In the pending $95 billion security aid bill, most of America has been focusing on U.S. aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. But few noticed that key funds for another region were removed—an action that could give communist China control of much of the Pacific. Watch the clip: Grant Newsham is an expert on Asia-Pacific, a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy, and author of “When China Attacks.” 🔴 WATCH the full episode (29 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0224GrantNewsham FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Grant Newsham, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Grant Newsham: I’m glad to be here, thanks very much. Mr. Jekielek: Grant, you brought something to my attention recently, which I find very concerning. The U.S. has a relationship with these compact countries, Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau. They govern about 6 million nautical miles of territory that essentially have been under U.S. military control for defense since World War II, and now that may be in jeopardy. Please tell us about this. Mr. Newsham: It’s not just in jeopardy, this is in extremis, which means that we’re about to lose. These three countries that you mentioned, they are right in the middle of the central Pacific. They occupy a huge amount of terrain, about as big as the continental United States. Take a map of the Pacific, look at Hawaii, and then go west and you will run into the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and then Palau. When you’re at Palau, you’re almost to the Philippines. You have this very long corridor, this huge territory where, since World War II, the Americans have had total control and total dominance of the area. These countries have signed treaties with us which say that in exchange for financial aid and some other benefits, these countries will allow the Americans to have sole and exclusive military access to their territory and the right to keep any other foreign military out of the region. This is a privilege that we’ve had and we seem to have taken it for granted. We think, “It will always be ours because we have a treaty.” We are now in danger of losing this and to the point that either you could have foreign militaries start to come in or that we would not be welcome there. We would not have free access. Try conducting military operations in the Pacific all the way to the Asian mainland without having a secure central Pacific. One way to look at it is these countries are a high speed corridor that give the U.S. military access to Asia and back, and also access to move north to Japan and south to Australia. If you don’t have control over that, then you will have a very hard time defending anything in the Pacific. You will eventually find yourself defending the United States from Hawaii, and quite possibly, the American west coast. Mr. Jekielek: These islanders actually serve in the U.S. military, and at significantly higher rates than most states. Traditionally, these are very pro-American people. Mr. Newsham: They are very much pro-American. Mr. Jekielek: The thing that always comes up today is that we’re spending huge amounts of money overseas. There was just a new bill sending many tens of billions to support Ukraine. There’s a lot of spending and there’s a lot of questions being asked. What is in jeopardy here and what is the price tag? Mr. Newsham: The reason why this is in danger is because parts of the treaties that deal with the financial aid America gives these three countries have been up for renewal. The treaties have been signed, but Congress hasn’t passed them, so they’re not going anywhere. The amount of money we’re talking about in terms of finance is about $120 million a year for the next 20 years. Mr. Jekielek: I just want to remember that you said million. Mr. Newsham: Million. Mr. Jekielek: Because generally, when we talk about these foreign aid scenarios, we’re always talking in billions. Mr. Newsham: You are right. We think that unless it’s a billion, it really isn’t much money. We’re talking millions here, $120 million. The legislation currently is in Congress. The Senate has passed it and now the House will decide on it. It is a $95 billion security assistance bill and about $60 billion goes to Ukraine. The legislation actually had a provision to pay the $120 million a year for the three compact states, which is what they call them. I’m told that it was mysteriously removed under obscure circumstances at a meeting between Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins of Maine, and Patty Murray of Washington. Before this meeting, the provision to pay for the compact states was in there, but after the meeting it was gone. You can hardly believe how little $120 million is in the context of the U.S. budget. For example, in Afghanistan, we were paying about $48 billion a year for operations, and this was every year for a good long while, so we ended up spending about a trillion dollars. If you’ve paid $120 million a year for 20 years to the compact states, you will have spent something like $2.3 billion vs. the $48 billion we were spending in a year in Afghanistan. Mr. Jekielek: Again, we get lost in these numbers, but that’s 48,000 million versus 120 million. Mr. Newsham: That’s how it is. Keep in mind that Afghanistan was a country of no strategic significance to the United States, none. Now, we’re talking about three countries that occupy the center of the Pacific Ocean and are indispensable to America’s defense position. We can talk about how we defend against the People’s Liberation Army [PLA]. We keep China in check by defending along a line from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines and down to Malaysia. That’s our so-called first island chain. We always talk about having this great relationship with Japan. Japan is building up its military. We’re doing more with the Philippines, and they’re taking their military seriously. We’re helping the Taiwanese out more than we ever have. You can do all of this all you want, and you can do it as well as you want, but if you don’t look at what’s happening in your rear area, you’re going to lose. But with the amount of money we’re talking about, it’s just embarrassing that we’re actually arguing about it. When this provision was removed from the legislation, presumably, it was done to save money. This is a bit like in a hospital. To save some money, they want to reduce their electricity costs, so they start pulling plugs out of the wall. You'll save some electricity, but what if one of the plugs is the one that keeps the life support machines going? You’ve lost a whole lot more than just that little bit you’re going to save. The people in these countries want us to live up to our promises. They serve in the U.S. military at higher per capita rates than almost any U.S. state. They have this long association with us, and they have a real affection for the United States. Just go there and you will see it immediately. There’s an irritation and almost a bafflement at getting stiffed by the U.S. government. They thought they had a deal and they know the amount of money wasn’t that much. Mr. Jekielek: The former president of Micronesia, President Panuelo, has been on the show explaining in intricate detail the level of Chinese Communist Party subversion in these states. The Chinese regime has been trying to co-opt these countries and get them on their side. Of course, a lot of it is just that money talks. That’s how they’ve done a lot of their diplomacy, even though it’s being revealed in many places to be short term. If you’re running out of money, then you’re looking for the next best offer. Some of them want that and the CCP always comes bearing these very attractive gifts. Mr. Newsham: The senior officials in some of these islands have been overheard saying, “Look, we don’t do this by choice. We do it because we don’t have any alternative.” It’s not just that the Americans are not willing to pay this tiny amount of money. The Chinese are there waiting to slip in, and they’ve been doing this for at least 30 years. The Chinese commercial presence in all of these countries is immense to the point where they dominate the main industry, which is the fishing industry in each of these places. That commercial presence is not just fisheries, but also the street corner shops. So much of the commercial activity has a Chinese presence, and that leads to political influence. The political influence can be greased with bribery in these places so that you can buy a constituency. You also have people in each of these islands who think, “China is the best alternative. They promise they’re going to send tourists and fill up the hotels.” In fact, they’ve done it in some cases and then cut it off when they weren’t happy with what these governments did. But nonetheless, this is where the economic bounty is seen to be coming from. There’s not a whole lot of Americans on the ground in any of these places, but you do find a considerable number of Chinese. Mr. Jekielek: Can our leaders really understand that there are effects from their action or inaction? We are very fixated on the Middle East, Russia, and Ukraine. They deserve attention, that’s true, But we forget about this part of the world and the effect of that can be so massive. Mr. Newsham: You do wonder if we ever had that ability. It may just be human nature to focus on the immediate thing and not see what the ripple effects are going to be. But here there is enough empirical evidence to tell us what is going to happen. You’ve got 30 years of Chinese activity, and you have the Chinese statements of what they intend to do, which is to push us out of the Pacific. They are fighting a political war. They haven’t fired a shot, but you can see how they have subverted the populations and shifted them away from the United States. It doesn’t help when this nation’s best friend doesn’t seem to be all that interested. In fact, the expression benign neglect was actually coined many years ago by somebody who was talking about these three states and the nations in the central Pacific; Palau, Federal States of Micronesian, and the Marshall Islands. They said, “We'll give them a little help, but otherwise, just leave them to the island life.” The Chinese are here offering them something better. Vacuums tend to get filled, and we’ve left a vacuum there. It’s not as if the People’s Liberation Army is going to show up tomorrow. But if these agreements are not kept in these countries, as I said, there are people whose patience is not unlimited. Every president of these nations has a blank check from China on his desk, and they haven’t cashed them yet. All they have to do is say to the United States, “Yes, we have a treaty, but we don’t think it applies.” At that point, what do the Americans do? Do they send in the Marines? Do we occupy these places to keep these people who don’t want us there in check? What do you do? It would take so little effort to avoid all of these ripple effects. Mr. Jekielek: Of course, we wouldn’t do that. It’s an unthinkable option. Grant, bottom line, what needs to happen here ? Mr. Newsham: What needs to happen is that the White House needs to get involved here. They can’t just say, “It’s Congress’s fault.” The White House didn’t take care of this issue long enough in advance so that it could be worked out. For them now to say, “It’s Congress’s fault and it’s the Republican’s fault,” is just wrong. What needs to happen is the House in particular needs to restore the provisions in this bill that the House is now going to consider. They need to restore those provisions at full funding, not some part of it, but all $120 million a year. As I said, it’s about $2.3 billion over 20 years. They need to put all of that back in immediately and to have the measures passed and to get us back on track with these three island nations. The leadership of the House and the Senate needs to realize that they are in the position where if they don’t get this right, they will be considered the people who gave the Pacific to China. To pay for this mistake, a lot of sailors and marines and army and air force people are going to die. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. For this tiny amount of money, you can avoid a lot of trouble. If you don’t do this, and if things continue as they are in the Pacific, you’re going to have to fight your way back. This is the same place we had to fight through to get to Japan in World War II. It’s going to cost lives and it just costs so little. The people there want us and it’s just baffling that we cannot get this done. The leadership of the House and the Senate needs to get this fixed. All this fixation on Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan is important, make no mistake. But if you can’t do this bit as well, we’re going to lose in Asia. It doesn’t matter what we do for Ukraine or Israel, if you don’t get these tiny agreements and tiny amounts of money allocated, then we will be in a position in Asia in the Pacific that makes the retreat from Afghanistan look pretty good by comparison. It’s unfortunate that we have arrived at this point. Once again, the White House has a role in this as well, if they are just arguing over a small amount of money. In all of this federal spending, is there a reason why the administration couldn’t find $120 million a year that they could offset? That’s what is called for. It’s not just the fault of Congress. The White House also has a role. This has almost been a bipartisan achievement. One thing I would note in all of this, in order to get the relevant part of the legislation where it needs to go, it had to pass through about 12 congressional committees. Mr. Jekielek: Basically, all the work has been done. Mr. Newsham: It was incredible work that was done by legislators and their staff. It was astonishing to see how well they did. This was Democrats and Republicans who all understood its importance. At the very last minute, it just pooled out. I know there’s a lot going on Capitol Hill, and maybe someone just didn’t notice that this was really important. Regardless, it needs to be put back in. But I really give credit where it’s due. There are a lot of people on Capitol Hill who did very good work to get it where it is. In football terms, it was on the one-inch line and they just couldn’t get it over the goal. In fact, the coaches called the wrong play and pushed it back to the six-yard line. But this really needs to get done, and there is no reason this cannot get done. I’m not inclined to hyperbole, because most things don’t matter as much as people say they do, or they can wait awhile. But this is one thing where the only people who are happy about this state of affairs are the people in Beijing. If I were them, I would be delighted at what’s going on. Now, they can say, “Look, these Americans don’t even like you enough to pay, but we are here. What do you need?” Mr. Jekielek: This is something that the CCP would be very interested in lobbying against. How could they achieve that? Mr. Newsham: I have wondered about that because they lobby for everything else. In this case, I don’t know if it’s just short-sightedness and stupidity that’s behind this. I don’t know if there’s a malevolent influence involved here. Often there is. You can see that with efforts to control technology exports to China or financial investments in China, their lobbyists are all over the place. You saw that phalanx of American lobbyists behind the TikTok CEO when he testified before Congress a few months back. They’ve got their people on his payroll. But in this case, I don’t understand exactly why they would need to lobby. I understand why they would want to, but it seems as though we’re doing this to ourselves. This is one case where it shouldn’t even be an issue. Exactly what is the argument against funding this? Is it that the U.S. government can’t afford $120 million? It’s so silly, considering the $48 billion that was given to Afghanistan every year. Even now, we’re paying millions to the Taliban, supposedly for humanitarian assistance. We’ve had our own borders opened up, and apparently in the last two years, about $20 billion has been paid to provide cash cards to the illegal immigrants. Mr. Jekielek: It is probably more than that. That’s right, migrant support aid is all in the books. That is not an estimate, that’s what they found. Mr. Newsham: The money is there, so I don’t know what the argument against this would be. Is it to save money to show responsible fiscal stewardship? That would be like standup comedy to try to argue, “We don’t really need the relationship with these three countries in the Pacific, which secure our rare area, which is indispensable to our entire defense position, and to try and replace the defense benefits we get from that secure control of the Pacific.” A rough estimate that nobody has ever challenged me on is that you would have to start at about $100 billion dollars if we had to actually militarily defend the position that we get from the COFA agreements. It would cost $100 billion, and all that’s being asked is $120 million a year, so I’m perplexed. Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think war with China under the CCP is inevitable? Because essentially, that’s one of the assumptions in what you’ve been arguing here. Mr. Newsham: It is inevitable, unless the Chinese Communist Party wakes up one morning and decides it wants to be nice. It is because China wants it. But also, I would point out that the kind of war we’re talking about, if you think of everything that’s happened to date where the Chinese have got a real strong presence in each of these three countries, but also every island country in the Pacific, they have done it without firing a shot. As I said, it’s political warfare, commercial influence, political influence, bribery, propaganda, and intimidation in some cases. It is pointing out things like, “The Americans aren’t really reliable.” We’re proving that case for them. But they say that this is all being done non-kinetically without shooting, and the shooting part only comes at the last stage if it’s even necessary. If these countries just tell us, “Look, we don’t think the treaties apply, and we don’t want you here. In fact, we need Chinese police support, and we need Chinese to help us guard our watchers,” we would be in a very difficult position at that point. With their behavior, it’s clear what the Chinese intend to do. But also they have said what they intend to do, which for starters, is to push us out of the Pacific. It was roughly 15 years ago when a Chinese admiral said to the then commander of Indo-PACOM, Admiral Keating, “You can have east of Hawaii, and we'll take west. How’s that for a deal?” The Chinese have always telegraphed their punches, so this is where we are today. You have this assertive, aggressive, hyper-nationalistic, totalitarian dictatorship that wants to push us out and dominate us. If that continues and we don’t check it and also counter-attack, we are ultimately going to come to a point where we either fight or submit. It’s unfortunate. I thought history had ended about 30 years ago and we had won. Those people were wrong. But human nature doesn’t change, and we can see what’s coming. Mr. Jekielek: A final thought as we finish, Grant? Mr. Newsham: I do want to stress this one thing again because I actually saw it in action and it really changed my impression about Capitol Hill over the last few years dealing with Pacific Island matters. I thought that in general that you would find layabouts and good-for-nothings up on Capitol Hill. But I have been really impressed with the quality of so many of the legislators and staff to get these three treaties where they needed to be. That is something that I’m impressed with, and now they just need to finish it off. You can look around the world and see that America goes to a lot of places where people either don’t want us, don’t really care, or they’re indifferent. We are just desperate to make friends with them, so we do all sorts of things to try to ingratiate ourselves with them. In the Central Pacific in these islands, these are people who want us to be there. There are not so many places where you can say that these are people who have had the trust in us, and have allowed us to take care of their national defense. No other countries on Earth have ever done that. These are people who are our friends and we should treat them as such. I will state this again. If this isn’t done, the people who are responsible can point fingers anywhere they want, but they will be known as the people who handed the Pacific to the Chinese communists. If worse comes to worse, and it probably will, it’s going to be these Americans from flyover countries who will pay the price for it. I hope we really do the responsible thing now. There are a lot of people watching. The Pacific matters as much, if not more than any other place that they’re arguing about up on Capitol Hill. Mr. Jekielek: Grant Newsham, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Newsham: Well, thank you very much for having me, I appreciate it. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Grant Newsham and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders, I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (29 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0224GrantNewsham Epoch Original DVD collection:

Several recent crimes in New York City have been attributed to a violent Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua. The recent beating of NYPD officers and a string of moped robberies have been attributed to the gang. Yet, as the city looks to possibly deport the criminals, the Venezuelan regime is refusing to take them back. The country has now halted all deportation flights, and this could complicate things for the United States as it looks for possible options on how to handle violent criminals coming in through the border. In this live Q&A with Crossroads host Joshua Philipp, we’ll discuss this topic and others, and answer questions from the audience. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇 https://ept.ms/3SXyyDr Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

“So, you had this left-wing, pro-communist and left-wing, anti-communist sections in our intelligence services. And then when the OSS was abolished, many went into the State Department. And they shaped the policies that we’re living with today.” In this episode, I sit down with Michael Waller, senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy and the author of “Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.” “There was a breaking point in the FBI and the CIA where they stopped serving American interests,” says Mr. Waller. “It ceases to serve the American interest if they view themselves as states within a state.” We dive into how the Soviet Union influenced our intelligence and security agencies, and how President Barack Obama fundamentally altered their agendas. “They’re making our own FBI agents and CIA officers what they call ‘agents of change,’ to change our culture. This is not legal. This is not what the intelligence community is for,” says Mr. Waller. Watch the clip: He also reflects on Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin. “I think any journalist should go meet any foreign leader and get whatever information or disinformation he can out of him. As long as he knows it’s all an orchestrated setup on the other side,” says Mr. Waller. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (1 h) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0222MichaelWaller FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Michael Waller, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Michael Waller: It’s great to be back with you. Mr. Jekielek: It’s been a long time and you have an amazing new book out. Before we dive into Big Intel, what do you make of Tucker Carlson going to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin? Mr. Waller: Any journalist should go meet any foreign leader and get whatever information or disinformation he can out of him as long as he knows it’s all an orchestrated setup on the other side. Mr. Jekielek: My thoughts exactly. Mr. Waller: Putin is going to say what he will say. One can guarantee that he put his best propaganda people in charge of preparing him for a very long time. Mr. Jekielek: What do you make of suggestions that Tucker Carlson shouldn’t be allowed back into the country or having been put on a kill list by the Ukrainians. What do you make of these types of things? Mr. Waller: Mr. Waller:A great way for the Ukrainians to win support from people who are on the fence is to threaten to kill Tucker Carlson. Really? What kind of lunacy is out there where they want to use either censorship or violence to prevent a journalist or commentator from interviewing a world leader? Mr. Jekielek: Any journalist should want to interview any world leader. With the appropriate caveats that you mentioned earlier, it would seem like a normal thing. Mr. Waller: Of course it would. Who wouldn’t want to interview Xi Jinping? Any international journalist would want to interview the guy knowing that it’s all set up. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about your background so we know what you’re coming in with here. Mr. Waller: My background is kind of eclectic. I came in with a very favorable view toward the FBI and the CIA and our whole intelligence community as the fundamental instruments of our protection during the Cold War. The FBI is mainly counterintelligence against Soviet spies and agents of influence. The CIA is the main instrument for the containment of communism or we hoped it would have been. Its mission was waging covert warfare at the sub-military level so that we wouldn’t have to send our own troops in, and informing our presidents with the finest possible intelligence gathered in the best manner with the most solid vetting. That’s what I was expecting. I saw something very different coming in as a college undergrad. That’s how I got into all of this. I’ve still been looking at it in the context of the system, but I am very alarmed. Any human institution is always going to have its problems and challenges. There was a breaking point in the FBI and the CIA where they stopped serving American interests. Mr. Jekielek: That’s an astonishing statement. Right now there are many people that are wondering if that statement is true. Obviously, it can’t be entirely true. Right? Mr. Waller: Right. No, it’s a generalization. But as a yes or no issue, looking at it in a black or white way, it does not serve the American interest if they view themselves as states within states, if they stop believing in the real American founding principles, and they are there as the central government to protect all of us rather than be the servant of all of us. It’s flipped on its head. Of course, they fight foreign spies. Of course, they’re great at fighting child trafficking within the country. They’re great at fighting organized crime. The FBI has done a lot. They have protected us from international terrorism attacks. The CIA has been the world’s best at this, there’s no question. But there is that breaking point where they are not really protecting America anymore, if they’re full of people who don’t even believe in America, the way it was founded, the principles on which it’s based, and they view half the country as potential enemies? Mr. Jekielek: You entered the system out of college. Please tell us about your career. Mr. Waller: It was never in the government, it was around the government. Starting out as an undergrad, I was approached when I was a student journalist, and ended up being a part of CIA Director William Casey’s privately funded network to support President Reagan’s policies against the Soviet Bloc to roll back Soviet communism. I didn’t really know what I was getting into at the time. I should have been quicker to figure out that if you’re told to go to church and sit in the back, and then the CIA director walks up to you and tells you a name, has somebody repeat the name, and he keeps going after one of his friends that had given you walking-around money to go on a trip with a CIA-backed insurgency against a communist regime. It took me a long time as a 21-year-old to put all that together. In fact, it was actually Bill Casey giving me my cryptonym at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. It was 30 years later I found out that he did that so that he would never have to testify before Congress what went on in that church. Mr. Jekielek: Can you flesh out what you actually did? Mr. Waller: I started out wanting to be in the CIA to wage Reagan’s fight against communism. My professor Jack Dziak, and Angelo Codevilla, who’s really well known and who I knew as a Senate Intelligence committee staffer said, “Don’t go in. You will hate it and it will hate you. It’s not mission-oriented anymore.” Mr. Jekielek: Wow. What year was that? Mr. Waller: 1983. That’s when I went in with Casey’s privately funded network. It turns out he was funding it out of his pocket, again, so he wouldn’t have to tell Congress anything, because it was his own money and it was his own business. We were just kids and we didn’t know what we were up against. My job ended up being to collect intelligence in Central America on Soviet Bloc support for the communist government in Nicaragua and for communist guerrilla movements elsewhere in the region. Mr. Jekielek: Did you stop doing this at the end of his tenure? Mr. Waller: It was before then. I met a Salvadoran girl during the war, got married, and had a family. Then I went off and did other things, but I kept going back and forth. I still worked with the Contras in my own private capacity because I believed in their cause. I was working with the Salvadoran army in my own private capacity as well, and then finally I went into journalism. Mr. Jekielek: There is a narrative on the conservative side that mainstream media is actually just a mouthpiece for U.S. intelligence. What do you make of that? Mr. Waller: For some elements in U.S. intelligence there is a symbiosis between the intelligence community and mainstream media and some investigative journalists who are chiefly on the Left. It has been that way since the 1950s. They have built up the careers of certain journalists at the Washington Post or the big three networks that they used to have, and now it’s CNN and certain websites. They give them illegal leaks of classified information. They become dependent on the intelligence officer or analyst or agent as the source, so they’re not going to cross you. They’re not going to say anything bad about your entity. They’re going to protect you as a source and then you’re going to build them up in their careers. They’re going to write books. The better ones are going to make a lot of money off those books. They might get some movies out of it. Now, you’re creating a wealthy class of journalists who are wholly dependent on the intelligence community as the source of livelihood. Mr. Jekielek: Do you have a sense of how prevalent that is? Mr. Waller: Anybody can tell. If you read intelligence sources say or so-and-so has received documents from the CIA or unnamed intelligence officials say this, that means unnamed officials are leaking to that journalist or to that news organization. There is a favored relationship there. Now, any good journalist is going to work his sources there, but not every good journalist is going to get a constant stream of leaks over a lifetime of journalism. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that these relationships started in the ‘50s, and you hear about Operation Mockingbird. The thesis of your book is that they went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains. Did that start as early as the ’50s? Please explain that to us. Mr. Waller: When the CIA was founded in the early ‘50s, that’s when the Cold War began. On one hand, it’s important for journalists to know certain things. But it’s also important for intelligence officers to obey the law and not leak classified information to journalists and not pick favorites among journalists. In the ’50s you had Allen Dulles, who was head of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State. They were very close to President Eisenhower. There were times like when Nikita Khrushchev gave that secret speech to the Soviet Party Congress to supposedly expose Stalin’s crimes and to hold themselves blameless for the crimes they had also committed. But it was admitting that it wasn’t just Stalin who was the bad guy, it was the whole communist leadership and international communist movement. That’s why it was a secret speech, because if the whole communist movement and the different parties of loyal Soviet agents and supporters around the world knew about it they would be terribly demoralized. When the U.S. got their hands on this speech it had to come out. It was a great intelligence coup to get that speech. How do you publish it? Do you have the CIA leak it? No. In this case, you had the U.S. Secretary of State release it through the State Department, translate it into various languages by the AFL-CIO through a private entity that was allied with the U.S. in waging the Cold War, and distribute it to ethnic communities who didn’t speak English or distribute it abroad. That’s a good way of using intelligence in a non-manipulative fashion, not playing favorites with journalists and just getting the information out there. They knew how to do it right, but they also knew how to do Operation Mockingbird-type activity, which was to run things through news organizations. Mr. Jekielek: With a specific agenda. Mr. Waller: When it becomes a political agenda it gets even worse, because then it’s intervening on how Americans think about their own leaders and how they think about their own policies. Then you have unaccountable intelligence officials manipulating American public opinion, and therefore, manipulating American politics and elections through management of attitudes. Mr. Jekielek: For the benefit of our viewers, what is Operation Mockingbird? Some people suggest this is still very much ongoing. Mr. Waller: First of all, we don’t know what is ongoing. We don’t know what kind of operations are continuing or what new ones there might be so that we actually know what has been declassified or leaked. Mockingbird was an operation to work through the press to influence public opinion and capture journalists. It was very straightforward, but it was not just individual CIA officials leaking to certain journalists; it was an actual controlled operation that was run from the top and coordinated. Mr. Jekielek: Was that with the intent to seed specific narratives into society? Mr. Waller: It was really to wage the Cold War against the Soviets. But the CIA did not support real anti-communist movements and they didn’t build up anti-communist forces. They built up non-communist forces. They built up the Democratic Left, or even the almost Democratic Left or the undemocratic Left that wasn’t totalitarian, in order to keep them away from the Soviet controlled communist parties and organizations and bring them into the wider spectrum of politics in whatever countries they were in. You had the real anti-communists in Europe. Who were they? We don’t know. It was all moderate Christian Democrats and then anti-communist labor. They were not real Right-wingers, but they viewed the communists as rivals to their goal to control the labor movement. You had this building up of the international Left, while the Soviets were building up the international hard-Left at the same time. That dramatically affected world politics and the way the world is today and also globalism for that matter, because they were both global movements. Mr. Jekielek: There was a group in the solidarity movement of Poland which was called Fighting Solidarity. They were the only group which had the explicit mandate to be anti-communist and to seek the removal of communist governance. A lot of people today don’t understand that solidarity was a labor union fighting for workers’ rights. Some people do, but a lot of people don’t. How many people know about Fighting Solidarity? Mr. Waller: You don’t hear about it much. I had forgotten about it. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to us why they were not supporting anti-communist forces, but only so-called non-communist forces. Mr. Waller: During World War II, we didn’t have an intelligence service when the war was about to begin. The war had already begun elsewhere in the world, but it really didn’t affect us. But we had no foreign intelligence service. The British came to the U.S. and said, “You really need a foreign intelligence service. Let us help you set one up.” That seemed like a pretty good deal. President Roosevelt appointed Wild Bill Donovan to set up what became the Office of Strategic Services [OSS]. That was our wartime intelligence service that collected and analyzed intelligence for the president and then ran covert operations behind enemy lines. This is where young guys like Bill Casey were recruited. He had invented tax shelters to help people get around Roosevelt’s New Deal wealth confiscation. You needed to bring in guys like that who know how to disrupt systems with minimal effort. A lot of them were good anti-communists, as well as anti-Nazis. During the war, Bill Donovan’s real goal with the OSS was to defeat the Axis enemy. He didn’t see anything beyond that. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, whom Donovan couldn’t stand and it was mutual, said, “It’s not just that. Stalin wants to reshape the world after the Nazis are defeated. We have to be cognizant of the fact that he’s going to be manipulating us.” Lo and behold, Stalin was flooding the United States with his agents and assets, many of whom went into the OSS. You need native speakers of these different languages behind Nazi lines and in areas where we need to operate. Who are you going to get? A lot of them were communist party members from those countries who had fled to the United States, some for refuge, and some to implant themselves as agents. This is how the Frankfurt School developed in the United States. For the purposes of our diplomacy and our covert operations, if you have Left-wingers from Europe and communists from Europe coming into the United States in the ‘30s, joining our intelligence services as subject matter experts and operatives, they are remembering where they came from and how they want to shape things when it’s done. You have the Stalinists wanting to shape it on Stalinist lines. Then you have the Euro-socialists who want to have a socialist Europe emerge from this. This is not putting American interest first. This is defeating Hitler in order to gain whatever they want. You had these Left-wing, pro-communist and Left-wing, anti-communist sections in our intelligence services. When the OSS was abolished, many went into the State Department and they shaped the policies that we are living with today. Mr. Jekielek: You use the term from Diana West’s book, The Red Thread. She found some astonishing disclosures around people who identified as communists very early on. You’re saying the seeds of this were planted right at the beginning. Mr. Waller: Before our beginning. It’s one thing to say, “These people on the Left or these Soviet agents did something in the ‘30s and therefore things are the way they are today.” It’s not cause and effect to say that. In writing Big Intel, I was really looking at what happened under Obama. How did the center just collapse within the FBI and the CIA, and both get overtaken by wokeness? Who was responsible? When did it happen? Why did it happen? What are the original documents to prove that it happened this way? Where did that impetus come from and where did it come from before that? By going backwards, you can find Diana West’s Red Thread, this intellectual chain of custody going back person to person, without a break, to a 1922 meeting in Moscow at the Marx-Engels Institute with the leaders of the Comintern, the Communist International. This was a brand new international global entity that was set up by the Bolsheviks to control all the radical socialists and communist parties around the world and make them loyal to the Bolshevik Revolution, and then to replicate Bolshevism worldwide. This was a centrally-structured command and control system for this. They were meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute mainly with their European agents and Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka or what became the KGB, to discuss, “How can we have a Bolshevik-type revolution worldwide?” The consensus was, “We are not going to have workers rise up in a violent workers struggle like Marx had called for or even a violent revolution as happened in Russia, because the workers are too well-paid. They’re aspiring, or at least they have some kind of hope. We have to find a different way to do it.” A Hungarian Bolshevik named Gyorgy Lukacs, who had been a minister of culture in the Hungarian Bolshevik regime, which had taken power just before the Soviets took power and didn’t last long, was the strategist behind the Red Terror of his country—to round people up and murder them based on their political and cultural views, to break up families, to break up churches, to break up any sense of moral tradition, to sexualize children and separate them from their parents, and break up nuclear families. This was a strategy of his. Mr. Jekielek: It sounds familiar. Mr. Waller: It sounds familiar. He lived until 1971 and he was very active as a theorist and a revered figure on the Left for all those decades. He was part of that Red Thread, but it was one of his ideas and he was the first to implement it. Karl Marx came up with it in 1843, five years before he ever wrote The Communist Manifesto. He wasn’t yet this economic madman who didn’t know anything about economics, but then he became famous for the Manifesto and Das Kapital. But five years earlier, he was a cultural warrior. He was writing about destroying pride in one’s country. He said that obeying legitimate laws, church, family, heritage, history, and parents were all oppressive. He said, “Your country is oppressive. Your just rulers are oppressive. Your morals are oppressive. Your religion is oppressive. Your parents are oppressive. Your siblings are oppressive. Everybody is oppressing you.” That was what he wanted to do to just rip society apart. That didn’t catch on. He got onto the Industrial Revolution troubles and the terrible treatment of workers back at that time to try to then have economic conflicts become the engine of change. This was revived after the Bolshevik Revolution at this 1922 meeting to set up a school in Germany where you could have all the intellectuals and trendy beautiful people and trust fund babies looking to be cool and relevant and add a lot of Freudian sex stuff and drugs and any kind of intoxication and just be cool and have a good time being revolutionaries to rip society apart. This was at a time when Germany was ripping itself apart after its unconditional surrender after World War I, not knowing what direction to go in. It didn’t have a long history of unity as a unitary state anyway, so you had all these factions battling each other. The cultural Marxists backed by the Soviets thought, “Let’s just fight the Hitlerites last. We‘ll fight everyone else first. Tear out the center of the country and then we’ll take over.” However, Hitler moved faster than they did and they fled. Many of them came to the United States with the help of a Soviet intelligence agent who negotiated with Columbia University for them to set up their Frankfurt School shop at Columbia University. The university had a teaching school to teach the teachers who fanned out across America and worked with a certain John Dewey, head of the National Education Association. He went to the Soviet Union and wrote a six part series in the New Republic praising Stalin’s education system. He also designed a new education system to change how American children learn and how they view the world. Mr. Jekielek: There are a few interviews of Yuri Bezmenov and he says that the majority of the effort that the KGB exerts is for subverting America, as opposed to intelligence gathering. Mr. Waller: Bezmenov gets a whole chapter in Big Intel. I went through those interviews and transcribed a lot of them so that they would be in print and not have YouTube suddenly banish them all someday. He was such a wise figure in his time. These were interviews that took place 40 years ago. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us who he was. Mr. Waller: He wasn’t a KGB man. He was a Soviet propagandist under journalistic cover based in India, but he knew the whole English-speaking world very well. He defected to the United States and relocated to Canada. Then he resurfaced with this immense knowledge of how Soviet propagandists are trained. He shared the whole philosophy and doctrine behind that training with the hows and the whys of that training. The goal is to break down our societies piece by piece, to create confusion, to create demoralization, to cause us to lose faith in ourselves and everyone around us and everything that we ever believed was good. It is to ruin us inside, to collapse us from within, and to basically defeat us. Sun Tzu wrote, “You defeat the enemy without fighting him.” This is what Bezmenov was explaining to us in 1983 and 1984. Mr. Jekielek: Many people were not ready to grasp this and did not understand it. How was it received at the time? Mr. Waller: It was received by people who were ideologically anti-communist and allied with President Reagan. But no one else wanted to hear the message. Mr. Jekielek: Our biggest threat from subversion currently comes from the Chinese Communist Party. It’s not something that appears a lot in Big Intel, and I’m curious about that. Mr. Waller: That’s a whole separate book or a separate lifetime of work to explore that. I didn’t focus on them in Big Intel because I was trying to answer the question, “How did the FBI and CIA become woke?” I investigated Obama’s political lineage and all the people all around Obama. The CIA director under Obama had voted for a Soviet agent to become President of the United States and knew that he was a Soviet agent. This agent was Gus Hall running on the Communist Party USA ticket. Then after he voted, three years later he got hired by the CIA. That’s kind of a problem. Why? It’s not like he had an epiphany at some point to fight communists. He just dismissed it and went along his way. Even in his memoir where he admitted this, he never drew any lessons from it. He just said it was a lark as a young man. Mr. Jekielek: He didn’t hide his ideological leanings when he was hired into the agency, which is shocking. Mr. Waller: When you’re interviewing for a job with security clearance, especially in intelligence, it’s like a confession. You admit all your dirt because they’re going to find out anyway. If you’re lying or obfuscating you’re definitely out, so you just admit it. Then they assess, “Does this present a danger to the United States?” Mr. Jekielek: Right, exactly. Mr. Waller: He had just voted for the Soviets a few years earlier, and now he wants to be a CIA officer? It’s not like he’s a defector from the Communist Party saying, “I want to help the U.S. destroy this.” It’s more like, “Okay, I voted for Leonid Brezhnev’s man to run America.” He makes his career there, and then Obama makes him his Homeland Security advisor at the White House and then names him to run the CIA. At the same time, there was another radical, General Clapper. I call him that because these guys wear uniforms that have stars and talk about, “My lifetime of brave service.” No, he was a known extremist throughout his career and there are stories about him at the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] back in the ‘90s. I was close to people at the DIA at the time, and heard these stories firsthand and have collected more since. He was protecting the worst elements in the DIA. He even protected the group of female Latin America analysts at the time who were outwardly pro-Che Guevara. One had a Che Guevara poster in her cubicle, not as a trophy, but as a sort of a shrine. One of the people he was protecting was Ana Belen Montes, the Cuban spy. Now, I’m not alleging he knew that she was a spy, but I am alleging that he was protecting openly radical extremists who were intelligence analysts there. He gave Pentagon passes to the Russian GRU military intelligence resident, the chief of Soviet and Russian military intelligence here in Washington, to go around unescorted in the Pentagon. Who on earth would do this? He had the authority to do that. These are the people who make their way up the system and somehow they all coalesce under Barack Obama at the top of the intelligence community. Then they reach down into the system to bring up those who came in from below and put them in middle management and upper management, but they couldn’t do it with meritocracy. That’s where diversity, equity, and inclusion comes in to pull them up with that criteria. Lo and behold, you now have woke people running the entire nerve center of the CIA. Mr. Jekielek: This is how DEI actually works. Essentially, there’s a kind of coded language. If you speak the language and put it into your applications, everybody who is involved knows exactly what it means and knows what team you’re on. Mr. Waller: There’s a lot of that. Mr. Jekielek: Not to mention people who would identify themselves as being part of a visible minority, when in fact they’re not. They knew the right language would get them in for more opportunities. Mr. Waller: As long as you can self-identify as what you’re really not, you will be promoted because your ideology is right. Look at what this does to the truth. If you can say that you’re a gender or a sex or a race that you’re actually not, and people are forced to believe that you are, and they can’t just agree that you are, they have to really believe that you are, then that’s just like Winston in 1984; two plus two equals five. You can’t just say it, that’s not good enough. You have to believe it. The FBI had a training program in 2021, and I got the 56-page slide presentation for it. There is a whole chapter devoted to gender and the importance of gender, because now DEI is what FBI Director Wray calls, “A core principle.” The CIA has also said this in their own literature which is unclassified. These have become core operating principles. Recently, the FBI even sent out a message on X that DEI ranks on par with the U.S. Constitution as a core principle of the FBI. But here’s the thing. When you believe that a man is not a man or a woman is not a woman and it’s whatever gender they say they are, and that you must believe it and your professional future depends on it, what does that do to an honest assessment of evidence as a crime fighter or as an investigator? What does it do to intelligence collection and assessment and the evaluations that we do for the national leaders of the country within the community, if facts are no longer facts? Mr. Jekielek: It’s like everything is subjected to an ideological test. Mr. Waller: Who did this before? The Soviets did it. The Chinese Communist Party does it. Here we are in a post-fact intelligence community driven by social, political, and cultural agendas that have their direct origins back in cultural Marxism spawned at that 1922 meeting with Feliks Dzerzhinsky in Moscow. The Republican congresses have been funding this stuff, so it’s not like it’s a partisan issue. They go along with it because it must be important if the FBI is doing it or the CIA is doing it. But if you look at what they’re doing, it’s important to have whoever’s the best person for the job. I don’t care where they’re from or what they do or what their personal life is like, as long as they’re not threats to national security and they are the best people for the job. That’s what you want. You need to have the FBI trained to work in certain cultural groups and subgroups, because you have to be trusted as an investigator. You have to make a coherent case before a jury. You need to work in those communities to understand them. That’s fine. But they are making our own FBI agents and CIA officers into agents of change to change our culture. This is not legal and this is not what the intelligence community is for, but that is what they are doing. Mr. Jekielek: What portion of these services think that way? Mr. Waller: It’s tiny. In the FBI, about 1.6 percent are what the FBI now defines as LGBTQIIA+. They keep changing that label so it might have changed again. It is 1.6 percent according to the FBI’s own figures. The FBI isn’t as diverse as it pretends to be and not all of that 1.6 percent wants to shove this down everybody’s throat, it’s just a fraction that wants to. You have a tiny militant group within the bureau pushing this. Then they end up being the nerve center and the political enforcers within the bureau. According to this 2021 FBI training course, if you misgender someone a third time, that’s a mark against you professionally and that will affect your promotion. Mr. Jekielek: Almost every system in Western society seems to have this same structure that you’re describing. A very small group of people says, “Yes, this is the right thing we’re doing.” Ultimately, it’s a very tiny group of people, but they have a lot of energy, and therefore they wield power. Everyone else goes along with it, with just a few defectors. Mr. Waller: Think of it from the cultural Marxism side. You’ve got the ideology of cultural Marxism and critical theory as the intellectual structure for how we process things. You don’t even need to know the ideology if you’re trained to think a certain way. They say, “You can’t say that, that’s racist. You can’t say that, you’re a misogynist for saying that.” No, I’m not. Then you want to overcompensate for that, so you won’t be called that again. The whole goal of cultural Marxism is to cause us to lose confidence in all our institutions. It’s not just the FBI, it’s not just the CIA, it’s not just the government, it’s now in medicine. Think of it, you can’t trust your doctor anymore, and you can’t trust the pharmaceutical industry anymore. Now, there are many reasons why we should be really skeptical and concerned, but when it gets to the point where there’s a total lack of trust, what becomes of us? Mr. Jekielek: Exactly. You’ve just mentioned these policies that Director Christopher Wray of the FBI has instituted and explained why they are highly problematic. At the same time, Director Wray testified in Congress about the Chinese communist party’s infiltration of American systems with cybertools set up to not just gather intelligence, to not just perform military activities, but to actually harm civilians. That testimony is accurate based on our own information. However, you have a whole bunch of Americans out there doubting this is real because of other things the FBI has done that have proven to be false. What you’re describing is a huge problem, but there’s also an important role that’s being played by the agency. Director Wray publicly testified about these things because this is a reality that we need to be concerned about. How do we square this, because we could fall into the trap that the cultural Marxists want us to fall into? Mr. Waller: Now, if we know the trap is there, we can avoid the trap. But if we deny the trap is there or don’t see the trap at all, then we’re getting pretty close to the end. It was great to hear FBI Director Wray make that public warning about Communist China, and he specifically said Chinese Communist Party. I don’t remember him saying it that way before. If he did, I missed it. Usually, it’s just the Chinese government. That means the FBI is really onto something and they’re devoting resources to this problem. We’ve seen it over the past few years anyway. But just think if there are nine senior diversity coordinators in the FBI. That’s nine senior people who are not working against the Chinese Communist Party. That’s nine senior people who are alienating most FBI personnel to comply with this crazy ideology and nine senior officials who are elevating people on DEI grounds who have no business being promoted in the first place. On the one hand, the FBI is our first line of internal defense against Chinese Communist Party espionage and subversion. But on the other hand, it is wasting its resources on its own cultural revolution internally so that we can’t trust them even when they’re doing the right thing, or at least we wonder if we can trust them even when they’re doing the right thing. This is just damaging. Mr. Jekielek: Then there’s also the issue of focus. You could be focusing on ideological tests for the local populace as opposed to identifying national security threats and neutralizing them. Mr. Waller: Think of the people who would make the best counterintelligence officers to work against the CCP. Is the rainbow flag/trans agenda really a recruitment point to get that type of person to want to join and have supervisors whose real mission in life is to go hunt down Chinese communist spies force them to go this route? Look at military recruitment. We can all see that by looking at the types of ads the military has been putting out to get the most useless elements of 20-something society to join the military. These are not the real people and the real warriors we want to join the military. We are alienating them out, and then we have this terrible recruitment crisis. You take the lowest common denominator, which is spelled DEI, and you focus your recruitment efforts on them to bring them up into the system for the sole purpose of making the FBI look more like America. Mr. Jekielek: The people that disproportionately go out and die for this country are the white males which according to the DEI system are at the absolute bottom of the intersectional hierarchy. Mr. Waller: For anybody who is mission-oriented, it doesn’t matter what kind of demographic they are from. They’re not finding a home in the military or the intelligence community because basically they are not welcome. Mr. Jekielek: In your book, you list ideas about how to deal with this, because it is so overwhelming. Mr. Waller: It gets really discouraging if you just look at the problems, and the problems are really severe. But if you have stage 3 cancer, that means you have hope. Maybe even if you have stage 4 cancer, there’s still hope, so what can we do? The first thing is that the FBI is politicized beyond repair. Let’s just say that as a point of argument. What is it doing to harass or abuse ordinary Americans for political reasons? The FBI’s eyes and ears on the ground at the local level are the state and local police and the county sheriffs. The county sheriffs have a unique legal authority to determine how or whether or not federal agents can operate in that county. County sheriffs are elected law enforcement officers. This is an election year, so every county sheriff is going to be up for reelection this year, and there are other candidates who seek to be sheriffs. This is a way for every citizen to say, “How can we help you as sheriff to make sure that the feds don’t come in and abuse us? How can we hold you accountable if you’re not going to be doing your job in that way?” You’re letting the sheriffs who are already aware or the candidates know that they have the people behind them, and you’re letting other candidates know that they had better do their job to defend the people who elected them. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to us what sheriffs do. Mr. Waller: I look at more of the federal part, but I’ve got two colleagues at the Center for Security Policy, Kyle Shideler and Chris Holton, who work this all the time at the state level. They’re working with sheriffs nationwide and with state legislatures nationwide. But the unique thing is every single citizen has a say during the campaigns for this and when they vote for sheriff this fall. We don’t normally pay attention to who’s running for sheriff, we just check whatever party affiliation we like and move on. But no, you have to talk to them and say, “We’ve got your back,” or, “We don’t like the job you’re doing,” or, “What are you going to do to make this right?” A lot of sheriffs’ departments and local and state police are bought off when the federal government gives them all this stuff like cool electronic gear and cool armored vehicles and cool automatic weapons and cool training. It’s really neat and really fun, but how does that protect the local population from an abusive central government? This is something that has to be an election issue for sheriffs, and it’s one of the solutions for overreaching federal control. Mr. Jekielek: It might not be obvious to people that a sheriff can take a stand against the FBI. Mr. Waller: They can say, “You’re not going to operate in my county if I think what you’re doing is illegal. I’m the chief law enforcement officer in this county. You’re doing something here that’s abusing the Constitution. You are breaking the law. Even if you’re not, and you can come in legally, I’m not going to help you. I don’t have to.” Mr. Jekielek: I don’t know if this is a commonly known reality. Mr. Waller: It was new to me until my colleagues brought it to my attention. But a lot of sheriffs know this already and they’re really glad when they know that other people are making others aware of it. A lot of sheriffs don’t know and they don’t realize it. They’re in awe of Washington or they’re afraid of Washington, or they want that cool surplus military type gear coming from them. Once you’re bought in, you'll do the FBI field offices. They say, “Hey, we need to send agents in. Can you help us? Can you be our eyes and ears?” That’s when the sheriff can say, “No.” Mr. Jekielek: Many of your solutions are at the local county or state level. Mr. Waller: That’s what my colleagues are doing at the Center for Security Policy. Go to securefreedom.org and you can find their material. They’ve been behind a lot of state legislative initiatives as well to help states grapple with this problem. The states and the counties and cities and towns still have a lot of ability. It’s just they don’t realize it and the voters don’t realize it. That’s the first part of it. The second part of the equation is you have a president come in who recognizes the problem, but can also come in with a real team that likes and trusts each other and has a real plan. They have executive orders written before inauguration day, and a calendar to roll out those executive orders. Executive orders are decrees from the president to implement a certain policy, stop a certain policy, or instruct different agencies to do certain things. Every president does it. There’s not a problem with that. The problem is when President Trump came in last time, he didn’t undo Obama’s executive orders. He has learned his lesson, but he needs to have his own executive orders to repeal bad ones that are already there. He can do it unilaterally, and then put his agenda forward through executive orders. By law, the federal agencies have to abide by that as soon as they’re made effective, which would be the very day that they’re signed. But where he did use executive orders in other areas of his presidency, he didn’t try to implement them as laws even when both houses of Congress were on his side. Biden then came in and simply repealed the executive orders and there was no law behind it. He just came in on day one with his team in place with his executive orders to fundamentally transform the government. Reagan did this very well when he took office in 1981. Bill Clinton did a really good job at it. Like it or not, Obama did a superb job at it. Biden did too with Obama’s team, I would argue, using Biden as a cutout. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve learned over the last several years that the agencies don’t necessarily follow what the president’s requirements are. Mr. Waller: They can wait it out for four years. They can drag their feet, they can slow walk, they can do whatever they feel like. They can lie and do whatever they want to a president who doesn’t know how to manage a bureaucracy, and who doesn’t have a team to manage it. It’s simply not enough to put in your own guy as CIA director for a year, then transfer him to the State Department and let the CIA run itself. That’s literally what happened. When President Trump came in, he put in Mike Pompeo, a great congressman, as CIA director. What did the CIA do? They ran him like an op, flew him around the world to visit all the CIA stations, and kept him out of Langley as much as they possibly could. Then they said, “Just trust Gina Haspel who had so much great experience working with the British, and let her run the agency for you.” He didn’t have any deputies under him who he trusted, so she worked on him really well. Then he recommended her when he was made Secretary of State, “Let’s put Gina in there, she’s a career CIA person.” If the CIA is part of the problem in interfering in our elections, why on earth would you let the CIA run itself? There was so much going on in the Trump administration and there was not a coherent team that was really working on this. They didn’t have an action plan because the president viewed running America like you would run a business, and it doesn’t work that way. Boom, the CIA just continued running itself. All those woke ads that came out from the CIA during the first months of the Biden administration were actually produced under CIA Director Gina Haspel when she was working under Trump. Speaker 3: When I was, I quoted Zora Neale Hurston’s, How It Feels To Be Colored Me in my college application essay. The line that spoke to me stated simply, “I am not tragically colored. There is no sorrow damned up in my soul nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.” At 17, I had no idea what life would bring, but Zora’s sentiment articulated so beautifully how I felt as a daughter of immigrants then and now. Nothing about me was or is tragic. I am perfectly made. I can wax eloquent on complex legal issues in English while also belting Guayaquil de mis amores in Spanish. I can change a diaper with one hand and console a crying toddler with the other. I’m a woman of color. I’m a mom. I am a cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box checking exercise. I am a walking declaration, a woman whose inflection does not rise at the end of her sentences suggesting that a question has been asked. I did not sneak into the CIA. My employment was not and is not the result of a fluke or slipped through the cracks. I earned my way in and I earned my way up the ranks of this organization. I am educated, qualified, and competent, and sometimes I struggle. I struggle feeling like I could do more, be more to my two sons, and I struggle leaving the office when I feel there’s so much more to do. I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided, patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling like I’m supposed to apologize for the space I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance. I am proud of me. My parents left everything they knew and loved to expose me to opportunities they never had. Because of them, I stand here today as a proud first generation Latina and officer at CIA. I am unapologetically me. I want you to be unapologetically whoever you are. Know your worth, command your space. Mija, you’re worth it. Mr. Waller: She just kept it going on within the community. The same thing with the FBI. You just don’t fire Comey, then his deputy McCabe, and then Peter Strzok, the counterintelligence chief. He was the chief spy hunter of the country, taking Hillary Clinton’s campaign propaganda, working with foreign intelligence officers and a Russian who they suspected all along was still working for the old KGB to do the Trump collusion narrative. It’s not enough just to cut off those layers of the FBI and then put in somebody else, even if it was the best person on earth. You have to just really go down to the root of the rot. Again, it’s like a cancer patient. You have to cut out the parts that are beyond repair. You have to heal the parts that are repairable and you might have to have some transplants here and there or you'll lose the patient. I appreciate the frustration of people who say, “Just defund it all and shut it down.” But that’s like saying because our military has messed up leadership and terrible recruitment, we should just not have a military anymore. That doesn’t make sense at all. We need the functions of the CIA. We need most of the functions of the FBI. Let’s preserve the functions, but change the structures, change the command and control, change the whole bureaucratic ethos and break them up so that they cannot be used against constitutional government. There are lots of different points of view and this is just to kick off a national discussion of how we would do this. There are ideas in progress all the time, but you take the crime fighting part of the FBI, the criminal branch and you move it over to the U.S. Marshal Service, eliminating some of the non-useful functions. Therefore you’re eliminating the positions and therefore you’re eliminating the federal employees. Get them off the federal payroll and get them out completely because you can’t fire them. Move it over to the U.S. Marshal Service, which is the first and oldest federal law enforcement agency, originally created by George Washington, with a really good reputation and not as woke yet as everything else. Move the FBI Academy over to the Marshal Service. Move the FBI National Security Division, that’s probably one of the most politicized units, and break that into a separate counterintelligence service simply to hunt spies and agents of influence. Then the rest of the National Security Division like counter-terrorism, parcel that out to other offices in government that already do that role and so on down the line. It’s not a perfect solution. But then you have nothing left of the bureau except the human resources side and the other parts that you don’t need. Then those positions are simply abolished. Those federal employees are off the books. They no longer have security clearances. They can’t be a problem anymore. Then with the CIA, first, it’s really bloated. You don’t need secret intelligence to spy on climate change, but that’s what we’re doing with our intelligence assets. We’re literally spying on the climate. Why do you need that? That’s a big waste. Why do you need secret intelligence for gender? It’s crazy all the waste that goes in there. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to us how that works. Mr. Waller: I can’t. It’s beyond logic, but they believe that gender is a fundamental role of the CIA now. I don’t understand it, but they say that that’s a big part of their core mission, so let’s accept that as a truth coming from the CIA. But there’s a lot that you don’t need. Of the 30-odd thousand CIA personnel, if you only have 1500 actual agents out there around the world in the clandestine service. We don’t really know how big it is, but it’s comparatively very small. Then what are the rest doing? A lot of them are doing support activities and intelligence collection and analysis. You need that technology and you need all that, but it’s very wasteful and very bloated. Abolish a lot of the functions that don’t need to be done. You don’t need the CIA doing open source intelligence because any journalist can do that. Any grad student can do that. Keep the clandestine covert operations side lean and mean and effective. There are a lot of great people in there doing a fantastic job as a separate standalone service, like a separate clandestine service. With the intelligence collection and analysis side, the information collecting and processing side, make that its own service, but weed it out to get a lot of the woke craziness out of there. Mr. Jekielek: How are people reacting to your suggestions? Mr. Waller: On the sheriff’s side, a lot of people just never thought of that before. I never did until my colleagues told me about it. On the dismantling of the FBI side, I found that the younger, former agents and whistleblowers think it’s a great idea. They would even go farther than I would go on it. Some of the older guys either still in or retired, say, “No, you can’t do it. It’s too complicated. There’s a whole technology side that you can’t break apart.” But they’re also attached to the FBI brand. It’s like the FBI has become the Bud Light of law enforcement. Now, if you like that brand, you can stick with it, but most people would not stick with that brand under those circumstances. We don’t need an FBI if it has run its course, but we need everything it does. The question is how do you organize it to do its functions? Mr. Jekielek: What about on the CIA side? Are there similar reactions? Mr. Waller: They mostly hate the idea. They won’t argue on the woke issue because it’s so blatant and so public, even with a lot of even liberal CIA guys who are still mission oriented. They say, “Yes, this is insane. This is doing us a lot of damage.” Well fine, then speak up and get rid of it. They wouldn’t speak on record for the book. I couldn’t even make hints about some of the people I talked to. If they’re not going to come forward, then they’re dooming their own former agency. It should go the way of the OSS. The OSS just became a liability once the mission was accomplished. But do it in a more orderly way than the OSS, which was completely abolished, and then we had nothing. Split it in two along those two functional lines and then pair back the useless functions that are within them. Mr. Jekielek: You’re describing massive changes. It’s hard to imagine how all of this would work. As we finish up, any final thoughts? Mr. Waller: We need all these functions, but we don’t need states within a state. We don’t need an intelligence community that views itself as above the American people whose leaders believe and act that they can mislead Congress and lie to Congress, including the very oversight committees whose responsibility is to govern how they operate. You can’t have an FBI director come in and not answer a yes or no question when either answer would not be violating any necessary secrets. There is a need to know the answers. Senator Cruz said, “Did the FBI have any assets or agents who were involved in the planning or execution of criminal acts of violence on January 6th at the Capitol?” But the senior FBI official would not answer. He was literally saying, “Did the FBI plan and commit crimes against Congress?” The FBI would not answer. That was two years ago, and they still have not answered. You’ve got to ask, “Why is that?” You would think the FBI would be as forthcoming as possible, but instead you have an FBI director who flies a Gulfstream jet from Reagan airport in Alexandria, Virginia to Manassas, Virginia, a six-minute flight for his commute home. This is his little principality, his little kingdom, and he acts like a sovereign entity. That’s a real danger. Now is really the time. It’s our last great chance to do something about it because the way the careerists have moved in and elevated, you’re going to have the whole FBI full of bad people in the next presidential term unless something is done this year. Mr. Jekielek: Michael Waller, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Waller: It’s great to be with you. I wish I could be more optimistic, but there is a reason for us to be that way if our citizens are adequately informed and active. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Michael Waller and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (1 h) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0222MichaelWaller Epoch Original DVD collection:

If the U.S. Supreme Court decides that it’s unconstitutional to remove former President Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot on the basis of the 14th Amendment, then other measures could—allegedly—be employed to keep him out of the White House. The Atlantic is suggesting what could become the next strategy in the growing list of plots. They suggest that Democrats could refuse to certify the elections in 2024 if President Trump wins. Yet this would be ironically similar to what the former president was accused of doing in the 2020 elections. In this live Q&A with “Crossroads” host Joshua Philipp, we’ll discuss this topic and others, and answer questions from the audience. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇 https://ept.ms/3PlWJL9 Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/

The U.S. Supreme Court made a decision Tuesday that was quite surprising to most people who follow the court closely. Despite overturning affirmative action in June 2023, the court declined to hear an appeal by an organization that had filed a federal lawsuit against a local school board, alleging that the board’s policy changes directly discriminated against Asian Americans. To understand the decision, as well as the implications, let’s go through the whole story together. Watch the video: 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale Exclusive video on EpochTV: Jack Smith Demands Twitter Info on All Americans Who Interacted With Trump | Facts Matter According to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted President Trump’s tweets leading up to January 6th. Twitter ultimately complied. This means that if you interacted with President Trump’s Twitter account before he got kicked off — well, your name is literally on a list. Watch the exclusive video 👉 https://bit.ly/3TaF5wp

“It looks very legitimate when the President speaks, yes, but I don’t believe a word when a KGB man speaks ... This was a propaganda message for [the] American public first.” Anti Poolamets is an Estonian historian and a prominent member of the Conservative People’s Party. He is an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump’s policies concerning Europe, and an equally fierce critic of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist ambitions and his invasion of Ukraine. “Trump was a man with [a] backbone and [the] biggest supporter of Ukraine,” says Mr. Poolamets. “Trump was [the] first who gave lethal weapons to Ukraine.” In this episode, Mr. Poolamets and I discuss Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin, whether the Russian president’s version of history stands up to scrutiny, and how the European Green Deal and the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations are threatening the global economy and state sovereignty. Watch the clip: “We can’t give away our sovereignty, and the EU is becoming more and more federal. [The] Green Deal is simply destroying European economies, and this is like the Soviet Four-Year Plan,” says Mr. Poolamets. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (1h 12minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0220AntiPoolamets Epoch Original DVD collection:

In yet another example of how weird chemicals have become ubiquitous in the modern American diet, a new study just came out showing that a pesticide linked to infertility was found in upwards of 80 percent of people in America. This paper was published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, and it was titled: “A pilot study of chlormequat in food and urine from adults in the United States from 2017 to 2023.” The term “pilot study” means that previously, this wasn’t something that was being measured—and there’s a good reason for that. Let’s go through what this chemical is, what its dangers are, how it came into our food supplies, and how to avoid it. Watch the video: 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale Exclusive video on EpochTV: Jack Smith Demands Twitter Info on All Americans Who Interacted With Trump | Facts Matter According to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted President Trump’s tweets leading up to January 6th. Twitter ultimately complied. This means that if you interacted with President Trump’s Twitter account before he got kicked off — well, your name is literally on a list. Watch the exclusive video 👉 https://bit.ly/3TaF5wp

Just earlier today, the judge overseeing the civil fraud case against President Trump here in New York issued his official ruling. It’s a 96-page document that rules that Trump is liable for manipulating his net worth in order to secure more favorable bank loans, and is therefore ordered to pay a massive penalty of roughly $355 million. Also, besides President Trump himself, his two adult sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are both ordered to pay a little over $4 million each, as well as former Trump Organization executive Allen Weisselberg, who has been ordered to pay a $1 million fine. Watch the video: 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale Exclusive video on EpochTV: Jack Smith Demands Twitter Info on All Americans Who Interacted With Trump | Facts Matter According to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted President Trump’s tweets leading up to January 6th. Twitter ultimately complied. This means that if you interacted with President Trump’s Twitter account before he got kicked off — well, your name is literally on a list. Watch the exclusive video 👉 https://bit.ly/3TaF5wp

“There are people—a non-trivial number of people—who teach in the academy, many of whom have tenure, who have obtained their credentials fraudulently. They have lied, they have cheated on their PhD, and that is an extraordinarily serious problem on multiple levels.” As professor of philosophy at Portland State University, Peter Boghossian was known for challenging orthodoxies. Today, he uses his distinct “Street Epistemology” method to teach communication and critical thinking. “There is something about giving people the tools to ask really good questions. But not only are we not giving them the tools so they don’t have the questions, but they’re force-fed one answer, and particularly to moral questions. And the consequence of that is it becomes an ideology mill, where the goal is to replicate the dominant ideology—whatever is morally fashionable,” says Professor Boghossian. He is known for his role in the Grievance Studies Affair, where he co-authored a series of intentionally fraudulent papers that were published in well-known academic journals, exposing the corruption of scholarship in a number of disciplines belonging to the humanities. Watch the clip: “My guess to you is, you’re looking at 7-to-9 percent of dissertations in the humanities that are plagiarized. If I’m wrong, it’s not because there are fewer, it’s because there are far, far more,” says Professor Boghossian. “We have endemic corruption in our academic institutions. The only other question is what to do about it?” 🔴 WATCH the full episode (49 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0217PeterBoghossian FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Peter Boghossian, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Peter Boghossian: I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve been talking a lot about academic corruption. Plagiarism wars is the term that you’ve been using. Mr. Boghossian: Right. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with plagiarism because this issue is now being described as a weapon that will be used by the Right to attack the establishment. Please tell us about this. You’re laughing. Mr. Boghossian: I’m laughing because, first of all, if you didn’t plagiarize, you would have nothing to worry about. For the record, I had my dissertation checked and it’s clean. The idea is that this is somehow a vast Right-wing conspiracy to weed out people. To weed out who? People who have obtained their credentials fraudulently? Would it matter if it was any kind of conspiracy? There are a nontrivial number of people who teach in the academy, many of whom have tenure, who have obtained their credentials fraudulently. They have lied, and they have cheated on their PhDs. That is an extraordinarily serious problem on multiple levels. Mr. Jekielek: That makes perfect sense to me, but it doesn’t seem that people are treating it as seriously as you and I would. Mr. Boghossian: That’s because they don’t understand the depth and the severity of the problem. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, who is paid $900,000 a year, got caught for plagiarism in an egregious way. She kept her job at $900,000 a year. She is no longer president, but she kept the $900,000 a year post at Harvard University. That is shocking. Mr. Jekielek: There are other criteria that are more important to these university administrations, correct? Mr. Boghossian: Yes. It’s assumed when you have a PhD that you went through a rigorous process to obtain it, and you did not commit fraud to obtain that credential. If you committed fraud to obtain that credential, then we can have a conversation about what should happen. It’s a little bit off-topic, but should you lose your PhD? At a minimum, you should lose any academic appointment that you have. I think that’s at a minimum. Harvard is, arguably, the most elite university in the world. It is most definitely one of the top five universities in the world, and you have somebody who has obtained their degree fraudulently still in a position of authority there. Mr. Jekielek: You’re suggesting that it undermines the whole system, but the whole system is already undermined. Mr. Boghossian: You’re right. It further undermines and delegitimizes a system that’s already not legitimate. Don’t hire college graduates, especially from the elite Ivies. Mr. Jekielek: In the woke worldview, everything is politics and everything is a power play. The means of getting there seem to be discretionary. You can easily imagine how this situation came about. Mr. Boghossian: Yes. The first thing you said caused me to laugh, that this is a Right-wing conspiracy. Can you imagine saying that we need to keep people who have obtained their credentials dishonestly, who have cheated, lied, and committed fraud, that we need to retain those people in service to some other ideology? That, in and of itself, should completely delegitimize the whole institution. Mr. Jekielek: My viewpoint was developed through many interviews, including some with you in the past. Mr. Boghossian: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. For decades now, in the academy, in industry, and in government, there has been a selection process for allowing people that demonstrate wokeism to gain positions of merit and positions of power. There are a disproportionate number of these people. Mr. Boghossian: They are not gaining positions of merit. They are gaining positions of authority, not merit. Mr. Jekielek: Positions of authority, okay. That’s right. I would expect there is a lot of this cheating going on. Mr. Boghossian: That’s the million-dollar question, “What percentage of dissertations in the humanities have been plagiarized? I don’t know and I can only guess. What percentage of dissertations in certain fields are plagiarized? The detection tool that we have now is called Turnitin, but it produces too many false positives and false negatives. There are other tools now being developed to analyze plagiarism. Very soon, within eight months is the best prediction, we’re going to know in mass how many people have committed fraud. My guess is that 7 to 9 percent of dissertations in the humanities are plagiarized. If I’m wrong, it’s not because there are fewer. It is because there are far, far more, and the 7 to 9 percent is just a very conservative estimate. My next educated guess is that it would be in fields with the word studies in them, like gender studies, grievance studies, black studies, Chicano studies, and indigenous studies. But again, that’s a guess, but that’s my prediction. Something gets lost in this conversation when someone says, “Maybe it wasn’t intentional or there was a mistake.” People who would say that tend to be younger, and the reason they would say that is because they’re always working on screens and moving text around. But with plagiarism, you’re actually taking a book and copying from the book onto the computer. That’s not merely copying and pasting text. There is a level of intentionality with that. When I give the figure of 7 to 9 percent, that could be independently adjudicated. We could bring someone in and they might say, “Wow, that is a clear instance of plagiarism, like with Claudine Gay.” It would not be like Harvard saying, “It’s duplicative language.” It is not. It is plagiarism, and it’s cheating. She cheated. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about the Grievance Studies Affair where you and two others submitted these fake papers to these various study journals. Then you cracked the code of how they could get published. Mr. Boghossian: Right. Mr. Jekielek: You were able to figure out that there was a code, and that these aren’t actually genuine areas of scholarship in the first place. Mr. Boghossian: They are all fraudulent, and I’m really glad you said that, because that is also lost in the discussion. I’m going to use the figure of 10 percent. It’s not that just 10 percent of the people have cheated to obtain their credentials. It’s that there are entire lines of literature that are fraudulent, so that’s a deeper level of fraud. Then there’s another level of fraud that we haven’t talked about where the universities are protecting people by making it more difficult to find those dissertations, and pulling people’s names off of DEI [Diversity, Equity & Inclusion] websites. Do I know that’s because they don’t want them to be searched? I have no idea, but it’s certainly a rather remarkable coincidence that has happened since the Claudine Gay scandal. I don’t know that, and I can’t prove that, but causally, it’s extraordinarily suspicious. The institution wanting to protect people who have committed fraud is yet another level of fraud. That’s like another story. One; you have plagiarism, two; entire bodies of literature that are corrupt, and three; institutions that protect people who have cheated. There is no politic or polite way to say it, nor should there be. There are other things that we can talk about, like citation cartels, but those are the three areas of corruption in the academy. Mr. Jekielek: To me, there’s a fourth area, which is that in many universities, the number of administrators has grown beyond the faculty. It’s not clear what they actually administrate. However, they are very dedicated to maintaining the ideological structure that exists. Mr. Boghossian: That is correct. Mr. Jekielek: It might not be the academics that are doing this. It might be the administrators who have built an empire, and they want to keep this empire. Mr. Boghossian: That is absolutely correct, it is the administrative staff and the DEI boards. The DEI board is the engine and the weaponization of the ideological capture, so that’s true. There are layers and layers of corruption. I’ve been screaming about this since 2015. I took action in 2017, and initiated the Grievance Studies Affair in 2018. Everyone thought we were crazy people. The problem with the Grievance Studies stuff is that it was too early. If we had done that later, it would have had far greater of an impact. But the fact of the matter remains, we have endemic corruption in our academic institutions. The only other question is what to do about it? Mr. Jekielek: I would say that for some of us the Grievance Studies Affair was very valuable. Mr. Boghossian: Thank you, I appreciate that. Chris Rufo and other people have told me that it changed their lives regarding their trust in the institutions and the institutions’ ability to discharge its original mission. That original mission has actually been changed as a consequence of this ideological capture or takeover. I don’t think people can quite grasp the severity of this—50 percent of the papers in psychology cannot be replicated. It’s called a replication crisis. You have clinicians going into clinical settings flipping a coin on whether or not what they have learned is effective. We have to have a source of trust. We have to have a gold standard for something we can trust, and we don’t have it now. We don’t have legacy media, we don’t have legacy institutions, we don’t have the ACLU, and we don’t have Scientific American. All of that is gone. We have to have something we can trust, but we don’t. Ultimately, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have brought this situation upon ourselves. We could have done innumerable things to stop this, and one simple thing would be viewpoint diversity. As Thomas Sowell says, “I will believe that you believe in diversity when you put a Republican in the Sociology department.” Mr. Jekielek: Yes, that’s funny. Mr. Boghossian: We all know the absurdity of the situation, and I don’t say that as a Republican or a Conservative. I say that echoing themes of Western intellectual thought, you need people who have strong beliefs. John Stuart Mill has talked about this. For example, I used to teach atheism at Portland State University, and I always had people come in to argue the other side of it. I had Phil Vischer from VeggieTales. I had Phil Smith from a conservative Christian university, who had the philosophy department come in and talk. I had people come in talking about aliens. I taught a science and a pseudoscience class. I had Nick Pope come in. I had a guy, Mark Sargent, who believes the Earth is flat. There is something about giving people the tools to ask really good questions. But not only are we not giving them the tools to ask the questions, but they are force-fed one answer, particularly to moral questions. The consequence is that it becomes an ideology mill, where the goal is to replicate the dominant ideology and whatever is morally fashionable. This is a wholesale ideological capture of our institutions. It’s remarkable. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to the cost of plagiarism, because in the end, most people aren’t in the academy. You’ve used the example of a fire department before. Could you reprise that for us? It was very apt and makes you think about it differently. Mr. Boghossian: Sure. You’re right, most people aren’t professors of philosophy or of anything else for that matter. When you mention plagiarism they say, “Okay, it’s cheating, but so what? Why should anybody care about that?” Okay, think about it in terms of the fire department. Imagine you are the superintendent of the fire department. You find out that 10 percent of the people who are currently in the fire department have cheated on their fireman’s exam. You have to assume there’s some lawful relationship between passing a fireman’s exam and the ability to put out a fire. If there’s not, then there’s literally no point in the fireman’s exam. It’s completely pointless. Passing the fireman’s exam qualifies you to be more likely to put out fires than the people who did not pass the fireman’s exam. That is an eminently reasonable assumption. If not, then we should systematically think about what’s on the fireman’s exam. Instead of thinking about plagiarism and cheating in the academy, think about it like cheating on the fireman’s exam. You are the superintendent of the fire department, you find out that a non-trivial number of people have cheated on the fireman’s exam. What should you do? Mr. Jekielek: I would get them to take the exam again and see if they can pass it. Mr. Boghossian: Okay. What would you do in terms of facing the public? Would you issue a statement? What would you do publicly? Mr. Jekielek: I would say, “Something unfortunate has happened and we need some accountability. We’re going to solve this problem and make sure that we always run these tests properly in the future. Meanwhile, with these firemen, we’re going to run them through again, because it’s important to keep the fire department active.” Mr. Boghossian: Because we want to put out fires. Mr. Jekielek: Correct. That’s the underlying assumption. Mr. Boghossian: Correct. It serves the public good. The first order of business is that you have to set up accountability. In public institutions we have to hold people accountable to discharge the mission of the public institution, or else the whole city would be on fire. We wouldn’t be able to put out any fires. The second thing is, we have to be transparent as public institutions if there is a scandal and a certain percentage of people have cheated. The way to regain trust in the fire department is not to hope that it won’t be picked up by the New York Times or Substack. The way to regain legitimacy and trust in institutions is to be honest with people. You say, “There’s a problem here and we’re going to root it out.” I personally wouldn’t use this solution, but that’s fine. You say, “We don’t know exactly who it is, but we’re going to retest everybody. If you fail the fireman’s exam, you’re not going to be a fireman. We want to assure the citizens that the fire department is perfectly situated to do what is in the interest of the public good. We were perfectly situated to discharge our primary mission, which is to put out fires. Currently, we cannot do that because people have obtained their credentials fraudulently.” If you did that, yes, people would be upset, but that’s the mature, responsible way to do this in a democratic society. That is how institutions should function. It is not, “We’re going to hide the results of the exam, so no one can find these people. We’re going to keep this guy on at an extreme salary.” As an example, for Claudine Gay, when they did an internal investigation of whether or not she plagiarized, she was found innocent. You’re not going to go to nepotism and cronyism and just say, “We’ve conducted this investigation. It was a terrible thing that happened.” In other words, you’re not going to lie. You’re going to be completely transparent with the public. If you think about it in terms of a fire department, it becomes much more clear what you need to do to earn back the public trust. This is not particularly complicated. Someone cheated, and you need to fix the problem of their cheating. Fixing the problem of cheating doesn’t mean keeping the person who cheated in their position. That is insane. If you wouldn’t do that for fire departments, why would you do it for anything else? Of course, you would root out corruption. It’s called a Right-wing conspiracy, because you want to root out corruption for people who teach at elite universities and who have obtained the degrees fraudulently. You want to root that out and put a stop to it, and you are called a Right-wing maniac? You are in some kind of cabal, because you want to expose cheating at top universities? Are you kidding me? Anyone who would make that argument is so morally compromised and damaged that they should immediately be held suspect on any position that they offer. Mr. Jekielek: You’re thinking about the plagiarism scandal. You did mention there being a lack of replicability in various scientific studies. It’s not just in psychology, it’s also in biology and all over the place. Mr. Boghossian: 50 percent lack of replicability, correct. Mr. Jekielek: John Ioannidis has a whole paper documenting that in detail. But this is how our health agencies have been behaving. We’re here at this FLCCC [Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance] Conference together. I was wondering if you could possibly be introduced as, “Peter Boghossian, unexpected guest.” Mr. Boghossian: I don’t have any medical credentials and I never talk about Covid. I don’t pretend to know things that I don’t know. No one should come to me for their Covid advice. Mr. Jekielek: But it makes perfect sense that you’re here now, because we have been talking about transparency and rooting out corruption. We’re talking about things which are applicable to the whole topic of this conference. Mr. Boghossian: Totally applicable. It serves everybody’s interest to root out corruption. Here’s one way to think about it. You use the word woke. I love the word woke, but some people have a problem with it. You can call it critical social justice, if people don’t like the word woke. It is a universal solvent that destroys everything it touches. The moment it gets in, it destroys everything. United Airlines has announced that it will seek more diversity with its pilots. That means people of a very specific race, usually African Americans and sometimes Native Americans. If I lived in a sane world, I would not have to ask you this question, but we do not live in a sane world. I am asking, “What factors, other than merit, should go into the selection of a pilot?” The answer is none, literally zero. Because every time you include some exogenous factor, then by definition, you are decreasing the meritocratic requirements to successfully complete the objective, which is to land the plane safely. By the way, you can also think about corruption, fraud, and cheating in terms of the pilot’s exam. You would be in the same situation if you were the head of Southwest Airlines and you found out that a certain percentage of your pilots cheated on their exams or lied about how many flight hours they had in the air. Corruption is only in the interest of people who are corrupt. Mr. Jekielek: Are we in the plagiarism wars yet? Mr. Boghossian: We are in the beginning of the plagiarism wars. I predict that 7 to 9 percent of papers in the humanities are plagiarized. I predict that in a very short period of time, I'd say eight months is my best guess, if you have a PhD, you will need to have evidence or proof that it has not been plagiarized, but that’s pretty easy to get. It’s not particularly complicated to get. I also predict that if my prediction is incorrect about the number of people, it’s not fewer than 7 to 9 percent, it’s significantly more than 7 to 9 percent. Again, I’m talking about cases of black and white plagiarism. I also predict that you’re going to find things in the STEM fields. Harvard has been recently targeted for data fraud, along with top scientists at cancer institutes. You’re going to see more and more of this stuff become mainstream. The consequence of that is there will be a further loss of legitimacy in our institutions. Fewer and fewer people are going to trust the institutions, and why should they? They are filled with liars and cheats. There are whole disciplines that have gone off the rails. Those disciplines once forwarded moral conclusions. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, exactly. Many people have been using ChatGPT and similar AI models. There was an example of someone submitting a legal brief that was written by ChatGPT that contained made-up references, so that’s how they got found out. This is a whole new realm where the integrity of our work means a lot less, and any means can be used to get the credentials. Mr. Boghossian: Yes, the legitimacy of the credentialing mechanism itself is undermined. I want to speak to the ChatGPT thing, because that really bothers me. What bothers me is not in the context of this conversation, that it’s bad for institutions or corruption. It’s that it prevents you from learning how to write well. The invention of the calculator did the same thing, it prevented people from quickly adding numbers in their head. You could use ChatGPT for whatever you want, but don’t use it to write. But that’s another thing—various AIs are going to make it more difficult to root out cheating. The problem is that there’s such an ideological movement in those universities that many of those decisions would not be made honestly, and would not be made sincerely. They would be made on ideological grounds. They would use those as a kind of witch hunt for one’s ideological enemies. Mr. Jekielek: This is the argument that is being made by people who are backing Claudine Gay, because I’ve seen those discussions happening online. They are saying, “This is just the Right attacking its ideological enemies.” You’ve spoken to this already, but that assertion is that everything is just politics. Mr. Boghossian: Yes, two things on that. First of all, the Left overwhelmingly dominates the academic institutions. Greg Lukianoff at FIRE [Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression] has done great work on that and categorized this situation by discipline. Some disciplines are well over 95 percent Left-leaning. There may actually be more conservatives, but there are very few people who are willing to admit they are conservative. If the situation were reversed and the Right controlled the academic institutions, I guarantee you the same criticisms would be there, “This is a Left-wing witch hunt. They’re just out to do this ideologically.” Mr. Jekielek: It occurs to me that using AI to write a dissertation would be like hiring someone to do it for you. It would be similar, correct? Mr. Boghossian: There are PhDs in India who do this. You can go to a paper mill and pull a paper, but that’s easy to find. The last time I looked you could spend $3 or more a page. It’s not a lot of money, and you can have a PhD. They’re usually in India where they custom write your papers for you, and people have done that for fun. There’s literally nothing you can do about this. Pedagogically, you could change it by requiring in-class exams, so that would change things. Mr. Jekielek: But you have to defend your PhD. Mr. Boghossian: Defending it would be less of a problem than writing it, just doing the required data collection and the literature review. Mr. Jekielek: We need a morality that enshrines meritocracy, because we’re not there anymore. Mr. Boghossian: No, we’re not and it came in sheep’s clothing. It came under the guise of equity. By definition, equity is the enemy of meritocracy. You can just look at the acceptance rates at Harvard, since we have been talking about Harvard. If you drew from the top 10 percent of Harvard applicants, over 51 percent would be Asians, cold-climate Asians. Whites would drop a little bit, Hispanics would plummet, and African-Americans would go from 13 percent to 0.9 percent. That’s a whole separate conversation from the questions there. What really is the problem if half the graduating class is Asian? What role should racial diversity play? Should racial diversity apply to extremely wealthy African-Americans, or should it apply to poor white people? Who does it apply to? Those are questions worth considering, but we’re nowhere near having that conversation. If we can’t even kick out people who have blatantly cheated, how on earth are we going to have that conversation? Mr. Jekielek: Right. If you are concerned that certain demographics are not doing well enough, or are not represented well enough, how do you actually help them to do better? Mr. Boghossian: It’s a very complicated system. Many African-Americans are in school systems that are failing and are poor because of the tax code that they’re in. How do we assure them a public education of the first-rate while maintaining a meritocratic environment across all K-12 systems? Mr. Jekielek: James Lindsay has co-written a book, The Queering of the American Child. Mr. Boghossian: Yes, he just asked me to blurb that. Mr. Jekielek: There are a lot of answers to this question in that book. Mr. Boghossian: Queering is not gay. Queering is just looking at something with a particular lens that makes what was once not normative look normative. Yes, there are answers in that book. The perennial question is, “Are the people who need it the most going to read it?” Mr. Jekielek: Yes, I had the same thought. The book makes the case that the purpose of education has been subverted. Mr. Boghossian: Yeah. The purpose of education now is to give people a critical consciousness to remediate oppression, as opposed to giving them critical thinking skills, or teaching them how to be less wrong more often, or teaching them how to participate in civic life, or teaching them how to be entrepreneurs, or teaching them other character values, although that’s little tricky in and of itself. It’s to develop a critical consciousness. For example, we all know that racism has occurred. It’s the ordinary, everyday state of affairs. How did it occur? It’s from the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire. Mr. Jekielek: In this interview, we might get very depressed. The same things we’ve been talking about today now apply to medical schools and this new generation of doctors. Mr. Boghossian: They didn’t get in through merit, they got in through some other characteristic. It is the same with pilots. Mr. Jekielek: They have also been taught that being a good doctor is not the key reason you’re there. Mr. Boghossian: Correct, now the key reason is health equity. Mr. Jekielek: Right, that’s another example. We’ve talked about firefighters and pilots. Doctors take this to a whole new level. Mr. Boghossian: We live in a democracy, and we’ve done this to ourselves, so we’re getting what we deserve. If you don’t like it, speak up and change it. Don’t be a coward. Be forthright in your speech and physically attend meetings. Don’t be held hostage by a small number of people. The last time I looked, around 8 percent of the people are actually true believers of this ideology. But they’re hyper-vocal, almost universally under-accomplished, online constantly, threatening people, and hurling epitaphs like Nazi and grifter. Enough people have capitulated to that to give this group a voice in society. You get what you deserve. If you don’t like it, fight back about it. Mr. Jekielek: The first time we interviewed, we talked about one of my favorite books of the last several years, How to Have Impossible Conversations. Mr. Boghossian: Thank you. That’s very kind. Mr. Jekielek: You wrote it with James Lindsay, and it’s a very valuable book. It becomes more valuable as we continue on with all this. You have a lot of great ideas about how to talk to people that are not on the same page. We might have fear, or we might be unaware. It might be that we are just distracted. Mr. Boghossian: I'll suggest a different question, “How do we listen to people?” You listen to people by asking questions, repeating back what they said to you, making sure that you understand it, then trying to figure it out and honestly reason with them. That’s street epistemology. That’s what we go around the world doing with my nonprofit, the Natural Progress Alliance. We go around the world and ask people, “Is the confidence you have in a belief justified by the evidence you have for that belief?” The only way you can reach any conclusions is to listen to people and understand where they’re coming from. We need more listening. Again, social media is a problem. I don’t know if we use the term anymore, but there are loudmouths. We have a lot of people who exert a disproportionate influence on certain public spaces. As a general rule, it takes a different skill set to deal with those particular people. We’re talking about the people in the center. We’re talking about people who are afraid. We’re talking about people who know what a woman is, but are terrified to say it. We’re talking about reaching people in the center. Reaching people on the fringes on this axis of Left or Right is a different skill set, but it always still starts with listening. Mr. Jekielek: There was a question for Justice Jackson in her Senate confirmation hearing, “Please define what a woman is.” She said, ”I’m not a biologist.” Senator Marsha Blackburn: Can you provide a definition for the word, woman? Judge Ketanji Jackson: Can I provide a definition? Senator Blackburn: Yes. Judge Jackson: No, I can’t. Senator Blackburn: You can’t? Judge Jackson: Not in this context, I’m not a biologist. Senator Blackburn: Okay. So, you believe the meaning of the word... Mr. Jekielek: There is a deference to expertise. I’ve encountered this in numerous situations, like with people avoiding responsibility for the Covid decisions they had made. It’s a kind of deference, but maybe it’s convenient to do so with authority. Have you noticed that or thought about it? Mr. Boghossian: Yes, quite a bit. We need experts in society. We have to have experts, But whether they occupy a position of authority or position in an institution, they have to actually have earned those positions through meritocracy, so that they actually are experts. The idea that we should demean expertise entirely is just total nonsense. The question is, “How do we create systems that guarantee that the people who are credentialed are actually experts?” That’s the real question. To do that, you cannot have any value coming into the system other than merit. Period. Here’s a little philosophical tidbit for you. The closer an activity is to reality, the more expertise is demonstrable. That would be playing a musical instrument, speaking a foreign language, doing jiu-jitsu… Mr. Jekielek: You can’t fake it. Mr. Boghossian: Yes, that’s exactly what I was going to say. You can’t fake it. Activities like gender studies, you can fake. Using plagiarism, you can fake something. You can just plagiarize. Activities that align with reality and have corrective mechanisms within them cannot be faked. Of course, I can give him a black belt on his waist, and we can throw him in a jiu-jitsu studio, and you will see what will happen to him in literally 10 seconds. You cannot fake genuine expertise, and there is such a thing as expertise. We need experts. It comes down to creating institutions that we trust, so that when they do produce experts, they actually are experts. Mr. Jekielek: Kevin Bass is an individual who has been studying for his PhD and has been in jeopardy for doing a lot of truth-telling online. Recently, he looked at different professions, both white-collar and blue-collar professions, and what the political orientation of those people in those professions was. The fascinating thing is that the white-collar professions all went hard Left and the blue-collar professions had reasonable distribution. Mr. Boghossian: In general, the more applied something is, the more conservative the person—within any field you can think of, like applied epistemology and philosophy, for example. More conservative people, not only politically, but dispositionally as well, tend to go into more applied fields, and more applied sub-disciplines within their field. Mr. Jekielek: I hadn’t heard that hypothesis before, but my observation is that there’s a war on the working class and the middle class as a whole. Mr. Boghossian: That’s where you’re going with it, okay. Mr. Jekielek: If the Left has captured the elites, according to your hypothesis, it would make sense that people on the Right would be more targeted. Mr. Boghossian: Yes, I think so. I also think we have created a managerial class. I resisted talking about this for a long time, but I really am starting to come around to the idea of a managerial class within our institutions that thinks that they know what is best. They think that their interests are the best. The overwhelming majority of these people are sincere, and they actually do think that they know what is best. They’re not acting for nefarious purposes to hurt people. But it’s creating an incredibly dangerous situation where they’re taking over the colleges of education and certifying the teachers who teach kids in K-12. These are all more or less a managerial class. Mr. Jekielek: Why is this so dangerous? Mr. Boghossian: It’s dangerous because the interests of the managerial class are not necessarily the interests of everyday people, not even working class people. Just because a group of people has a certain value, that doesn’t mean that everybody else should adopt that value, and if they don’t adopt that value, they are immoral. But when you control the institutions, you can certify the teachers who teach people, so that you can replicate that ideology. They’re using the institutions as a way to replicate the ideology. Mr. Jekielek: You didn’t believe that these people existed before? Mr. Boghossian: It’s not that I didn’t believe that they existed, but I didn’t believe that they exerted the radically disproportionate degree of influence that I now think they do. Look at Brexit as an example. Virtually none of the elites thought it would pass, and it was passed overwhelmingly. The managerial class is just the best way to describe this, and it is somewhat different from the elite class. Mr. Jekielek: We can actually have good conversations, and I’m going to recommend your book again. I’ve recommended it many times, because I have certainly learned a lot from it. Mr. Boghossian: Thank you very much. Mr. Jekielek: We talked about institutional reform. At this conference, we’ve talked a lot about parallel institutions, and I see FLCCC as a parallel health system. Mr. Boghossian: That’s a big thing we haven’t talked about, but we probably should. What does it mean to create a parallel system and a parallel architecture to the existing system? It’s not just that you’re creating a new university. How do we create accrediting bodies that decide which universities become accredited? You’re literally talking about building entirely new systems. There are two things to look at. First, you need to build new things, which I’m in favor of. Full disclosure; I’m a founding faculty fellow for the University of Austin. You could do nothing to the existing academic infrastructure, and let come what may, or you actually attempt to move people, students in particular, from college to vocational schools, or to the new institutions that are being founded. But I’m not a Pollyanna about this. To be sure, these institutions are going to take time. We’ve talked about peer-reviewed literature, making new bodies of literature. Peter Singer, the Australian ethicist, is trying to do that now with the Journal of Controversial Ideas. People are trying to do new things, but these are slow, expensive, and in some cases can take decades. What do we do in the meantime when we have people in legacy institutions teaching kids that sex is assigned at birth or that you can change your sex? Have you ever spoken to young people? I was giving a talk fairly recently, and there was a young person there. I don’t usually pick young people, but I asked her mother if I could ask her a question. I started listening to questions in which she used the phrase “assigned at birth,” and many of the ideas from queer theory. Queer theory states that there is no natural order of things. You can queer the fact that you have certain genitalia and make it agree with your preferred description. If you’re assigned sex at birth, then that’s an arbitrary relationship. Actually, this is capricious and you might as well just assign somebody something else. We’re now in a state in which people are going to these institutions and they’re learning things that are just completely false. They’re going into teacher training programs, and then they’re instructing new teachers to teach kids things that are completely false. Sex is not assigned, that’s just completely false. You cannot change your sex. We can have a reasonable conversation about whether gender is performed and if you can change your gender. I personally think you can, if you buy into the idea of gender, but you can’t change your sex. That is total nonsense. That’s just one example, and we now have kids thinking this is true. Ultimately, they grow up and then they influence public policy. They get into positions of authority. Mr. Jekielek: It’s a kind of nihilism. Mr. Boghossian: Yes. That’s because we think about the people tearing down statues and subverting the democratic process. Small groups of thugs are doing just that and taking the law into their own hands. A great example of this is Mayor Ted Wheeler in the city of Portland, Oregon. Rene Gonzalez, the city commissioner, had his car firebombed outside of his house by Antifa. Not turning into a banana republic would be job number one of anybody in authority. Rene Gonzalez is an inveterate Leftist. It’s not like he’s some far-Right guy. But when you are an actual communist, someone that is just a hardcore democrat like Rene Gonzalez looks like they’re on the Right. That’s Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker’s Left-pole thing. We have to speak up. We have to maintain a kind of vigilance on the structures and the systems that we have created. These are tenuous things. You don’t just build this ex nihilo, out of nothing. This has come to us and people have literally died to give us this system. My grandfathers were in the war. If you think that you can be callous with this inheritance of Western civilization, you are in for a very rude awakening. Most of all, the thing that you can do is to not be a coward. You can speak up. When you do speak up, one of the things you realize is that people will respect you more, not less, because you have been forthright in your speech and you have spoken up. But the key to that is having the disposition to change your mind. If someone presents you with evidence about Covid, or experts, or pilots, or firemen, or plagiarism, you have to say, “Okay. I thought this before. Now, I’ve looked at the evidence, and I’ve changed my mind.” You have to be open to changing your mind, but the key there is to not be a coward. It’s a simple prescription. Mr. Jekielek: You can internalize that. Mr. Boghossian: Be honest in your speech, and be forthright in your speech. But make sure, before you do anything that you listen and understand what somebody is actually claiming, as opposed to what you think that they’re claiming. The other thing is that very few people physically go to meetings. People don’t show up for meetings. When you go to these meetings, there is a very small number of hyper far-left activists at these meetings. It appears as if their voices have a disproportionate weight. I’m not even talking about if you’re on the Right, from the center, or on the Left. If you want to have a better world and you want to have a better society, you have to show up at board meetings. You have to show up for your kids at school. You have to just show up to these things, and that alone will help move the needle. Educate yourself, and speak openly and honestly. This is not complicated. These are time immemorial prescriptions for dealing with any kind of lunacy or mass psychosis. Mr. Jekielek: Find some courage and participate. Peter Boghossian, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Boghossian: Thank you, I appreciate it. Can I say one more thing? Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely. Mr. Boghossian: If the fear is that you'll lose your friends as a result of speaking honestly with them about something, you’re probably right. But why would you want someone as a friend if you can’t speak openly and honestly with them? Once you start having what Aristotle calls virtue friendships, where you’re actually honest with people, you will have more fulfillment and satisfaction in your life than anything else you could do. The best thing you can do for your whole life is to be a person of virtue and have friendships with people of virtue. The only way you can have those friendships is if you’re honest about what you say. We’re living in a society right now where the cultural climate is preventing people from speaking openly and honestly. Mr. Jekielek: That is great advice. Mr. Boghossian: Thanks. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Peter Boghossian and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (49 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0217PeterBoghossian Epoch Original DVD collection:

“The left had their grand vision. And it turned into a nightmare, and even they are starting to back away from it. They'll never say that, but if you look at what they’re doing, they’re trying to go back to the middle. They’re trying to fix the military. They’re trying to pump more oil. They’re trying to get more police officers. This is exactly what we were told was the problem with the United States. And so, they had their chance, they had their great progressive experiment, and it blew up in their faces.” In this episode, I speak with Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian, and the author of “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation.” “We’re getting this axis of Iran and Russia and China and their appendages: North Korea ... India’s not as pro-Western as it used to be,” says Mr. Hanson. “And we’ve got Qatar, who’s helping Hamas, and we’ve got Turkey that’s just a rogue country now, vis-a-vis the West and NATO. So, we’re starting to unravel, and getting an alliance of roguery against us.” We discuss the left’s current strategy heading into the 2024 presidential election, today’s international geopolitical landscape, and Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin. Watch the clip: “The wherewithal to allow Ukraine to win is not feasible in nuclear poker. It just isn’t—not when you’re dealing with Putin,” says Mr. Hanson. 🔴 WATCH the full episode (45 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0214VDH Epoch Original DVD collection:

As election season is beginning to kick into high gear, so are many of the lawsuits that have been lobbied against former President Donald Trump. Let’s go through where all of these cases stand, including the Jan. 6 case in Washington, and three cases in New York. Watch the video: 🇺🇸 Epoch Times 25¢ Full Access Special Offer: https://ept.ms/RomanSale Exclusive video on EpochTV: Jack Smith Demands Twitter Info on All Americans Who Interacted With Trump | Facts Matter According to a heavily redacted search warrant and other documents released earlier this week, Special Counsel Jack Smith demanded information on Twitter users who liked or retweeted President Trump’s tweets leading up to January 6th. Twitter ultimately complied. This means that if you interacted with President Trump’s Twitter account before he got kicked off — well, your name is literally on a list. Watch the exclusive video 👉 https://bit.ly/3TaF5wp

The world’s largest “carbon capture” facility is now being built in the United States. The construction in Wyoming, known as “Project Bison,” is set to be completed and running by 2030, and it is claimed that it will remove five million tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year through so-called direct air capture technology. The project is part of a larger push now taking place with similar programs. In this live Q&A with Crossroads host Joshua Philipp, we’ll discuss this topic and others, and answer questions from the audience. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👇 https://ept.ms/42Keadt Stay Informed. Stay Free. https://www.joshphilipp.com/