CSP author of “Big Intel” is American Thought Leaders guest on Epoch TV

This week’s American Thought Leader is the Center’s own Dr. J. Michael Waller, author of the Amazon bestseller Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.

Epoch TV host Jan Jekielek interviewed Waller for an hour to talk about the crisis within the CIA and FBI as they continue to politicize their ranks with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and other forms of critical theory. The full interview is available online.

Jekielek highlighted some of Waller’s quotes from the long-form interview, going back to before the Cold War began.

“Here we are in a post-fact intelligence community driven by social, political, & cultural agendas, that have their direct origins back in cultural Marxism spawned at that 1922 meeting with Felix Dzerzhinsky in Moscow,” Waller said, pointing to the origin of the Frankfurt School whose ideology permeates American academia and the intelligence community.

Many consider US intelligence since World War II as conservative. But in reality, with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Waller said, “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.”

“There was a breaking point in the FBI and the CIA where they stopped serving American interests,” Waller said, referring to the agencies’ forced imposition of critical theory, a product of the Frankfurt School, on its personnel – and on its lack of accountability to civilian direction and oversight. “It ceases to serve the American interest if they view themselves as states within a state.”

The intelligence community became a vehicle for radical social and cultural change under Obama, a trend that has continued unbroken: “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.”

Jekielek began the interview, recorded shortly before Tucker Carlson conducted his interview with Vladimir Putin, with a question about whether America’s top TV journalist and commentator should meet with the Russian dictator at all. “I think any journalist should go meet any foreign leader and get whatever information or disinformation he can out of him,” Waller said. “As long as he knows it’s all an orchestrated setup on the other side.”

This election year, according to Waller, is decisive about whether the FBI and CIA will entrench themselves further from constitutional government, or be forced back to perform their legal duties. “It’s our last great chance to do something about it,” Waller said, “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.”

Waller drew attention to the work of Center colleagues Christopher Holton and Kyle Shideler, who assist state lawmakers, state and local law enforcement, and county sheriffs.

Big Intel builds upon a blueprint the Center published to trace the ideological chain of custody of the CIA’s and FBI’s embrace of critical theory, back to the origins more than a century ago. In his Epoch TV interview, Waller acknowledged journalist Diana West and her acclaimed 2019 Center for Security Policy monograph, The Red Thread.