Michael Waller: Author of 'Big Intel' | Ep 222

Take a look behind the curtain with a real whistle blower, an American patriot prepared to embrace the uncomfortable truth. Because this program has no time for comforting lies. Here is civil liberties enthusiasts, Second Amendment defender and recovering FBI agent Kyle Seraphin. Hello my friends, and welcome to the Kyle Seraphin show. Today is Wednesday, it is January the 17th, and we've got

a very interesting show for you. Today we're going to be talking to Doctor J Michael Waller. He's a think tank analyst, he's a journalist, he's a man who has seen some very interesting things and a recent author of the book Big Intel. We'll be teasing that here in just a second, and we'll give you some links in the show descriptions where you can find that out. Before we get into our interview, which I think you will enjoy immensely.

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Check themoutagain@patriotcoolers.com and the promo code is Kyle. Kyle, Ladies and gentlemen, joining me for today's Kyle Seraphin show is J Michael Waller, who goes by Mike. Unless I'm very mistaken, that's what I. Always call you, so hopefully that's OK. And Mike Waller is the recent author of a book called Big Again, Tell how the CIA and the FBI went from Cold War heroes to Deep state villains. It's going to be released this week. You guys should be able to find it on Amazon.

We'll make sure that the links are in the description for you. Mike, thanks for joining me. Great to be here. All right, buddy, and I made you download a Google product, no less. It was, it's a terrible experience, but yeah, it's, it's better than visiting the local

field office. All right, so you're a security analyst, you work for a think tank in DC, but I also remember your previous Twitter bio said that you were like a one thousandth generation American. You guys basically put the soil in place in order for the American continent to to exist. What's the story there? How long has your family been in this in this area? Oh well, if you don't include the American Indian side, we need to. Include that we can't, we can't discount it this.

We're not trying to get cancelled today. I want to be diverse here and inclusive but but not equitable. So but but my first English settler side came over on the supply ship for the Mayflower, which really wasn't a supply ship at all. It was just a bunch more colonists coming in who didn't have supplies. So we were the next ship in in 1621. That goes back a long way. Yeah. And has your family always been, are you all E coasters? Has that always stayed there? Yeah.

And what part of the New England? There's some, there's the Southern Wallers were different. They were in a different group. So we invaded Ireland with Cromwell. They came over earlier. You say the Southern Wallers. I love that. I want to have factions of my family where I can do that. We're not that we haven't been here that long to do that. The Southern Wallers. All right, Mike, you, you have

an incredible life story. Your your book kind of I told people that it reads like a Clancy or a Ludlum novel. And if people are not spy novel fans, they don't know what I'm talking about. But will you kind of tell people, you know, where you came from, where you grew up? Obviously you've got deep roots in America. And then let's get into your story and, and how that came

into writing this book. Well, it's kind of almost like a Forrest Gump experience as opposed to a Clancy or a loved 1. And I sort of just was there at the time of things and I was just ended up being part of events and and, and, and even history. So it was kind of it was a neat experience where where I thankfully didn't get into Georgetown University.

I had been trained first and we came from a non political family, rural New England and patriotic Americans but completely non political and and my grandpa voted one party and my grandmother voted another party and we never knew till they passed away which party they were in. So it was that kind of a kind of a family. But when I was a teenager I got interested in the anti nuclear

energy movement. And this was in the mid to late 70s because I was concerned about the environment, what nature, what was going to happen to boiling water coming out of the cooling part of the reactor being dumped into the ocean and what was going to happen to the fish beds off the New England coast. So that was my concern and I was brought in to struggle sessions after a while.

These were professional agitators from California who came in to recruit high school kids who had been recruited by their teachers who were all, you know, anti Vietnam War activists and stuff. And and going through struggle sessions where they then berated me and wanted me to berate myself, which I wouldn't do that. How stupid it is to be for the environment when the real struggle is to fight American capitalism. Right. Yeah, of course.

How old are you at that? Time I was about. 15 That's really and and what about your peers? What kind of peers were in these struggle sessions? Or was it like a, you know, a gang scenario? It was it was a gang scenario. And then we were peeled off individually, OK, We were three, you know, older people from California. And when you're 15 years old, somebody's in their 30s or 40s, they seem really old. And these people were really intense. And I thought, no, just this is not for me.

These people are really bad people. So I sort of declared a personal war against this kind of subversive movement, recruiting kids, turning them into anti American radicals when they were joining for innocent purposes. What would the lifelong interest? Yeah, So you're anti nuclear. That seems like a thing that at least I don't know whether it makes sense now to you or not, but, you know, loving the environment's not a terrible

sort of virtue. And the Sierra Club and so on and so forth, they're not awful, at least by nature. And then they're trying to subvert this and turn it into an anti American sentiment that American capitalism is the actual problem. Right. Is that where people do it? Where the other kids in the area are like going like, Oh yeah, you're right.

There were, there were, they were not as many as they wanted to. And this was a neat thing because the at that time the the pro Soviet far left wasn't attracting young people very much. So they were they were really open about who they accepted into their movement. But for our purposes here, I was brought into a larger group of different high school kids from different parts of my state to go through training. So we didn't even know each other. I guess that's part of the the advantage.

If you don't know anybody, you don't have any kind of natural defenses maybe or or clicks or allies. Why do you think it wasn't successful? Because it seems like it's pretty successful now. If they wanted to push that, I think it would be very successful. There's something that must have changed in the in the interim. Well, they did succeed in that they they succeeded in shutting down construction of one nuclear reactor. It was supposed to be a dual

reactor. This is the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. So they they succeeded in, you know, to this day there's only one nuclear reactor. So New England is importing gas from Putin, trying to make it look like they're not, but they have been. They've got an offshore pipeline off Cape Cod where the ships dock, so they can't even be seen now.

And they used to dock right up in Boston Harbor, but after So you don't even see these Russian ships coming in to supply gas to mainly Massachusetts. So so now what's this? What 40 plus years later, the the the chief sources of energy in northern New England are oil, nuclear energy and wood. Right and. You get your sustainable energy green tax credits. Well, at least through 2023.

If you buy an iron stove that burns trees, you get the same tax credit you would get for buying solar panels because it's considered renewable energy. Makes sense to me and everything old is new again. The, the interesting, I guess piece to that is that you see these kind of like memes online and I, I always think that memes kind of say 1000 words. They, they, they put so much in one place and it's like people that are arguing against Russia, they're so awful.

That's why we got to do this thing. And at the end of the like the meme, they're buying Russian oil and gas and they fully put on the clown wig and the mask and the makeup and they've a clown themselves over and over again because all these things end up serving the exact thing that they claim that they're against. I wonder if that's on purpose or are people really just that ignorant? I can't really tell either. Well.

I don't know because you people like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts who was behind this deal with the Russians, you know, they shut down the both the Pilgrim reactors in Massachusetts. The reactors could have been renewed. They shut down the reactor in Vermont. They shut down the main Yankee reactors. So the only one left is Seabrook in northern New England and that's powering 3 states.

They didn't want to have hydro coming down from Quebec because that would involve cutting down trees to put in a power line. So they've they've really screwed themselves. People like Elizabeth Warren who are pushing for this on the side, let's buy gas from Putin kind of secretly at the same time she's out there lobbying Barack Obama. This was years ago to exonerate Soviet Atom bombs by Ethel Rosenberg. I'll be thinking what what, what kind of agenda are these people in?

If you averse of it for a long time, you can kind of figure it out, but it sounds strange to the average American. Well, we're looking at them. We know they're not dumb, although they appear that you know they're, they're happy to appear dumb or say things that are dumb that motivates a base. But then in the background, they're doing all these nefarious actions that look very calculated.

You have more exposure to these people than than most, at least dealing in Washington to see the way you do. Would you agree they're not dumb that there is at least some motivation or they're not just? Operating, they're not, they're not dumb. They're, they're, they're really sharp people. They, they, a lot of them know how to make a lot of money in office. They know how to pressure crazy agendas on the American public and how to, you know, they know what they're doing.

You, you, you cannot have somebody like Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who when he was a congressman, or now Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts when he was a congressional staffer helping communist insurgents in Latin America under President Reagan. And they have. It's not like it was a youthful stupidity or indiscretion. It was they have been on this for their entire political lives. They're pushing something. They know precisely what they're doing.

All right, so you've got a pretty good insight into this. Like you said, Forrest Gump was the other analogy, by the way. It's it's either Clancy, Ludlam or Forrest Gump who just touched all these interesting key points in history. When I first started perusing your book, that was what drew me in. I was like, whoa, what is this guy all about? He's been all these different things. He kind of has these crazy experiences that you'd think you had to plan it.

And then in reality, we know that it's just like you're more likely to just kind of accidentally Forrest Gump your way into it. Tracy Beans, my buddy was reading. She was like, I'm absolutely engrossed by this. I sent her over that sort of advanced comedy. So she would and she'll probably interview you as well. So let's give people this, you're 15, you're getting this anti nuclear energy situation.

You're you're running into commies from California doing struggle sessions and that kicks off your personal jihad, which I like that word. So we'll just use it real quickly. Tell people where that took you in the next couple years and how you ended up doing some of the wild things that you did, which are right in the first pages of the book. That'll hook people.

In So I ended up going to George Washington University, and this was in the late summer of 1980. So Jimmy Carter's President Reagan is on the verge of being brought in. He's going to start a nuclear war. He's going to, you know, destroy the world. There's all this terrible propaganda going on about Reagan. So I cast my absentee ballot for Reagan from my dorm, but I had to show my ID and apply in writing and explain to my town office why I needed to vote

absentee. But those were the old days when you needed those types of things. Yeah, well, we had some sort of basic. Common sense. Yeah. Yeah, So. So imagine being a freshman kid three blocks from the White House when Reagan is inaugurated president and his inaugural parade breaks up on your campus. I'd gone in as a congressional intern and my congressman was retiring. And he said, hey, you wouldn't do any good in my office because I'm retiring. Why don't you go intern in the Senate?

So he called up my US senator, Gordon Humphrey, and said, hey, if this kid from the state, would you like to have him in? And so, so boom, I'm in. And who's there 22 cubicles away from me? But this guy, very nice guy, but kind of quiet, always on the phone like this. In the fall of 1980, Morton Blackwell, who then disappears the day after Reagan's elected to join Reagan's transition team. And he becomes one of Reagan's main policy people. And his whole, he'd come up

through youth politics. So he said, hey, come on and join us. Come to this thing called CPAC, CPAC 81. How long Reagan was there, Bill Casey was there, and all these other people were there? Yeah. How long had it been going at that time? Was it relatively new? It was just a few years old. OK, yeah. And it wasn't anywhere near like it is. It's a hotel space and people come in and speak in the big rooms and there are hospitality suites. But you get to meet all of these people.

You could just, you know, meet the Reagan's and say hello to them and get your picture taken with them and all that. It was a really, really cool time. And so you're there as a kid and they say, say, what are you doing? And then who's there? Roy Cohn, lawyer, who would. He'd been, you know, Joe McCarthy's investigator in the 1950s.

And you had, you had all these old people from the OSS and, and, and legends from World War 2 and all these other folks and you'd get to meet them and just hang out with them. So it was being in that environment where you have all these opportunities come up and just stumble right into them.

Do you remember thinking that you were touching pieces of history that we're going to be written about and spoken about for 100 years at the time, Or what was your sense of the of the environment when you were walking through? No, it was cool because it was Reagan. It was, I mean, we were looking for girls and so we weren't, you know, and it was a good venue for that. But but Megan's a movie. Star too, and like we we forget

that. I think at least my generation does because he wasn't a movie star to me. But. He was, you know, California's governor, but he was also a movie star. That was like his big thing. And he was head of the Screen Actors Guild, and that was one of his experiences. He was a Liberal Democrat who was head of the Screen Actors Guild union. Then he testified before Congress about communists in Hollywood. This was in the in the 40s or 50s.

This was long, long ago. So he was on this back then. But you, you get to meet these people and some of them you're just a kid. So they don't know who you are and and so forth. And you don't know who they are. Like, I didn't know. I'd never heard of Roy Cohn when I met him. I just knew about him after the fact. So you just bump into these people without knowing who they are. This is my life right now too, by the way. I keep meeting people and they go, oh, this is so and so.

And I go, oh, it's really nice to meet you. And then I find out later I'm like, oh, that person some some national relevance. I probably should have known that beforehand. It's kind of fun. It's kind of fun to Forrest Gump through it. So as you're meeting these folks and you mentioned youth politics and obviously you're now involved in youth politics. You're, you're an intern, yes. But was that a driving force?

Did people look at it as a driving force to be able to move national politics and and the needle at least in the 1980s? Was that something that people were driven to? Yeah, yeah. They were very much so. And Reagan was really conscious of it because for him, groups like Young Americans for Freedom, which was his favorite youth group, and the College Republicans, were vital to his electoral victories in California.

They were active in supporting him, especially Young Americans for Freedom. In his 1976 presidential campaign. John was his favorite youth group. And this was back when John Wayne was signing direct mail letters for for Young Americans for Freedom, right? So you get the, I think was it Jimmy Doolittle or some of these other great World War 2 figures were signing direct mail for for this youth group.

This was right before I came on, but Reagan had had helped do fundraising for Young Americans for Freedom back then. So it was a great time to be in youth politics and we really didn't know where we were going to go. Some come into Washington with a big agenda. I want to be a senator someday. I want to be this and that. And those are your more often times cutthroat people with, let's say, fluid ethics. Yeah, morality. That's a bit flexible. Yeah, yeah.

And you could see it at the time, but then in hindsight, you can really, really, really see it. So other people just sort of went along and said let's just let's just do stuff. And that's sort of where I fell in. All right, So what comes up next? So let's see, you got into

student journalism. I wanted to go to Afghanistan because at that REF chapter at George Washington, we had a guy from Soldier Fortune magazine come in, Jim Coyne, straight from Afghanistan. And so so he said, you want to do journalism? He said, come on back to Afghanistan with me. And that's a great idea.

But at the same time, I was working now at the College Republican National Committee. I was with the Young Americans for Freedom national office, so I was doing President Reagan's national security portfolio for both youth groups. So who's at the White House? Morton Blackwell. Now he's with Conservative Outreach. He was the guy I'd worked with when I was a Senate intern. And then Faith Wittlesie, who was Reagan's ambassador to Switzerland, who was also very youth politics oriented.

And she said to me, look, you speak Spanish. You you go down to Central America, do your student journalism down there. OK, great. I want you to meet somebody. So. So she introduced me to Reagan's, one of his Central America guys on the National Security Council. It's ACIA, man. Constantine Mengez, they called him constant menace. Both his friends did for one reason and his enemies did for another.

Really great guy. And he said yeah, come on down, I'll get you set up with the Contras in Nicaragua. So these are the anti communist insurgents who were fighting the Marxist regime in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega even back then fighting him and went down there on my first trip. And then that started off my student journalism career.

But at the same time, Constantine, so this was the invasion of Grenada in 1983. When Reagan went in, cleaned out the communist government there, there'd been a coup. They overthrew and assassinated the Marxist Prime Minister. There were American Medical students on the island. So Reagan went in, took out the regime and came back with this trove of secret communist documents and treaties.

And everything Reagan had been saying about the Soviets taking over the hemisphere was proven true by these documents. This is. Is that urgent fury? Is that what I'm thinking? Operation Urgent Fury yeah, and they so they so and and the documents were most of them in English or or they were English versions of them captured because it's an English speaking government. So wow, here's something that Reagan CIA wanted to keep it all

secret. Of course, you know, what source and what method are you protecting in that way? But anyway, that was the idea. Michael Levine over at the working with the White House and the State Department and and and Constantine and others said, no, let's make it all public, which they did. It was fantastic. So Constantine said to me, hey, we're not we're not.

I want you to be on the on the watch for, for hard evidence of Soviet military equipment, any documentation, any Soviet involvement in Nicaragua and El Salvador. And they were collecting it obviously from the Ciai didn't

know what I was doing. He didn't tell me what he was putting me up to do. But I guess I ended up working to collect this kind of documentation and photographic evidence and material evidence of Soviet military support for the communists in the region and ended up being a back channel to CIA Director Casey. But he, I was getting this walking around money to do it. I didn't know where it was coming from. It was this old guy who'd been in the OSS who said, here, here's some walking around

money. He introduced me to, well, years, 30 years later, I found out he came out of CIA Director Casey's pocket and he was apparently funding a bunch of people like me out of his pocket so that he would never have to report to Congress that he was spending this money because it was his own private money. It wasn't appropriated money. Hold on, you got to say that again.

So the director of the CIA is taking money from his own pocket, his personal cash, and he's he's laundering it through former OSS guys that are retired that. Are his old buddies from the OSS because Casey had been in the

OSS? Sure. That are just in the world that are kind of operating and and he's personally running what we would call a hip pocket source, somebody who's not officially on the books and and they're just sending you off on these like official cover or non official cover journalists and things, but you don't even know what you're reporting. So, no, I had no idea. And and it was so Constantine at the White House, he'd said to me, hey, I want you to meet my friend Jim.

I was OK. I didn't ask questions. It's like a White House guy says, I need you to do something. I said, OK, cool. So Jim's this nice old guy and we had coffee or tea and, and we, he's telling me, you know, some World War Two stories. He'd been in the OSS. And I think, OK, well, it's really cool to be talking to somebody who was, you know, blowing up Nazis and everything and, and, and also thought the Communists were bad at the same time.

But I really didn't know. And then one day he said to me, this was late 83, and I was supposed to go out with the Contras in January 84 for the first time. He said, you're a Catholic, aren't you? I see I'm not a very good one. He says, well, look, go to the Saturday vigil Mass at 5:00 at Saint Matthew's Cathedral and sit in the back left set of the pews and just stay there until someone talks to you. I know what this was.

Is this really such a dangerous trip that I've got to, you know, yes, it would have been a good idea to be in in good standing with the Lord, you know, before going on a trip like that. But I really didn't know, but I thought, OK, I'll go. So I went and and you know, during Mass, I see further up ahead this stupid guy and I said it looks like little Casey and sure enough, it was him. So after Mass, he gets out and I thought, oh, I'm going to talk to him.

I'd met him at CPAC and I just shook hands with him and that was all. So. So he had no, you know, there was no connection other than that. And then this woman comes up to me and said, are you water? I said, yeah. She said stand here. OK. And then who shuffles up the aisle to leave? But Casey with his whole personal security detail that just materialized from these plain clothes people in the in the the the evil. And he shuffles over to me like,

Oh no, it's this. So really in a goofy stupid kid ways. Oh, nice to meet you, Mr. Director kind of thing. I didn't know. And he said Capitanoke. And I said what? Because he was famous for mumbling and said Capitanoke. And he shuffled away And then a man with him said to me, Capitan Luke, remember that name? And that was that. And so I didn't know. OK, fine.

It was weird. So then the next week I went out with the Contras and I'm stuck at the airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras with my friend and, and my I had hair then, you know, and I was skinny. So I looked kind of like one of these communist Marxist kids who got out. They were called Sandalistas to show solidarity with the with the Cuban backed movements. And so and we're getting a hard time getting through customs because we didn't know where we were staying. We didn't have any local

contacts or anything. We couldn't answer any of the questions. So I said full rank. I said in Spanish, said I need to speak with Capitan Luke, Captain Luke. And they looked around and went, what's that? So this later on this big fat officer comes out and I didn't recognize their Insignia. And I said Capitan Luke. And he said, oh, Capitan Luke, welcome, come on with me. And then he let us through.

Well, it was 30 years later, Bill Casey's son-in-law told me that I was Capitan Luke. That was my crypt in him that Bill Casey had given me in church. And, and it didn't make any damn sense because he gave you no context and you're out there. You just Forrest Gumped into it. He just mumbled it and then another guy said remember that name and I was OK. So when I said Capitan Luke, so

I, I didn't know for 30 years. So I was talking to Casey's son-in-law who was president or chairman of the board of the school, the grad school where I taught at the time, Institute of World Politics. And he listened to the story and he laughed. He says that was Bill. He was giving you your cryptonym. He said he always did that in church because he could never be forced to testify in Congress what he had said to anybody in church. So I didn't exist on any books.

So you're paid out of his pocket. He's given you, he's given you a pseudonym to go work underneath. And and this is your secret identity as you go down there that you didn't even know is your secret identity accidentally say that. So OK, So what do these guys do? They they took you in. They said, oh, you're good to go now you're Captain Luke. They just left and then they, they, they, we had, you know, a twin cab pickup full of Contras out there waiting for us and we just took off.

I had no idea. All right, so and, and your your cover is essentially that you're doing photojournalism. Is that what they? Student journalism. So the thing back then was to, to was for, for conservative students to have their own newspapers, because most college newspapers then, as now were lefty.

And, and so we set up our own 1. And unlike, say, the Dartmouth Review, which Dinesh D'souza founded or, or, or, you know, the more polite, that review wasn't erudite, but it was sophisticated and it was clever and it was informative. We were just out there to attack and to expose Marxists and infiltrate Marxist groups for fun and disrupt them and expose all their paperwork and their members and this kind of stuff. I would call a shit disturber. You guys are just poking the

bear. Yeah, yeah. And really, if if we had had social media, then we would have been shit posters. I love it. Yeah. So as opposed to the Dinesh was the more sophisticated guy and his his people ended up going to the Wall Street Journal and other places. And my guys sort of just sort of dispersed. Some of them actually went places. But I don't want to expose them and discredit. Don't. Expose anybody that's great. So student journalism and and then are you trying to do

original reporting down there? Was that the goal, I mean? Yeah, original reporting. And do what I was going to do had I gone to Afghanistan. And this was when, when Afghanistan was occupied by the Soviet Union, we were going out with Ahmad Shah Masood's forces to who? Who was always on the good guy side. He was not a jihadist ever. He was. He was assassinated by al Qaeda right before 911.

And then and then we went in. But he and I, I had met Masood but not in Afghanistan, but never made it to Afghanistan until much later. All right, so as Captain Luca, you're doing your reporting, you come back to the United States. Where are we going with this? Where does it keep going? Oh, so then I started writing for for, you know, real publications and then and then got involved with some, some think tanks where I was pretty much free to do as I wanted.

It was. So it was a lot of fun and it was stuff, again, mostly in the Western Hemisphere, any place that was Resistance. Yeah. All around Central America, Columbia got Chile. This is what Pinochet was running Chile. And it was, it was a really remarkable time to be a kid then. But it was also at the time the Soviet active measures were at their peak. And Reagan was battling Soviet active measures and exposing them in public really for practically the first time in a

systematic way. And so he had a whole apparatus within the White House and the State Department and interagency to be exposing Soviet covert influence campaigns against the United States and against the West in general. I got I was part of that because, lo and behold, through College Republicans, the daughter of the House Intelligence Committee staffer who was doing this, who then went into the Reagan administration to run it, she was working with me at College Republicans.

And then we became friends and she said, hey, you should meet my dad. And then I got connected in with this whole office to counter Soviet active measures. And it was a great office because the guy running it heard Romerstein himself had been a Communist Party member when he was a kid in the 1950s, and he had defected in place to the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.

Then he became a staffer there. So he was involved in the breakup of the Communist Party USA, the breakup of the Ku Klux Klan, a whole bunch of other, you know, anti subversive stuff. And so he took me under his wing and then brought me into a whole new universe of people. Let's talk about active measures just a little bit for people's kind of background.

I know a lot of people probably heard the terms you kind of touched on what it is, but can you talk about some of the, the techniques that were being used and, you know, end goals and, and, and who was implementing them at least in the United? States sure well the the Soviet Communist Party so it wasn't the Soviet government, but it was the ruling party itself that had this apparatus for active measures. So active measures is a Soviet term.

So it's an English translation, like the word disinformation is an English translation of a K GB term disinformancia. And active measures was was any it was a spectrum of covert activities ranging from planting false stories as disinformation to recruiting journalists or politicians or businessmen or any influencers, all the way up to supporting insurgencies and assassinations and terrorism. So it's that whole active

measures spectrum. And that was the Soviets most effective weapon against us, put us on the strategic defensive even before the nuclear age. But during the nuclear age, it was really handy because the Soviets could fight us without ever escalating up to a nuclear threshold of strategic nuclear war. And how successful? What's the crowning kind of achievements of these active measures, if we can pin them down? On some specific ones, shutting down the American nuclear power

industry was one of them. So this is where it really when I really learned this. Now I'm in my late teens, early 20s, learning about Soviet active measures and thinking, wait a minute, I was a dupe in a Soviet active measures campaign to shut down the American nuclear industry. Interesting. Which was part of shutting down the American strategic weapons production because the plutonium being produced for our warheads was coming from the nuclear waste of nuclear power plants. Interesting.

So when you realize, whoa, you were right in the middle of it, you didn't even know. And then to see it now at the national strategic level was astonishing. So they they got us to shut down our nuclear power industry effectively. They stopped, they got President Carter to stop strategic modernization for the most part. They got the United States to not deploy the enhanced radiation warhead in Europe to defeat a Soviet armor attack on

NATO. A lot of a lot of nuclear weapons production and modernization and arms control issues were were exploited by Soviet active measures campaigns, and those campaigns succeeded as the Soviets were modernizing. Their goal was to keep us from modernizing, keep the Brits from modernizing. And there is. Reagan exposed a lot of that, and he was able to force a lot through.

But they're, they're using basically Americans compassion and sensibilities towards their fellow man and sort of good nature and kind of weaponizing it in order to sort of subvert the ability of the of the national security apparatus to do the thing that it's supposed to do, which is allow people to be compassionate but keep them safe 1st and. Right. And there were people in the national security apparatus who were wittingly or unwittingly part of it. We don't have good laws to

defend ourselves from this. We've got the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is from the 1930s, and it's a slap on the wrist and it's it's not that effective. But we don't have good counterintelligence laws. We have counter espionage laws against spying, but we don't have good counterintelligence laws against acting as an intelligence operative for enemy power.

So they get away with it. Yeah, it's really worth pointing that out to my to my audience because I think we I've talked about this a little bit, but it's it's very strange to learn that people are doing things that are against United States interest. That would obviously be be antithetical to the way that we would want them to behave, whether they be government actors or non government actors. And yet they're not breaking any laws.

They're doing things that we would sort of all agree are not good for America and they're not good for even themselves maybe. And yet we can't stop them. That's sort of why freedom and liberty is dangerous, I guess, is that we have a lot of open door policies that you wouldn't have if we had an autocracy or if we had a a truly tyrannical police state, which we seem to

be trending towards. Yeah. And some believe that having that type of police state is really a good thing for America because it protects US against these types of adversaries. So they want to have, you know, the equivalent of Britain's Official Secrets Act. Oh, well, Britain's a democracy. Well, it's not a Republic. It has, it has a chief of state and commander in chief who is ordained by God to be in that position.

Really, really, we really believe that, you know, it's nice and quaint in in an American point of view, but it's very important in a British point of view to have a monarchy. But it's not the same thing. And that same person is Canada's commander in chief and Australia's commander in And so when we import ideas and systems from countries that don't have our fundamental founding principles, that becomes a danger to us. You know, we keep, we keep coming back to this like

democracy versus Republic thing. And and for whatever reason, the political left continues to push the idea of democracy. Do you have a do you have an instinct on what that end goal looks like? Why that that terminology push continues to happen? Well, as as our founders knew, if you have pure democracy, you will have tyranny. You'll have mob rule and mob rule through elites who are ensconced, and then they're able to mobilize the mobs. That's if you have pure democracy.

So if you have a Republic that is democratically elected, then you have these checks and balances in a federal system. So now it's a Federal Republic. So you can't have a centralized elite take over ideally, yeah. You can't have a powerful centralized government with few checks and balances, ideally. And you have the individual states having a lot of power ideally. OK, I'm, I'm putting something

together in my head here. You talked about Russians using some of our compassion against the nuclear program keeps us from doing the things that are best for US. One of the things that I always here argued against the institutions that exist in the American Republic, the way that our constitutional Republic is structured, things like the Electoral College, the argument is that it's elitist.

It's old fashioned and elitist. And the thing what you just said a second ago was that when you have mob rule, true democracy 50% + 1, the elites can actually run that much more effectively because they can run the mobs. So they're, they're selling this agenda of democratic type rule. And yet you're saying that it's in fact the opposite. The arguments are almost turned on their head. It's kind of an interesting

little subversion. Yeah, And you, this is entirely consistent with the ideology of somebody like Barack Obama, where if you have that 50% + 1, that's considered a mandate for you to do as you want. So when he was elected, he came in with all these executive orders to fundamentally transform our entire government and our society overall. He had these executive orders prewritten. So executive orders are legal, they're constitutional.

They're the president's missives to different government agencies or bureaucracies to do whatever, you know, the president deems needs to be done. And a lot of these executive orders remain in force from president to president. And sometimes they're changed and sometimes they're kept intact. So Obama came in with the whole with these executive orders pre written because he had his very narrow mandate, you know what, a 1 1/2% popular vote majority, but a very large electoral vote majority.

So the Electoral College was fine with him because it showed a massive, massive mandate for what he was going to do in terms of electoral votes. But in a pure democracy, he would have had almost no mandate at all. But this is consistent with the critical theorists and the the the Marxist scholars like like Herbert Marcusa, who Obama was a big fan of. Marcusa was a. One of The Pioneers of critical theory, critical sex theory, critical legal theory, critical race theory and so forth, it's

permeated our society. Yeah, so his, his his doctrine. He had many doctrines, but one of repressive tolerance was to tolerate up to a certain point and then shut off your tolerance and then have that 50% + 1 majority to impose your will as a democratic mandate. What does that look like in practice? The the tolerance to a certain point? Can you give an example?

Free speech up to a certain point, and then it becomes insensitive, then it becomes dangerous, then it becomes terroristic, disruptive of society, hurtful. So that's the move from political correctness, which I remember when I was a kid being sort of the argument, to now there's hate speech, and hate speech is not just immoral, it's potentially illegal if we can make it so kind of thing. Right, right. So you start, you start now.

Now Google just the other day came out with a a policy on, on insensitivity. They're going to have some sort of insensitivity index in case that there's something, somebody says something during a time of political or cultural or social attention, they're going to shut things down. This was their big event release that they just did. Yeah, it was called significant event or something to that

effect. I. Remember seeing right, Yeah. So back in the in the say in the Vietnam War period, in the in the 70s and the Cultural Revolution that was taking place in America, free speech was taken to its extreme by the far left because it was to their benefit at that time. They were there were words people didn't say. There were, you know, you didn't talk about sex or you didn't talk about, you know, bodily functions or other things in public.

You didn't have, you know, George Carlin's famous words, you know, could not be said on TV, but they really weren't tolerated anywhere except among friends or certain types of groups. So in the name of, of complete freedom of speech, all those, all that social self-control that we had as a civil society was thrown out the window. And and then they issued their own types of censorship, like hate speech, as you've just said, and.

What do you think that what do you think the motivating goal is by by throwing those social norms out? Well, it's part of it's part of what the, the, if you go look at say, the Frankfurt School of Thought, which was created by the Soviets aimed at Weimar Germany to tear apart Germany after World War One, tear out the political center of the country so that the communists would come in and take over the institutions. It didn't work as Hitler beat them to the punch. So what did they do?

They came here and they set up, they set up their doctrines here at Columbia University and elsewhere at a teacher's college to go populate the different schools, to teach the teachers and indoctrinate them. And to tear us apart in society.

To take away our beliefs in family, our belief in church, our belief in God, our belief in society, our belief in American founding principles, and just, you know, regular human decency, hard work from the character right, to tear it all apart and make us relentlessly question everything we say and everything we do. And then to start censoring people who try to recover that, or to try to stop this calculated destruction from taking place.

The first you, you've written several books, correct? I know this is your first book we're talking about. You wrote one about the KGB. Did you write some previous books as well that I'm I'm not aware of? My doctoral dissertation was on the KGB and its successors under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and that was a really cool experience because I got to go to Moscow during the Soviet collapse.

Another Forrest Gump experience being Imagine being in the Kremlin the day Boris Yeltsin secedes from the Soviet Union and declares the Soviet Union is abolished. It was just a neat thing there. So what do you do? So as a doctoral student, well, I came right back the next month, and I started working with these activists and journalists and others. They had sacked KGB offices and were going through all these documents. And by that time I'd studied a little Russian, but it wasn't

any good. And so they were just showing me what was there. So I was bringing bags of documents back to the US to be translated, and this was KGB internal documents and internal party documents. And one journalist I worked with got into Gorbachev's vault, where all of the Soviet Communist Party leadership's archives were, and she was there for days and days and days with photocopiers and bags hauling out documents. She wrote a whole book based on this and provided me a lot of

the materials herself. So this was a really neat time to be there. But I got to meet the exact KGB generals who were running Soviet active measures campaigns against the United States. And how open were they with you? At that time they were remarkably open because, you know, in a weird sense, the KGB foreign intelligence officers were among the most liberal in quotes in the Soviet Union because they knew how messed up the USSR really was in relation

to the rest of the world. But they, they knew the truth and they thought, if we can save the Soviet system, let's do it through glasnost and perestroika with Gorbachev and let's have some sort of, of, of relations with the West. But by this time, they didn't know what was happening and what their future would be. So there were a series of conferences in Moscow that, that were run by former Soviet human rights activists and journalists and others.

And so, and they would have these KGB officers come in with victims and they would talk and, and it was sort of like a, like a big a, a meeting almost. It was a really cool time to be there. People airing grievances. People were explaining what had happened and you know, this is what you were a victim of, kind of deal. Is that what we're kind of hearing? Yeah, yeah. And it was inconsistent. So some were some of the the KGB people were very defensive or

defiant about what they did. But there were others who, who, who if they knew that you weren't a dupe and that you kind of knew what you were talking about, they would you could have a good conversation with them and come to an understanding. Some of them because they still have the Russia post Soviet Russia kept the old Soviet secrecy laws.

Got it. And, and some of these guys, these cage even were angling for partnerships with Western companies and economic opportunities because they were still just getting their Soviet salaries and rubles at the time. So at the time you could you could buy whatever you wanted to. Interesting also and. Then figure out what was true in the Yeah.

Sure. It sounds like though, what you're saying is that the the the people that were most educated upon what was happening in the West, that were doing the active measures that were working against the West also were getting radicalized in their own right based on how much better the West was and what they were trying to defeat actually looked like a better outcome from what than what they were living in. Yeah, yeah. One of them was a very famous KGB general, Oleg Kalugin, who

lives in Maryland now. He, he did not defect to the United States, but he was, he was an advisor to Yeltsin. He stood on the tank with Yeltsin in front of the Russian parliament building in 1991. And then, and then he thought, wait, no, this is Yeltsin's day. Everybody else off the tank and just have Yeltsin stand up there as the hero against the communist machine. So it was General Kalugin who knew and who understood it. He knew all about activism.

He ran tons of operations against the United States. He even paid a very famous journalist who taught other journalists to. He was the bagman, the KGB bagman to pay this guy. Very interesting. So. So he, yeah, it's a very. And he'd been doing that since the 1950s. So his knowledge of America was very, very intimate. Your, your new book is called Big Intel. It's talking about sort of the woke tip.

You talked about executive orders and the missives and sort of the, the agenda that Barack Obama came into the country with. We're also seeing it kind of tied in right now. I think the Twitter Files and some of the other interesting sort of reveals of the, the, the private Intel industry, which seems to have an awful lot of folks from the government start, you know, either former government or current government that are on a different salary.

Can we talk about the swing, the way that intelligence has moved? They were heroes. We talked about it. And I think we've we sort of knew the American way of life was superior. Even the Soviets knew it. And then somehow they're the villain today. There's got to be some kind of a changeover. Where where did that happen? Well, they were always a villain to somebody. So it's a question of, you know,

whose villain are they? So if you look at the, the start of the FBI and, and this even before he was in the FBI, this, this Edgar Hoover, this this young lawyer, he was in his 20s when he was running the Justice Department unit to round up communists and deport them to Russia. He, he, he had, he grew up on Capitol Hill. He worked in the Library of Congress. That's how he knew how, you know, the early 20th century version of databases worked. That's how he knew how

Washington worked. But his main job, and then when he took over the Bureau of Investigation, it wasn't as a lawman to fight crime. It was to hunt down communists and anarchists. And the, the law wasn't a really good tool for him. But he, he did what he could. He didn't have, he was winging it as he went along. And when you're in, when you're running the Bureau for almost half a century, you're going to make a ton of mistakes.

But when you think about the few laws that that that reigned in, who were and the immense power that he had, he was really restrained in comparison to today's FBI. That is, that is a profoundly, probably upsetting statement for most people who are looking at today's FBI and thinking where it is. And they go, well, think about

the big abuses. And we can go back to the Palmer Raids. We can go back to McCarthy and we can go back to all the different, you know, we had guys that were in the civil rights movement trying to tell Martin Luther King Junior that we've got stuff on you and you better do the right thing and kill yourself. And we think, man, that's super abusive. And, and the statement you just made is that they're way worse today. And that Hoover was pretty

restrained. Let's let's keep fleshing that out because just let people kind of have that digested moment. And, and it's intense. That's an intense claim. And I don't think you're necessarily wrong. I think the powers just in and of themselves kind of tell us that too. So some of it's technology. Yeah, Can you imagine if Hoover had the technology that Chris

Ray has? Well, that's the thing we talk about often times that people, you know, the Soviets too, if they had the ability to do what some of these data companies could do, change things, manipulate people's perceptions without them ever even knowing that they're being manipulated. You know, that's the Soviet wet dream is being able to send information and and curate what it is true and what's false.

People, I think knew they were being lied to in the Soviet Union, at least the people that were paying attention. That's sort of the instinct we have. And that seems to be what you just said about the least the KGB guys that were trying to do the those operations, They weren't. Fooled. Well, everybody in the Soviet Union knew they were being lied to, and they would lie to each other and then they would know how to read through the lies. Sure.

And I've talked to, so I talked to Matt Taibbi about this a little bit. But on Dinesh's podcast and, and when we were talking about it, he said, yeah, there was sort of this, this atmosphere of people saying words, but none of them had any meaning because that's just the thing you did. If you were silent in public, you looked ridiculous. So you're just talking about inane.

You're, you're tweeting. And we, we kind of saw this kind of interesting little amusement of a it's like it's just birds making noise. If the birds stop making noise, that's usually when something really scary is about to happen. And he said that was always the Soviet There was always people talking, but nobody was saying anything because you didn't want to. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Yeah. You, you talk about your beet rations or something.

And and that would, that had special meaning. It was called esoteric communication. But it's funny you brought up Matt Taibbi, because I've never met him, but I followed him since I was in Moscow during the Soviet collapse. He was with this sort of counterculture or underground paper called the Exile. And I really liked it. And I followed it because he was just going after the KGB like crazy. And there were very, very few American journalists who were

doing that. So I was not in the, I was doing academic work back then, but I, but I followed him and never got to meet him. And then he resurfaced online and I thought, wait, I've heard of this guy. I've met him. And then boom, he comes out and exposes with with Mike Shellenberger that the the Twitter Files and and so he has just stuck with his principles on going after big government, just from a very different

perspective. Yeah, I mean, he's an interesting guy because I think he's more like the classical liberal left. We don't agree on probably everything. I don't know what we don't disagree on though. Like we haven't really kind of compared notes and saying, oh, this is where I think you're wrong. But he's he's kind of like a he's an athlete and he comes from an American position of, of liking what this country is about. And the disagreement is like, how do you make it better?

I think that used to be the old left versus right, at least when I was a kid. That's what people were trying to figure out. Like how, OK, we kind of agree that America is a great place, but we want to make it better and it different parties were abusing it. But that's not what's going on right now. That's not what we're seeing in this country. We haven't even agreed on the moral basis.

And it sounds like some of that was actually subverted through Soviet techniques and Frankfurt School and so on. And then it made its way into the Intel community, which is really from hunting commies to basically hunting people that disagree with commies. We've done a a whole flip. There had to have been some kind of major infiltration. Do you have a sense of what it looked like to to make that happen? Well, there was but, but when you think of it, American counterintelligence was never

very good. They'll be very sad to hear you say that, but I'm I'm OK with that. It's terrible. I mean, there was only one. So, so I had the sort of the, I was the only, you know, person to be in KGB headquarters after the Soviet collapse at Lubyanka. And then going around just with ransacked documents and talking one-on-one with all these people who were involved both inside and outside the KGB and in the party and then victims and everything else. And only one person from the FBI

wanted to know more. And he took me out. We became friendly. He was kind of a strange guy. So we weren't pals, but I went to his house a bunch of times. His wife cooked me dinner. I got to know him pretty well. And he wanted to know everything he possibly could. And then one day he was arrested. It was Robert Hanson. So Robert Hanson was the only FBI person interested in in the my findings on the KGB.

And then another time I got some material on in Arabic, and I knew it was some extremist stuff, but I couldn't read Arabic. I didn't know, but I knew the source. So I gave it to a friend of mine whose wife was an FBI agent who was born in Lebanon and she spoke native Arabic. And I was with him when he gave it to her and she just kind of dismissed it.

And I thought that's really unprofessional for an FBI agent to just dismiss, be so dismissive of something and not even ask where it came from or not we want to know more or anything. So, so I, I mentioned her to, to, to the FBI, said, hey, there's a problem. You got a professional issue here. Well, turned out she was an alleged spy for Hezbollah and I reported her to Hanson. So I've, I've, I've seen some of these little snippets as I was scrolling through your book.

I, I, I didn't get to like sit down and and page through everything one at a time. I did a lot of kind of like touching the waypoints on which is that's the only way that you can see this, that I knew that was the setup. So I had to cover my face because it's. No. That the the guy who was interested in the KGB was the guy who was getting his paycheck

from the KGB. There's just, you can't make this stuff up. And so the idea that the FBI has always been kind of bad at it, like I said, it will hurt the feelings of people that I worked with who thought they were great. And there are, there are former agents that worked in CI that would consider themselves, you know, kind of spook like. And they didn't want to be criminal investigators. They wanted to be Intel people.

But they're not trained. For it, and they don't have the background in it. And even though they're getting a little better about sending people to farm and and sending people to Langley, it's just not the FBI. It's not built for that because it's theoretically still has a law enforcement. It's both a shackle and a weapon. And I think we've seen it move towards more of a weapon lately. Only because they're willing to come after us internally. Yeah. We're trying to deal with that now.

The comment I said before about the FBI being really poor about counterintelligence, historically, it's not against the FBI counterintelligence agents. It's it's the way the FBI is set up. Yep. It was never set up to be, to run deep dive strategic offensive counterintelligence operations to disrupt the adversaries foreign intelligence services against us. We don't have a capability for that. The CIA doesn't do it.

The FBI has. A counterintelligence entity should do it. In fact, President George W Bush tried when he set up the foreign counterintelligence executive it it didn't. It didn't stay. Why? Because they put FBI agents in charge of it, right. Or just one more bureaucracy. So, so it, it was, it was really sad. So, yeah, you'll have, you'll have some good.

Most of the penetrations or most of the cases that we see that that are made known to the public are not like really good counterintelligence work being done. I'm sure some is, Most of it is walk insurance or most of it is, is provided by foreign countries that rely on that, that provide this to us. So some of the best cases against the Soviets and even against the Russians were walk insurance. Yeah, you want.

To define what that is for folks who don't know what a walk in is. So, so it's a, it's a, in this case, it's a foreign intelligence officer or agent who turns himself in to the FBI or wants some defects to the United States and turn against the other side. So there were some really vital ones, you know, KGB major Stanislav Levchenko being one of them.

My former professor, Vladislav Bittman, who was with the Czechoslovak Secret Service, who was the pioneer of, of teaching the discipline of studying and countering disinformation in the United States, which none of the so-called disinformation experts you see have ever probably even heard of the guy, let alone studied under him. He was a brilliant, wonderful man. But these were walkins who

volunteered. So it wasn't like they were being worked as an op by the FBI or the CIA to, to have them come over. Some of that might have happened, but basically it that's if. If it has, it hasn't been public. It seems that most of what the FBI has been able to do even recently, we see them, they're basically like spamming and, and giving people, you know, direct advertising on social media saying, hey, like, go put something in Russia.

And there's a, there's a certain amount of money associated with coming over here. But you know, the, the, the words I remember someone saying is like, if anybody is willing to step over from, from a Russian intelligence service, if you're going to get, you know, people from the Gru or whatever, they're going to come over. It's a 7 figure amount of money that the United States government is willing to go.

And they're going to, because these people are going to have to relocate their entire life and going to try to make it worth their while. But that's not how you recruit

people. And the other big problem that they have is if you're talking about people that are essentially law enforcement officers that have this mandate under their, their actual job code, the 1811 criminal investigator and, and all the training at, at Quantico is based on you're going to go find crimes and we're going to go find out who did them. That's the theory of what the FBI is, which goes back to that route.

They were going after commies, but probably ineffectively, even if that's what he was interested in. And they they basically got their funding and they got their money and their and their ability to operate going after Interstate crimes where there was a problem with local law enforcement unable to proceed. Pursue people across

jurisdiction. I always tell people, if you want to know why the FBI doesn't make any sense, because it's got a mission set that has nothing to do with why it was created. And you have this expectation they're going to go after Bonnie and Clyde and the Dillinger Gang. And so do people who join the FBI, it turns out. And and then they're like, no, no, no, no. You're going to be like looking for cyber actors from, you know, North Korea and you're like, how do we do?

What laws do we have to affect? And they're like, oh, none, none, none at all. You can't do it. And. It's just this mission creep where the FBI performs all these valuable functions that our country needs, but how well is it doing it? You get state police, local cops, They're doing a great job busting people. The FBI comes in to help and then delays everything for a long time and then gets all the credit and then gets more money from Congress for the great job

it's doing. You're literally describing Steve Friends talking points here, so I love that. Let me let me tell you something that I thought when I was there doing counterintelligence. You tell me how this analogy works from a lot of time looking at this. I forgot you were a counterintelligence, but I said how bad it sucked. Well, it was, it's totally, it's awful. It was one of the worst things I've ever done in my professional career.

I spent two years basically hating what I was doing and thinking, I, I remember having a discussion with my boss. This is very candid. And I said, she goes, you know, where do you think you're going to be in five years with this agency, which they love to know, do you want to be a manager? Can we groom you into this garbage, whatever else? And she said, where are you going to be in five years? Where do you see yourself and how you're going to get there?

And I said, well, it's January and if I'm still working the squad by June, I'm not going to be working for the FBI anymore. So that's where I see myself in the next 6 months. I don't have five years of, of foresight because I can't even do this for another six months. I've got to get out of here. I can't do this work. And, and the, and the way that I'd come up with it because I'm always looking for analogies. The, the, let's say that the, the law enforcement apparatus is

a hammer, right? Bad guy pops up, smash it. That's what we're, that's the job. And counterintelligence is a much more sort of sophisticated move. And so it's more like a screwdriver. You know, you've got to basically turn it, turn it, turn it, turn it, turn it, and eventually you get home where it needs to be and it keeps two things together. And the FBI, as it currently stands, is a hammer with a screwdriver welded on top of it.

So it is the most awkward screwdriver to use because it's got all the way to the weird, clunky law enforcement thing behind it. And it's also kind of a crappy law enforcement agency because as you try to swing it, you've got this thing that's thrown off the balance and you can't get too close to the wall because there's this thing sticking out the end of it. So it's doing two things pretty ineffectively because of the, you know, because it's trying to

do 2 missions with one tool. What do you think about that as an analogy? Yeah, yeah. It was set up as a well, have you seen the founding memo of the FBI? No, I don't think it's like a half page memo, which it's like a stream of consciousness from a turn an attorney general named Bonaparte. He was related to Napoleon and this was because you there were of the anarchist violence and other things and it referred to special agents. We need special agents for this

and that. So that is what the FBI considers its founding document, meaning a memo, poorly written memo from an attorney general from 19 O 8. So the FBI wasn't even created by law. There's no law establishing the FBI. Now they've, they've been since moved underneath the DOJ, which was done by some, some move that Congress I think signed off on. So there's that. Yeah, well, it was part of the DOJ from the beginning, but it had a different status within

the DOJ, but. What you're saying is that basically the foundation of it is that under considered executive order, Attorney general mandate? What does that? Play a general memo and this is this is the FBI on its own website describing its own history, saying that this is our founding document. Which is weird by the way, because if you've ever seen and I've made this argument, I said if you ever find a woman who lies to you about her birthday, what else was she lied to you

about? And her age? The FBI lies about it's age to me because it became the FBI in 19341935. I can't remember where it officially crosses over, but it was called the Bureau of Investigation. The the Air Force used to be called the Army Air Corps. They don't claim the birthday is when the Army created the Army Air Corps. They became the when they became ADOD entity underneath the United States Air Force. That's their birthday. It's 1947. I should I should remember that

better. But I think it's in September of 47. But that's their birthday. That's the real birthday. The FBI really started in 1935, but they claim a different birthday because it's I don't know, is it sexier? They got more time on the on the earth, but. It's well, this is they're, they're, they are so they hate J Edgar Hoover, right? I mean, they're really embarrassed about him. They want to take his name off headquarters, but. Well, there's hey guys, I, I literally, this is very just

personal and funny. I, I went to a, a retired agent and I'm, and he's working in law enforcement now with a bunch of real cops, you know, doing real cop work stuff. He's a sheriff and he may even see this, which will be funny. He's got a picture of Hoover on his wall. And I, I, I'm interviewing with his guys and I'm chatting with him. And I said, isn't it funny that he's got a picture of that famous tranny up on his wall? And they said, what are you talking about?

And, and they said who who I said Hoover, I said Hoover was famous for cross dressing and bunch of, you know, sort of alternative sexuality. And they said, is that real? And go, Oh yeah, it's real. So they they they were, they were loving it because they they wanted to make fun of him for being a Bureau guy, because local law enforcement always guns to give the Bureau a little bit of a hard time. That's sort of natural rivalry state and fed.

So they go in and they go, what's up with that tranny you got on the wall there, man? And he's like, oh, it's, you know, unconfirmed rumors. The OG guys love the Hoover era because they were taught by the Hoover guys. But at some point in the last 20 years, yes, I agree with you. Now they've kind of, they want to divorce themselves from it, even though he was kind of like the original, you know, he was the original alternative guy in government who wanted.

The he was the G man, you know, he was the always gets his man. He was upright. And really he was the most, one of the most popular figures in America for years, one of the most trusted figures in America for years. So even up until the late 60s, just just before he died in the early 70s, he still had the support of 2/3 of the population. Selling your own legend? Try to. Yeah, exactly.

So So the whole legend of the FBI being born in 19 O 8, it's just a modern day continuation of Hoover's fiction. And even Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation but still wasn't Federal Bureau until you said FDR brought it in

sometime in the 30s. And, and you think that even in all that gangsterism, which is kind of the way you have to look at it, the way that he had files on people, the way that he used the authorities and he was stretching what he was allowed to do versus what he was legally, you know, supposed to be doing, even that was constrained. I think that, like I said, that nugget is going to bother me now that it was constrained compared to what's going on today.

Yeah, so, so think of, you know, the Banona intercepts. This was the Army Signal Corps had had broken the Soviet code during World War 2. And so while we were focused on fighting the Nazis, the Army Signal Corps was revealing, hey, the Soviets are doing this nasty stuff to us because they have an end state after World War 2 or after the war, as they called it, that goes beyond just defeating the Nazis. They're coming after us. And so they were able to.

This was a foreign intelligence mission to break the Soviet code. But Hoover knew about parts of it. OK, but he could never use what those intercepts said about Americans working for the Soviets, had their names, their positions within various parts of the government and wherever else. This was sort of like a earlier day version of NSA monitoring and and FISA 7O2 and all of that. But there was no law preventing Hoover from exploiting that intelligence. He just didn't exploit that

intelligence. He never even told the president about it because he knew the President Roosevelt was surrounded by Soviet agents, the code to the Soviet agents. Why do why do we think he didn't use that in a a weaponized way or or go after some of these folks like what was the the

restraining principle? So Hoover got, Hoover was was generally lean Republican, but he would work for whatever president wanted him to. So he did spy work for President Warren Harding to spy on political opponents. He did spy work for FDR to spy on political opponents and even political allies. And he he even monitored Eleanor Roosevelt's appointment secretary. And when she found out, she got really angry and she said the FBI is a Gestapo. Interesting.

And, and Truman, he Truman and Eisenhower didn't make any political abuse of the FBI. And they didn't like they, they Hoover was not part of their inner circle, but they kept him on. The Kennedys used him a lot. They hated him and he hated them, but they used him a lot for their spying on mainly Communists in the civil rights

movement. And so it was Bobby Kennedy, attorney general, who instructed Hoover to wiretap Martin Luther King. It wasn't Hoover just getting his jollies by listening to dirty conversations. It was it was a direct missive from Attorney General Kennedy to Hoover. And Hoover thought at the time, I don't want to do this because this will destroy the FBI if we're caught spying on the civil rights movement. So he did it. He had to do it anyway. So at that time. The FBI was doing a lot of this

sort of like anti KKK stuff. They were trying to expand influence and trying to show that they were the good guys. I think that's kind of concurrent. So that would that would make sense that it would look really bad. Yeah, and there was trouble, too, because the KKK wasn't violating federal laws at the time, right? So it wasn't an FBI issue. So. So to fault the FBI for not going after the Klan, that was a state issue. So it was President Johnson who finally said you've got to smash

him. He said I want you to infiltrate the Klan like you infiltrated the Communist Party and Hoover actually did and just destroyed it because you had a lot of state and local law enforcement working with the clan in the Deep South. What was the the authority set that they were using? Did they have that? Was the KKK act that they passed or was there something else that had to like how did they justify it? There were there were some laws then, but it was mostly LBJ

telling Hoover plus up the KKK. And then they did. Yes, Sir. And that and did that start is that Emmett Till era that I'm thinking of? I'm trying to remember kind of what was happening concurrently as far as big cases and. That was 6465 was that it was early to mid 60s, obviously right after the Kennedy assassination. But you had, you know, murder is still not a federal crime, right? KKK is lynching somebody. It's not a federal crime unless

it's it's over different states. But boy, you know, right, every FBI agents need the cooperation of the state and local police and the courts. And if you don't have that in the Deep South at that time in many areas, then that's a big problem. But Hoover went in and got the job done. Now, sending New Yorkers down to Mississippi, you know, they didn't quite fit in, but it was still, it was still he, he did a good job at it. They're still happy to do that. Oh yeah, yeah.

It's such a misfit sort of situation. So he, my buddies and I always kind of wonders, like when did the FBI kind of step it outside of its scope of operations and start doing things that it doesn't really necessarily have a legal mandate or it doesn't really have legal authorities to do? And that was always the question I always had. It's like, hey, go do this thing. It's like, OK, well, what legal

authority do I have? That should be the whole concept of a special agent is that you actually have a very, and I'll say this again, because I think people may not know it. A special agent is someone who is an agent of the government in a very special instead of circumstances. They are not broadly speaking, Joe Biden is an agent of the government. An ambassador can be an agent of the government. They have broad powers to make deals and and enforce certain, you know, requirements.

But a special agent is a very narrow thing. It's actually people think special agent makes you better. It's like, no, it makes you more limited. You only have these things, Title 18 and Title 21 that you can go out and enforce. So it's very weird to think that if they said go do this thing, go get the KKK and you don't have the authority to do it. Like the people were like, got it. Let's go, boss.

That's that loyalty to the Bureau culture that I guess is probably one of the most dangerous thing that continues to exist. Yeah, it's just, it's like a fraternity, right? Where you, you, the fraternity can do no wrong even when you know it's doing really wrong. And so you still defend the fraternity because it's a fraternity. But this is not. We can't look at at the FBI as a frat, although maybe we should. Now it's a frat that's I. Won't allow us to now, I don't

know. We'll ask Sarah at the DC field office when she thinks about frats. But anyway, so that's you got, you've got a, if you have loyalty to a brand, regardless of the quality of the brand, then you're doing a disservice to everybody that you're advocating to. You don't have the FBI agents Association saying, hey, the bureau's hurting. It's got bad leadership. It has weak leadership. It has too much leadership. It's too centralized. It's got mission creep. It's lost public support.

We need to do something to help fix this. You don't see them doing that. No, you see them giving gift cards to people that took a knee for BLM, Yeah. Yeah, so so it's not even like the former agents or explore special agents or or management or anybody else or even advocates for making the FBI really serve the public. When you talk about special agents in Hoover's time, you had the FBI had its narrow role. It was to fight anarchists and communists and and certain Interstate crimes.

Then you had the gangsters and the multi State Bank robbers. But it didn't enforce prohibition laws during prohibition that there was a prohibition Bureau with special agents for enforcing prohibition. It didn't enforce alcohol, tobacco and firearms because you had and have a separate Bureau for that. But you don't hear many people saying ATF is a sacred agency. We have to keep it. We can't change it or fix it in

any way, right? Because it's, it's OK to say abolish ATF because it's abusing Second Amendment rights serially and, and you don't. And a lot of the laws are obsolete from the prohibition era still. So, so a lot of the mandate for ATF is not there. But as long as ATF exists, why has the FBI usurped certain ATF functions that already by statute are being handled by

ATF? So let's just peel that away and let ATF handle that, take it out of the Bureau and then put ATF in its box and deal with it as it needs to be dealt with later on. Yeah, thrown in the ocean and never recovered. It's, it's so interesting because so much of this historical context, I think is what's lacking from this is one of the biggest things about America's that don't know anything about their history. They don't know anything about the concepts of where things

came from and why they're there. And then they're easily steamrolled by stupid arguments. You know, ATF when it was created and you just mentioned prohibition, so it's worth talking about. We're talking about a fundamentally a tax organization that joined DOJ in the 90s. In my lifetime, it joined the, it's not like it's historically been there. They didn't have a law enforcement core mission. Their job was to take money from things that were illegal or that were already legal but were

regulated under a certain way. And like, you know, and then tax violators were what they went after. And they turned that into this, like thing where they are hunting down guys who have machine guns, which is also relatively new to the American concern because people were rolling around with those for many years and, you know, just started. And the gangster era is why those things got sort of regulated in kind of a way that I think probably wouldn't pass today.

It wouldn't pass scrutiny today. I can't imagine the National Firearms Act in 1934 getting through a Supreme Court review if it wasn't already part of our history for the last whatever it is, 80 years, 90 years. Yes. So it's institution, it's all like New Deal socialist bureaucracies. And if you go back and study the New Deal, who was the New Deal? The New Deal had these writers

programs for who? For Communist Party propagandists who could not get real jobs, so they were working on the off grants and salaries from the US taxpayer in the name of economic recovery, writing their stuff and then recruiting their cadres at our expense. So the Soviets then got their assets on the ground here to be paid for by the American taxpayer. It's brilliant with the stamp of approval as government employees.

And, and the amount of damage that FDR has done, you know, historically to this country and even, I think even Truman, some of the stuff that got signed under Truman were, were fourth. It was the fourth term. It's, it's the closest that we ever had to like a, a complete takeover of our federal government is the only guy that ever didn't do the 2 terms and out right. And it's so interesting to me that, that he's revered on the political left in so many ways.

And, and then you just look and you're like, you can pretty much trace a lot of this stuff. That is the rot that has finally come home to roost. It's finally metastasized to an end state of, of a pretty obvious danger to the left and the right, if they're being honest about it. I can't, I don't think they are. But it, it actually, it's, it's grown beyond those original boundaries of, of just being ideologically driven. Now it's just progress.

And the progress is to its own detriment, it seems like. Yeah. And, and what is progress? What do they mean by it? If you look at at the term progressive, there are lots of different histories of it. But in the Marxist sense, you're always moving to progress. What is that progress? Well, for his his part, it was the dictatorship with his words of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the working class. So there any Marxist by definition is working toward a

dictatorship. So you have the economic Marxists where the toiling masses of the proletariat defeat the rich bourgeoisie. Well, now the rich bourgeoisie are the Marxist leaders, so they've changed it to a cultural approach. So instead of being an economic battle between the haves and have nots, the victims and the victimizers, it's a cultural battle.

And the cultural battle, now the proletariat is anyone who wants to destroy American founding principles, anything with Western. In the Western moral tradition, it's them, because it's the dead white men who are the oppressors, and they have to be destroyed. Except for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were dead white. That's right. Yeah. Well, if you can't have inconsistencies and, and you know, what do you call it, cognitive dissonance, then you can't be on the political left.

I don't think you have to tolerate a certain amount of that headache every day. It let's talk about how it kind of goes after the info. So you talked about communist writers, you talked about new deals, sort of infiltrations with that sort of thing where now the federal government is in fact paying for its for people writing against its own

interests in theory. Or American people and even even more than that, because if you you consider that that World War 2 is beginning, we're not involved in it yet. This is 1940, nineteen, early 1941, and we don't have a foreign intelligence service. We have naval intelligence. We have army intelligence overall, but they're very narrowly, narrowly defined. We don't have anything like

ACIA. So President Roosevelt says, you know, after the British are leaning on us, we need to have a Central Intelligence organization. So this is where the Office of Strategic Services was set up as a wartime foreign intelligence service. Really neat story about the OSS and we've heard a lot about it while Bill Donovan setting it up. He was a really cool guy in history. I mean, we need guys like him as long as they had a good counterintelligence instinct, which he did not.

So Donovan set up the OSS with the single minded objective of defeating the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese by Mussolini. We never thought about what's the end state going to be after the war. Nobody almost in the United States was thinking what do we want the world to look like after we win the war. Stalin had decided by 1943 I want to spread communism to Europe and the Americas and have communism to rule the world. We didn't have that kind of

view. So we just looked at Stalin as a war time ally to fight Hitler. So when Donovan is recruiting into the OSS, he is bringing in Americans or foreign nationals who had been born Americans who'd been born abroad, or foreign nationals bringing them into the OSS as analysts and linguists and all the things that we lacked. But he wasn't screening them to make sure they were not agents of town. He said he was, but in fact, he wasn't in the Venona. Transcripts proved this.

Hoover was aware of what much of what was happening. Congress was aware of much of what was happening, but Donovan actually lied about it. That allowed the Soviets to have a wholesale penetration of the new US intelligence community, and it became so contaminated that by the end of World War 2, OSS was disbanded and we had no intelligence community at all. But it got us to the point where among intelligence professionals, there were no enemies on the left.

This is a gross over generalization, but I mean, where you get this intelligence community sentiment that there are no enemies on the left, even with an intelligence service that was set up to battle the and that's so bizarre. That's so and it was and it was populated by people. I mean, it's a it's an over generalization because at first they were doing a really good job, need operations.

I mean, Italy would have been a Italian Soviet Socialist Republic had it not been for James Angleton and and the CIA making sure that the Italy's 1948 elections didn't go to Stalin because the Soviets were really active in that. So there were a lot of the early CIA covert operations did a great job to protect American interests and Western civilization. Can you imagine if Italy was a Soviet Warsaw Pact member about how that would have changed?

Well, to be married right now. Even though my wife grew up in communist New York, she would have been probably a very different version of that family came from from Italy and not not to right in that era. Yeah, so, so there was some really neat stuff going on by a lot of these early intelligence professionals under under Allen Dulles running the CIA. I have to imagine, and that's the thing about being in a, that

was a start up environment. So they didn't have rules, they didn't have bureaucracy, they didn't have lots of oversight that people even knew what the hell they were doing. It was just like, hey, you, they're, they're paying people out of their pocket to go and do stuff, which that kind of cowboy culture, you kind of almost have to run Intel. Like it's never going to be looked at. Like no one's ever going to be able to look at what you're doing again. If you're right, yeah.

And this was why the OSS was so successful in running commando operations behind the line. So Bill Casey, Reagan's CIA director, he was he was a finance lawyer in New York. He invented the tax shelter to get around FD Rs, New Deal taxation. And so he was recruited into the Navy and then into the OSS. And he had this crazy idea of when, when, when Eisenhower, you know, runs D-Day to invade Normandy, how are we going to get the Allied troops from the

coast of France to Berlin? So he said, let's parachute in behind Nazi lines and get native born Germans behind Nazi lines to run operations to make it easier for our forces to get through. And it was a crazy idea. Everybody thought it was nuts. OSS chief Donovan loved it. The British said it'll never work, but let's try it anyway. Casey ran that whole operation. So this was just guys who pretty much didn't know what they were doing or they they didn't know.

They had not been conditioned to think in a defeatist way that it couldn't be done. Yeah. Which will Colby with a guy like this, he became CIA director. The thing is like that, that sort of mentality which still exists in unconventional warfare, still exists in the the special operations thing. We used to call it operating in the Gray. When you talk about people, it's like it's not right, it's not wrong. If it works, it's still it's still good. That's very operational morality type stuff.

It's a terrible way to run a society, it turns out. And those people cannot be everywhere. Because if everybody's operationally moral, then everything decays. But having some Gray operators in the world that are ready to go out there and just solve problems, whatever the cost is it, it may end up being the the only tool that you can use in somebody's very, you know, especially if nobody's looking to the end state.

As you just mentioned. It just reminds me that we're not looking at end states when we did a lot of our policy with China, either the US is really good. In fact, the CIA historically is pretty good at what's, what are we trying to accomplish right now. But they push into something and something else pops out and we end up with either, you know, some other regime we're going to

fly in 10 years. That's, that's the entire story of the American, the American intelligence services is we're going to solve this problem right now. And we have no idea what it's going to lead to and nobody is leave it out. But they do a great job for the duty that they have right in front of like right after 911. It was a really similar thing where we didn't have, you know, FBI was in no shape to deal with it. And, and there was a debate in Washington.

Should the 9/11 attacks be considered a law enforcement issue and not a military type attack? So should we just have an investigation that arrests terrorists around the world rather than go off and and do what we ended up doing? So that was a great idea. But then what happened? This supercharged FBI, this and, and what's his name, the director, Then Mueller, he'd only been on the job for a week, which people don't realize. And worse, turns to him and says, why weren't you guys on

top of this? And he said, well, it wasn't I, I really don't know. I said, I want to make sure this never happens to another American again. It's your responsibility. So that was Mueller's marching order. So he then what did he do?

He did a great job of what the president wanted him to do was to create this monstrous FBI and, and, and everything that came out of it. And he was the second longest serving director after Hoover. But then you had the Department of Homeland Security come out of this. You had the Office of the Director of National Intelligence come out of this. So what Bush did was centralized everything to prevent the stove piping of intelligence.

But in centralizing everything, he made it so that a few people at the top could manipulate it. So when Obama takes office, he likes what he sees with Mueller and his FBI and asks Congress to extend Mueller's term beyond the 10 year mandatory limit. He brings in people like General Clapper to run the 17 member intelligence community. He brings in Brennan ideologues like Brennan to run the CIA. Who did Brennan vote for?

Three years before he was recruited into the CIA, he voted for Soviet asset Gus Hall as president of the United States. Now, you can think, well, he had a stupid attack or whatever else, but really only three-year maturation from that time until the CIA brings him in. And then he writes in his memoir that was just a lark. Rather than say, you know what, I'm going to use this as a counterintelligence lesson. This is how these guys work. This is how these guys fool

young voters. Nothing like that at all. Instead, he went and put he and Clapper at Obama's orders. But they didn't need to be ordered because they were fine with it, imposed DEI and all the alphabet soup of rainbow ISM into the entire intelligence community with a vengeance. And they could do that because it was a few people at the top of a very centralized system that had been designed never to be centralized because that would endanger our Republic. There's something really critical.

You talked about Mueller coming on and my buddy George Hill talks about this as well, former NSA and military intelligence, etcetera, and also FBI. And the thing that he says is that literally the like September 12th, the mandate comes down that no American will die again from terrorism on US soil. And that is fundamentally A tyrannical mindset because you can't have a 0 failed mission without imposing tyranny. You can't do it.

There's no opportunity. And and when they did that, they changed the definition of national security fundamentally from what it was all the way from inception to date. And that moment onward, it's like now you can't fail. Tyranny's on the menu and it's required. And as you just said, centralization allowed. Everyone always thinks it's like, oh, if you could just change the things at the top. No, the guys at the top made it so the things at the bottom were also then corrupted.

And this problem that I think most people have a hard time getting their head around, how do you fix it when the top is corrupted? Everyone's sort of OK with the idea that senior management and various different agencies are problematic, but they've changed the culture and they've had 20 years to do it. And so now, now we're not dealing with a problem at the top. We're dealing with agencies that are a problem.

I think that's my position. I assume that's the same thing that we're kind of coming to with what you're saying. Sure, because imagine how the recruitment standards changed 20 years ago. So now you have people in mid career and senior career who entered as very junior people recruited on that basis of what we would now call DEI.

Yeah, 100. Percent and the CIA had had a very, very lame like the FBI had very poor tech capabilities back then and so they were hiring techies right Well these techies are you know San Francisco type techies brought in to the CIA. Well, it was neat to have a broad spectrum of the public buy in on fighting terrorism, but then that changes the whole culture of the whole agency. So you and it wasn't just being

imposed from the top. They couldn't impose things from the top, say the Clappers and the Brennans of the world if they didn't have organized cadres at the lower levels. And these operate like old Communist Party cell groups. So these are autonomous, but linked horizontally linked employee research or employee resource groups, ER GS or in the CIA they're called agency resource groups AR GS. So this is whatever my identity of the month is or whatever.

However I view myself as I'm going to identify with other people like me. So like you, you asked me if I what my family background was and I said, you know, way back in the 1600s, there was an Indian someplace.

But if all of a sudden I start running around saying I'm an Algonquin, you know, that that's just stupidity and, and, and pretty much and untruth, even though there's, there's much truth there to it. But I start demanding my rights as a Native American Indian and I start going around wearing feathers and, and a loincloth or something, which would terrify anybody. They worked for me.

Yeah. So, So what a stupid thing for for me to demand Native American rights just because I might identify with 1. And that's what's what's happening with these ARGS and ER, GS throughout the government bureaucracy. And it started out in the private sector and in the universities and then and then in the during the Clinton administration started going into the government. Well, what did Bush do? He kept Clinton's CIA director on George Tenet. So Tenet was fine with all of that.

So by the time, you know, through the early 2000s, you had these wackos with these identity groups now getting into the lower level management so that when the radicals come in at the top, they pull these people up into the senior management levels and start putting their mandates down. And that's really how the old common term works. The old Soviet Communist Party networks around the world worked in a very similar fashion, interestingly.

Enough the, there's a, there's an analog I'm seeing right now. You talked about the guys that were in the Soviet Union that were the, the KGB, the senior collectors or the senior management there. And those officers would know what was going on in the West and it radicalized them to be more pro western or at least more sympathetic to the West 'cause it looked like the outcome was better.

I think the environment that you operate in and that you immerse yourself in does have a, a general effect. When I talk about the FBI needing to leave Washington, DC and, and we've talked about this privately, but we'll say at

public here. The one of the major problems with having a swampy type group of your basic level employees is that if you are the FBI director, the CIA director and you go down to the Starbucks that's in the lobby, which there are, and, and you're sitting around the everyday secretaries and intelligence analysts on the front lines and the people who are the SOS and the Mappas and all these different lower level positions. The banter that you hear is pro

government, pro left. And you are hearing that that is what America looks like because that's what your day looks like. You're, you're surrounded by it. And so whether you may have, you know, libertarian leanings or lowercase C conservative type feelings, that's not what you're surrounded by. And it radicalizes you because that's what you think is normal.

And where you are is what you think is normal, which is why my argument has always been Kansas City, Omaha, I don't care where you put it. Put it somewhere in the middle of America. And you know, Huntsville is a is a cheap choice for us just because there's already a big base of operations there with billions of dollars already spent. But move it from something like DC. We talked about people in DC think that America looks like DC. It's the same problem New Yorkers have.

It looks nothing like most of America. And I don't know why they don't know that, but maybe they just don't travel or when they do, they just think, oh, they're just hiding the real America from me. It looks actually like where I live, which is crappy. It's it's just so strange. But this is this is the fundamental problem is that it's it's now, it's now encouraging that spin of operations, even in a worse and worse way. They're radicalizing. Yeah, yeah.

And and and this part of the dilemma, what do we do with the FBI? So moving it out of DC is a great idea, but then what happens to those communities, right? Every time you have a big federal project go someplace, you have, you know, craziness emerge around it of whether it's all same with university towns and college towns. So, So maybe not so much military bases, military towns, maybe not yet, but it's

certainly going to go that way. So So yeah, you've got a great idea to move it out of town, and Huntsville is a good, cheap choice. But what about the people of Alabama? I mean. Very sympathetic to that because the last thing you want to do is go drop in. Like the question is this, are 1500 or 2000 FBI employees going and plunking down in the middle of Huntsville, AL going to change the culture of Alabama? Probably not. Will it change the culture of Huntsville? Possibly.

A lot of money comes in with it, right? And those people are then now dependent on those jobs and so on. So you, you do move it. But the other question is, do we bring in enough local people from Huntsville? Because there's an awful lot of people that work in DC that are not going to leave DC.

That's the only hope that I would hold on to that your lower level staff, the janitor staff, the, the secretarial staff, the, you know, the basic level, what they call management and program analysts, which are not analysts at all. They're just, you know, low level kind of grunt employees. Are those people going to be able to shift the culture so that when you go down and have that that coffee, it's not at a Starbucks, it's at a Dunkin' Donuts now, or it's at something

that's a little bit more. Maybe there's a Waffle House outpost on the base and maybe you go and have that and that actually moves people back towards the center. If it tax it back. That's the only hope that I would have. I'm also down with the disbanded all completely. You've, you've failed in your mandate and you tarnished your brand and, and it doesn't seem like anybody's interested in doing that, even though I, I think there's a strong argument for it at this point, especially

if we're talking. About Brand is so powerful. It's kind of like Disney where you know how rotten it is, but you have to watch it anyway and expose your kids to it. I suppose. But if you if your argument is, and I don't think you're wrong that that Hoover, you know, had nowhere near the amount of corruption and capabilities that a Chris Ray does, how terrifying is that for most Americans to probably hear that for the first time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't like Hoover

blackmailed JFK to stay there. His his. He was. By law, he was mandated to leave the FBI at age 62. Can't. The Kennedys wanted him to stay on because he was doing their work for him. He didn't need to blackmail them. Now, you could say that, well, there was a subtle blackmail, but that's not the point. Any FBI director can do that to any leader if there's something legitimate there. Hoover did have files on

everybody. And even when, after he died, Judge Lawrence Silberman was tasked to go in and to find Hoover's files. And the FBI, FBI director, I think Kelly at the time said they're not here. He didn't realize that they were in the file cabinets lining the hallway to his office. They were just part of the landscape. And he never, they were not in

any database. So Hoover had a lot of really gross dirt on a lot of people, but he didn't use it and he didn't weaponize it. Well, he he did use it, but he used it not against the American population. It was to protect the Bureau a lot of times. It was to maintain what he wanted to be able to do for the mission set that he saw as a fundamental good. Yeah, which is. And he saw himself as a real protect, rightly or wrongly, found himself as a protector of

the country. Because if you if you go back and read his, he was a prolific writer and a prolific speaker. He would talk about preserving the Christian values of America. He would talk about Marxist infiltration of churches and communist infiltration of schools and how they're out to brainwash your kids. He was warning all of these, everything that you see now, whoever started warning about as early as the 1920s. Yeah, predating FDR then.

Yeah. And we let them all in and, and, and now they've they've won it. They're almost like the. It seems to me that they're like the dog that that has caught the car and doesn't know what to do with the hubcap. It's like, I mean, it can smash the hubcap on the ground, but it can't eat the whole car. But at the same time it doesn't want the car to keep driving. And and we're just there doesn't seem to be an end state that would be a victory.

Maybe that's just a fundamentally American inability to look into the future, but it doesn't seem an end state victory. Like what's a victory for the left look like other than I guess just just dictatorship? Is that what? Is that where it has to go like you stated? Well, luckily leftists end up eating their own when they take power, so. So yeah. How did they not see that? That seems like the most fundamental truth.

It's like, OK, this agency which used to go after people on the left and is now going after people on the right, It's still eating people on the left every day. It's going after Muslims and blacks in ways that they would consider weaponized. And I'm not real crazy about it right now either. They they can't even see that because what it's it's mostly doing our dirty work. Yeah, it, well, a lot of things just can't be answered. We, we, we, you know, you leave, you're left speechless.

Because this was the thing, in researching this book, if if had had somebody said to me, J Edgar Hoover was far more restrained with his abuses than Chris Ray is with today's FBII would have thought this guy's, you know, this guy's crazy. That's the hypothesis you'd assume that you were going to disprove by doing your research. No, it never occur. It didn't even occur to me until I started doing the research and I thought, well, why didn't Hoover smash these guys when he

good? Well, he didn't have a lot to do that. Why didn't he go after this when he could? Didn't have a lot to do that he was he had his own really great ideas and did some really valuable services to the country he wanted to. He he kept, for example, FBI was a foreign intelligence service during World War Two in the American hemisphere. He fought for that. He wanted to make the FBI an A global intelligence service for the US.

So he lost that fight. But he succeeded in keeping at least the Americas under FBI purview. And in doing so he probably changed history because the OSS person in charge of Latin America was a Soviet agent. Perfect. So, so he did a lot of really neat things. He just did it in a he got too long in the tooth. He was there too long and he didn't have laws to govern this. So the like you said a while ago, in the 40s and 50s, you didn't question the FBI

director. In the 50s, you didn't have oversight hearings about the CIA, not until really Watergate. It was even even as a kid I talked to senators about hearing something. We really shouldn't be questioning things about the CIA because they should just be left to do what they're supposed to do to protect the country. And this is at the time when the CIA was becoming really super controversial because of what Reagan was weaponizing it against what? Against the international

communist movement. So you had. So if you have lawmakers think we can't question these guys. Then of course, you're going to get impunity because that's pretty much been blessed by Congress for these agencies to act with impunity. President Johnson had a, had a quote. He was, he thought, you know, Hoover's been around too long, it's time for him to go. But he's so handy at spying on opponents. So he he said, you know, I'm going to team Edgar on the team.

I'd rather have Edgar inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in. Yes, I've heard this quote. I didn't realize, but yeah. The Kennedy said you can't fire God. Right. So this is how they looked at the Bureau and it was kind of OK. It was accepted by Democrat and Republican presidents Alive you. Know what's interesting, though?

Durham actually almost sort of cosigned on some of these ideas, stating essentially that the problem is not policy or law or procedures that the FBI has, is that it fundamentally needs to have good men and women that are enacting the mission of the FBI like it historically has. That's sort of the argument.

And that's not happening. So he doesn't, he doesn't point to any particular failure and say, oh, if you had just done this training or if you done this when you read the Durham report, his whole thing is like, like your culture is trash and people aren't doing what they were designed to do. He doesn't really recommend to fix other than people need to go back to doing what they used to do. And I don't know how you do that either. No, no, because the FBI has no legal charter.

There was an attempt and I think 19791980 to like by conservatives to have a charter for the FBI. This was in the, in the aftermath of the Church Committee hearings and the, the, you know, the trashing of the whole intelligence community and the demoralization and so forth.

And let's have a legal charter for the FBI so that it that can be governed by some set of principles and that was defeated that never became law There's. No left and right boundary and it's just doing whatever it wants to do. No guard rails up. It's never a good. Do you have any sort of do you have a hypothesis for correction on this yet? Like you said, you didn't expect that you'd come up with the the conclusion that you did when you

started doing this research. Have you come up with a path that makes sense to you? Well, I think it's like with the old OSS that did great service for our country during World War 2 to defeat the Nazis and the fascists and the Imperial Japanese. It's time to start over. You need a new ethos. You need a new culture of just mainstream culture. Doesn't it be liberal or conservative? It just has to be American.

But when? Here's the thing with the wokeness that's permeated it. Imagine wokeness and critical theory. It starts out with a with a with a with an end state that they want. So everything has to be manipulated to achieve that end state. Imagine rules of evidence being applied in that fashion by the FBI, where you collect evidence and then you present evidence and then you have investigative rules of procedure that are all governed by the end state that

you wish. And of course, everybody wants to prosecute the guy they're investigating. I get that. Or at least let the facts speak for themselves and let the evidence speak. But there are rules for this. But if if you're basically inventing facts and distorting facts on purpose to achieve a political end state, then you've thrown out the whole idea of justice and law enforcement, and the same with an intelligence

service. If you're tasking intelligence and then collecting intelligence and then analyzing intelligence to inform by law the president, but you're doing it to achieve your own personal end state, you're not serving the country. You become a danger. And if the whole culture is that way, look at the CIA recruitment videos that were put together under Trump. I saw.

They were released under Biden, but they were put together under Trump. And you have this, this self-serving, you know, every sentence was was in the first person. This, this, what do you call it? Intersectional woman with an admitted mental disorder. Yes, she's she's not an urgent or whatever the hell she was talking. Neurodivergent and she can do whatever and she's this and that and she's so wonderful. She's the poster child for the CIA.

This is where we're trying to recruit people like that to be intelligence analysts. It looks like narcissism to me. But if you had one person with that, OK, that's an issue that can be handled in human resources, which is a whole another that you know, can of worms. But but it's a recruitment video. This is who we want. Yeah, they don't want people like you. Bring yourself centered weird focus. We would have just generally called non scientifically weirdos when I was growing up.

Bring the weirdos, not bring the Captain America types, not bring the selfless self-serving patriotic types. Like just bring me the people that are so focused on their own weirdness and, and we love you for it. Like come here and be part of the CIA. That's what that's what those videos say to me.

It's not surprising that's who's and also what you're going to do is you're going to turn guys that are like me that decided when I was 27 that if I die in service to their country, then that's an appropriate use of my life. And I think you got to be a certain type of person to do that. Many of our 17 and 18 year olds have no concept of what they're signing up for. They do it anyway. God bless them.

And we need that. There's also some older people that have looked in, you know, guys that were in my recruitment class 27, 252627 to have a little bit of taste of life. And they still said, yeah, this is what I'm about.

Like I'm into this. You had a bunch of guys re up after 911 because they believe in the concept of what America is. And you're going to take those people and you're going to say, wait, you want to have some black lesbian neurodivergent, you know, ADD weird things that she wants to celebrate about herself? That's not my values. I'm not going to go serve that. Like let all the weirdos go do that. And we're going to have an entire agency of weirdos with an

awful lot of powers. Yeah, if you have certain traits that you can't help, but if you're still the best person for the job, you're the best person for the job. I think we should have more autists in the intelligence community. They think so differently from everybody else and they focus so well and they're very fact driven. Those are my favorite analysts,

by the way. They're like, give me a total weirdo that does that's socially out outrageously strange that nobody wants to talk to, but we'll answer questions in a blunt and honest way, like I'm 100% behaving. That person needs to be doing some thinking with me. We need more of that kind of thing, but we can't hire somebody because they have that. We can't send them like get sources or anything like we need you doing the source work.

You're the guy for that. You're, you know, personable and interesting and, you know, walking into a place and accidentally, you know, saying the right thing and that's you need that. But the autism 100%. Give me those people on the the screen. Yeah. Yeah, but if you, you know, I mean, my son went through Army basic training, but he was only as good as the chubbiest girl in his unit. That's how basic training was at Fort Sill, you know, 10 years

ago. And you had you had high school football players grow fat in basic training because they couldn't work out right. Because we have to all do the same thing at the same. Time so think of this intellectually now and and where you have and this is where this is where the Harvard controversy is so handy right now in terms of what are the universities producing in terms of intelligence analysts and intelligence agents when they either don't know or they deplore American history and

founding principles. If you hate your country and what it was founded on, how can you take an oath to uphold the Constitution? And secondly, how can you defend your country if you don't believe in it? That's not a liberal or conservative issue. That's a crazy versus non crazy issue. But so when you're packing the intelligence community with the finest of the finest from Harvard, I don't know if Harvard grads even go into the CIA anymore, but this is this is

throughout academia. You've got the same problem. They don't understand their history. They don't find me one non Marxist Latin American studies department at any American University. I don't know of one, but if our people working in our own hemisphere are educated with a Marxist view of the hemisphere and the politics of the hemisphere, it's no wonder that we're staging A coup right now in Guatemala because it's a

conservative Christian country. And, and so USAID and the CIA and the State Department have been working for years to change their whole judiciary to have a judicial coup d'etat in that country. And then we we sanctioned Guatemala lawmakers from coming to the United States because they vote the wrong way, even if they have sons in the US Marine Corps as as was in one case. So this is the kind of thing you're seeing worldwide. You kind of got to think. And Dinesh wrote a book about this.

Dinesh D'souza wrote a book, The Enemy Within, looking at what motivates Islamic extremism. And a lot of it is our own wokeness that we're exporting on everybody. Yeah, the weirdest thing. I think I had a long conversation with Tara Reid about what happened and now she's in Moscow and she's she's in Russia and she's she said, you know, I was raised like everybody else, even though she's kind of on the anti war and political left.

She said, you know, I sort of believe that Russia was always our enemy and I'm over here now. They look like they're a lot happier than what I saw and I'm a lot less fearful. The idea that somebody in the United States who was not like an enemy of the state that the Americans would look at and go like, yeah, you're a problem. You sold secrets, whatever you did, you gave missile technology away.

Somebody who just spoke out against the regime, sought sanctuary in Moscow. I that that's untenable to me as someone who grew up in in the 80s and 90s. It's unbelievable. And and it's a complete reversal. And, you know, maybe it's a failure to grasp that the Cold War is over. And as you said, like some of those people there, they actually embraced when it ended, it was ended for them. Maybe they were like, OK, let's next stage.

It's a different stage now. Obviously what's going on in Russia is not the same kind of animal. And some of the old cronies are there, but it's not the same enemy, even if we want to treat it that way. And the idea that. People, it's not communist and I, I think this is where a lot of American leftists started hating Putin was because Putin is not a communist. He's a Russian nationalist and they're two very different things. He's still not a nice guy, he's

still a tyrant. He's still, he, he assassinated 2 members of my editorial board. So I, I take it a little bit personally. He he's, he's got 10s of thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at us and he's got a huge intelligence presence that continues to compromise our

whole country now. Like an old school Russian, like the old school Russian. More like a monarch than he was, than he is. Like the Communist Party is sort of. Like the KGB men called themselves Chichisti or checkists after the check up, which was the first Soviet intelligence agency. So it's the, it's the the KGB traces its origins to the check up. He's a checkist and he's a proud checkist. And we, we want to call him a fascist. He's not a fascist.

He's not a Nazi. He's not a communist. He's a checkist. If you understand the mentality, then you can understand Putin and you can work with him. But we have to remember, if it wasn't for we depended on Putin to supply our forces in Afghanistan by land, we were shipping things in by sea to the port of Riga, Latvia, and then through the Russian river system, through the Russian railroad system all the way to Central Asia and then down to Afghanistan. And so, so you can work with the

guy. He's not going to attack us. He'll subvert us. But we never pushed back. Like when the Soviet Union collapsed, we were saying, let's have a stand down against all offensive Russian intelligence OPS against the United States. Start over. There was no need for this kind of thing anymore. And the United States government under Bush Senior was against it. Clinton was against it.

So. So they were against opening up the KGB archives and pushing with the huge leverage we had to open up the KGB archives to expose all the KGB agents in our society. Bush 41? No, Bush. Yeah, 41 and Clinton both opposed it. The whole political establishment oppose it, which has to make you wonder, what is it in the political establishment that makes it so that only the most left wing and the most conservative people are advocating for exposing these KGB archives?

And there it is then. That's something we talk about like a uniparty or a single kind of focus. It doesn't have to have parties. Probably even the wrong word, but just Co aligned interests that that seem to work well, perfectly well together. Which is why again, get people out of the DC swamp and that sort of power circle. It'd be really interesting to see if we could decentralize

some of our government. I'd love to see it, but there's an awful lot of people that seem Co aligned to not make that the case. Doesn't seem to be serving Americans very well right now. Yeah, well, I'm on Capitol Hill right now, so you see it all around me. So. So I, I don't, I don't want to expose too many people in, in my own neighborhood right now because it would show where I am.

But you, you see the if, if they had federal, if they lost their federal jobs, they would lose their, their million and a half dollar homes. They would lose their secondary homes, they would lose their entire lifestyle, they'd lose their friends and networks. They couldn't do the entertaining they do. They couldn't take the vacations

they take. So you have both spouses working on taxpayer funded salaries and then they go into government contracting with their now taxpayer funded pension and then making twice or more what they were making in the civil service as contractors now. So they're, they're racking in half $1,000,000 a year or more off the US taxpayers. So you have like 9 of the wealthiest counties in the United States are surrounding the DC area there. It's just, there's no industry here.

It's just just central government. You can't take that away from. They'll fight to the death to keep that because that's their whole existence. It's. The self licking ice cream cone, I said that to someone, they'd never heard it before the other day and they were like, oh, I'm taking that. I'm like that's been taken. That's a pretty well established metaphor for people who ever been around the Beltway.

Mike, I appreciate you spending all the time kind of chatting with us. I think people are educated and they're probably going to be more interested to tell them where they can find the the book and where they can find your hot takes on social, which are also some of my favorites. So the book is Big Intel. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere else. It's on Audible. So there's audio versions and Kindle versions and everything

else. Big Intel. And then our website issecurefreedom.org at the Center for Security Policy, and I'm on Twitter at J Michael Waller. And we'll have all those links in the show description so folks, you guys can click through if you're hearing it and you're thinking I need to see more of it. Some of your Twitter takes are some of my favorites, too. They are not polite and they are not pulling punches. So I appreciate that and I

appreciate the honesty. Thanks for spending the time with us today, and I hope we do this again. Maybe not the next book. That may take a little bit too long. We may have to get you back on sooner than that. That'll be fun. All right. Appreciate it buddy. See you. OK, you all, Big thank you to our guest, Doctor Waller, for joining us and having this very long conversation. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I hope you learned something. I hope something walks away.

Things that I didn't know as well, especially that sort of hot take on the idea that J Edgar Hooper was more disciplined than today's director, Chris Ray. That is a troubling thing to hear, and yet I'm fairly confident he's correct. If you guys want to support our show, you can also support our buddy Garretta Boyle over at the merch store. This is the Dash Suspendables. Again, the Dash Dispensables. Don't forget the dash The Dash dispensables.com. Use the promo code Kyle.

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Keep them moving. I know it's probably pretty chilly up there in Wisconsin, and there's no reason for us not to put them to work unless the lights go out, in which case you can't run the printing press. The. T-shirt press the dash, dependables.com, the merch store really appreciate it, folks. Make sure you're supporting all of our sponsors. If you want to check out the my pillow, you can also use my pillow. Our promo code is Kyle very easy.

You guys know how to get there. Mike Lindell got cancelled this week, so it's probably a rough week. If you were thinking about making a purchase from them, use our promo code Kyle. You'll save just like any of the others, except it'll support the Kyle Sarah can show and we do appreciate that. All right folks, that's about it for today. Let me go ahead and throw up a five star review. Standby for one of those.

And there it is, our five star review of the day coming in from Tactical Arms Corps. Joe says love it, five stars. Kyle, I respect you and I appreciate your service and sacrifice so much. Thank you for doing this amazing show and keeping us informed and prepared concerning the crazy closing in around us. Keep up the good work. God bless you and your family. Well, God bless you, Joe. I really appreciate that. Thanks for watching the show. Thanks for listening on Apple, folks.

If you want to leave us a five star view and have yours read, just do so on Apple. It is the link in the description on Apple podcast. You can also find us on Spotify on iHeartRadio, anywhere that you listen to podcasts, including the spyware devices that you shouldn't have in your kitchen, but you probably do. Go ahead and just say, hey, play the Kyle Seraphin show and Alexa or Siri or whatever, these other sort of crazy AI things that are spying on us.

They'll be able to pull that up and give it to you right away. We'll see you. Again tomorrow with another interesting interview, I'll be on the road. You'll be listening to an interview with John Frankman, former Green Beret and a patriot who said no thank you to the jab as well. Another suspendable, no doubt. So we appreciate you guys today. Have a great one. And we'll see you again tomorrow.

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