Ex-CIA Agents Now Occupy Highest-Ranking Positions in Big Tech, Racist Diversity Officers, & the Psychology of War | SYSTEM UPDATE #113
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Project Mockingbird was the name of a secret CIA project that caused the agency significant embarrassment when it was exposed in the mid-1970s as part of the Senate's Church Committee investigation.
Its basic purpose was to covertly infiltrate and then influence the nation's largest media corporations by implanting agents and other methods for ensuring that corporate news in the United States served the agenda rather than undermine the agenda of U.S.
foreign policy.
Today there is absolutely no need at all for Operation Mockingbird.
That is because, as we have previously reported, U.S.
security state agents openly send their top operatives to get hired by television networks, which proudly tout the number of former CIA, FBI, NSA, and Homeland Security operatives on their payroll to report the news to Americans.
But it's not only corporate media outlets that are drowning in former operatives of the US security state.
These agencies have also utterly infiltrated big tech corporations, especially Google and Facebook, and especially among those positions that are responsible for censoring political content from these monopolistic platforms.
In other words, at exactly the same time that a small army of security state operatives openly get hired by and help shape the propaganda that emanates from the country's largest media corporations, They are also dictating the boundaries of what citizens can say online, of what ideas and people can be heard, and which ideas and people are prohibited.
We'll show you the extent of this infiltration and what it means.
Then, ever since the post-George Floyd protest movement erupted in mid-2020, diversity training counselors and diversity officers have become increasingly distinguishable from explicit old-school racists.
They frequently insist on dividing schools and workplaces up by race, pinning whites and non-whites against one another and segregating them into different physical spaces and insisting that racial progress can only happen if we once again return to a form of woke segregation.
We'll interview the excellent young reporter Aaron Sibarium, who reports a lot on these developments for the Free Beacon.
His new story is entitled, quote, Woke or KKK?
NYU hosts a whites-only anti-racism workshop for public school parents, and it describes exactly what it sounds like.
A public program funded by state money about racism at NYU that excludes everyone except white people.
How is that legal?
And even if it were legal, why would anyone think it's a good idea to return to the time when races were segregated in the name of combating racism?
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It is, I think, indisputable that the U.S.
security state, the part of our government that is completely secret, is designed to operate in total secrecy, wields more power now than ever before.
You may recall that the security state was created after World War II.
It was intended to be one tool in the American Cold War against the Soviet Union, created by an act of the National Security Act in 1947 under President Truman.
And at the time, everybody was aware that creating a part of the government that was designed to operate in total secrecy was something that could be very menacing to the American way of life, to the core values of the republic, if it were permitted to operate without constraints, without democratic accountability.
The core precept embedded in the U.S.
security state from the beginning, something inculcated into the heads of every person who worked there, as they themselves will tell you, is that the one red line that could never be crossed is that the powers of these security state agencies could never be used domestically on U.S.
soil against American citizens.
It was only supposed to be directed outward.
against America's enemies.
It was at a time when the United States perceived an existential threat from communist Soviet Union that was importing its ideology around the world.
The U.S. felt its security required it to go around the world in a decades-long Cold War combating the Soviet Union using coups and destabilization campaigns and all sorts of covert operations.
And it used the CIA and the powers of the national security state, which previously were illegal.
That's why they needed to be created under the National Security Act of 1947 in order to undertake some of the dirtier aspects of the Cold War. - Sure.
And for decades, that core virtue, that core precept of the U.S.
security state, with some exceptions, was honored.
People who worked in the U.S.
security state understood they were never to infiltrate domestic groups or spy on American citizens or be active on U.S.
soil.
And all of that began to change really in earnest in the 1960s.
The CIA grew in great power in the 1950s under the very aggressive Director Allen Dulles, whose brother, John Foster Dulles, was the Secretary of State.
They were this power couple, basically, under an older and more passive President Eisenhower, who more or less let Allen Dulles do what he wanted.
So the CIA was growing and growing and growing and oftentimes doing things that not even President Eisenhower was aware of.
Again, remember, when Eisenhower left office in 1961, he sounded the warning against the military-industrial complex and part of what he was concerned about was the unconstrained powers of this part of the government that was very unusual because democracy requires transparency and this was a secret part of the government.
And it was only in the 1960s when the FBI and the CIA, the FBI under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, who ruled that agency for six decades because he kept dossiers on the private lives of almost every American leader and everyone in Washington was petrified of him so nobody could fire him.
The FBI and the CIA started routinely infiltrating domestic groups, monitoring American citizens, spying on American political dissidents.
And it was the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s that led to concerns that this agency was out of hand.
The CIA was very much involved in Watergate.
There were CIA agents who had broken into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.
And then they were also found to have engineered the break-in into the psychiatrist's office of Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower.
And so by the time the Watergate scandal came to full fruition and Richard Nixon was driven from office, Which itself was really more of a war, an internal war, among this deep state or the security state because the famous source for the Watergate journalist, led by Bob Woodward, himself was the acting director of the FBI, as we now know.
So that information was coming from getting fed to the Washington Post by the FBI against Richard Nixon.
And Bob Woodward himself appeared almost out of nowhere.
He was a naval intelligence officer.
So he too came from the U.S.
security state in the 60s and wound up at the Washington Post.
And then this Noble Watergate story that I fed on as a child, that propaganda about how journalism works in America, turned out to be Effectuated through leaks from principally the director of the FBI who was angry at Richard Dixon in part because he was passed over to be the permanent FBI director.
But anyway, the Watergate scandal is what first began to generate genuine skepticism and suspicion about the U.S.
security state in the United States.
And ultimately, there was a special investigative commission led by the liberal Democrat Frank Church of Idaho that investigated the security state.
One of the things it uncovered was this program called Operation Mockingbird that was designed to infiltrate corporate media outlets through clandestine covert means so that the security state, the dark, deep state, the CIA, could ensure that the messaging American citizens deep state, the CIA, could ensure that the messaging American citizens were getting from the largest media corporations, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, always aligned with the propagandistic goals of the U.S. foreign policy establishment that there was nothing in those newspapers
always aligned with the propagandistic goals of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, that there was nothing in those newspapers or magazines like Time Magazine or in these networks that would subvert or undermine their goals.
Here from the Helsinki Times in November of 2021, the sourcing is always a little sketchy when it comes to Operation Mockingbird because the church committee never really declared it so openly.
and then finally, But there were lots of reporters working with the church committee who have reported on it.
So here you see the article.
CIA's Operation Mockingbird, a precursor of U.S. manipulation of world public opinion.
Quote, during the Cold War, the U.S. CIA launched its Operation Mockingbird, which aimed to collect intelligence by bribing journalists and institutions around the world and affecting public opinion by manipulating news media.
Carl Bernstein, a famous American investigative journalist who unveiled the scandal in 1977, he was of course the partner of Bob Woodward who uncovered the Watergate scandal, said that according to the plan, the CIA recruited journalists that were put on a payroll by the CIA and instructed to write, quote, fake stories.
The CIA admitted that at least 400 journalists in 25 organizations around the world had secretly carried out assignment for the agency.
These journalists were openly working, or secretly working rather, for the CIA.
And so much of what you would read, if you go back now and read articles in Time Magazine or the New York Times about CIA coups, where the CIA would overthrow democratically elected leaders that it perceived were insufficiently deferential to Washington, And installed in the place of that democratically elected government a dictator that was more favorable to Washington at the time.
And you can go read these stories.
They would, the New York Times would, Time Magazine would report this, herald this as a revolution against communist tyranny or against communist dictatorship.
They would celebrate it.
They would describe it in a way that Americans would support.
Chile or Indonesia or whatever country the Americans had couped.
had experienced a encouraging revolution against communist tyranny.
That was how the 1964 coup of the CIA sponsored in Brazil was described.
They had the journalists in their hands and they were little puppets.
That's what Operation Mockingbird was.
And it was embarrassing when it was revealed for the media, for the CIA, Because this was something that the CIA was not supposed to be doing, propagandizing the American public.
But ever since then, that is what the American security state has focused on, domestic manipulation and operating on American soil.
And so many of the whistleblowers the last decade that came out of the NSA, including Edward Snowden, but also William Binney and Tom Drake, talking about people who have worked at the NSA for their lives, their adult lives, denounce the NSA primarily because They were so bothered that the U.S.
security state during the war on terror specifically had done exactly that which the U.S.
security state was never supposed to do, which is turn their microscope inward on the American public.
There's a famous quote from Frank Church, the senator who led that investigation.
I used this quote and borrowed from part of it as the title of my 2014 book that I wrote on my work with Edward Snowden reporting the NSA ubiquitous spying system called No Place to Hide because Frank Church had said that the United States had basically constructed turnkey tyranny is how he described it.
By which he meant that the United States had in its possession the power to spy on every American, to spy on every conversation.
And that if that ever got directed inward, our democracy would be over because there would be no place to hide, which became the 2014 title of my 2014 book.
And that warning by Frank Church was very prescient.
He was a mainstream Democrat.
He was not some left-wing radical.
That's why he became chairman of that committee.
It was a bipartisan committee.
And his warning was based on this investigation that the U.S.
security state had become completely out of control.
A part of government that could be used to single-handedly destroy democracy if it ever got turned inward.
And now it's turned inward in so many ways.
And one of the ways is that Operation Mockingbird has become unnecessary because now they just do it out in the open.
They put their operatives, once they retire or leave these agencies, right in CNN or NBC newsrooms or on the pages of the New York Times that then proudly tout, oh, welcome to our new analyst.
The former deputy director of the FBI or the former head of this unit of the CIA.
They do it right out in the open.
A lot of people have forgotten that in 2008, the New York Times published a story for which it won the Pulitzer Prize.
I remember writing about and doing reporting about this story a lot at the time.
It was considered pretty scandalous.
There you see the headline on the screen.
It was written by the investigative journalist David Barstow, who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for this article, the title of which was Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand.
And what it reported was that the Pentagon had placed an enormous number of Operatives, former generals, that they got hired by all the networks so that if you turned on your TV, you would always see this kind of network of former generals.
And unbeknownst to the public, they were not acting independently.
They were receiving talking points every day from the Pentagon, and they were disseminating talking points from the U.S.
intelligence community about wars, about military operations, about intelligence activities.
And none of this was disclosed.
That's why the New York Times won a Pulitzer for reporting it.
So that was supposed to be embarrassing, because of course you're not supposed to have people whose loyalties are to the U.S.
security state working for news outlets.
There's supposed to be a separation.
That's what made Operation Mockingbird so embarrassing.
And the reason nobody remembers this article, and I know nobody remembers it, is because we've blown past That kind of an arrangement that at the time was considered embarrassing.
We now have countless numbers of former U.S.
security state officials working at every one of these major media outlets.
If you turn on the television, You will almost certainly on CNN or NBC in particular see panels where they say, welcome our panel.
We have this former FBI director, this former CIA operative, this former NSA spy, this former Homeland Security chief, this former Justice Department prosecutor.
There's an army of these people who report the news for the biggest and most influential networks.
That's where Russiagate came from.
That's where the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
That's where it came from.
All of these lies to which you've been subjected, especially during the Trump era, have come from these intelligence agencies picking up the phone and calling their favorite journalists like Natasha Bertrand or the people at the Washington Post or New York Times who gave themselves Pulitzers for reporting on the non-existent connections between Trump and Russia.
But they do it out in the open.
These people are now liberal television stars.
They have huge social media accounts.
Talk about spooks.
People who are spies.
And they're now the leading faction.
Shaping the news, out in the open, no longer covertly.
In 2018, the Politico, a very mainstream outlet, their media reporter Jack Schaefer wrote an article about this trend entitled, The Spies Who Came Into The TV Studio.
Former intelligence officials are enjoying second acts as television pundits.
Here's why that should bother us.
Any detail just how extensive this is, I'll just show you a small portion of it to get a taste for how extensive this is.
Who ran the agency from 2013 to 17 under President Obama is the latest super spook to be reborn as a TV newsie.
He just cashed in at NBC News as a Senior National Security and Intelligence Analyst and served his first expert views on last Sunday's edition of Meet the Press.
The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parody with CNN.
Which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director and NSA Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity.
Other lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV's grow lights.
Almost too numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg, former Acting DEA Administrator, Chief of Staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and Counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, Frank Fuguzi, former Chief of FBI Counterintelligence, Juan Zarate, Deputy National Security Advisor under Bush at NBC, and Fran Townsend, Homeland Security Advisor under Bush at CBS News.
CNN's bulging roster also includes former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, former FBI agent James Gagliano, Obama's former National Security Advisor Tony Blinken, now the current Secretary of State, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, senior advisor to the National Security Council during the Obama administration Samantha Vinograd, retired CIA operations officer Stephen L. Hall, and Philip Mudd, also retired from the CIA.
Do you think it's likely or even possible that these media outlets are going to maintain separation and report adversarially on the U.S.
security state when their entire newsroom is filled with people who worked at the senior levels very recently?
Every one of the people who work at these networks call, as their colleague, former head of the CIA or Homeland Security.
That is why you never hear a peep of criticism about these agencies.
That's why these agencies have disappeared.
from left liberal discourse.
They're no longer discussed, whereas they used to be the centerpiece of American political critique because of how much danger they posed.
Back in 2019, Matt Taibbi listed a, off the top of his head, list of the huge number of people Who once worked at high levels of the U.S.
security state who now are employed by U.S.
media outlets.
There you see it.
John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Fuguzzi, Fran Towson, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinaigrad, Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director, Josh Campbell, Asher Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gaglione, Jeremy Bush, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price, Rick Fricona.
He says I can keep going.
And then he did keep going.
Also, Michael Morrell, John McLaughlin, John Cipher, Thomas Borsig, Clint Watts, James Baker, Mike Baker, Daniel Hoffman, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, David Priest, Evelyn Farkas, Tony Blinken, Mike Rogers, Alex Finley, Malcolm Nance.
Now, We've covered this before and this should be incredibly disturbing.
It's the reason why there's such a closed information of propaganda about things like the war in Ukraine or about Russiagate or anything involving Trump.
These media outlets are drowning in the people who used to work at the agencies that have waged these propaganda wars against the American public.
And that's why no longer necessary are things like Operation Mockingbird.
They don't have to do it in secret, they do it out in the open.
But one of the crucial points is that they don't just control or have, they've not only infiltrated the largest American media outlets, this part of the government that's secretive and that was never supposed to involve itself in American domestic politics.
Increasingly, they also work at the most influential big tech internet platforms that, as we all know, censor continuously.
Last night we reported that Google just simply removed Jordan Peterson's interview with RFK Jr.
Even though RFK Jr.
is a presidential candidate polling at 20%.
That's how extreme this censorship regime has become.
They colluded to remove the sitting president, Donald Trump.
They destroyed the most popular app in the United States, Parler, at the time when people were looking for a platform that didn't censor.
That's how aggressive the censorship regime has become, but increasingly it's dictated in part by the U.S.
government externally.
That's what we've been reporting on for so many months now.
That's what the Twitter files were.
That's what that judge last week determined that the U.S.
government, the FBI, is constantly pressuring Big Tech to censor for it, and that's unconstitutional.
But there's another element, another layer to it, which is they've infiltrated these Big Tech companies these ex-CIA agents have.
Exactly like they've infiltrated corporate news outlets that are all over the censorship regimes.
Remember, part of the Twitter files focused on someone named James Baker, who was the Deputy General Counsel of Twitter, directly involved in the pre-Elon Musk regime in almost every censorship decision, and he had come to Twitter right from the FBI.
Where he was General Counsel of the FBI.
So the FBI sent its top lawyer to go work in the part of Twitter that censored political content.
Do you understand?
That's the FBI controlling our domestic political discourse and the limits of it.
Here from Mint Press in July of 2022, a reasonably reliable Independent media outlet and this information they publish here.
We've confirmed separately they Published this article entitled meet the XCA agents deciding Facebook's content policy Some may ask whether the big fuss what the big fuss is There's a limited pool of individuals with the necessary skills and experience in these new tech and cyber security fields and many of them come from government Institutions casinos after all regularly hire card sharks to protect themselves, but there's little evidence that That this is a poacher turned gamekeeper scenario.
Facebook is currently not hiring whistleblowers.
The problem is not that these individuals are incompetent.
The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world's most important information and news platforms is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what you do not see online.
And all with essentially no public oversight.
In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington.
They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability.
The U.S.
government does not need to directly tell Facebook what policies to enact, though of course we now know that's exactly what the U.S.
government does.
This is because the people in these decision-making positions are inordinately those who rose through the ranks of the national security state beforehand.
Meaning their outlooks match those of Washington's.
And if Facebook does not play ball, quiet threats about regulation or breaking up the company's enormous monopoly, or now increasingly overt and loud threats to do so, can also achieve the desired outcome.
This is the multi-pronged effort to ensure that at the exact same time that our nation's largest corporate media outlets are propagandizing the public actively, Through the use of hiring these U.S.
security state agencies, Facebook and Google and the largest big tech platforms are under control of the same people who ensure that dissent to those orthodoxies, to those narratives, are not permitted.
Interviews are simply removed.
That's happened with Jordan Peterson of RFK Jr.
An entire range of views that are too questioning of, too descending from, too divergent of the foreign policy agenda of the United States government are simply banned in part by pressuring Big Tech directly from the U.S.
government, in part by placing inside the censorship units the people who come directly from those agencies.
There is a Twitter account that is Goes by the name Name Redacted.
It's at nameredacted247.
And they do an outstanding job of tracking exactly this limited question.
Mainly, how many people have gone from the U.S.
security state directly to big tech platforms where they work on censorship regimes, just like James Baker went from being the top lawyer of the FBI to the second highest lawyer of Twitter.
It's a stream, a revolving door of people.
So in this comprehensive thread from December of 2022, this person counted and they provide ample documentation that you can go check and that we have checked.
That makes it a very reliable source of information.
And this first tweet says, quote, Google currently employs at least 165 people in high ranking positions from the intelligence community.
Google's Trust and Safety Team, which is their censorship unit, is managed by three ex-CIA agents who control, quote, both misinformation and hate speech.
Here's the breakdown.
The CIA has 27 people at Big Tech.
FBI has 52.
NSA has 30.
Homeland Security has 50.
And the Office of Director of National Intelligence, ODNI, has six.
Here is, oh that's, actually that's just Google.
That's just Google's trust and safety.
Here's the next tweet.
After learning that Twitter employs at least 15 former FBI agents, I searched Facebook.
What I found is alarming.
Facebook currently employs at least 115 people in high-ranking positions that formerly worked at CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS.
And there you see the breakdown.
17, 37, 23, and 38.
Not surprising, senior managers of trust and safety at Google YouTube also include former CIA officers, one of them Nick Rossman, expressed radical viewpoints on Twitter referring to anti-vaxxers as quote Nazis and Confederates.
Do you think these people are objective arbiters of misinformation or do you think they're using There's censorship power inside Big Check in the same way that people inside corporate media are using it to advance the propagandistic aims of these agencies against their own citizens.
The account goes on, quote, all but a few of the former intelligence agents were hired by Facebook after the 2016 presidential election and after the FBI established their social media focused task force, FTIF.
Now, they offer a couple of examples I just want to show you here.
Here is the LinkedIn page of Nick Rossman, and you can see right on his LinkedIn page, here he is.
He identifies as, he now works at Trust and Safety at Google.
He was a former FBI analyst.
He lives exactly where you would expect in Fairfax County, one of the home bases of the intelligence community.
And he uses he, him pronouns according to their profile.
So here is Jacqueline L. Here is her LinkedIn profile.
She works in Trust and Safety at Google, which is, again, their censorship unit.
And she identifies herself as former FBI.
She lives in Washington, D.C.
There she is.
And this repeats itself over and over and over again.
That's where these people come from.
That's why they're making the censorship decisions that they're making.
Here is Aaron Berman, who also uses he, him pronouns.
He leads the misinformation policy team at Facebook, and he used to be at the FBI, sorry, the CIA for 17 years.
Here's his LinkedIn page.
There you see him, Aaron B.
He currently works at misinformation policy for Metta and he was a former CIA agent.
He went to Georgetown, he now works at Metta.
Over and over, this is who they are.
Here is, oh, this is Aaron admits to specific Facebook campaigns where he tackles quote misinformation, of course.
That's what he...
Touts himself as doing.
So here you see a tweet from Aaron Berman.
Check out Facebook's responses to the Oversight Board recommendation on COVID-19 misinformation.
We are increasing transparency as recommended and will continue looking to health authorities to tell us what misinformation is likely to contribute to imminent physical harm.
And he's pointing here, this is very notable, to a tweet by Andy Stone.
And that name should be recognizable to you, Andy Stone.
Andy Stone was the Facebook official who in 2020, in October of 2020, went to Twitter to announce on behalf of Facebook, that they were suppressing, algorithmically suppressing the New York Post reporting about Joe Biden based on Hunter Biden's laptop, pending what he called a third party fact check.
Obviously that third party fact check never came.
I've repeatedly asked Andy Stone in Facebook if they produced it, if they can provide it.
Of course they won't and can't because the information they suppressed turned out to be completely authentic and true.
And Andy Stone is a lifelong Democratic Party operative.
He worked for Nancy Pelosi.
He worked for the DCCC, the Democratic Campaign Committee responsible for keeping a majority of Democrats in the House.
Do you see who is running big tech and their censorship units?
It is exactly the people you would expect based on the decisions that they're making.
Here is Aaron Berman, the former CIA agent, touting the fact that he also works on censoring dissent about the war in Ukraine.
Quote, here is more on what MEDA is doing in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, including adding several safety features and taking extensive steps to fight the spread of misinformation.
We are working 24-7 on this.
I'm sure they are.
The CIA's top priority is the proxy war in Ukraine.
And they have people at the top level of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and others, who are right from the CIA, who are responsible for determining what information can and can't be heard.
That's why that censorship constantly aligns with what it is that the CIA wants you to know.
Now Matt Taibbi recently did some reporting, we'll go over this on another night, I want to talk to Aaron in just a minute, where they held an event with Russell Brand and Michael Schellenberger in London to report on what they call the censorship industrial complex.
And obviously this is something Matt Taibbi learned a great deal about because he spent weeks, if not longer, delving into the Twitter files reading Where the censorship pressures and directives are coming from that Twitter complied with to ensure that censorship served the interests of the American establishment.
And they created this chart, which is really an amazing chart because it shows you the connection between the U.S.
security state, the disinformation groups that have recently emerged that are all funded by George Soros and Pierre Omidyar, and the way in which they work together to censor big tech.
To censor the internet, to censor the flow of information at exactly the same time that these operatives of the U.S.
security state are doing that in corporate media.
And that is what is amazing.
There used to be a significant pushback to these agencies.
Central to left liberal politics was the view that these agencies are nefarious.
It was talked about constantly.
Journalists were particularly obsessed, the best ones were.
The real ones, the ones not on their payroll, with exposing their secrets.
That's what we did in 2013 when we exposed the NSA's secret spying program.
People won Pulitzers previously to that for reporting what the CIA was doing.
When is the last time you heard corporate media talking about the US security state?
They never do.
And it's because in 2015 and 2016, the U.S.
security state aligned itself against Donald Trump and devoted itself to sabotaging first the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency.
That's where Russiagate came from.
That's where all of those scams came from, including the lie in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop was misinformation.
And as a result, the illiberal establishment began to embrace these security state agencies.
And that's why I say they are more powerful than ever.
The only criticism you ever hear from them comes from independent media.
It used to come from Tucker Carlson, but unfortunately he's fired from Fox, so you don't have that anymore from him.
There are parts of the Republican Party that are quite critical of the FBI.
In fact, the investigation we were able to report on last night about how the FBI is working in conjunction with Ukrainian intelligence to censor the postings of American citizens on the internet about the war in Ukraine came from the Republican investigation.
Go check how many media outlets reported on that story.
Almost none.
They don't report critically on these agencies, and as a result, these agencies are at the peak of their power.
More powerful than ever.
And because of that, they are absolutely embedded in the most significant corporations that control the flow of information and propaganda in the United States, including corporate media on the one hand, and big tech on the other.
And it's hard for me to describe something more menacing than that.
This is why they're so obsessed with destroying the few outposts of independent media.
The few places they cannot control.
Because without those, they really do have a fully closed information system.
And a fully closed information system is the hallmark of totalitarianism.
If you can control how people think, and prevent them from hearing dissent, you can control All of their actions because their actions are based on what their thoughts are, and if you can control their thoughts, you don't even need to control their actions.
And that is the system that is being created, and I think this reporting about how infiltrated they are into Big Tech It's extremely important to continue to pursue, which we will.
A lot of reporting has been done on how infiltrated they are in corporate media.
We will continue to do this reporting to complete this extremely menacing picture about how Americans are being battered with propaganda that's emanating from all of the same places, and in particular the part of the government that was never supposed to involve itself in domestic politics and yet now is the leading actor shaping domestic politics in the United States.
So for our interview segment tonight, we will speak to the excellent young journalist Aaron Severium of the Free Beacon about his new article entitled Woke or the KKK.
NYU hosts a whites-only anti-racism workshop for public school parents.
In that article, he reveals yet another example, maybe one of the most extreme yet, Where self-proclaimed anti-racist teachers and diversity counselors use what looks a lot like, in fact exactly like, old-school Jim Crow racism, and yet for some reason it's regarded as benevolent or justifiable because the assumption is they have pure motives in their heart.
That has been such a clear trend, especially since the protests erupted after the killing of George Floyd, that really gave a lot of energy and a lot of spirit to what had been confined to this extremism on academic and in college campuses.
Here is a video produced by the comedian Ryan Long about how frequently Anti-racist woke ideology seems to find very common ground with old school racism that it pretends to combat.
When me and Brad first met, I didn't think we'd get along, but turns out we kind of agree on everything.
Your racial identity is the most important thing.
Everything should be looked at through the lens of race.
Jinx, you owe me a Coke.
We both have a lot of opinions about people of colour, even though we barely know any.
I say coloured people, but as long as we're classifying them.
We both think minorities are a united group who think the same and act the same.
And vote the same.
You don't want to lose your black card.
Sorry, I don't know, I just think we should roll back discrimination laws so we can hire based on race again.
Jinx, now you owe me a Coke.
Hey, tell them what you told me yesterday.
White actors should only do voices for white cartoon characters.
You've been saying that for years.
Stick to your own.
Us white people, we have so much privilege.
I agree.
It is a privilege to be white.
Ask him about interracial dating.
All I said is that black men who date white women have internalized racism and white men that date ethnic women are fetishizing them.
Guys against interracial dating now?
Like am I being pranked?
Did Boomer put you up to this?
All right, so let's stop that video there.
White people should be making white food.
Crap macaroni and cheese, no seasoning, not even salt.
You get the idea.
There's two people, one with a woke t-shirt, one with a raced t-shirt, and they seem to be saying exactly the same things.
I'm going to bring out Aaron, but before I do, I just want to share with you a very quick anecdote.
Right before I left The Intercept in December of 2020, or October of 2020, There was a diversity consultant hired by the parent company of Intercept called First Look Media that became a requirement that all these corporations had to hire diversity consultants from the outside and give anti-racist schooling to the employees of Every corporation.
And I decided to go, even though I didn't have to, just because I wanted to hear it.
I had been hearing a lot of stories about what insane, kind of overt racism they were spreading in the name of anti-racism.
And I went to this diversity workshop and the very first thing that was announced by the diversity counselor was that in just a few minutes we were going to break up into two groups, one for white employees and one for non-white employees.
They were going to divide the company based on race, put white people over here and non-white people over here so that we could have completely separate conversations without one another.
I was amazed.
It was amazing to hear that.
That they were just to divide people up based on no criterion other than race.
And there was one room whites only and a room for non-whites only.
And there were employees who quite earnestly raised their hand and several of them said things like, my mother is white, my father is Asian, which room should I go in?
And several of the mixed-raced Employees had the same question and the answer was, well, you should go in whatever room you're comfortable in.
And then one of them said, should I switch back and forth?
I don't even know if that was earnest or if that was mocking.
But of course, the answer was, you do whatever you want.
You're part of the non-white group.
I mean, it was just incredibly offensive.
There are so many mixed-race families now, and to tell people that the best way to make progress in that dialogue is to start dividing people and segregating them based on race seems offensive as hell to me.
And yet, that is now what is the centerpiece of a lot of these workshops.
Let's bring on Aaron because he just spoke a story about one that seems even more extreme for a lot of reasons than usual.
And we are happy to welcome him to the program.
Aaron, good evening.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me, Glenn.
Sure.
So let's just begin with this new article.
This is something that you've been reporting on a lot, these kind of trends.
This one did seem more extreme to me, which is why I wanted to have you on.
So go ahead and tell us what you learned.
Sure, so beginning in February of this year, NYU hosted a whites-only anti-racism seminar for public school parents in New York City.
The goal was to, in a Racially homogenous setting, teach white parents how to be good anti-racist allies and quote unquote show up in their public school communities.
A lot of these folks are active in PTAs and things of that nature.
Uh, lest your viewers have any doubt, uh, this does indeed violate a number of U.S.
civil rights laws, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funds like NYU from engaging in rape discrimination, as well as laws that ban discrimination in contracting, because, of course, NYU charged money for this seminar.
And so the white parents who subjected themselves to this, out of the goodness of their heart, paid $360 for the privilege.
So it was a whites-only segregated training in the name of anti-racism, which violated all of the laws designed to bring about a more racially inclusive America.
So presumably if a black family, a black set of parents, or a Latino set of parents, or an Asian set of parents, or any non-white people had showed up wanting to pay the same money to attend this forum, presumably they would have been turned away on the grounds that they were the wrong race.
Is that your understanding of what the rules essentially were?
Yeah, and we know that because they didn't, I mean, they're really, they left no ambiguity.
They not only said that the seminar was designed specifically for white people, which maybe you could argue, you know, it's not totally clear from that language, is it only whites, really, blah, blah, blah.
But then once everyone had been selected for the seminar, they sent out an email explaining why they were meeting, quote, only as white people, and included an article that Essentially laid out the case for a kind of anti-racist segregation.
I mean, the article explicitly argued that it was important for white people to unlearn racism on their own, in their own spaces, in order to prevent traumatizing people of color in the process, because people of color experience racism every day, and it would be triggering to hear the horrible implicit biases and microaggressions that such a training would inevitably surface.
And then as if that document in writing wasn't enough to establish a cause of action against this thing, at the first meeting of the seminar, someone asked, "Hey, this seems a little counterintuitive.
It's anti-racist, but there's only white people here.
I'm not sure about that.
And then the facilitator, Barbara Gross, who's like the associate director of NYU's Education Justice Research Center or something, says, look, we're doing this to spare people of color the burden, you know, of hearing our racist thoughts because they experience racism every second of every day.
I mean, she actually said that.
Later in the same seminar, a parent expresses gratitude that there's no people of color in the room because she thought it would be harming for them to hear her experience of racism.
You know, she describes a black kid in her kindergarten class being expelled for bringing a knife.
She says, you know, it'd be harming for people of color to hear me say that.
So, I mean, there were numerous statements in which everyone acknowledges it's a whites-only space and in which it's clear that there is a policy of excluding people of color.
So, you know, I would not want to be the lawyer defending this program in court.
You know, one of the things that, obviously the people doing this believe that they're justified in segregating people by race, because unlike those who did that previously in the Jim Crow era and the like, there are people who are doing it with good motives, unlike the ones with bad motives.
Even though it's the same exact act, they presumably see it as different.
Yeah, what always strikes me as well, beyond just the evil of segregating people by race, is that the assumptions seem exactly the same to me as well.
One of the things that bothers me so much about new gender ideology is that I think we had made so much progress in the idea that If you're a man or a boy, that can encompass a huge range of issues.
That it used to be the case that if you were a boy and you wanted to play with dolls or you like fashion, you were often told you're not a real boy, you're a girl.
And girls who like sports or wanted to wear their hair short or like to wear jeans instead of dresses, we're told you're not a real girl, you're a boy.
We kind of got rid of that.
We escaped from that.
We grew out of that.
We realized that boys and girls doesn't mean that you have to be one specific thing.
And now we're back to the idea, oh, if this boy plays with a doll, we tell him he's not really a boy, he's a girl.
Same with the girls as well.
It's just a very regressive set of assumptions about how we judge people based on their groups.
The same thing is true here.
You know, the controversy over the use of race in admissions process is obviously based on the view that unless you apply different standards to black and Latino people, they're incapable of getting into college by meeting the same admission standards as everybody else.
just incredibly grotesquely, crassly racist view of the capabilities of various races.
And then here, too, this idea that even if you're not going to be a girl, Even if you're a black person and want to go to this seminar, for your own good, you're going to be shielded and protected because to be black or to be Latino means you're too weak to just experience the world as it is.
You have to be shielded and protected by white people who are stronger and know better for you than you know best, than you know for yourself.
Is that kind of mentality evident as you do this reporting?
Yeah, well, so in this seminar, and you can listen to the entire thing online and see certain clips, and I suggest everyone does that to see it for themselves, but one thing that struck me was that they say it's for people of color's own good, but when you actually watch it, it really seems like these white people are in fact exhibiting a kind of what Robin DiAngelo calls white fragility,
Like they are terrified that they might offend a person of color and that fear sort of makes the training into this therapeutic refuge where it's like oh finally a safe space where we don't have to worry about offending people of color.
I mean this sounds comical but that they really say things like that and it's it's so it's pretty it's pretty clear to me that yes that they have this sort of paternalistic assumption about
Minorities and their kind of hypersensitivity, but that assumption of minority sort of hypersensitivity is really, I think, pretextual justification for them to indulge their own white hypersensitivity and to kind of avoid confronting maybe the worst pangs of white guilt that they, I think, somewhat irrationally feel.
That's the sort of interesting sociological dynamic.
And I suspect that you see that kind of thing in other similar programming.
This is an area of reporting that you do a lot of.
You also do a lot of reporting on Sunship and college campuses.
And I wanted to ask you about a different article that you published about Stanford Law School in just a second.
But before I get to that, how is it that, and I don't want you to reveal your shorts or anything, but how is it generally that you find out about these kinds of excesses?
Are there people offended by them who tell you about them?
Are there people in these programs who complain?
What generally is the genesis of how you learn about these things?
Certainly a lot of people reach out and at this point I know a number of parents in New York City who kind of You know, are aghast by what's going on and share stuff amongst themselves.
So that's one way, it's just kind of word of mouth.
But honestly, I would emphasize that often this stuff is not confidential, right?
In this case, they took down the website advertising the training after, I guess, they must have gotten suspicious that there might have been a leaker or some such thing.
But, you know, initially, right, someone sent me that link And I mean, it's just on NYU's website, promoted pretty prominently that they were doing this obviously illegal thing.
And that's true of a lot of what I report on where it's not super hidden.
It's not like they know it's illegal and they're ashamed of it.
They take steps to keep it secret, which is more, I think, the MO actually of Harvard and some of these other institutions that have been, the Supreme Court ruled, illegally discriminating based on race.
At many corporations and in many kind of, you know, educational contexts outside of admissions, the people running these programs are so steeped in the sort of ideology and idiom of race consciousness that it doesn't even occur to them That there might be a legal, maybe they think there might be some people who are politically or morally opposed to it, but I don't think they even realize that it's flagrantly against the law because it's just so taken for granted as a best practice.
You know, do you want to promote racial equity?
Well, the way to do that is with race conscious policy.
That is just the kind of governing assumption of Really a large swath of academic and corporate bureaucracies and as a result, because they don't even realize it's illegal, they don't bother to hide it.
And so if someone just Googles for enough time, it is astonishing what you can find.
I mean, I wrote something about About a year and a half ago about states that were triaging COVID drugs based on race, which is very illegal, obviously violates the 14th Amendment, no lawyer would tell you that that's okay.
These states, including Utah, which is a red state, they just put it on their websites.
I mean, it didn't even occur to the bureaucrats in these places, ah, maybe we might get in trouble for that.
That's how taken for granted You know, I think a lot of this does come from Robin DiAngelo, kind of the patron saint of woke racism, as well as the queen of profiting off of racism.
I don't recall anybody who's profited off of explicit racism quite as effectively as Robin DiAngelo in the last, say, 50 years since Jim Crow ended.
We have this pamphlet that we can put on the screen.
It is Robin DiAngelo charging $1,800.
It is for a white-only affinity group where white people come and learn about their racism and it also is just labeled white-only.
So People who are not white are excluded, just like they used to be from restaurants and buses and drinking fountains.
And as you say, there's no sense at all that this needs to be hidden because I do think they've convinced themselves, as is so true of left liberal politics in general, That their motives are so recognizably and indisputably benevolent that nothing they do could ever be called into legitimate question.
Is that a caricature of how they think or do you think that's really the extent to which they've gone?
No, I think that's pretty accurate, at least of folks like Robin DiAngelo.
Obviously, there's a spectrum and some of this stuff is adopted for more cynical reasons, but DiAngelo, I think... Look, she even wrote a book about how well-intentioned white people perpetuate racial harm.
It's like the lack of self-awareness there is just...
hysterical.
One other funny D'Angelo story that my former colleague Charles Lehman reported while he was still at the Free Beacon, she actually charged more money for a speaker appearance than a black woman who appeared at the same time as her.
So, you know, she literally, she like, was making more money than...
To talk about racism.
Diverse people of color.
Yeah, it's just absurd, right?
So, no, it's...
And the other thing I would say, too, is that it's...
I do think she's a true believer in some ways, but I also think that true belief can itself be caused by financial motives, right?
There's an old saying, you know, Try convincing someone of something whose paycheck depends on him not understanding it or something to that effect, right?
Her whole paycheck depends on her not understanding the toxicity of her project, so of course she's just, I think, a brick wall when it comes to these objections.
But yeah, no, I mean, it's a combination of cynical profit motive and then kind of on top of that is layered sincere belief.
Yeah, so last question and I think I was joking with you before the interview that I was interviewed by Jordan Peterson and it ended up being a two and a half hour interview including about 45 minutes of technical difficulties, not on our end in the middle.
So I was about to apologize and then I realized compared to the time he consumed of mine, I'm consuming very little of yours.
But I did want to ask you, you do do a lot of reporting about censorship and free speech debates on college campuses.
When I was going to college in the kind of early to mid 90s in law school as well, there was a lot of debate at the time about this, what was called then political correctness and the idea that there was this attempt to force people into kind of speech codes.
And then as I became a journalist, I never really liked to write about college campus disputes because even by the time I was a journalist in 2005 and 6, I'd assume that these people on college campuses mostly would grow out of these kinds of petulant ideas, and by the time they got into the real world, by the time they became adults, they would understand that they couldn't control people's thoughts that way.
That turned out to be very wrong, at least about the millennial generation and now Gen Z, where you see them infiltrating these institutions.
with exactly the same kind of censorship obsession that they learned in college, tried to apply in college, then took with them.
And you see it along the way where they leave home and the college deans become their parents who safeguard them and keep them safe.
And then they go into the workplace and they expect HR to do that for them.
So anytime that something's upsetting, you used to run to your mother, then you ran to your RA or your college, and now you run to HR.
And it's just like prolonged infantilism that leads them to believe that in the workplace, even in college campuses especially, maybe you don't have any exposure to ideas that you dislike, and there are supposed to be authorities that keep that from you, keep you safe from that by suppressing it and censoring it.
And that's obviously become the accepted orthodoxy of liberal discourses, that bad ideas get not engaged but suppressed and banished and censored. - No.
What is, from your reporting on college campuses, do you think this is getting worse?
And talk a little bit about this reporting that you did about Stanford Law School that was supposed to be a free speech seminar and turned out to be something much different.
Yeah, so at Stanford, the back story is that many people probably know this.
In March, there was this really dramatic shout down in which a bunch of students heckled a sitting federal judge.
And the DEI administrator basically took the microphone from the judge and joined the students.
And heckling him, more or less, they shouted obscenities.
One allegedly said, we hope your daughters get raped.
Some of this was caught on video.
It was very bad.
And so in the wake of all the backlash, Stanford promised that they would do a half-day mandatory free speech training, kind of like, you know, free speech equivalent of diversity training.
And the implication was that everyone would get together on one day in the spring and have a number of speakers and have to maybe do exercises together to promote tolerance, et cetera.
And that was at least, I think, kind of the way it was sold implicitly.
That wasn't what happened.
What ended up happening was it was an online module where you had four videos you were supposed to watch.
But there was really, there was no, excuse me, there was no way of...
Checking compliance.
You literally just had to check a box saying that you watched them.
So as a result, a lot of students either put the videos on background on mute and then, you know, just did other stuff while they were playing in the background.
Or in one case, someone's told me that they just clicked on the attestation link without even opening the videos.
The whole thing took this student about 10 seconds to complete.
So, not so surprisingly, it was a joke.
I mean, it really was performative virtue signaling all the way down.
And I can't say I was terribly surprised by that.
To be fair, I do think that for at least the next couple years there will be less of this nonsense at Stanford, because now they are under the microscope, in part as a result of my reporting.
And also, frankly, you know, I I don't mean to endorse what people might call cancel culture, but I will say that when I have published the names and faces of the students involved in these protests, and with Stanford I did, you know, the person who was directing the entire thing and was caught on camera directing the heckling, we did publish that person's name.
I've heard through the grapevine that that really freaks out and pisses off students, even though they have no expectation of privacy when they do this.
They then turn around and are like, oh, how dare you dox me for seeing my name.
They're ingratiating themselves by choice into a public dispute.
Yeah.
But that's that infantile mentality that they're supposed to be protected and treated like a child and not an adult, purposely involving themselves in a controversy.
Right, no, exactly.
But because they are children and are rather thin-skinned, when you publicize this and then people start, rumors start going around that, oh, judges aren't happy, uh-oh, you know, what if you lose a clerkship, blah, blah, blah.
These kids are also very status-conscious and career-oriented, and so I think it really doesn't take that much bad PR directed at any one of them for it to create a chilling effect.
So, you know, look, I don't think it's the job of journalists to, you know, create or enforce consequences, you know.
It's not like I go about my day thinking, oh, how can I ruin these kids' lives?
No.
But I also think that journalists don't have any obligation to, you know, spare people the attempt, you know, um, and, and, and protect their privacy when they've effectively waived their right to it.
Um, and I will say if the schools aren't going to punish the kids and they didn't punish anyone on the Sanford case, or even, um, do more than this kind of minimal perfunctory free speech training, it's not enough, but I do actually think it is useful when, um, but I do actually think it is useful when, um, the kids' names are published, and there's blowback, and they face, uh, at minimum, online shame, and at, um...
Worst or best, rather, you know, career consequences.
I just don't think that there's any other way that this stuff will stop anytime soon, because the schools have really shown themselves to be totally unwilling to impose even the slightest bit of discipline on the worst offenders, right?
We're not talking about kicking someone out for a kind of mean post.
That would obviously be bad.
But, you know, someone goes and shouts down a sitting federal judge, someone tells them We hope your daughters get raped and there's no consequence for that.
I mean, give me a break, right?
Heckling is not First Amendment protected speech, and that's very much settled law.
Everyone knows that.
Even if it were protected speech, if you are an adult, as they are, and you involve yourself in a public controversy and in a public protest, reporters have the right to report on what it is that you're doing.
And maybe you're going to get credit for it.
Maybe people are going to applaud you.
Maybe people are going to look negatively upon you, and maybe it'll open career paths.
Maybe it'll close them.
It doesn't matter.
The job of the journalist is to describe Relevant public events to the public and whoever is participating in these protests is completely fair game to be reported on regardless of what your intention is.
Just to describe what is happening I think is reason enough that that's in the public interest and ultimately I just want to say
I don't know if I would have the patience to kind of wade into the sewers of the worst parts of liberal culture the way you do, so I hope you're getting some kind of hazard pay for it or some mental health support or something, but I'm glad you're doing it because this sort of stuff does bubble up to larger institutions, and I think it is important to continue to watch it and monitor it and report on it, so I'm glad you're doing it, and I appreciate you taking the time to come on our show tonight to talk about it.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
This was fun.
Absolutely.
Have a great evening, Aaron.
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