How the Great Cultural Revolution transformed the CIA and FBI

An early Soviet active measures campaign took on a life of its own and survived the collapse of the USSR. It provided the philosophical and strategic bases for a cultural Marxist revolution so profound that it penetrated the cores of the CIA and FBI.

That is one of the startling findings of scholar J. Michael Waller in his new book, Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains. Published today [January 16] by Regnery, Big Intel shows how the intelligence community failed to defend the United States against a decades-old Soviet covert operation to destroy democratic Western societies from within.

American Greatness is reprinting an exclusive excerpt of Big Intel to show how the Obama administration used the George W. Bush-era centralization of the intelligence community to impose critical theory and cultural Marxism on the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence services. The excerpt is slightly edited for context and clarity.

Excerpt from Big Intel: The Obama fundamental transformation

With a bipartisan and apparently balanced national security team named and confirmed by the Senate during a long post-inaugural political honeymoon in 2009, Obama aimed his first strike at the top of the centralized 17-agency intelligence community: Admiral Dennis Blair, the uncontroversial, nonpartisan Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Obama asked for his resignation in May, 2010.

Now came the revolution. As Robert Mueller had centralized the FBI, the new director of national intelligence post would centralize authority over all American intelligence agencies. Obama replaced Blair with one of the most radical, flawed intelligence figures since the Comintern infiltration of the World War II Office of Strategic Services.

James Clapper … made an ideal pick for President Obama in 2010 because he looked like a Republican but acted like a Marxist. Unanimously confirmed in the Senate as Director of National Intelligence, Clapper would remain in charge of the entire American intelligence community for the rest of the Obama presidency.

As DNI, Clapper found a devoted White House partner in John O. Brennan, the former CIA chief of staff and President Obama’s special assistant for homeland security. Brennan called Clapper “my foxhole buddy and good friend.” Before long, Obama would name Brennan CIA director.

Clapper provided the sheltering roof, what Russians would call the krysha, for the critical theorists in and around the administration to get to work…. Clapper’s cultural revolution of intelligence would be incremental, done small at first and escalated gradually, until finally becoming a fait accompli that all must accept if they wanted to continue to serve and keep their jobs.

The cultural revolution in the intelligence community, as with much of the rest of the government bureaucracy, began on August 18, 2011. On that day Obama issued Executive Order 13583. The title said it all: “Establishing a Coordinated Government-Wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce.” The shepherdess of the executive order was presidential confidant Valerie Jarrett.

Diversity order 13583 was a social revolutionary ukase. It made no reference to enhancing intelligence collection, analysis, operations, or capabilities. It gave no explanation as to how such a diverse force might strengthen the intelligence community with language skills or knowledge of domestic or foreign cultures or the benefits of varied personal perspectives, experiences and backgrounds.

On its face, 13583 looked like a virtue-signaling sop to the various identity groups that funded or mobilized voters for Obama’s presidency. But there was nothing superficial about it. It was an ideological coup. The executive order was a majoritarian decree to transform the culture of the entire federal bureaucracy through implementation of critical theory. Once the bureaucratic culture changed—as Italian Communist Party theoretician Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse had taught—the proper opinions and policies would follow. Obama knew that personnel is policy.

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