Expert Michael Waller: America’s Intel Agencies Are Compromised
America’s intelligence agencies have been politicized to such an extent by left-wing ideologues in recent years that they have been transformed from respected defenders of American national security interests into a leftist police state bureaucracy. This is the basic premise of Dr. J. Michael Waller’s book, Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains. Dr. Waller provided an in-depth discussion of his book and the current state of America’s intel agencies at an event hosted by the Bastiat Society of Washington, DC on September 6, 2024.
Thus, he favors a new executive order to abolish the FBI and transfer its useful functions to other agencies.
Waller’s talk outlined the historical timeline of this transformation, via a long communist “Red thread,” dating back more than a century to a meeting in 1922 at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. The meeting was attended by the leaders of the European communist parties to consider how to spread the revolution into the Western democracies, including the United States, after having recently succeeded with Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917.
Their first target was Germany. The communists’ strategy for a takeover of Germany was to foment distrust and dissatisfaction with the country’s relatively new constitutional republic, the Weimer Republic, established in 1919. Unfortunately for the communists, Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party, aka the Nazis, had the same idea, capitalized on turmoil created by the communists, and successfully preempted the communists’ takeover of the country.
The ideological force behind the communists’ agenda in Germany was an unofficial school of thought known as the Frankfurt School, established in 1923 at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Its purpose was to promote the communist ideology of Karl Marx. After Hitler achieved power in 1933, most of the scholars of the Frankfurt School fled Germany to other European countries and to the United States.
In the United States, prominent Marxist scholars from the Frankfurt School established a presence at Columbia University in 1934 under the name of the Institute for Social Research. This group of Frankfurt School scholars developed and promoted the ideas of critical theory, which espouses relentless criticism of an existing order for the purpose of destroying it and replacing it with a new communist revolutionary order.
Critical theory led to the development of critical law theory, critical race theory, and critical gender theory. Dr. Waller stated during his talk that critical law theory gradually spread throughout American higher education and is now taught at almost every law school in the United States. This has led to law school graduates trained in critical law theory to gravitate to legal careers that advocate the various forms of critical theory, which, in practical employment terms, means careers primarily in leftwing advocacy groups and government.
Critical race theory and critical gender theory have gradually become established social policies in the federal government under the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or DEI policy. Essentially, DEI rejects the primacy of individual rights, merit-based advance, objectivity, and excellence on the grounds that these concepts are merely strategies used by the dominant group (white men) to subjugate minority racial, gender, and sexuality groups.
Critical law theory and DEI policy is now so prevalent in the federal government that Dr. Waller stated up to 97 percent of political donations from U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) employees are given to Democrats per Federal Election Commission data. This is an indicator of how politically-lopsided the DOJ has become in favoring Democrats and socialist, left-wing policy over Republicans and conservative policy.
Thus, the federal agency most responsible for enforcing U.S. law is also one of the most politically biased and not representative of most of the country.
The predominance of attorneys trained in critical law theory at American law schools and now employed at the DOJ has spread into the FBI and the other intelligence agencies. Thus, Waller’s reference to the “Red thread” means that the long-term objective of the communist leaders who met at the Marxist-Engels Institute in Moscow in 1922 has been significantly achieved with the gradual spread of Marxist progressive ideology throughout American institutions.
Waller Names Names
Waller mentioned several recent U.S. government officials with radical anti-American backgrounds who burrowed into the government bureaucracy many years ago and eventually rose to its most senior positions.
For example, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was a self-described leftist radical during his college days at Columbia University where he participated in student riots and an armed takeover of a Columbia University ROTC office in 1970.
Also, Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, voted for Communist Party USA presidential candidate Gus Hall in the 1976 U.S. presidential election. And Obama’s FBI director, James Comey, actually identified himself as a communist during his college days in an October 2003 interview with New York magazine. The magazine suggested that Comey had ill-defined, self-promoting political views and a soul that was “up for grabs.”
Waller explained that former senior government officials such as Holder, Brennan, and Comey are only representative of a new and much larger generation of like-minded officials that have spread throughout the intelligence agencies.
It is Waller’s belief that critical theory now permeates the intelligence agencies to the point that open support and advocacy of DEI policies are now required for promotions, coveted assignments, pay raises, and bonuses. Therefore, he argues, DEI policies within the intelligence agencies should be treated as a foreign-sponsored counter-intelligence problem, but the counter-intelligence and the public corruption divisions within the FBI are the two most politically corrupt parts of the FBI and should be the first to be cleaned out.
The cultural decay and politicization of America’s intelligence agencies has become so deep and widespread that Waller believes simply changing the political leadership of the agencies or restructuring the organizational charts will not solve their systemic problems. The problems can only be addressed by dramatically downsizing these agencies as well as drastic recruiting reforms, including banning hiring from schools that push critical theory.
Interestingly, Waller points out that the FBI was never created by an act of Congress but by an executive order in 1908. Thus, he favors a new executive order to abolish the FBI and transfer its useful functions to other agencies, such as the DOJ and the U.S. Marshals Service.
As for the CIA, Waller commented that it is too large at 35,000 employees and wastes billions of dollars on intelligence information that can be found in the public domain. Rather, the CIA should only comprise around 1,500 employees who are engaged in needed covert intelligence activities.
Needless to say, Waller paints a very dark picture of the current state of America’s intelligence agencies. He sees them as degraded and heavily-politicized left-wing bureaucracies that have compromised their intended missions of neutral service to the nation’s security and protecting the U.S. Constitution. Waller’s book Big Intel is a must-read for those interested in this history and his discussion at the Bastiat Society of Washington, DC event on September 6, 2024 is found on Youtube here.
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Steve Dewey is a retired federal financial regulator and founder of GeoFinancial Trends, LLC (www.geofinancialtrends.org) and writes on Substack (stevedewey.substack.com). He can be reached at steve@geofinancialtrends.org
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