kind.
This happened right when American foreign intelligence was founded, so it started during World War II, when Wild Bill Donovan, who did great things setting up the Office of Strategic Services, he was single-mindedly fixated on just defeating the Nazis and the other Axis powers, and so he didn't mind bringing in hardcore communists, including communists from other countries, to come in and work for American intelligence, especially in their research and analytical directorate.
So, it's not they were just anti-Nazi.
What Donovan didn't understand, that J. Edgar Hoover did understand at the time, was that these communists were trying to set up a situation so that after the war, the world would be shaped in Stalin's image, not the way America wanted it to be.
I mean, this is very fascinating, Mike, because what you're really saying is that the United States entered an alliance of convenience with Stalin.
I suppose the decision at the time was, listen, Hitler's a threat, Stalin's a threat, but Hitler is a bigger threat at the moment.
So let's team up with Stalin.
But the net effect of that, for someone who wasn't looking at the big picture, is that the alliance with Stalin opened the door to all kinds of far-left and even pro-communist influence.
Within American institutions.
Was that something that occurred more broadly than the intelligence services?
I say that because if you think of what McCarthyism was, wasn't McCarthyism an effort to ferret out that kind of borrowed influence that was in the CIA? It was also in the State Department.
In a sense, McCarthy's methods were clumsy, but wasn't McCarthy fundamentally right?
Looking back on it, Joe McCarthy was right on just about everything.
And nobody can be right on everything, so he had a really good track record.
It was more of his style, the early age of television and how you came across on TV. He had this Midwestern directness about him that didn't go well with the East Coast establishment types who were more erudite in the way they spoke.
And he didn't go around Washington to try to make a lot of friends within the establishment.
So that's what really did him in.
But he was right on all these issues.
And it was a bipartisan concern.
So you had a lot of Democrats as well who were just as hardcore anti-communist and just as committed to rooting them out as McCarthy was.
John F. Kennedy was one of them.
When he was a new senator, if you go back and read Kennedy's speeches as a senator, almost every single speech had warnings of subversion.
The Soviets were subverting our country.
Let's take a pause. We'll be right back with J. Michael Waller, the book we're talking about, Big Intel, how the CIA and the FBI went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains.
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I'm back with J. Michael Waller, former CIA operative, counterintelligence expert, senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy.
We're talking about his book, Big Intel.
Mike, the story as you describe it, the turning point, if you will, involves a group that some people will be familiar with, but others not, and that is the Frankfurt School.
So let's talk about the Frankfurt School, what it is, why is it called the Frankfurt School, and sort of what was its unique and distinctive role in this narrative?
The Frankfurt School was an academic institution that was set up in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s.
When the Soviets realized they could not replicate their Bolshevik revolution in Europe and America the way they had in Russia because the workers actually had hope.
Workers had an upward mobility potential, so there was not going to be that violent revolution.
So the Soviets and their communist allies and Had to figure out other ways to destroy us.
And they developed the Frankfurt School in Germany to bring in these communist intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals and all Marxist scholars and entertainment figures, cultural figures, and so forth, to figure out how can we apply Marxism so it's not the working poor proletariat against the wealthy bourgeoisie,
but it's the Popular struggle, let's say, against culture, against patriotism, against Judeo-Christian foundations of society, against whatever representative governments that there were at the time, and most of Europe at that time had representative governments in America, obviously.
How to destroy confidence in those systems, destroy the beliefs in those systems, and everything that was oppressive, down to the family.
The church was oppressive.
The government was oppressive.
Democracy was oppressive.
The family was oppressive.
Morals were oppressive.
And to get everyone fighting each other and tearing each other apart over that.
And through those means, the Frankfurt School figured out ways to destroy society from within.
And they knew it would take generations.
So when they started this in 1922, it took place in Moscow at a meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute.
So you had the communist international leadership there.
You had Felix Drzinski there, who was the founder and the head of the Chekhov, which became the Soviet KGB. And so they were there with the Western communist leaders planning this out.
So they set root in Frankfurt, Germany, to start to try to tear Germany apart from the century.
That's really interesting, Mike, because I was familiar with the Frankfurt School as a sort of an institution of a motley collection of Marxists, right?
There was this guy, Theodore Adorno.
There was another guy, Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse ultimately ends up in the United States.
He teaches at the New School.
He goes on to teach at, I think he taught briefly at Brandeis.
He then went on to teach at the University of California in San Diego.
So he was a He was a guru of the hippie movement.
So there's a way to track the influence of these characters in America.
But what I did not know, which you're telling me now, is that the Frankfurt School was sort of cooked up.
By active involvement of the Soviets and through a direct participation of the Soviets, was that participation in terms of intellectual work or did the Soviets contribute the money and then it was Western intellectuals alienated from their own society who came up with the ideas?
It was all of the above.
The Soviets had their model for taking power.
And it worked for them, but they needed Westerners.
They needed Europeans and Americans and others.
How can we make something work in your own countries where every experience is going to be different?
So they provided the organizational support through the Communist International, which they controlled through the Communist Parties of each country.
And this is why it was so important.
Are you a Communist Party member?
The question back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, because if you were, you were an agent of the Soviet government.
A willing agent. It's not, are you a left-winger?
Because left-wingers weren't necessarily agents, but Communist Party members, by definition, were.
So the Soviets had all the mechanisms for that.
They had the seed money for that.
They had the command and control structure for that.
But with these intellectuals, they said, just go out and just do your nasty work.
Just don't oppose what we're doing here in Moscow, and everything's going to work out fine.
So that's what happened. Now, most of the Frankfurt School people broke with Stalin because they didn't like his idea of socialism in one country and a personal dictatorship, but they still were loyal to him for the most part until the very end.
And then when they moved to Antarctica, like you said, Marcuse, boom, it just blossomed in a thousand different ways.
You trace this to the crisis of Marxism, in which the Marxists realized that Marxist prophecy of a workers' revolution never materialized.
But interestingly, it never materialized.
It wasn't really a workers' revolt that overthrew the czars.
It was a revolutionary vanguard led by Lenin.
And so Lenin introduced this idea of a sort of a revolutionary vanguard of lawyers and intellectuals and soldiers who would kind of come together and overthrow the old regime.
And I think what you're saying is that the Frankfurt School realized that something of the same Not exactly the same because, of course, Russia and the West were very different type of societies, but you needed a coalition of intellectuals and lawyers and artistic people and students and others to come together to subvert Western society from within.
And this has been going on, I take it now, for, well, not quite a hundred years, but pretty close.
Yeah. Yeah.
So when they failed in Germany, they wanted to fight the Nazis last.
They were fighting the monarchists, the conservatives, the moderates, even the socialists, even fellow Marxists.
They were fighting all them. They wanted to fight the Nazis last because they wanted to tear out the center of the country.
They're having a very polarized country.
Look what's happening to our country.
And look who's doing it.
So, in tracing back the origins of all of this, you find what Diana West called the red thread of this continuous ideological chain of custody from one person to another, from one institution to another.
Over a century, you can follow this unbroken chain from when Felix Straczynski and the Chekal and the Comintern set up what became the Frankfurt School All the way to people like Herbert Marcuse.
What did he do when he came to America?
He joined the Office of Strategic Services in World War II. He worked for the predecessor of the CIA. And the CIA to this day considers Herbert Marcuse to be one of its own.
Never mentioning any of this other stuff.
So this is how you have this infiltration of our intelligence community.
With cultural Marxists of the Marcuse type of variety, with their critical theory and all that, to come and then mainstream it throughout the intelligence community like we see in the rest of our society.
Mike, in the 60s when I thought about the left and I thought about the sort of the revolutionary left, their commitment was essentially sexual liberation.
That was a huge theme, allied with a certain type of radical feminism.
Then it was opposition to the Vietnam War.
That was a key theme.
And then it was to villainize these government agencies, right?
The CIA was horrible.
The FBI was horrible.
There was this sort of rhetoric anti-government and anti-institution.
Now, when did the left kind of...
I'm flipping on that, because it seems like now we have an agenda that is loosely related to all that, but it has all these new elements.
I mean, you've got the trans phenomenon, for example, which we didn't have then.
Obviously, you don't have the Vietnam War.
And the left has now become, I mean, certainly if you turn on MSNBC or CNN, the vehement defenders of the CIA and the FBI, which is, at least for people like you and me, a little bit of a puzzling sight if you have some sense of historical perspective.
Yeah, so when the CIA and FBI were going after these communist Soviet-backed subversive networks, and then the new left networks, not because they were left-wingers, but because they were loyal to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and Algerian revolutionaries and Palestinian terrorists and who knows who else.
So that was a counterintelligence problem for us.
How are these foreign regimes and movements funding or manipulating public opinion or people in our country?
And the New Left, they weren't well organized at all, and they were sort of too extreme for their own good because they broke all kinds of laws, got themselves into trouble, and put a lot of their movements out of business.
So it took the old guys to come up with the term New Left.
And it took the Frankfurt School to fuse Freud and his sexual theories with Marxist theory to use sex as a weapon to destroy the morals and the fabric of society as a sexual revolution.
and with this people like Betty Friedan, who had her own party background and radical feminism.
And then just let's get rid of all this oppressive morals that we have in our country that are holding us back and let's just be free and have free love and all the rest of it.
Most people weren't being ideological about it, but it was rebellious, it was fun, it was exciting.
People wanted to be part of it.
And it was fighting oppressors who wanted to stop you from exercising these feelings that where morals were keeping you back from that.
So this was a weapon.
It was sort of weaponized sexual revolution, weaponized feminism.
Along with everything else weaponized against society and people like Marcuse, who developed theories to blend sex and Marxism, then created the theories to give real direction and real cohesion to the new left and to make it a real powerful force.
So that's how you get critical theory, to criticize everything in government, criticize everything in society as oppressive, and therefore your job is to fight the oppression.
And then critical law theory, critical legal theory emerges from that.
That's taught through most law schools in the country by the 1990s.
We'll be right back. Let's take a pause, Mike.
We'll be right back with J. Michael Waller.
The book, Big Intel.
You can follow him on X, J. Michael Waller.
And we'll be back for a final segment.
I'm back with J. Michael Waller.
We're talking about his book, Big Intel.
Mike, you know, sometimes when we talk about the effect of intellectuals on society, I have to ask myself...
There has to be some receptivity on the part of society for the intellectual's influence to work, right?
In other words, you can't have an intellectual come along saying, let's overthrow the family, let's overthrow the church, let's all turn anti-American and stop celebrating the 4th of July.
People could just go, you're out of your mind.
So there's got to be some...
vulnerability in our institutions of culture that succumbed so readily to this kind of radical critique.
Do you agree with that?
And if so, what do you think that vulnerability was?
Sure, and I think most of us can even feel it ourselves.
There's a fear of ostracism.
So if you have, let's say, a radical political person in your family or a trans activist or something, a lot of family members aren't going to want to criticize it because they don't want to divide the family and they don't want to be ostracized and have a terrible Thanksgiving.
So they just kind of go along.
And over the years and over the generations, it just gets worse and worse.
So we all have some kind of fear of isolation, personally.
So now imagine this on a professional level, where you have these militants going into bureaucracy.
These militants just inserting scripts in TV shows and movies, certain words and certain characters and themes.
Little by little, enough to make us uncomfortable, but not enough to make us push back.
So over generations, you then have your revolution.
I mean, really what you're saying is that sort of, by and large, people are nice guys.
If they hear someone who's angry, they kind of think, well, why is this guy angry?
Maybe he has a point. Maybe I should try to meet him halfway.
And it is the sheer militancy and tenacity of the left...
In which they take some ground, they occupy it, and then they wait, and then they take some more ground.
And this is a continuous process so that what you're describing in this book that happened to the FBI and the CIA is in some ways not unique.
It's happening throughout society.
Right. Throughout every place we see churches, schools, government, you know, local town governments and even our own families.
So imagine when it does go into the FBI. When you get these new hires coming in, and they get radicalized, and they set up what, like the old party cell groups, and the FBI, they're called employee resource groups, or in the CIA, they're agency resource groups.
They're aggrieved, angry identity groups.
Name your subject and there's one of them and they act like old party cells and they operate together quite apart from their professional responsibilities.
Then they demand privileges because they're not being promoted.
So this is where DEI comes in.
DEI is a weapon to propel these radicalized cells within the bureaucracies upward through the central nervous system to become managers, supervisors, lawyers, adjudicators.
And they go up through the bureaucracy as a militant extreme group and higher and higher.
So then you get, say, a wimp like FBI Director Chris Ray who won't push back on them.
He ends up carrying the water for these woke extremists even though he himself is not woke.
I mean, the other thing that's scary is that these are intelligence agencies, and by that I mean they have to look at the world with objective eyes.
They need that kind of openness to criticism, a genuine willingness to be able to speak your mind, to say, I think this is what's really going on.
And when you have this woke culture, isn't it true that it becomes Difficult, if not impossible, to have these kinds of, quote, intelligent conversations for the simple reason that you're offending me, you're triggering me, you use my wrong pronouns.
I mean, suddenly you're introducing a whole new speech patrol that makes the function of intelligence itself subordinate to this nonsense.
Yeah, yeah. And you have trainee sessions for pronouns.
Imagine that, all the thousands and thousands of people in the bureaucracy, how many tens of thousands of man hours or person hours or whatever they are, are wasted on all of this in the training.
But it's even worse. You won't get promoted if you don't subscribe to it.
So if you're simply a collegial person who you keep your mouth shut, that's not enough anymore.
You must go along if you wish to get promoted.
But it's even worse than that, because with critical theory, they believe that America was created by nasty, racist white men who were creating a system that was oppressive, that was based on oppressive morals, that was designed to keep white men supreme, and therefore you have to fight back on it.
So if you have intelligence officers and FBI agents, or even in the military, military officers, who don't believe in the founding principles of our country anymore, Who's defending us?
I mean, these are the very agencies you're saying that are entrusted with identifying the bad guys.
And you're saying in their mind, the bad guy is probably some, quote, patriarchal dad in Arkansas or some church-going mom, you know, in Tupelo, Mississippi.
And these people are now, quote, on the warpath against that threat.
Yeah. So when angry parents during the COVID lockdown can see what their kids are being taught by government employees, also known as public school teachers, and they approach their democratically elected school board, which pushes back so some of the family members start arguing loudly with the school board members, and then what does the school board do?
They call in the FBI. Very chilling.
Well, Mike, you know, as you said, in the Reagan years, there was some effort to corral this stuff because it had been going on for decades even before that.
You describe the temperament of the ordinary guy that is a little defenseless against this kind of militancy.
I mean, as you say, you can see it in a family where one child proclaims that I'm non-binary, and then everybody is like, oh, well, how do we deal with this?
So the question is...
Has the country lost its resolve to be able to fight back against this?
Is the Republican Party simply hopeless at this point?
How does your book envision a way out of this kind of madness that's been going on for a long time?
The first thing is to let people know that they're not alone.
Because what the radicals want, they want people to feel isolated, demoralized, marginalized, like they have no support or allies out there anywhere.
They want them to feel depressed and hopeless.
And you see that throughout society now.
So first, we're not alone.
Nobody's alone. There are lots of people who feel the same way, even people in the FBI and the CIA and elsewhere.
So then, if we're not alone, then we need to learn how it's working and what its origins are, which was the purpose of big intel.
But then, so what can we do about it?
First, we need a president who can do something about it, and it looks like Donald Trump is really putting together a plan.
There are groups out there, Heritage Foundation and others, that are putting together real action plans on what to do, which didn't happen when Trump was elected before.
That means have a team, and that's at the presidential level.
And while that's vital, it's also vital to know that we all can do something ourselves at the local level.
We never think of our sheriffs.
We'll vote for sheriff in the sheriff elections, but we really don't know what they do or what the difference is between sheriffs, so we pick whatever political party affiliation it is.
But if you think of what a sheriff does, sheriff has the constitutional duty to supervise law enforcement in the county and has the authority to decide whether or not to help federal agencies work in their areas.
So the FBI can't go in to investigate or enforce state laws.
But they can if a sheriff deputizes them to do it.
A lot of sheriffs know this.
A lot of sheriffs are afraid to use these powers.
The public generally doesn't understand it.
So if we elect sheriffs who can protect our communities from federal abuse by not serving as the eyes and ears of the central government, when it's unjust, sometimes it's necessary.
And by not acting basically as agents of the central government against the very people who voted for them in their communities, then we can empower our sheriffs.
And our sheriffs will then serve as our last line of defense and a very vital line of defense.
Fascinating stuff.
And I really appreciate the way that you, Mike, have burrowed into these institutions.
I mean, you have personal experience.
You have a good knowledge of history.
You describe in the book how you sat down, even before your own time, with like old-timers at the CIA and the FBI and...
Kind of ferreted out what the roots and origins were of all of this stuff.
So you're coming at this from a very informed point of view.
Guys, the book is called Big Intel, How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains, the author J. Michael Waller.
Mike, thank you very much for joining me.
Dinesh, it was great to see you again.
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