Shaun Newman Podcast - #792 - J. Michael Waller

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

J. Michael Waller is a senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy and president of Georgetown Research, a private intelligence company in Washington, D.C. He was an asset for CIA director William Casey’s parallel intelligence activity in the final years of the Cold War. During his career, he had extensive contact with the FBI and CIA and watched both descend into political correctness and wokeness. Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Contribute to the new SNP Studio E-transfer here: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

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He's a senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy and President of Georgetown Research. a private intelligence company in Washington, D.C. I'm talking about J. Michael Waller. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Jay Michael Waller. Sir, thanks for hopping on. Good to be with you.

Now, I'm going to assume, and I say this way too many times, and my audience probably gets annoyed when I say it that way, but I'm going to assume most of us don't know anything about J. Michael Waller. So we're going to start there. I want to just briefly, your background. Let people know who you are. Well, I'm with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. It's a non-profit, non-government-funded organization where we deal with defense and national security policy.

I used to be a professor at the Institute of World Politics where I taught the sort of the West's only curriculum on propaganda, counterpropaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare. I did work at Fort Bragg teaching psychological operations to the special. forces as a civilian. And long ago, I got my start as a college student, infiltrating communist front organizations, disrupting them, and then did some volunteer work as a CIA asset in Central America for Director Bill Casey to work with the Contras in fighting the San Anastas in Nicaragua. When you say you're not government funded, I kind of chuckle because I'm not government funded on this side. That actually kind of means, I mean, you're watching, you know, Elon Musk right now and

Trump and a whole bunch of people just like go after the U.S. government in any which way they can. And one of them has been this like payout. Hey, you want to just take a lump sum? We'll give you a bunch of months payout. And now that has come to the

CIA as well. Have like, what do you know about what they're doing from your end? Like I'm just a Canadian watch this going like, this is fascinating. Maybe Americans think the same way or maybe I'm just odd. Well, maybe a little bit of both. I think the same way, too.

Here's the thing with the, like any bureaucracy, they have a natural tendency to expand and justify their existence for obsolete work or no work at all. And without any proper legislative oversight with checks and balances, they just grow and grow and they have mission creep. And they keep people on who shouldn't be there or they hire people who shouldn't be there. So looking at the CIA. from the outside in, and I know a lot of people on the inside, it's just this flabby, flaccid organization that does good work in a lot of places to serve its intended purpose.

That is to collect intelligence around the world and analyze it and inform the president with analyses and assessments and what they call estimates. And then the other side, which is running covert operations. This always has to be at the personal direction of the president of the United States in certain consultations with committees in Congress. But what's happened over the years is there hasn't been that oversight. There hasn't been a good, solid legislative oversight of the CIA for almost 50 years. So you can imagine now two generations of intelligence personnel have gone without anybody watching what they're doing for the most part. This is dangerous to our constitutional form of government and it's just dangerous to our place in the world when you have

an agency now that has become so politicized with such lowered standards that it cannot accurately tell the president what is happening in the world to help him make decisions necessary for the country well one of the things we've seen um i i don't know many countries that have escaped this in the the western world anyways but like here in canada you know like you pick an organization DEI has just been slowly creeping in, right? The pride flag is slowly taken over the Canadian flag and on and on and on. And I, you know, I just can't point to one organization. One of the things when I was reading up a little bit of Vosha, you know,

you talk about that in the intelligence communities, this, this slow creep, if you would, of kind of woke ideologies. Like, that's affected the CIA. Like, like, that's actually happening? Like, doesn't that seem counterproductive? I don't know. I mean, I say that as the Canadian military puts tampons in the men's bathroom and the U.S. military has its own set of things that have been going on and you're like,

as I ask a question, I'm like, I'm almost answering my own question. But regardless, what have you been seeing from the CIA and other agencies in the States? It started out slowly, like with the rest of society. It just kind of crept in and it crept into our vocabulary. And people thought it was stupid or offensive, but went along with it anyway because they didn't want to seem out of step with the way society was moving or whatever else. But then it started to go in to be imposed with the militants under the Obama administration for ideological reasons. And the same thing was happening at the time in the UK with MI5, which is the British counterpart

to the CIA. And actually the CIA sort of spun off from MI5 during World War II. So there's common roots there with CES and Canada with the Australian and the New Zealand equivalence and even with the Mossad in Israel and elsewhere you see this wokeness taking over where everything now is politicized. That means our intelligence officers and analysts have to look at the world through a DEI lens and to comply with the ideology of DEI, they have to lower their standards for recruitment. They have to lower their standards for artificial promotion based on the way people look or the way people act as opposed to how professional they are and it deteriorates the whole system so look at those five countries those are the five eyes those intelligence services they're

an alliance to for mutual defense against you know against mutual foreign adversaries and it's completely deteriorating yeah it's it seems so even like israel's massad that seemed like once again i'm um i know of these places or of these agencies right i don't know like it's not like i work form folks, but like it seems very counterproductive, almost like it's, uh, if you were staring at these and going, how do I undermine them, right? It might be a little bit of, uh, I don't know, you mentioned that you taught psychological warfare at, uh, Bragg, right? Right. Right. Is this, like when you look at this, do you see a bigger, you know, if you take a 10,000 foot view, do you see infiltration of different things and this, how this is playing out, or am I going

down conspiracy rabbit holes. Well, remember, conspiracy is a legal term. It's a group of people who secretly get together to do something nefarious, if not criminal. And so when I wrote the book Big Intel came out last year, it was about how the CIA and FBI went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains. And I chose the subtitle because their work during the Cold War was to insulate our societies from foreign hostile ideological penetration. Our long-serving FBI director, Jay Edgar Hoover, warned about this during the 48 years he ran the FBI.

And the CIA was created to defend against this. In fact, its statutory role is to fight hostile foreign propaganda, as is the FBI. But instead, in writing, Big Intel, researching it, I realized, I went back to trace, where do the roots of DEI come from? They came from critical theory, critical race theory, critical law theory, critical theory in general. What was critical theory? It was cultural Marxism. It went back to the 1843 Karl Marx. Before he wrote the Communist Manifesto, he was attacking culture, attacking every root of Western civilization, down to the nuclear family, down to our systems of democratic government or even constitutional monarchies,

everything else, just tearing them apart, all sorts of values, traditions, religious belief, everything, to rip it apart under relentless questioning of everything, not to solve the problems, but to put doubts in people's minds about the goodness of their own societies, even down to the family level. So this was the cultural Marxism of 1843 that was revived for Europe and North America after the Bolshevik Revolution when the Soviet said, we can't replicate. this revolution in Europe and the Americas, we have to find another way. And this was cultural Marxism. So I traced this back to a meeting in Moscow in 1922. So the Bolsheviks hadn't even been in power for five years, where they had the leaders of the communist parties of Europe,

the head of what became the KGB, and they met to hammer this out. So a lot of these were German intellectuals. So when Hitler came and started persecuting everybody, they came to these cultural Marxist theoreticians came to the UK, United States, Canada to develop this theories to make war on our societies. And they infiltrated our intelligence services and over time developed what's called critical theory that became DEI. Every time I think about this, I'm like, oh, 1922, it's 2025. You're saying that it's taken 100 years to slowly methodic, introduce these theories and just slowly work on it and, you know, somebody's sitting there going, it won't be in my lifetime, but if we're going to win this war against the powerful United States,

against the powerful West, against Europe, we're going to have to slowly push these things into their institutions and it's going to take time. Yes. They even said many times in the 1920s, this is going to be beyond our lifetimes. This is going to take generations to do. And they were right. Do you, this is a personal question. Like, I guess I just, Michael, do you look at like, what do you, is there anything in the West where we're like, okay, this is in the next 100 years, folks, it's going to take time, but we're going to do this. And none of us are going to be alive for it, but that's like our culture doesn't look at life that way. Does it? Or am I just? No, no, we tend to look at things, you know, in the United States, we look at it for election cycles.

That's the longest range view most people have. We'll last through this four-year presidents. and then we'll move on. And some others, it's a generation or so. Some it's even shorter than that. So very few cultures, maybe some of the East Asian cultures will look at things in the more long term. But if you take a, so this becomes shocking. It becomes unbelievable when you're thinking, well, some people are planning 100 years in advance. Yet some do think that way.

Urban planners in our countries think that way. financial analysts think at least, you know, up to decades in the future. So it's not unusual to think that way, but it's just the average normal person doesn't think that way at all. Well, you wonder if our cultures, you know, I think, and I'm thinking specifically of like North America, right, Canada and the United States, have to adjust how we look at things. Because when you, when you just look at, you know, and once again, I'm thinking of two years, once in a time, I thought two months was a long time.

So when you look at two years, it's like, just pick your head up, man, and see where we're heading. You're going to, you know, and I think of our own country, Michael, with different things like medical assistance and dying and how we thought that was a great idea. And now I look at it and I'm like, I don't know how anyone thought that was a great idea. And yet, here it is, you know, and I like to use the other word, eugenics. We're killing people. Right. It's pretty wild. And it's only going to get worse.

It doesn't get better. You don't take that cat out of the bag. And all of some, it's just like it's, oh, it's all good. It's like it gets worse. And when you're talking about different ideas and I just, the forethought is almost unnerving, you know, a hundred years ago, they were like, this will work. It'll take time, but it will work. That seems almost bizarre to have that foresight. Yeah, well, they have a sense of inevitability about this.

The whole idea behind Marxism is that this is an inevitable course of history. So the whole ideology looks at itself in historic terms. You know, not unlike, say, Christian missionaries. They're not looking at helping the people who already need help, but they're looking at transforming society, transforming the world for something eternal. When you put it that way, this is for the fight between good and evil, the fight for your soul, the fight for something that is almost outside the human being, like this is eternity.

And I could see that motivation, actually. when you put it in those terms, you're saying then, and I guess the way I'm hearing it is like, Marxism is kind of like Christianity. I don't mean in the ideology. I don't mean in the religion. I don't mean anything like that. Just in how true believers, if they were to go out in the world, would approach it. This is going to take longer than my lifetime.

But if we need to convert these people, because if we don't, is eternal damnation for them. Exactly. Exactly. They're giving their whole life, their whole lifetimes, whether it's a long one or a short one they're even risking their lives they're risking death to bring about this ideology and to convert people to the side of atheistic Marxism where there are no property rights no values of any kind for some sort of higher secular purpose when I go back you you said you taught psychological warfare correct

yes when you say you taught psychological warfare I'm curious you know like During COVID, different countries talked about how they had different Nudge units and different things in their military that were working on their own population. When you hear that, you go, oh, they were just like, my brain goes to teaching in class on this day, and this is what they're talking about. Like, would you have any insight on that? Sure. That term Nudge units came from someone named Kass Sumsstein, who wrote a book called Nudge.

and it's all about how to use subtle psychological means of getting people to do things they ordinarily would not do. So he wrote the book for regular society and for commercial purposes and for political purposes. But military purposes, it works the same. It's all aimed at the way people think and act. So they nudge you, and oftentimes you feel the nudge and you move. Think if you're in a group and somebody nudges you on something and you unintentionally move in a direction that you wouldn't want to go.

you want to go forward, but you instead move aside to let somebody else in without even thinking. That's a nudge. And that allows someone else to get ahead of you and set you off your course in a very benign way. But now imagine doing it routinely for hostile intentions. It's very easy to do. Would President Trump, would he have a, forgive me, this won't be the right title, but like a nudge officer or a nudge something, you know, like when I see president, Trump sitting here as a Canadian go, we'd love to you be the 51st state.

I go, that's an interesting thing for the president of the United States. And now I know Donald Trump says some wild stuff, but I think we're all learning. There's always a method to the madness. And is he nudging the conversation to something? Obviously the tariffs and getting border security beefed up and everything else. When you see that, do you see something else? It's more of a shove than a nudge. Yeah, it's.

He's, you know, if you read his book, Art of the Deal, you can understand the man. You can understand what he does and why he does it. And then it becomes really clear. What did he do? He said, while he, for governor Trudeau of the, of the 51st state. I mean, he was, it was an attack on Trudeau. It wasn't an attack on Canada. But when he said Canada will be the 51st state, he was really trying to just give Trudeau a

shove and to put him down he had he has no respect for the man uh and then what does trudeau end up doing he ends up eating out of his hand it's interesting though some of the um ripple effects of those comments has ignited a interesting conversation in canada about whether or not we should become the 51st day whether or not that's even possible and it's opened up this whole series of conversations about Quebec separatism about all these things that were i'm not i don't want to say dormant but we're maybe simmering slightly. And he just threw gasoline on it. That's why I'm like,

was there more of an ulterior motive to that? Is there more to the psychological on it that from your background, you're like, well, or you're like, no, he was, he's worried about his borders. He's worried about his borders. He, uh, but it first started just as a dig against Trudeau, just being a loser and part of the wokeness that we have to purge out of our society.

it ended up becoming something else because it got so much traction. And really, Americans like Canada a lot. But I don't know if most of them, I think we like Canada the way it is and not as part of the U.S. And it wouldn't give us many more conservative members of Congress or senators anyway. But he did it to Mexico as well. You saw how he gave Mexico a really hard shove. And the Mexican president, who is diametrically opposed to Trump on most things, She came right around within a day or two and did what he wanted to do.

And now there are 20,000 Mexican troops mobilizing near our southern border for the purpose of smashing the cartels. He did it on the Panama Canal comments. He did it with Colombia and immigration. He's now his Greenland comment, what an outrageous thing to say. And then now you have the Danish government say, well, we don't like this at all, but let's talk about it. And some Greenland autonomy people saying, well, we're interested in hearing more about this. So that takes a shove. You can do it with a nudge.

It'll take a long time to nudge. So sometimes, you know, in Trump's world anyway, a shove will speed things up. Yeah, it's, I guess President Trump probably isn't the right guy to point to. But as a Canadian sitting here watching, listening, I'm like, every time he talks about Ken, And I'm like, what is he trying to, like, parts of it I completely get, understand. Other parts, I'm like, I wonder, you know, like when it comes back to the psychological warfare, and I don't mean to stick on this point too much, but I find it interesting because you've taught it. So I'm like, okay, you want to get a population to move a certain direction.

Is it shoves? Is it a series of different things? Or is it just slight, you know, bringing things up in conversation. It's, it's commercials on TV. It's, you know, because like, I look at this from the DEI perspective and I'm like, you know, Is it the lesbian couple in a cartoon? Is it these little things that by themselves are, I don't know, insignificant. You see a lesbian couple on the street.

Do you like, do I care? No, I don't really care. But all of a sudden you see it around your children. You're like, that's a weird spot to put it. You know, like in Regina, we just had a, oh man, I'm going to butcher this. Not that it matters. Is it a trans man, trans woman? I don't know.

It's a woman who transitioned. and pregnant in the school, in an elementary school. And I'm like, that's confusing for my brain. Why is that there? And when you start to see that, to me, this feels way more nefarious. But I don't fully understand how psychological warfare works. And I feel like at times it's being played out on our own population from a DEI perspective. Yeah.

Well, it's weaponizing psychology. So if you take psychology as something that is more medical oriented, say in psychiatry and you're using it to to completely pervert twist and destroy people's beliefs in everything they've ever known everything they've ever been taught and even to lose confidence in themselves you know you're weaponizing psychology to destroy entire population's views so they can be reshaped so imagine imagine when you were you know in the third grade if you're your male teacher turned turned up to class pregnant how messed up that would be for you for what your parents taught you from what's all around you and you're told that this is normal this is good and people who think it's

wrong are haters they're cruel and you see this done on a mass scale now you know never before in our history have we had the in the in the free western societies have we had teachers unions and teachers organizations come in on an organized scale to twist what children believe and to take children away from their parents intellectually and psychologically and emotionally. And for the very teachers who are being funded by those parents are the ones who are working to turn the children against those parents. This is insanity that's happening right now. So it takes somebody like, you know, Trump really spoke for the majority of Americans when he's, was elected. They knew what they were getting from the first time. They knew what they would get if

if the Biden team continued with Kamala Harris. And they don't want that. So they want they want Trump to shove people around. They don't want any more nudging because they know what that is. Because think of it with all this DEI stuff, that's a great example of the nudge. Just one more push. Rainbow flags or just be tolerant. We just want acceptance. First we just want tolerance. Now we on acceptance. Now we demand conformity and we demand to be put ahead of everybody else. And we keep accepting that because we take the nudge and we politely yield because that's how most people are. Until finally we realize we're losing everything that we held dear. So Trump speaks to those people who have been nudged completely aside, had their careers ruined, had their families torn apart.

And he's shoving back. And he knows he only has four years to do this. So he can't afford the slow process. And it's not his nature anyway. He didn't become a billionaire by slowly nudging. He did it by shoving people really hard. His whole way of dealing with his demolition companies, his construction companies, his bankers, everything else,

his real estate transactions. It was always a really good shove to get the art of the deal. And then to make the other side want to come back and cut a deal with you. When it comes to psychological warfare teaching, I feel like I'm missing something on Fort Bragg. And I'm just, it's like it's on the back of my brain because I feel like they've been in a huge. And I'm sure there's a listener going, you got to ask about this. And I'm sure you know what I'm talking about because I feel like Fort Bragg has been in the news, alternatively, maybe over the last bit.

But like with revolutions in different countries and different things like that, with the psychological warfare, like just the, the nudge units, everything. Is any of that, like I'm drawing a blank this morning, which doesn't, well, maybe it happens a little more than I like to admit, Michael. But when I say things like that, are you like, oh, yeah, you're talking about this or you're like, oh, we don't talk about that. No, I can talk about anything. So for the military part, it's just tactical operational, psychological operations. It's to get populations in your areas where you're running a military operation to change their attitudes or to comply or to come and join your side or to give up. up. So it's not on the big picture political warfare side, which is, you know, how do you

overthrow governments or how do you, you know, change elections or this kind of thing. So in that, and it's an important tool for anybody in the military, any military force anywhere, because you want to achieve your objectives while getting the civilian population not to oppose you so that you don't have to harm them. And so psychological operations, is can be done as a very in a very humanitarian way either to quicken an operation and to do it with the lowest possible casualties and even to get the civilians to help you out to in your time have you ever seen these units be used on domestic like on homeland because like I go back to COVID and I think of the UK there was there was news break out of there here in

Canada on the east coast there was talks about how Canadian and once again I use Nudge you can laugh you know everybody can laugh that's the number word that just keep coming up for me um when when it's abroad and you got uh you know an operation going on in i don't care Somalia i'll pick on sorry samolians and you know you you want to go in there and you have certain things going on as a canadian i guess i understand but when you start you know like when i look at covid and the overarching what happened here you know from mandates lockdowns fax passes on and on the canadian military being involved, albeit I think minimally, but certainly there's there's news about it. You're like, have you know, like, where does your brain go with that?

I mean, because I don't know about the United States. I actually don't think I've read anything from the United States, but Canada and the UK for sure. Talk about psychological war from, well, nudge units from the military. Right. And Canada and the UK have a different system, different laws concerning uses of the military domestically than we do. So it's quite different. But if there were American military psychological operations units running against the population, I'd never heard of it. And I was looking out for that

during COVID. That would be really scary because a lot of these units can do a really good job. And they don't just do it with traditional World War II style leaflet drops, which people tend to picture, but they're using technology to a really good degree. There are. There are other ways of doing it though, and that's because the central administrative state, which has the power to take from you and it has the power to give to you. And it can regulate. If you're a recipient of federal funds in any way, the central government can take more control over your life or force you to comply more by virtue of the fact that you depend on them

for your subsistence. That's why rural people tend to be more resistant to central government than urban people. people do because it's a completely different mentality, urban versus rural, or even in the United States, the coastal city regions versus the rural Midwest. When you say, when you say they have different, you know, like the leaflets, I think everybody's seen the movie where they drop the leaflets and, and certainly even in some newer modern movies, they've done similar things. When you say they have, they have more advanced ways, what do you like, do you have some examples of what that would be? Sure, they, first, the big social media companies, especially meta, Facebook, Instagram, even Twitter then, and I presume X now, but I don't know for a fact. They, a lot of their business model, by giving you the free services, they sell all your data.

And you can subscribe to this data. And so it can know everything about you, who your friends are, who your networks are, what terms you use, what words you say, what groups of people you interact with, and where precisely where they are. And so the military did use this in the early 2000s, 27, 2010, 20, right up to the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, in which I'm personally aware, because I worked with this technology then.

You can geolocate individuals and groups and track them and find all the different nodes of communication where are your influencers. And then you can influence them through social media or other ways. or if you're in the middle of a town someplace and you're the local influencer and that town is becoming problematic, the military can track you and then can either send a group out to talk to you, send a group out to bribe you, to pay you to turn other people against you, send a group out to shoot you, send a drone out to get you. You can do all this just through monitoring social media

through these different subscription feeds. So this is specifically the military you're talking about. You think law enforcement would know, well, I mean, not know about it. Obviously there's going to be some sharing of information, I would think, between the different agencies and everything else. When you're looking domestically and you're staring at, you know, open borders once upon a time, you know, under Trump, I've seen the charts where it just goes spike and spike and it just drops. Would local law enforcement have the ability to do the things you're talking about with social media and tracking and all the different, you know, the keywords and see where the groups are and like you go down the rabbit hole of the ability the military could use in Iraq, Afghanistan. Could that be

brought home when you're facing emergencies? It can and it can't. So really the laws, you know, law seldom keeps up with technology. And in this case, you can't have the military sharing with law enforcement. And because law enforcement, you can't, you cannot, not on this type of thing, because law enforcement is enforcing the law. And in the U.S. we have laws governing what law enforcement can collect, they need to go to a judge for a warrant or, or or, and with whom they can share information. So, and we have a decentralized law enforcement system in the country. It's all at the state and city level with the FBI, which is, which is a weird combination now of law enforcement and domestic intelligence, which we didn't have before 9-11. So what you, and then you have different

legal standards. So if you're in a law enforcement, you can only collect evidence that meets the standard of evidence and if that evidence was illegally or improperly collected, it cannot be used. Whereas intelligence, you get that information anywhere you need to, but you can't use intelligence to enforce the law or to bring somebody to court because it won't stand up in court. That's part of the huge controversy now of what's tearing the FBI apart. apart from DEI is we have a we have a federal law enforcement and domestic intelligence service in one entity that no other major democracy has ever had. Can you explain that a bit more?

Sure. So the FBI's job is to, well, first, Americans have a different relationship with their government than members say of the British Commonwealth. have so with our the government is response it's governed with the consent it governs with the consent of the governed so we don't have any higher authority at all it's the highest authority in the in the country is the constitution and the individual citizen so the whole object of government is to serve the citizens under the constitution now the the the the the the the the European import that was brought over in when we had the big immigrations coming in from

Central Europe was the people serve the government and then the government will help the people completely reverse view where it's no longer government by consent of the governed but it's governing by central authority through a more educated ruling class, educated in quotes ruling class to tell the people what they need and tell the people what they must do in exchange for a new civil contract, new social contract where if you behave well, you will be taken care of. So we've been in this turmoil for a century in our country just trying to grapple with the idea of, do we have a big central government that takes care of all of us and breaks up our system of federalism

where the states are are practically sovereign under the federal constitution. Or do we simply eliminate the idea of states' rights and the individualism of states to impose centralized laws on everybody so that the people in Los Angeles live under the same laws as the people of Vermont, even though there's so little in common between those two. And that's been the big fight in our country about the nature of government. Is it big brother that serves everybody? Well, if you need a big central government, you need a secret police system, a political policing system to ensure public compliance.

Yeah, the way you put it there, that seems to be, well, certainly here in Canada, right? Through COVID, it was like, or is it individual or is it group think, right? like we and you know and we had one solution size fits all it doesn't matter if like you say LA to Vermont to the middle of Kentucky to you know up in the middle of nowhere Alberta you know that that was kind of the mentality then you know uh keeping track of time here I don't want to hold you up too long I do I do want to get your quick thoughts though on USAID um like I'm seeing like protests I'm seeing people calling you know Trump and Elon Musk like like dictators, Nazis, like a whole bunch of wild stuff.

And then on the other side, like, you know, going on X and just like reading some stuff, it's like, well, it looks like they were funneling money through this organization. Where do you come on on this? So USAID is older than I am. And it has never, ever, ever been subject to a significant audit or to any congressional investigative hearing to make sure that it was doing its job. So you have a 60-something-year-old bureaucracy that's been left to its own devices all this time. Now, in the beginning, it had a fixed purpose, and it had a real sense of mission, which was to support, to help impoverish people around the world, to deliver humanitarian aid,

and then to help them get out of the situations they were in by improving, whether it was fresh water at first or building roads or building schools or, you know, advancing as these societies would continue to develop. served a great purpose on the humanitarian side. It also served a strategic purpose during the Cold War as a soft power against the expansion of Soviet communism, where they were, they had this myth that the rich countries were just wanted to exploit the poor countries and communism would liberate the poor. USAID's purpose was to to combat that. But start with the collapse of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. It became something very different. There was this question of what do we do with this big aid bureaucracy? What do we do with all of the assets we have as the United States government

that were designed to fight the Cold War? So they repurposed themselves. And with USAID, it became a money-making operation. And only about 10% of the money that is provided to USAID actually goes to its intended destinations. The rest of it goes to layers of bureaucracy and contracting and inefficient logistics and everything else. So this is a gigantic, multi-billion-dollar-a-year money pot for a lot of special interests.

And those special interests happen to be Democrat Party-oriented special interests. So what we found was over the years, USAID had become a slush fund for their political operations abroad, as well as here at home. That's what the big fight is all about, the slush fund, and with no oversight of it. So it's a big piggy bank for certain political, entities in the United States at taxpayer expense under the false rubric now, false guys, of being intended to help the poor overseas. So that's what the big fight is about.

Do you think that the, you know, I forget what the numbers broke down to in the election, but do you think the one portion of the population will ever see it the way you just talked about it or will they, you know, for the next four years, assume Trump is the most evil man? Like, is there a way to break that echo chamber for Americans so they can actually see Then maybe this isn't such a good thing, like how it just kind of morphed over time. Like when you're talking about how big it got and it never was audited and all these things, I'm like, well, it doesn't matter what you are. If you never get audited, eventually bad things are going to happen and they're going to

continue to have it because there's no oversight on it. So like, I can see just reasonably, I'm like, well, that, that isn't good. But there's certain people, certain groups of people, they're locked in their ways and they don't want to see anything. They don't want to hear any of that. Right. And that'll always be the case. But I think the majority of the public, while the majority have already voted for Trump, you don't hear them complaining that they don't like what he's doing. Yeah, fair enough. It's pretty much. And the other thing, there's so much going on right now. Talk about shock and awe just in two weeks of a presidency, all the things that Trump has done. And there are no plans to slow down.

So, but the public seems to be, first, they're numbed by all of this. But second, a lot of people are coming out and saying, yeah, you know, that was, that's true. This is what I experienced. So you have many more stories coming out. And then once the actual data comes out, people are going to, they're just, all this fraud, decades and decades of fraud and abuse are going to be laid before the public. And some people will never accept it, but I think most people will. As I let you out of here, where can people find you on social media? And then where could they buy your books?

You can find me on X at J. Michael Waller. And at the Center for Security Policy.org is our website. Center for Security Policy.org. And then my book, Big Intel, the best place to get it is on Amazon because they get the best price. Yes, Amazon seems to be the way to find anyone's books these days.

Jay Michael Waller, folks. Thanks for hopping on and doing this. Nice joining you.