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Jan. 13, 2025 - Info Warrior - Jason Bermas
56:49
The Insider Threat
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Welcome to Making Sense of the Madness.
We've got a great show lined up for you today.
We've got Adam Lovinger to talk about the insider threat.
We're going to go deep into the deep state and beyond.
You're not going to want to miss it.
Buckle up and get ready to make sense of the madness.
And we are back.
Adam, thank you so much for joining us.
Now, before we get into the book, what the definition of the deep state is, etc., I'd really love to get into your background and how one gravitates to be in the intelligence community and then serve on the National Security Council and what that's like.
Yeah, so I don't know how far you want to go back.
We won't start in the crib.
But I'm a lawyer by background, and I was working in a big law firm while September 11th happened, and I realized that my calling in life was not making rich banks richer.
I understand that rich banks have to get richer and that there's capitalism, and I'm a great supporter of that.
But I was working in Washington, D.C. The Pentagon's right across the river.
It had been hit on 9-11.
And I'd always had a great interest in national security.
I have a master's degree in security policy.
And I just got the opportunity to enter the Pentagon and serve as the general counsel in the lead Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction support office from the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
And I was in that job for a couple of years.
And, you know, soon thereafter, learned that we really had no serious strategies to win our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And so I started looking around the Pentagon.
Where's strategy being done in this building?
And it turned out it was being done just down the hall from where I was.
And I started to develop relationships with this high level strategy office called the Office of Net Assessment.
And, you know, within a couple of years, I was hired and I was working on national security strategy.
So when you get in there post 9-11 and you start to realize you don't feel like there is a coherent vision for what's going on in the Middle East.
What are you seeing?
And does that vision ever form in a coherent manner?
Yeah, so, I mean, one of the things I talk about in my book, The Insider Threat, is my relationship with General Mike Flynn.
And he ultimately, when he becomes National Security Advisor, he brings me over to the National Security Council in the Trump administration.
But if we go back 10 years, our relationship really began around the year 2016. And what we were both seeing, he was in battlefield intelligence and I was in, I would call it the highest level strategy office in the Pentagon.
We were seeing the same thing and the same pathologies.
Number one, we were seeing not much focus on really winning these wars.
And this is an old problem that goes back to the beginning of time.
War creates economic opportunities.
There's all these defense contractors.
In times of war, a lot of money is being made.
And so there's all of these institutional pressures just to keep these wars going, not to win them, not to seriously focus on let's solve these problems and let's move on.
So there's that problem.
The other problem is also a bureaucratic issue where you really have Bureaucratic empires getting made, getting developed inside the national security state.
And again, the exigencies, the threats, the crises that emerge out of wartime, there's a lot less scrutiny that goes into building these bureaucratic empires during times of war.
And then finally, there's a third aspect, which I think sets my...
Apart from a lot of other books, it may open people's eyes a bit.
Is there a certain ideological aspect to America not winning its wars?
We've seen recently all of these protests on Ivy League University campuses, these pro-Hamas protests, these anti-American protests.
These things do not happen in a vacuum.
This sort of ideology, this anti-American ideology...
has consequences once it starts seeping into our national security bureaucracy.
And you get people that don't believe in America, you know, in these jobs.
And they see that their job is actually to cut America down, to restrain America, to make us not so preeminent in the world.
And these are characters that I started seeing, particularly during the Obama administration.
It seemed like there was a big emphasis to put People who didn't believe in America in certain key nodes within the national security bureaucracy.
And you get a certain, I mean, maybe in their minds they don't think that they're sabotaging America, but they do think, oh, our job is to restrain America.
We're too powerful.
We need to sort of balance America's power with our adversaries just to create this sort of better system.
And it's really very troubling.
And problematic development.
So that's what I focus quite a bit of my book on.
Well, since you kind of talked about the contemporary issue about what's going on in the Middle East, but at the same time talked about the bureaucracy issue of the incentivization of not only finances, but I would argue geopolitical power with these wars and to remain in them.
How do you balance that?
Because for me, I don't like what's going on in the Middle East.
Now, you're not going to find me in a protest.
But at the same time, I'd like to see a ceasefire.
I'd like to see stabilization there.
I think a lot of people that voted for Trump the first time around wanted to see that in the Middle East.
I'm not in love with what's going on in Syria right now.
You know, I'm not an Assad fan.
But at the same time, I realize it's our Central Intelligence Agency went in there through Operation Timber Sycamore.
The region has always been rife with conflict.
And now the guy that we're putting in is an ex-Al-Nusra Al-Qaeda fighter.
And obviously that's concerning in that cycle.
So how do you balance those type of things?
I'm certainly not...
A war hawk either, but I don't think we don't need a military.
I don't think that we don't need intel, you know, not one of these anarchists.
I like to think that I'm pragmatic.
And, you know, earlier in that little segment, you kind of brought up the point that a lot of people are invested in keeping these things going.
So obviously, when you build that bureaucratic state, things are going to be difficult.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
I think we're in really good hands with Donald Trump, but I'm not even talking politically.
I'm talking from a policy perspective.
And I'll explain why.
So, you know, as far as the bureaucratic corruption that fuels these wars, Trump, more than any American in history, even more so than Dwight Eisenhower, who famously warned about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address.
Trump, more than anybody, understands this pathology, how this government corruption really fuels these forever wars.
So there's that issue.
The second thing is that when I was transferring, when General Flynn asked me to go from the Pentagon to become Senior Director for Strategic Assessments at the National Security Council under Trump, what was really interesting during that transition period from Obama to Trump is that all of the Information that I was getting from our intelligence agencies that was sort of pouring across my desk was showing me very clearly that America's enemies were
scared.
They were scared of Trump.
They sort of, you know, in a shorthand, they thought that Obama was working for them because Obama was coddling America's enemies to such a degree that they really thought that he was working for them.
And I actually think he was in many respects.
But when Trump was elected, This peace through strength projection of power.
You know, we had no wars during the Trump administration, which is a phenomenal phenomenon.
I mean, those four years were years of peace.
And that's because America's enemies, they saw that America was strong under Trump and that Trump was a no-nonsense kind of guy.
They didn't have blackmail material on him.
They couldn't.
Coerce him and his advisors, for the most part, genuinely believed in America first and genuinely wanted to keep this peace through strength dynamic going.
And so I think that that resolve, that peace through strength...
I mean, sure, it's building up the military, it's making America more powerful, but that's how you get peace.
So I think that's really important.
And then secondly, about the Middle East, one of the problems that the American people, I think, increasingly realize is that presidents that want to put daylight between us and our allies.
When America is no longer obviously firmly supporting our democratic allies, that is a signal to our enemies that, okay, now you can unleash the dogs of war.
So Trump's support for Israel was absolutely critical for the Abraham Accords, which amazingly brought this peace between The Israelis and the Gulf Sunni Arabs.
I mean, many people thought that wasn't even possible.
But it's that no daylight policy that is so conducive to peace.
Whereas you saw, you know, Obama and really Biden to an extent, you know, oh, do we want to give the Israelis weapons?
Do we want to twist their arm?
Do we want to try to get some Iran deal?
That is so provocative.
That is like a recipe for war.
And so, you know, maybe some people get frustrated with various allies of ours.
But you got to realize that, you know, like in a family, you know, dealing with outsiders, like you kind of keep the family business on the inside.
And to the outsiders who, you know, could don't wish your family harm, who wish your family harm, you show solidarity.
And it was just fascinating.
I mean, just recently, Anthony Blinken admitted, the Secretary of State under Biden just admitted that the more The Biden administration pressured Hamas to release these hostages in Gaza, that the more reluctant Hamas was to release them.
I mean, that's a stunning admission, but it goes right to this point that with your allies, you hold them really close.
That doesn't mean that you don't have disagreements, but you don't allow that daylight to be exploited by these authoritarian, horrific regimes, you know, whether it's China or whether it's the Iranians and, you know, Al Qaeda, ISIS, you know, whomever.
You keep your democratic allies close.
So you kind of mentioned the peace through strength aspect.
And I would say this, you know...
In large part, I really liked Trump's foreign policy.
I'd agree with you that he didn't start any new wars, but at the same time, you know, he talked a tough game against Saudi Arabia.
He gets in there, cuts a $400-plus billion arms deal.
I'm not in love with what's going on.
In Yemen.
But at the same time, he was the first guy in my generation to ever talk about the military-industrial complex and name it by name.
He was the first guy to criticize these wars for blood and treasure.
And I think what's most important, and what I think a lot of nation-states outside of, you know, through strength, is that he was willing to speak to people and be diplomatic.
And I think, you know, him talking to Kim Jong-un...
In particular, was a moment that other people said, all right, well, at least he's willing to discuss things.
Because again...
Outside of the Middle East, I don't know that a nation state or a leader had been more demonized in Western culture than North Korea, right?
Axies of evil.
Even Trump had fun with Little Rocket Man and all that stuff.
But at the end of the day, he was able to make that historic trek into North Korea and have a conversation.
That's what I want to see more of.
That's what I like about the guy.
A lot of people...
Talk about him, unfortunately, in a negative respect when he even hints that Xi Jinping is intelligent or powerful or made a correct policy decision.
I think that's intelligent and pragmatic, and I want to see and hear those things, and I want those people to speak together.
Same thing with Russia, right?
I mean, I watched that press conference, that joint press conference between Putin and Trump.
More of that.
What are your thoughts?
You know, Jason, you're actually focusing on an issue that you and I are perfectly aligned on this.
I've been thinking precisely about this issue for a long time.
One thing that is so unusual about Trump is that he's like an ordinary American.
You know, it's like he recognizes that, okay, you have these adversaries.
You have Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
You have Putin in Russia.
You have Xi Jinping in China.
There's a lot of problems with our relationships with them, and these are very destabilizing countries.
But he's not so obsessed with putting out the peace feelers, extending a hand of not alliances or partnership or working together, but just trying to see if you can resolve your differences.
And he's man enough to extend himself to...
Even if there's like a 10% chance of success, he's still willing to take it.
And I think that that's what he did with Kim Jong-un.
It's like, there was no real basis for a deal, but that's not going to deter him.
He's man enough to be able to take it on the chin.
And you know what?
He's going to try to make peace with Kim Jong-un.
And if it doesn't work out, chances are it's not going to work out.
But it's like, he puts himself out there.
This is so rare, Jason.
I mean, I'm glad you focused on that.
So many American presidents are just obsessed with managing these relationships.
Essentially, when leaders come together, it's just a photo op because everything's been worked out ahead of time.
And that's really taking off the table a lot of tools of statecraft.
When that's what is sort of guiding you.
And so I think that what made, for example, the Abraham Accords just blew people out of the water.
I mean, that was incredible.
That's genuinely one of the biggest obstacles of peace in the Middle East.
Every American president since 1948 has been trying to create peace between Israel and the Sunni Arabs and has failed.
But here Trump comes along and he succeeds, and he succeeds tremendously.
And it's because he...
He's willing to expend the capital of the presidency of the United States, take risks, and that's just what ordinary Americans do.
And that's, I think, one of the many reasons why he was elected with such a mandate.
Well, he certainly, despite the media fervor, has been the most popular president in my generation.
The insider threat, how the deep state undermines America.
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We're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with more Making Sense of the Madness after this.
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So Adam, in the subheader of your book, you have the term Deep State.
Now, obviously, a lot of people will say that's a loaded term, a convoluted word.
Some people will tell you it doesn't exist.
Some people in the mainstream will tell you, thank God there's a deep state at this point.
I tracked the terminology back to a guy named Peter Dale Scott, who was a lefty guy but a historian, and coined the term, geez, back in the late 70s, early 80s, talking about deep events in politics, the assassinations.
of the 60s in particular and saying, you know, every once in a while we have one of these large-scale events that you just know that we're not going to be able to get to the bottom of.
Now, again, I think it's been used in a number of terms, especially over the last decade or so, but only over the last decade or so did it become popular vernacular as well.
What is the deep state?
Where is the deep state right now?
And when battling the deep state, what do you think would be the most effective in doing so?
Yeah, no, it's good.
I think it's really good to, you know, define it.
As I mentioned, I'm a lawyer by background.
It's like you really have to know, you know, define like what you're talking about, particularly a term, you know, the deep state, which gets thrown around a lot.
And I try...
You know, in actually the very first pages of the first chapter of the book to really, you know, tell the reader like what I'm talking about.
And what I saw, well, first of all, before encountering the deep state, I did not think it could exist.
And I didn't think it could exist because, you know, as a lawyer, it's like you study the constitutional order of the United States.
And you realize that there is, in our constitutional order, there's these checks and balances.
You got Congress, you know, making sure that the executive branch and you got, you know, the courts and a very elegant sort of system to make sure you don't have these abuses of power.
What happened to me, Jason, is that soon after General Michael Flynn asked for me to come to the NSC, you know, by that time, I'd been in the Pentagon for a dozen years.
Perfect performance ratings, no security issues, no investigations, no problems whatsoever with my career.
Within a couple of months, I was under five investigations, two administrative, three criminal.
And I was just so surprised.
I was like, how could this be happening?
My understanding of law is that you need to have a legal predicate in order to investigate something.
You know, weaponize investigative processes and go after people, you know, based upon nothing.
Well, that was a big awakening to me.
I mean, in many respects, maybe being a lawyer was a handicap because I was like, these very senior bureaucrats, and these are some of the highest level bureaucrats, including Obama's deputy secretary of defense, Bob Work, who for some...
The reason I still don't understand was held over for the first few months of the Trump administration.
He was intimately involved in weaponizing these investigations, launching these investigations without a proper legal predicate.
These are illegal investigations and just going after me.
The time when I really realized there was a deep state and I knew that I needed a lawyer who actually understood this better than I did was when I reached out to The highest level personnel bureaucrats in the whole Pentagon.
And I put them all on one email with a bunch of senior lawyers.
And I wrote, what is happening to me?
These investigations are clearly illegal.
They're criminal.
And this needs to stop.
And I don't want people's careers to get destroyed by weaponizing federal processes.
That's a serious crime.
And all these lawyers and all these senior officials, these are senior bureaucrats, they said, no, no, you've got to cooperate with this stuff.
And then at that point, I was like, whoa, the law doesn't matter.
And then so what I saw, Jason, over the course of then about four years is that I'm fighting this system where the facts and the law don't matter.
I mean, I was sort of hermetically sealed off.
From the facts and the law.
And I went from one node to another node to another node.
And what I mean by that is that first of all, my security clearance was suspended based on lies.
Then it was revoked based upon a separate set of lies when they realized the first set of lies wasn't going to hold up.
And then I was removed from the civil service based upon an entirely new set of lies.
And then I had to appeal that.
And what I realized and what I call the deep state are these various nodes within the national security bureaucracy, kind of boring jobs, jobs like, you know, security clearance jobs, the certain personnel jobs, the administrative law judges.
You know, these people are working together in what is technically under the law a criminal conspiracy because they're knowingly and willfully.
And this is when, you know, I got what the law calls dispositive evidence of a criminal conspiracy.
And this, you know, when they work together like this, they have a lot of power.
There's no checking and balancing, no accountability, no independence and objectivity.
And it's a Soviet process.
You would see this happening in the Soviet Union, but here it's happening in the United States of America and targeting, you know, people coming into.
To the very White House, to work for the president.
So there's a few things that I want to hone in on this.
You just mentioned checks and balances.
And, you know, I often posit that we unfortunately have moved so far away from the constitutional republic in which you had an executive, a legislative, and a judicial that balanced one another.
And I would argue that, unfortunately, post-World War II is when that really begins to accelerate with an executive within an executive, mainly through the avenues of the continuity of government program and these black sites that begin to be created with things that are born classified outside of the purview of the presidency.
And now we're in a system where You constantly hear about democracy, especially from one side of the political spectrum, but we're not a democracy for a damn good reason.
If we want to amend the Constitution and Bill of Rights, you need a two-thirds and a three-quarters vote.
That's not a democracy.
And that's to ensure that we are not cavalier about changing that document because, in essence, it's supposed to support the minority.
It's supposed to support the individual.
However, with these bureaucracies, we have moved further and further towards collectivism.
And unfortunately, I would say collectivism built on false narratives.
Often perpetrated by our intelligence community.
The FBI, the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security.
There's a dozen other ones.
You know there's the pseudo-agencies, fusion centers, etc.
Some have now called that the blob, right?
That's not the deep state, that's just the big administrative state.
In order to rein in the quote-unquote deep state, the bureaucrats that are really making the moves behind the scenes in these offices, don't you have to severely cut down the blob?
Yeah, I think that job number one is to get more serious about enforcing the law.
So what has really shocked me...
Is that, you know, we have all of these laws on our books and Congress spends a hell of a lot of time, you know, passing laws that are very detailed and, you know, arguing over every single word.
But what I've seen, Jason, firsthand are entire statutes that are just ignored and in a very dangerous way.
For example, The Freedom of Information Act.
This is a very important act to ensure that the American people have access to the secret dealings of what's going on inside the US national security bureaucracy and the federal government as a whole.
What I've seen is that these hyper-empowered bureaucrats can ignore And weaponize the Freedom of Information Act to conceal based upon lies.
You know, there's various exemptions, you know, in the course of, you know, what the deep state in my case calls administrative due process.
Like I'm going from one node to the next to the next and next and everything's hermetically sealed off from the facts of the law.
None of it matters.
You know, there was this one senior bureaucrat.
His name is Edward Fish, Ned Fish.
And he's now the head of security.
At the DCSA, so the guy that's in charge of all security clearances in the United States government.
I mean, it's incredible.
This guy, we put in a Freedom of Information Act request for his emails.
He sent us 76 pages that were entirely blacked out.
Not even one word was revealed.
And what he's doing, I mean, that's just on its face illegal.
Because it's like, you can't do that.
But what he's doing is he's thumbing his nose at federal process, at their constitutional order, by saying, I'm not going to follow FOIA. I'm not going to follow the U.S. Privacy Act.
And he can get away with it.
Not only that, he gets a promotion to be the head of security of the DCSA, the entity in charge of all security clearances, of all incoming Trump officials.
This guy is still there.
And so that's what I think is step number one.
I mean, I agree with you.
We do need to cut our federal bureaucracy, but if we're going to be a democracy, if we're going to be a republic, if we're going to be true at all to our constitution, we must begin enforcing our laws and not allowing these...
Criminal operatives inside our national security bureaucracy to get away with just ignoring inconvenient laws because it gets in their way from really abusing their authority against their political and ideological adversaries.
Well, certainly in the next segment, I want to get to criminal accountability within the executive and surrounding branches because I don't think that we've seen it in decade upon decade and barely saw it, say, in the Iran-Contra affair.
But again, I want to wait to get to that because you really just talked about something important, the FOIA. And what I think we need is mass declassification of all sorts of documents.
You know, it's still...
This is something that is a vivid memory of mine, that my senior year, we went to the Roosevelt Mansion in Hyde Park, New York, and, you know, they have the little historian guy there, and even then, I'm sitting there as a 17-year-old kid, and all of a sudden, he's like, well, you know, some of the documents here are still classified, but I think that's okay, because, you know, the American people, I'm thinking to myself, wait, this is World War II. You know, why are these things still classified?
Fast forward to me reading Operation Paperclip by Annie Jacobson, and she leads that book, that there are still 600 million documents that are classified regarding Operation Paperclip and the Nazis.
I don't know where we're at a decade plus later, but I bet it's not that great.
You look at...
JFK, RFK, MLK, all those assassination programs.
We could get into MKUltra.
All the nefarious things that we kind of know about on the peripheral but still haven't gotten a really good look at.
How is it that we start a real reformation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights without mass declassification?
And I think that includes things like 9-11, like the corruption in the Iraq war, and then some kind of criminal accountability, at least for the most egregious.
Yeah.
No, I agree with you that, I mean, the national security state has really, I think, gone a little bit out of control.
And, you know, we understand, you know, we were attacked on 9-11, and so we created new agencies, and a lot of things were being done more and more in the name of national security.
As time goes by, as the evidence comes out, Lee Smith, who's a really brilliant guy, wrote a book called, he wrote a book on canceling the President of the United States, came out by Encounter Books, and he talks a lot about information flow and cancellation.
There's really this, you know, the issue is that there's too much weaponization of secrecy.
I think that, you know, that's a problem that's really emerged in recent years.
And you're right.
I mean, there's this sort of, in this epidemic, you look at polling, and the American people don't have a lot of trust in the United States.
And I think that a lot of that, you know, does come from, you know, this default to excessive secrecy.
And that has a structural and strategic long-term detrimental impact on the legitimacy of our government.
The more secretive it becomes and the more times that officials say, well, we can't talk about something because it's classified.
It's like, well, there's so much evidence of weaponization and so much evidence of corruption.
It's clear.
That in the name of national security, a lot of this stuff is getting covered up.
So I'm with you.
I think there needs to be less of a focus on this secretiveness.
I think there should be a default presumption that we do want transparency when it comes to the American people.
That's how their government will be more accountable and there'll be more confidence in the integrity of the American government.
So yeah, I think that's an important thing.
And most people that I deal with You know, we're focused on the issues.
I'm personally not focused on the declassification issue, but there are a bunch of people I know going into the Trump administration, including Russ Vogt, the Director of Office Management and Budget.
He's very concerned about this issue.
So I do know that a lot of the incoming Trump people care about this.
The book is The Insider Threat, How the Deep State Undermines America from Within.
We're going to take a quick break.
More Making Sense of the Madness after this.
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Adam, you know, we talked about accountability.
I've posited this to a ton of my guests out here, Giuliani, many of them, and said, look, we haven't had any real accountability within our executive since Iran-Contra.
And I would say, I mean, I guess you could say Scooter Libby took the brunt for Enron, but at the same time, he got a pardon from Trump.
And if you think that he was the head of that cartel, come on, give me a break, right?
Most of those people, even during Iran-Contra, now that we're several decades away from, got slaps on the wrist.
They had their sentences commuted or pardoned.
And the guy that made the face of it, Oliver North, got book deals, TV shows, and radio shows and became a millionaire.
Not the way to discourage that type of behavior.
And when you look at that type of behavior, you've got the United States running covert wars in South America.
They're utilizing their ally Israel to run the guns down to South America in this plausible deniability circle.
And I don't know that that network was ever really reined in.
How do we get accountability if when such criminal actions are taken, we don't really prosecute them or really even persecute them in the court of public opinion with the media we have?
Yeah, no, it's a huge problem.
And I think that it's actually one of the central problems with the deep state, for lack of a better word, and just the American people's confidence in our federal government.
It's like the American people, they know that if they commit a crime, God forbid, if they commit a crime, I mean, they will be prosecuted.
And there's a lot of ordinary Americans, there's a lot of minorities in this country.
Who get a very, very raw deal.
And then you have these elites, you know, at the highest levels of government.
You have James Comey who lies to Congress, which is a crime.
He mishandles classified information knowingly.
That's a crime.
You have Hillary Clinton who generates the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
That's a very serious crime that she, the American people, as they went to vote for the polls, she had lied that Trump was the one who was collaborating with the Russians, where, in fact, it was she who was collaborating with the Russians through various cutouts, of course.
But what happens at the end of the day is that, you know, if you have this sort of dual justice system in America, I mean, you're really going to, I mean, it's just, it's...
Antithetical to everything the founders envisioned.
It's a horrific state of affairs.
I saw this extraordinary poll a couple years ago, jointly commissioned by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland.
The poll was that 34% of Americans think that violence against the government under certain circumstances is totally legitimate.
And we think about what one in three Americans are thinking, you know what?
Violence is something that's legitimate.
This is not a good thing.
And so I think that, you know, we're in a crisis now.
I mean, sometimes good can come from bad.
And one thing that's really happened since the Iran-Contra affair that you mentioned is the politicization of legal warfare or what's called lawfare.
I mean, what's happened to Trump with all these lawsuits, you know, Peter Navarro getting sent to prison, Bannon getting sent to prison.
There's really, I mean, the Department of Justice is the most politicized government agency there is.
In 2016, there was a poll done and 94% of all political donations from the Department of Justice went to Hillary Clinton.
Six went to Trump.
This is a real problem.
These agencies are not apolitical.
They're highly politicized.
And so if the Department of Justice is the agency that has the legal authority to criminally prosecute people, you can't have 94% voting for one party and six for another.
I mean, it's an absurdity.
So no wonder you're getting the politicization of these criminal prosecutions.
That's got to stop.
So I think we're really reaching a tipping point here.
Trump and his staff, they recognize how politicized the criminal justice system is, and I think they're going to do something about it.
But it's really, it's had to reach this critical state for there to be getting much attention on this issue.
Can really be done about it.
Because, you know, one of the things I really liked about Vivek Ramaswamy when he was running was his statement that, you know what, the way that we're going to cut these bureaucracies is we'll just cut them in half day one with the social security number.
That way they can't claim it's political.
And then we'll whittle them down from there.
I had never thought of that.
I kind of thought to myself, well, that's...
Actually, pretty brilliant.
I don't know how that works in reality or if it would ever be allowed to happen in reality, but we have a ton of bloat.
If we were to do that, the world doesn't end, the government doesn't shut down, the U.S. doesn't become weaker militarily.
So I was like, hey, that's not a bad idea.
I'm extremely skeptical with this Doge thing.
Honestly, I hate the fact that it's even named that to pump up Elon's meme coin.
I mean, talk about jackassery.
I get it.
We're Americans.
We like branding, etc., etc.
But again, I'm extremely skeptical where that happens.
You got Patel coming in at the FBI. He said some good things.
You know, I loved when he said, let's take everybody out of that D.C. building, send them around the country, tell them that they're going to fight crime, and we'll turn that into a museum.
I've often posited a similar thing about the United Nations.
Get the U.S. out of the U.N., U.N. out of the U.S. We've got a nice building to make a nice museum in.
Where we can show all the evils of globalism and the failures of it.
Just an idea.
In reality, what happens in less than two weeks now?
We got an administration incoming in about a week and a half.
Hopefully, no assassination attempts or anything wild happens.
And you do have these people coming in.
Whether or not they're confirmed, who knows?
Whether or not they can get their agenda done, who knows?
What do you think is going to happen?
Yeah, so I don't know what's going to happen, but you're talking about some serious structural reforms that are necessary.
And I don't like to opine on things that I don't have first-hand experience with or expertise in, but there is an area that I do have first-hand experience with, and I believe some expertise.
I didn't want to get expertise in this area, but I had to develop it in the course of fighting this lawless administrative state.
And that is...
It relates to these inspectors generals.
So I didn't really think much about inspectors general before going to work for the government.
And even while I was in the government, I rarely encountered them.
But, you know, pretty much every federal bureaucracy, you have this what's called like an internal watchdog.
And what I've noticed, Jason, is that this is something that just doesn't work.
These internal watchdogs have been totally captured by the agency that they're supposed to check and balance.
What's kind of crazy is that the agencies that they're supposed to check and balance also pay their salaries, pay their pensions.
And so it's this farce that they're at all independent and objective.
And what I've noticed, and I talk about this in my book, is that these inspectors general, they must be disbanded.
And fortunately, Trump has a 10-point plan, dismantling the deep state, transferring power to the American people.
And on number six of that 10-point plan is addressing this problem of inspectors general.
It is a desperate, desperate problem.
I, for example, in chapter 23 of my book, I write about, you know, how there was a senior investigator in the DOD office of inspector general who was murdered on the premises of the DODIG. This is a secure facility.
He's murdered.
He's stuffed into the trunk of his car.
The Alexander Police Department.
They do an investigation to determine it's murdered.
And then what happens?
The DOD Office of Inspector General covers it up as a suicide.
And it's been covered up, Jason, to this day.
And so if you can have these Inspector General murdering their investigators and concealing it and covering it up as a suicide, don't you think they...
I mean, it's not unreasonable that they are just criminal enterprises.
Who are doing massive cover-up operations, and it allows these agencies, agency leadership, to steal from the American people, to line their pockets, to pay their buddies sweet federal contracts, and ensure that nobody's watching.
These Inspectors General are in on it, and they're criminal operations.
And this is a problem.
The United States Office of Special Counsel is another agency that I have firsthand experience with.
This agency is supposed to protect federal whistleblowers.
Well, the guy who was murdered and stuffed into the trunk of his car was whistleblowing to Congress.
And what did the U.S. Office of Special Counsel do?
Nothing, because they're part of the criminal cover-up operation.
So this is how bad it is.
I, Jason, didn't think it could be this bad.
Until I went to the Alexander Police Department.
I was like, here, I got this FOIA report.
The guy was reported as suicide.
You're saying it's homicide.
I'm writing my book, The Insider Threat.
Chapter 23, I need you to confirm or deny that this is an authentic report from your Alexander Police Department that determines that it was homicide.
What did they do?
They said, yes, it's an authentic report.
It was homicide.
But it's been covered up, Jason, to this day.
And so coming back to the big structural issue that you mentioned, inspectors general, that function must be transferred to the legislative branch.
Those personnel, those billets, that is the job of Congress under the United States Constitution.
Congress must check and balance the executive branch.
The executive branch cannot check and balance itself.
You know, it's a totally compromised operation.
And it's one of these emperors has no clothes issue.
It's so obvious the emperor has no clothes.
It's so obvious these IGs are just cover-up operations for the very agencies that pay their salaries.
It's like, come on, you know.
So on day one, I think that that is a critical, critical issue is to address this problem of IGs and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
We've got to take one last break.
When we come back, I want to hone in on the issue of censorship, big tech, government, media, collusion, and how we circumvent that obstacle or at least fight back against it.
Final segment of Making Sense of the Madness after this.
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And we are back.
So, during the COVID-1984 nightmare, I don't think it was ever more at least prevalent and people became more aware that there's a certain collusion between government agencies and big tech companies, media, and the narratives that are put out there.
Now...
I often talk about this as a plausible deniability circle, right?
Like when Zuckerberg's sitting there with Joe Rogan and he's like, well, we didn't get told to take anything down.
We said something was coming down the pipe and it looked like Russian disinformation.
So yeah, we decided to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Meanwhile, our own Department of Justice and Bill Barr had the thing for 10 months before and they all knew it was real.
And yet nobody mentioned that and we end up censoring it.
One of the most disturbing things that the Supreme Court has done in recent history, in my opinion, is stepped in on the Missouri versus Biden decision by the state Supreme Court, where they clearly said, hey, this is collusion.
The government's telling these social media companies what to do, and then they're doing it.
Now, I'm a dumb guy.
I didn't realize that when they stepped in and they said, oh, well, look at this and we're going to...
I was worried when they said, we're just going to suspend the ruling and we're going to decide.
But then I thought they actually had to rule on the case.
Instead, they pulled this no-standing nonsense again.
So this whole issue was still in limbo.
It was cut and dry to me.
The state Supreme Court seemed to get it.
And yet, we're still in that realm of censorship and collusion.
And let me take it one step further.
This is an article.
From three plus years ago now.
Exclusive inside the military secret undercover army.
I'm just going to read the first paragraph.
The latest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade.
Some 60,000 people now belong to a secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called Signature Reduction.
Now they later say that that's actually not the name of the program.
It's an art form.
That's what it's referred to as.
The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniform and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.
That's a large force.
They're acting domestically.
They've been around a decade plus.
You read that article, there's been no oversight.
I think we would be ignorant to think that they aren't in the most powerful consultancies and businesses like Google, like X, etc.
When you have a totally unaccountable government agency that's doing clandestine operations, by the way, they follow somebody there, and they have access to all of the DMV records, they can create people, they can take them away, they can modify things.
In fact, going into beyond the virtual environment, They show you some of the tools.
And when I saw this, I was just kind of taken aback.
That looks like a regular hand.
It's actually a DARPA-created Operation Silicon glove that these people wear that can have anybody's biometrics on it and, by the way, emit human oil.
Doesn't an agency like that need some type of oversight?
And isn't it a huge problem when you continue these plausible deniability circles with companies and governments so nobody is accountable?
Yeah, these are huge, important issues that you're raising, Jason.
I'm really glad that you're doing it.
It's a real public service, and thank you for that.
You know, one of the things, I mean, there's two big issues that trouble me.
I mean, there's more if I think about it, but there's two that really jump out.
You know, one is the amount of surveillance.
I mean, Americans don't want to live in a surveillance state.
I mean, that's what's happening.
And that's what happened during the Soviet Union in Russia, in the Soviet Union.
That's what's happening today in China.
It's like there's just something psychologically so unpleasant about just constantly having all of these watchers, you know, watching everybody.
It's, you know, the American people have what's called...
What the Greeks call us thymos.
And it's like a spiritedness.
And Alexis de Tocqueville talked about this a lot in some of his writings on early America, which was that part of our joie de vivre, we're about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
If we're living in a surveillance state, you can't be happy.
I mean, it's a horrific thing.
And so it's making us less and less American and more and more like our adversaries, more and more like our enemies.
That is actually part of the design of our enemies.
I mean, this is another hour-long conversation if you want to have it.
Well, I think it's the drive towards collectivism and modern-day globalism.
Absolutely.
You know, whether you want to call it the Great Reset or the New World Order or global governance, etc., whatever buzz term, that is the movement of narrative management and control, collectivism, and unfortunately, less choice, more surveillance, more control.
Correct.
First of all, there's so much evidence, for example, that America's enemies are behind this.
This evolution of our democracy, they've wanted to make us more like them for a very long time.
Because, you know, in essence, when America is a shining city on a hill, when we're a country of liberties, their people, you know, Russian people, Chinese people, Iranian people who want to live free, who want to live in a liberal democracy like we have, a classical liberal democracy, they're yearning to come to America.
They become an existential threat to their authoritarian leaders.
So the authoritarian leaders of those countries, for decades, they've been trying to make America more like them.
By doing this, we're essentially doing the work of our enemies for them, by making us more like them, so that we are actually a less attractive destination for their people, which is their intent.
This brings me to my second point, which is that...
The more you have these secret collaborations between government and the private sector and creating these secret armies that you mentioned, America's enemies, this is like giving them a gift on a silver platter.
Because the more sort of complexity and secrecy you can create, those are all open avenues through which you get Russian, Chinese, Iranian subversion of America.
Our expert.
I mean, their political culture is subversion.
America's an open democracy.
We've never been good at that.
If we wanted to subvert one of these countries, and we tried, we couldn't do it.
Because that's just not who our political culture is.
Theirs is.
I mean, Russians learned subversion of their mother's milk.
I mean, it's like you get guys like, you know, Putin coming out of the KGB. I mean, this guy, he lives and breathes this.
He's a creature of this.
You don't have Putin types in America.
I just think that these efforts that you're talking about here, which I think are super important, the concealment, the secrecy, if I was America's arch enemy, if I was Putin, if I was Xi Jinping, if I were the Ayatollahs in Tehran, I would be doing that.
I would be creating these secret armies, these secret collaborations between industry.
And our intelligence agencies, our law enforcement here, I'd be like, that's how we bring down America.
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