General

AfD co-leader slams Italy’s Meloni, says she has allowed open borders and supports pro-war policies with Ukraine

/13 Comments/in /by

TOO has posted quite a bit on Meloni, most quite negative, but some hopeful. This one is pretty much the end of all hope: “Migration has actually doubled there under Prime Minister (Giorgia) Meloni. Open borders instead of blockades.”

From Remix:

“I want to make it clear that this Melonization will not happen with us”

Tensions are growing between European parties on the right, with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) now openly criticizing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for presiding over a huge increase in immigration into Italy and her pro-war stances in the Ukraine conflict.

“We will not bend our program for anyone. That must also be clear for us, including our political positions, which are correct, which have currently brought us to second place in the polls in Germany, which offer unique selling points and which we will not bend in favor of European positions just so that we are more attractive to some. We see this in Italy. Migration has actually doubled there under Prime Minister (Giorgia) Meloni. Open borders instead of blockades. Meloni is also in favor of more weapons in the Ukraine war and confrontation with Russia instead of peace and diplomacy for Europe. I want to make it clear that this Melonization will not happen with us,” said AfD co-chairman Tino Chrupalla at the AfD Saxony state party conference.

“For us, German interests always come first,” he added.

The sharp criticism of Meloni, who leads the Brothers of Italy party, comes after the AfD was expelled from the Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the EU parliament earlier this month. Notably, France’s National Rally’s Marine Le Pen pushed for AfD to be kicked out of the group after AfD MEP Maximilian Krah made comments that not all soldiers who served with the Waffen-SS were war criminals, as reported by Remix News.

Le Pen’s move just before EU parliamentary elections has been seen as a major betrayal of a European coalition partner, and a desperate attempt to improve her party’s image in the eyes of the French public.

Now, there are rumors that Le Pen may be preparing to form a new right-leaning group along with Italy’s Meloni, or to potentially join Meloni’s group, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).

Critics, including many in the AfD, argue that Meloni and Le Pen no longer represent the right. Notably, Meloni’s rhetoric on immigration has radically shifted since she took power, and she has embraced open borders and more legal migration.

While many across the European right have been critical of Meloni and Le Pen, their parties remain on top in both Italy and France. Meloni’s support has dipped only slightly over the last year and currently remains the most popular party with 27 percent support. Le Pen has seen her support rise and currently sits at 34 percent.
[Video: Meloni’s policy of promoting legal immigration  “marks a trend of conservatives across Europe embracing demographic transformation and mass immigration as long as it’s legal,” although illegal immigration is close to an all-time high  in Italy. We see the same in America, where conservatives routinely pledge allegiance to legal immigration except that illegal immigration is completely out of control and effectively legal.]

John Mearsheimer: “The Truth about Israel”

/5 Comments/in /by

Gaza war: Israel is the big loser; Americans also lose; Iran as winner.

“Noticing” by Steve Sailer

/12 Comments/in , /by

Noticing: An Essential Reader
Steve Sailer
Passage Publishing Co., 2024

Politically incorrect data blogger Steve Sailer has just released a new book of essays on a variety of taboo subjects which is well worth reading. Most pieces in this collection are already available from various outlets including VDARE and Taki’s Magazine. Unfortunately, Noticing: An Essential Reader 1973-2023 does not actually cover 50 years of essays as the subtitle implies. The earliest is from 1992, but any but the most obsessive fans will still find something here they have not seen before.

Before readers contact their lawyers I should mention that Sailer did in fact publish something in 1973, namely a brief letter to the editor of National Review which he reproduces in the introduction. However, this was before he finished high school, and he did not begin publishing for pay until around 1990. As he explains, he had an interest in data such as baseball statistics from a very young age. This initially led him to work in data analysis for a marketing research company, but he also noticed broader patterns in human affairs.

As a child he was very impressed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a presidential advisor who hosted a seminar at Harvard covering the latest data on the question of school funding and school performance. A study commissioned by the Johnson administration known as the Coleman Report had come to a politically incorrect conclusion: when it came to doing well in school, money was far less important than other factors, whether cultural or genetic, on the part of the students themselves. Sailer’s writing career has largely followed similar lines, as he rejects the standard dogma that all people are equal. However, he also rejects the idea that, as he paraphrased a sociologist of the time, “people aren’t equal, and I just can’t stand it.” Instead he has made a career of calmly and politely noticing facts which the current elite brands as racist, sexist, and so on.

One of the less expected areas of human biodiversity covered here is cousin marriage, which is very common in the Muslim world but quite unusual in the West. His essay on the topic was written in the context of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which it was often claimed would bring the country freedom and democracy. There was some public skepticism of the idea that Iraq would become a “Jeffersonian democracy,” but few were willing to explain why, as that would be racist. Sailer explains that through the longstanding custom of inbreeding, Muslim countries have become especially unsuited to our system of government.

All people have a natural instinct to prefer those who are genetically similar to themselves, but how strong this instinct is varies depending on how similar they are. Due to high rates of inbreeding over many generations, Muslims tend to be more similar to their extended families than White people in the West are. Compared to their own families, even their neighbors are relatively alien to them. This leads to the highly clannish mindset reflected in the Arab expression “me against my brother, my brother and me against my cousin, my cousin and me against the world.”

Individualist Western societies, by contrast, have historically had relatively weak family ties apart from close relatives, and they have depended on a common national identity — “me and nation,” if not necessarily against the world, at least having their own distinct culture and shared interests. Without this, there is little basis for any sense of the common good, and thus for trust between the people and the government, or even between members of the same community. Instead there is constant conflict between different clans, tribes or sects.

In such an environment, what appeal can there be in concepts such as impartial justice or free and fair elections? They may have elections, but these will only be tribal warfare by other means. Why should the loser feel bound to respect the results? If one group has power, they will only use it to enrich themselves and abuse others. This is what we seen in many “nations” in the Middle East and Africa. Of course, there may be other reasons for this as well — the average IQ is significantly lower in these regions than in the West, and low IQ is correlated with corruption and nepotism, but Sailer leaves the subject of intelligence for other essays.

Another unexpected topic is golf course design. This is not a subject that appeals to mainstream journalists for several reasons. It would be hard to frame the sport as “inclusive”— not only do many golf courses cost over $10 million to construct, but many are the property of “exclusive clubs accused of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism.” Golf players tend to be White, male, gentile, and straight, with the architects being largely Scotsmen.

There is also the question of aesthetics. Modern artists and architects often aim to be offensive, creating something deliberately unattractive to most viewers. Sailer argues that the appearance of golf courses, by contrast, reflects common human instincts. He refers to one study in which people from 14 countries were surveyed about what they would “like to see in a painting.” The two artists who commissioned the polls then produced the “most wanted painting” for each country based on the responses. Most of the resulting works were landscapes, and shared the common elements of lakes, grass, trees and hills or mountains. As Sailer puts it they “look remarkably like golf courses.” Other research has confirmed that people “respond strongly to landscapes with open, grassy vegetation, scattered strands of branchy trees, water, changes in elevation.” One theory is that this reflects the African savannah on which the first hominids evolved, to which we still have an instinctive attachment.

Speaking of Africa, Sailer covers Black-White differences in several essays. His writing on IQ mentions the 15-point difference between the Black and White averages, while other pieces cover Black advantages in athletics. His attitude toward Blacks may be jarring to some White readers. He effusively praises Black athletes and celebrates the desegregation of sports. Blacks are in some ways “superior” as he puts it, while Whites are merely more “nerdy.” Some of his comments endorsing interracial marriage are likely to raise the blood pressure of readers of any color. However, there is no reason to believe any of this is insincere, and it makes it difficult for the normie reader to dismiss his writing as motivated by “hate” or “White supremacism.”

The topic most likely to be already familiar to readers is the much higher crime rate among Blacks as compared to White Americans, but the author addresses this in a particularly original way in one essay. In 1999, a less politically correct time, the liberal magazine Slate published a debate between Sailer and economist Steven Levitt over the latter’s theory that the legalization of abortion had reduced crime. Levitt compared crime rates in 1985 and 1997 and concluded that abortion had prevented many future criminals from being born.

As Sailer explains, the theory was superficially plausible, as Blacks had three times the abortion rate of Whites while having eight times the murder rate. However, there was a major spike in crime in the intervening years in connection with the popularity of crack cocaine and the associated gang warfare. In 1993 the murder rate among 14-to-17-year-olds, who were born in the 1970s after Roe v. Wade, was 3.6 times the rate for the same demographic in 1984. The contrast was even higher for Black males in particular. Sailer argues that the same cohort had lower crime rates by 1997 partly because so many of them were already in jail or dead.

There is a surprisingly balanced section dealing with Jews included here. The first of this group of essays is a review of psychologist Richard Lynn’s The Chosen People, a book analyzing Jewish accomplishments in various fields in an admiring manner. Lynn found Jews dramatically overrepresented in Nobel Prizes and numerous professions, as well as in counts of prominent individuals. He attributed this to the high average IQ of the Ashkenazi, the majority ethnic group among Jews globally, which based on numerous studies he estimated at 110. However, he conceded that their intelligence alone would only account for them being overrepresented by about 2 to 1 in the professions, and yet the actual ratio is often much higher. Lynn attributes this to “strong motivational and work-ethic qualities,” and cites data suggesting Jewish students are more likely to aspire to both a high income and a high status in society.

The next essay however follows from the first in an unexpected way, although it was written earlier. If Jews have been so successful, why is it still taboo to say so? Sailer notes that the mainstream representation of Jews is still that of a vulnerable minority. He cites a 2006 article by Jewish commentator Noah Millman who was surprised to hear a rabbi admit in a sermon that Jews had a great deal of influence in the US. Millman was used to hearing Jewish leaders argue that Jews should identify with other supposed victim groups because they themselves are in a weak position — historical victims who might be persecuted again in the future. Yet as Sailer points out, Jews are only 2% of the US population and yet made up 35% of those on the 2009 Forbes 400 list of the country’s wealthiest individuals. Almost half of The Atlantic’s list of the 50 most important pundits were Jewish. Sailer credits this contradictory state of affairs to a Jewish elite who seem quite intolerant of criticism or even noticing on the part of gentiles, for reasons that are left to the imagination.

Another essay makes similar points while returning to the subject of golf. Sailer covers the common complaint that Jews were unfairly excluded from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant country golf clubs, and so were forced to establish their own organizations. He goes into depth on the subject and makes several interesting points. First, it is unlikely that many Jews would have preferred WASP country clubs to their own. Like most people of any ethnic group, they enjoyed being surrounded by their own kind. Their own clubs were exclusive as well, with a 1962 report by the Anti-Defamation League, of all people, coming to the conclusion that Jewish clubs actually discriminated against Christians more than vice versa. Jewish establishments reflected the cultural preferences of Jews— in comparison with their WASP counterparts they focused more on eating than drinking and clubhouses than golf courses. Many were even better funded than their gentile equivalents.

Second, although many Jews were indeed rejected from country clubs due to their origins, this often had nothing to do with gentiles. Many cities had two Jewish country clubs, one German and one Russian, with the German one generally being considered the superior one. German Jews for many years excluded Russian Jews, whom they considered crass and uncouth.

How, then, did the country club myth develop? Sailer argues that just as the Israeli government whips up public hostility towards neighboring countries as a means of distracting from domestic issues, Jewish elites in the US promote an exaggerated image of hostile gentiles in an attempt at “healing gaps within the Jewish community by castigating Christians.” Unfortunately neither the Anti-Defamation League nor the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed for bankruptcy in the time since these essays were written, so the basic dynamic remains unchanged.

Sailer ends the book with an interesting piece entitled “What If I’m Right.” Here he covers the implications of his observations in a typically modest manner. Many liberals claim that if noticing were to be normalized, this would justify drastic policies such as slavery or even genocide. Sailer finds this baffling, although he gives them the benefit of the doubt in assuming they are not projecting their own desire to commit such acts. Instead he posits that they feel a haughty sense of superiority to other Whites based on their own IQs, so they assume that recognition of such differences between races would mean similar contempt on the part of Whites toward Blacks.

As many of his essays clearly show, this is not the case. He is surprisingly sympathetic toward minorities even while being blunt about their shortcomings. Obviously he takes an interest in these issues because he would prefer to see less crime and fewer untimely deaths, not because he means to exalt Whites or vilify other races. If anything, he has embarrassingly little attachment to his own race. As Scott Greer has already pointed out, he would do better to take an interest in Whites as such, rather than the colorblind “citizenism” he currently advocates. The latter could further erode Whites’ ability to take their own side while being increasingly outnumbered and overwhelmed by other groups.

Steve Sailer has produced a well-written set of essays which can introduce a non-ideological reader to the facts we are not supposed to notice about human nature. Denial of these facts has been the basis of disastrous policies, as he has often pointed out. But even aside from policy, it is degrading to attempt to believe lies, particularly regarding critical facts of life. Sailer’s book should be uplifting and enlightening to anyone exposed to the modern mendacity around diversity and equality.

 

Stewart Baker in Reason Magazine on Enacting Quotas in all Areas of American life

/in /by

The Left is addicted to identity politics and conservatives want to help their business allies (and don’t want to be seen as racist). Once again, they will enact a bill attempting to make up for lower Black and Latino IQ by mandating it.

Congress is Preparing to Restore Quotas in College Admissions

More than two-thirds of Americans think the Supreme Court was right to hold Harvard’s race-based admissions policy unlawful. But the minority who disagree have no doubt about their own moral authority, and there’s every reason to believe that they intend to undo the Court’s decision at the earliest opportunity.[D]isparate impacts are everywhere in the real world, and so is the temptation to solve the problem with quotas. The difficulty is that, as the polls about the Harvard decision reveal, most Americans don’t like the solution. They think it’s unfair. As Justice Scalia noted in 2009, the incentives for racial quotas set the stage for a “war between disparate impact and equal protection.” Ricci v. DeStefano, 557 U.S. 557, 594 (2009). …

In fact, undoing the Harvard admissions decision is the least of it. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have embraced a precooked “privacy” bill that will impose race and gender quotas not just on academic admissions but on practically every private and public decision that matters to ordinary Americans. The provision could be adopted without scrutiny in a matter of weeks; that’s because it is packaged as part of a bipartisan bill setting federal privacy standards—something that has been out of reach in Washington for decades. And it looks as though the bill breaks the deadlock by giving Republicans some of the federal preemption their business allies want while it gives Democrats and left-wing advocacy groups a provision that will quietly overrule the Supreme Court’s Harvard decision and impose identity-based quotas on a wide swath of American life. …

Not surprisingly, quota advocates don’t want to fight such a war in the light of day. That’s presumably why APRA obscures the mechanism by which it imposes quotas.

Here’s how it works. APRA’s quota provision, section 13 of APRA, says that any entity that “knowingly develops” an algorithm for its business must evaluate that algorithm “to reduce the risk of” harm. And it defines algorithmic “harm” to include causing a “disparate impact” on the basis of “race, color, religion, national origin, sex, or disability” (plus, weirdly, “political party registration status”). APRA Sec. 13(c)(1)(B)(vi)(IV)&(V).

At bottom, it’s as simple as that. If you use an algorithm for any important decision about people—to hire, promote, advertise, or otherwise allocate goods and services—you must ensure that you’ve reduced the risk of disparate impact.

The closer one looks, however, the worse it gets. At every turn, APRA expands the sweep of quotas. For example, APRA does not confine itself to hiring and promotion. It provides that, within two years of the bill’s enactment, institutions must reduce any disparate impact the algorithm causes in access to housing, education, employment, healthcare, insurance, or credit.

No one escapes. The quota mandate covers practically every business and nonprofit in the country, other than financial institutions. APRA sec. 2(10). And its regulatory sweep is not limited, as you might think, to sophisticated and mysterious artificial intelligence algorithms. A “covered algorithm” is broadly defined as any computational process that helps humans make a decision about providing goods or services or information. APRA, Section 2 (8).  It covers everything from a ground-breaking AI model to an aging Chromebook running a spreadsheet. In order to call this a privacy provision, APRA says that a covered algorithm must process personal data, but that means pretty much every form of personal data that isn’t deidentified, with the exception of employee data. APRA, Section 2 (9).

Actually, it gets worse. Remember that some disparate impacts in the employment context can be justified by business necessity. Not under APRA, which doesn’t recognize any such defense. So if you use a spreadsheet to rank lifeguard applicants based on their swim test, and minorities do poorly on the test, your spreadsheet must be adjusted until the scores for minorities are the same as everyone else’s.

To see how APRA would work, let’s try it on Harvard. Is the university a covered entity? Sure, it’s a nonprofit. Do its decisions affect access to an important opportunity? Yes, education.  Is it handling nonpublic personal data about applicants? For sure. Is it using a covered algorithm?  Almost certainly, even if all it does is enter all the applicants’ data in a computer to make it easier to access and evaluate. Does the algorithm cause harm in the shape of disparate impact? Again, objective criteria will almost certainly result in underrepresentation of various racial, religious, gender, or disabled identity groups. To reduce the harm, Harvard will be forced to adopt admissions standards that boost black and Hispanic applicants past Asian and white students with comparable records. The sound of champagne corks popping in Cambridge will reach all the way to Capitol Hill.

Of course, Asian students could still take Harvard to court [Why not White people?]. There is a section of APRA that seems to make it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity. APRA Sec. 13(a)(1). But in fact APRA offers the nondiscrimination mandate only to take it away. It carves out an explicit exception for any covered entity that engages in self-testing “to prevent or mitigate unlawful discrimination” or to” diversify an applicant, participant, or customer pool.” Harvard will no doubt say that it adopted its quotas after its “self-testing” revealed a failure to achieve diversity in its “participant pool,” otherwise known as its freshman class.

Even if the courts don’t agree, the Federal Trade Commission can ride to the rescue. APRA gives the Commission authority to issue guidance or regulations interpreting APRA – including issuing a report on best practices for reducing the harm of disparate impact. APRA Sec. 13(c)(5)&(6). What are the odds that a Washington bureaucracy won’t endorse race-based decisions as a “best practice”?

It’s worth noting that, while I’ve been dunking on Harvard, I could have said the same about AT&T or General Electric or Amazon. In fact, big companies with lots of personal data face added scrutiny under APRA; they must do a quasipublic “impact assessment” explaining how they are mitigating any disparate impact caused by their algorithms. That creates heavy pressure to announce publicly that they’ve eliminated all algorithmic harm. That will be an added incentive to implement quotas, but as with Harvard, many big companies don’t really need an added incentive. They all have active internal DEI bureaucracies that will be happy to inject even more race and gender consciousness into corporate life, as long the injection is immune from legal challenge.

And immune it will be.  As we’ve seen, APRA provides strong legal cover for institutions that adopt quota systems. And I predict that, for those actually using artificial intelligence, there will be an added layer of obfuscation that will stop legal challenges before they get started. It seems likely that the burden of mitigating algorithmic harm will quickly be transferred from the companies buying and using algorithms to the companies that build and sell them. Algorithm vendors are already required by many buyers to certify that their products are bias-free. That will soon become standard practice. With APRA on the books, there won’t be any doubt that the easiest and safest way to “eliminate bias” will be to build quotas in.

That won’t be hard to do. Artificial intelligence and machine learning vendors can use their training and feedback protocols to achieve proportional representation of minorities, women, and the disabled.

During training, AI models are evaluated based on how often they serve up the “right” answers. Thus, a model designed to help promote engineers may be asked to evaluate the resumes of actual engineers who’ve gone through the corporate promotion process. Its initial guesses about which engineers should be promoted will be compared to actual corporate experience.  If the machine picks candidates who performed badly, its recommendation will be marked wrong and it will have to try again. Eventually the machine will recognize the pattern of characteristics, some not at all obvious, that make for a promotable engineer.

But everything depends on the training, which can be constrained by arbitrary factors. A company that wanted to maximize two things—the skill of its senior engineers and their intramural softball prowess—could easily train its algorithm to downgrade engineers who can’t throw or hit. The algorithm would eventually produce the best set of senior managers consistent with winning the intramural softball tournament every year. Of course, the model could just as easily be trained to produce the best set of senior engineers consistent with meeting the company’s demographic quotas. And the beauty from the company’s point of view is that the demographic goals never need to be acknowledged once the training has been completed – probably in some remote facility owned by its vendor. That uncomfortable topic can be passed over in silence. Indeed, it may even be hidden from the company that purchases the product, and it will certainly be hidden from anyone the algorithm disadvantages.

To be fair, unlike its 2023 predecessor, APRA at least nods in the direction of helping the algorithm’s victims.  A new Section 14 requires that institutions tell people if they are going to be judged by an algorithm, provide them with “meaningful information” about how the algorithm makes decisions, and give them an opportunity to opt out.

This is better than nothing, for sure. But not by much.  Companies won’t have much difficulty providing a lot of information about how its algorithms work without ever quite explaining who gets the short end of the disparate-impact stick. Indeed, as we’ve seen, the company that’s supposed to provide the information may not even know how much race or gender preference has been built into its outcomes. More likely it will be told by its vendor, and will repeat, that the algorithm has been trained and certified to be bias-free.

What if a candidate suspects the algorithm is stacked against him? How does section 14’s assurance that he can opt out help? Going back to our Harvard example, suppose that an Asian student figures out that the algorithm is radically discounting his achievements because of his race. If he opts out, what will happen?  He won’t be subjected to the algorithm. Instead, presumably, he’ll be put in a pool with other dissidents and evaluated by humans—who will almost certainly wonder about his choice and may well presume that he’s a racist. Certainly, opting out provides the applicant no protection, given the power and information imbalance between him and Harvard.  Yet that is all that APRA offers.

Let’s be blunt; this is nuts. Overturning the Supreme Court’s Harvard admissions decision in such a sneaky way is bad enough, but imposing Harvard’s identity politics on practically every part of American life—housing, education, employment, healthcare, insurance, and credit for starters – is worse. APRA’s effort to legalize, if not mandate, quotas in all these fields has nothing to do with privacy. The bill deserves to be defeated or at least shorn of sections 13 and 14.

…

Regional Complexities Of the Israel/Hamas War

/2 Comments/in /by

I’m no fan of Terry Gross of NPR but this interview with Gregg Carlstrom on the complexities of the Middle East is well worth listening to—conflicts among the Arab states and a lot on Iran and the Gaza war.

Regional Complexities Of The Israel/Hamas War : Fresh Air : NPR

Pick the Hillbilly, Trump

/5 Comments/in /by
Pick the Hillbilly, Trump

Now that it looks like Trump is seriously going to be the Republican nominee for president, who should his vice president be?

If he’s headed for a catastrophic, 1964-style defeat, then he should definitely pick Nikki Haley or Kari Lake. Another four years of Joe Biden will be a disaster for the country, but at least we can accomplish something by ridding ourselves of these pestilences. (Nikki because the media will finally look at her, and Kari because the voters will.)

Come to think of it, let’s add the cast of “The View” to that list.

On the other hand, if there’s the remotest possibility that Trump could win, he ought to pick Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. The two complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, as running mates should. Vance is smart, Trump is not. Vance is not exciting, Trump is too exciting; Trump is from Florida, Vance is not.

There’s no chance of his overshadowing Trump. Only 200 people in the entire country will care that Vance is smart. Everyone else seems to want Trump’s razzamatazz. The ex-president can keep being Rodney Dangerfield, and Vance will be the accountant.

Vance’s one flaw is his slavish loyalty to Trump, but I feel Trump is magnanimous enough to overlook this shortcoming.

Moreover, Republicans could really use a boost in Ohio this year, where popular Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is running for reelection in an increasingly red state. Having Vance on the presidential ticket might be enough to flip the seat. Let’s just hope Trump is not the sort of person who cares only about himself.

Because, boy, does he owe us. In the last few election cycles, he’s cost the GOP Senate seats in Alabama (Luther Strange), New Hampshire (Don Bolduc), and three (yes — three!) Senate seats in Georgia (David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler and Herschel Walker). I’m also counting Blake Masters in Arizona because of that asinine — and well-publicized! — call Trump made to him days before the election.

Trump’s only other potential running mate who isn’t completely preposterous is the all-new, anti-immigration Sen. Marco Rubio. But here, Vance has a razor-thin edge by virtue of not being constitutionally prohibited from being Trump’s vice president — at least not without sacrificing all 30 of Florida’s electoral votes.

While it was wildly helpful for The Washington Post to unfurl a lengthy exegesis this week on the reasons the Post thinks Rubio would make a terrible, awful vice president (on “Meet The Press,” he refused to pre-certify the 2024 election as fair, and he doesn’t agree with the Post that it is beyond all human capacity to deport illegal aliens), the paper can save its breath. Rubio can’t be Trump’s VP.

The 12th Amendment (or the 11th, if you’re a Democrat and you don’t believe the Second Amendment exists) provides:

“The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves[.]”

This provision is not incidental, archaic or easily evaded by a quick move to another state (as endless news outlets have claimed). If Trump is sworn in again, he can’t swear to preserve, protect and defend “quite a lot of the Constitution.”

Although the 12th Amendment made other changes to the Electoral College, the prohibition on the president and vice president being from the same state was in the original Constitution. It wasn’t an afterthought.

The framers were concerned about any one state gaining too much power. That’s why, for example, the district that houses the federal government can’t be a state. As James Madison explained in Federalist No. 10: “The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.”

(Look at California for specific instances of loony contagions sweeping an entire state.)

And no, Rubio can’t just move to another state before the election to avoid the 12th Amendment problem. Dick Cheney is cited as the example of a quickie pre-election residence change because in 2000, he moved from Texas to Wyoming days before becoming George W. Bush’s running mate.

But that wasn’t an obvious scam.

Regarding Cheney’s inhabitance, a federal court found:

“It is undisputed that he was born, raised, educated and married in Wyoming and represented the state as a Member of Congress for six terms. After additional public service, he eventually moved to Dallas, Texas, to become the Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton Corporation.”

(Talk about your obscure Dick Cheney trivia! Who knew he ever worked for Halliburton? I’m surprised the Democrats never mentioned that.)

Even during his five brief years as Halliburton’s CEO, Cheney still received mail in Wyoming and maintained a registered vehicle there. When Bush chose him, Cheney resigned from Halliburton, sold his house in Texas and moved back to Wyoming. Then, just for good measure, Cheney shot a Texas friend in the face.

Except for his senatorial duties in Washington (which don’t count toward residency), Rubio has no conceivable connection to any place in the country except Florida.

Of course, if Fox News is telling the truth about Trump cruising to victory, possibly flipping New York and winning shockingly large percentages of the Black and Hispanic vote, then, sure, he can sacrifice Florida’s 30 electoral votes.

But if Fox is just whispering sweet nothings in right-wingers’ ears, there’s no way Trump can concede the third-largest state before the voting even starts.

Surely, we can trust Fox to tell viewers the truth.

— Reason magazine, April 18, 2023: “In a $788 Million Defamation Settlement, Fox News Admits That It Spread False Claims About Election Fraud”

— Associated Press, April 19, 2023: “Fox settlement part of flurry of lawsuits over election lies”

— VOX, April 18, 2023: “Fox pays $787 million for its 2020 election lies”

Back to the original question: Can Trump win? My calculation is, if the election is about Trump, he loses; if the election is about the media and the prosecutions, he wins. The one advantage we have this year is that liberals’ hatred for Trump has driven them out of their cotton-picking minds.

COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER

Michael Waller: The Transition Integrity Project, AKA the Trump-Will-Never-Be President Project

/in /by

Tucker interviews Michael Waller. Be paranoid. Very paranoid. As the saying goes, just because you are paranoid does not mean they aren’t coming to get you. The Transition Integrity Project is basically a plan to seize the government in case the evil Orange Man gets elected. They are very good with names that imply the moral high ground while intending the opposite.

Besides the usual neocon suspects like Boot, Frum, and Kristol, Waller has quite a bit on the central role of Rosa Brooks (nee Ehrenreich [half Jewish on her father’s side]), described by Waller as a “red diaper baby,” implying that she is on the far left. Another key figure is Mary McCord who has sterling leftist anti-Trump credentials and is ironically “executive director of the [Georgetown University] Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.”

No surprise that the big-name neocons are involved in what is fundamentally a project to save democracy by institutionalizing Leftist authoritarianism. They are quite prepared to nullify election results via military coup  if necessary or at via least lawfare: McCord is running a “program to plan over 100 pieces of litigation without even knowing who they will be suing” because they are not in office yet.

As usual, the left is way ahead of the right in war-gaming the future, as in 2020 when swing states changed election laws to enable ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots despite their susceptibility to fraud.

These people are terrified that any hint of populism, anti-globalism or (god forbid!) the interests of White America having any real power in American politics.

Tucker [00:00:00] In the summer of 2020. Four years ago, a professor at Georgetown University called Rosa Brooks headed up a group that she called the Transition Integrity Project. Heard of it? Hey, you’re about to learn a lot more about it. So the goal of the Transition Integrity Project, this was before the last presidential election, of course, was to play out different outcomes from that election and see how the country would handle each one. Kind of a war game, a political war game. The project was made up from representatives from a bunch of different groups but similar groups law professors, political strategists, retired military officers, all from the left. Now, their stated goal was to focus on four possible outcomes of the 2020 election a narrow Biden win, a big Biden win, a Trump win, and a scenario with no immediate winner. Basically a tie confusion. So they spent four days doing this and they played out a bunch of different scenarios. Okay, now you should know if you want a flavor of what this look like, that Donald Trump was played by Bill Kristol. Joe Biden was played by former Democratic White House chief of Staff John Podesta, etc., etc. other members of the group included washed up neocon lunatic Matt Boot, Michael Steele, the MSNBC regular Jennifer Granholm, the failed governor, and David Frum, who’s some sort of loud Canadian. So you can kind of get a sense of what these were like, these meetings. So here was the assessment of what they found. This is Rosa Brooks describing it. We’re quoting a landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involves street level violence and political crisis. That’s not a threat, though, she went on. And we’re quoting, with the exception of the big Biden win scenario, each of our exercises reached the brink of catastrophe, with massive disinformation campaigns, violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse. End quote. Again, not a threat at all. Elect our guy, or America falls apart and people die. That’s just a result of social science. That’s what we found. So they said the Transition Tech Group project said that their goal was to find out the very worst thing that could happen in a presidential election. And the assessment was clear. You could not allow Donald Trump to win or else America would end. So the Washington Post, owned by the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, dutifully printed these results in September 2020, two months before the election. Just to give you a sense of what this was really about. But what was it really about? And will this project and this kind of thinking and the people who pulled it off have any effect on the coming presidential election? Well, J. Michael Waller has thought a lot about this. He once worked for the CIA. He knows a lot about the Intel world having been part of it. He’s a senior analyst for strategy at the center for Security Policy, the author of a new book called Big Intel. And we’re happy to have him join us now to unpack the Transition Integrity Project. Thank you so much for.

Michael Waller[00:02:54] Great to be with you.

Tucker [00:02:55] So what is. I characterized it briefly, but if you could just give us an overview, the Transition Integrity Project, what was and is it and why does it matter?

Michael Waller[00:03:06]It it’s the opposite of what it says it is of course.

Tucker [00:03:10] Yeah. Of course it’s not here to bring integrity, integrity to political transitions.

Michael Waller[00:03:15] Maybe to their own, you know, fundamentally transforming the country. But no. So whenever you hear these words, they’re the opposite of what they mean. Yes. For these guys, it was to determine in 2020 that the transition from a Trump administration would be nice and orderly. And if it wasn’t orderly, the military should intervene to remove Donald Trump.

Tucker [00:03:37] Okay, so it was calling for a military coup.

  1. Michael Waller[00:03:40]Right. And and the the the the head of the head of the of the project, the co-founder of the project, Rosa Brooks, had actually called for reconsidering and getting rid of civilian control of the military back in 2016.

Tucker [00:03:53] So if the this is maybe a a side road, but I think it’s important if the military is not controlled by elected officials, as it would be in a democracy, who would who would make decisions about military force?

  1. Michael Waller[00:04:05]They’re not clear about that.

Tucker [00:04:06] Oh, they’re not clear about that.

  1. Michael Waller[00:04:07]This is Banana Republic.

Tucker [00:04:09] Well, of course, by definition.

  1. Michael Waller[00:04:11]Yeah. In the name of protecting our constitution.

Tucker [00:04:12] Yeah military hunta to save democracy. So Rosa Brooks is called for that.

  1. Michael Waller[00:04:17]Yeah. So even when Trump was elected or inaugurated two weeks later, she wrote that we have to find a way to remove him from power.

Tucker [00:04:26] So would you say, just as just so we can define terms at the outset, that anyone who calls for a military coup against an elected official is, by definition, an enemy of democracy.

  1. Michael Waller[00:04:35]Public enemy.

Tucker [00:04:36] Yeah, right. So that, of course, didn’t happen because in my view, I think it’s been demonstrated factually. They rigged the election and Joe Biden became the president. So did the election. The Transition Integrity Project continue?

  1. Michael Waller[00:04:55]Well, they did the first part in semi secrecy.

Tucker [00:04:58] Yes.

  1. Michael Waller[00:04:59]This time. They’re being more open about it. They’re inviting reporters to their war games.

Tucker [00:05:03] So same, same group.

  1. Michael Waller[00:05:05]It seems to me they’re not fully, forthright about who the members are. Right. And they weren’t at all in 2020. But now you’ve got retired generals.

Tucker [00:05:16] So what would be the point of this?

  1. Michael Waller[00:05:19]To make sure that their transition has integrity, meaning that even according to their latest war games, if Donald Trump wins a free and fair election, he still has to be removed.

Tucker [00:05:35] So if you have people again, just a definition of terms. If you have people who are calling for the removal by force of an elected official, that is I mean, that is insurrection, right?

  1. Michael Waller[00:05:45]It’s yes, it’s legal insurrection because they’re doing this now through lawfare. Right? They’re doing it through Georgetown University Law Center. That’s the premier law school in Washington, DC, right? It’s a feeder school to the Justice Department. Yes, it’s a feeder school to Supreme Court clerks. Write it to the whole intelligence community. And this stuff is being planned there.

Tucker [00:06:08] So a country that cared about its own preservation, cared to, you know, set its own systems, continue for the benefit of its grandchildren, would immediately shut down Georgetown University Law Center, obviously, because it’s a, it’s an insurrectionist.

  1. Michael Waller[00:06:20]Imagine if Hillsdale was doing this right.

Tucker [00:06:22] So, so, so but just for those of us who aren’t following it on a day to day basis, as you are, what are the mechanics of it? So there is a group of people who meet at Georgetown University Law School to think through how to seize power from Trump if he were elected in 2024. Is that what you’re saying?

  1. Michael Waller[00:06:39]That’s what we know now from when they themselves talked about it to NBC. Yes. And then they invited a reporter from the Atlantic to actually attend the event. And he was so disturbed by it. He said, this is a real problematic issue for people who believe in the Constitution. So even the Atlantic is thinking this is dangerous.

Tucker [00:06:57] Yeah. Well, yeah, that which says a lot since the Atlantic has obviously taken a pretty strong position against the Constitution. Yeah. Over, over a period of time.

  1. Michael Waller[00:07:06]You have these red diaper babies like Rosa Brooks, who, you know, comes from a household that was really on the Soviet side during the Cold War. [A polite way of saying she’s Jewish.] Yes. For sure. Who was then a, a senior Pentagon official selecting who the Obama generals would be writing about how we have to end civilian control or reconsider or do away with civilian control of the military, wargaming out military coups against a sitting president, first after a after a disputed election and now being being the host of an entire project to unseat a president who they agree would have been legally and clearly elected by a majority of the public and electoral votes. This is done now in the name of protecting the Constitution. So you have the Transition Integrity Project of 2020 and whatever its name is right now, being run under Rosa Brooks at Georgetown University.

Tucker [00:08:02] I think I’ll just say this is my opinion. I think Rosa Brooks is a violence fetishist who loves violence, obviously fantasizes about violence. So this should be I mean, obviously it’s a threat. Any anybody with power who fetishize violence domestically is scary, but there’s sort of no one to call about this, right?

  1. Michael Waller[00:08:24]No, because what they’re doing is they’re manipulating the legal system. So she, the somebody under her, Mary McCord is sort of the Zelig of all of this. She’s been characterized as this in the, you know, American Spectator. She’s everywhere you look. So she is a counsel on the Trump impeachment committee, one impeachment committee to the January 6th committee. All of these other things, she is involved in all of these and more, and she’s running a program to plan over 100 pieces of litigation. They don’t even know who the defendants will be because they’re not even in office.

Tucker [00:09:00] Right?

  1. Michael Waller[00:09:01]To sue to prevent the government from functioning if the election doesn’t go the way they want it to. And her husband, whose last name is Snook, he was one of these career anonymous bureaucrats working inside the Supreme Court. He’s outside now, but his job, as is she puts together the litigation with her team. He makes sure it’s not shopped to other jurisdictions where they won’t win. So they want to keep it in the Washington, DC circuit where they’re guaranteed a win.

Tucker [00:09:27] Right. So I would assume, that the Intel agencies are involved in this.

  1. Michael Waller[00:09:36]We know retired. And of course, you’re not always retired when you retire. And then you have former officials who still have security clearances. So even if they retired, they still have access to classified information and a window inside the machine.

Tucker [00:09:50] Can I ask you a I mean, one of the great frustrations. There were so many frustrations in the Trump administration, you know, like refusing to act in America’s interest or even your own interest. But one of them was. Why would you let Brennan, someone like Brennan, who’s a liar and a force for violence and anti Americanism. Why would you allow that guy to continue to hold a security clearance? Why do any of these people still have their clearances? Why can’t anyone do. Why can’t E1 do anything about that?

  1. Michael Waller[00:10:15]Well they can. A president can revoke somebody’s clearance or somebody acting in the president’s authority. It’s just it’s a it’s part of the big Intel industry in Washington where you leave government service. So you built your whole career at taxpayer expense, right? You have your security clearance. You go out then into the intelligence industrial complex to make a fortune as a contractor. And then you land university gigs and media gigs.

Tucker [00:10:38] And but you retain your clearance as you do this. Yeah. So that’s a massive advantage, correct?

  1. Michael Waller[00:10:44]It’s huge because now you’re already cleared, you’re already in the system. You’re already accepted. You’re already one of them.

Tucker [00:10:50] Right.

  1. Michael Waller[00:10:50]And so you’re part of a fraternity.

Tucker [00:10:52] So even though you’re not working for the government and therefore we’re not bound by it in the civil service rules, you can do whatever you want. You’re just a private contractor. There are very few limits on your behavior, but you still benefit from the knowledge of what the government is doing. You know a lot more about what the government is doing than the average taxpayer or voter. Correct. Right.

  1. Michael Waller[00:11:10]And that’s the reason some should keep their clearances, because we need that kind of institutional knowledge once people leave. Right. But we don’t need it on this massive industrial scale like they have in Washington, D.C..

Tucker [00:11:21] So again, why wouldn’t if you were the incoming Republican president, you just cancel the security clearances of people who are political actors? I mean, that’s not hard, is it?

  1. Michael Waller[00:11:33]No, because you’re abusing the it’s a privilege to have a clearance, right? It’s an economic order.

Tucker [00:11:37] I don’t have a clearance.

  1. Michael Waller[00:11:38]No, I don’t have a clearance.

Tucker [00:11:40] Yeah.

  1. Michael Waller[00:11:40]So, so so it’s a privilege to have it. And you’re doing it at the expense of the taxpayer. So you’re still, in effect, a public servant, even if you’re in the private sector. But this is just become one big club, one huge business, one big grift in many ways, but one big political war now, where you have a merger between hardcore political activists, violence fetishists and public enemy types and the people who are supposed to be inside our system to serve our country and protect our Constitution.

Tucker [00:12:10] So, how do you think this plays out? Let’s say Trump gets elected. What happens?

  1. Michael Waller[00:12:17]They’ll have 100 pieces of litigation ready to go out the door during the presidential transition. To hamstring him. To hamstring all his appointees. They have their allies inside the government to slow walk security clearances to make sure that his appointees who don’t have clearances cannot get clearances. He’ll be a one term president. So the bureaucracy knows. Just ride it out. Just drag things as slowly as you can and make things as hard as you can. And then and then shop for the, the right judicial venues to make sure that you get a court circuit that will rule favorably in your case. So just think, when you’re a Washington insider at Georgetown Law School and your husband was on the Supreme Court staff, you’re networked across the Justice Department, your network, among the judges, you know everyone. They’re your friends, right? They’re your social circles. Of course they’re going to help you.

Tucker [00:13:10] It sounds like the swamp wasn’t trained. Not at all. Not at all. Has it gotten stronger?

  1. Michael Waller[00:13:16]Yeah, because. Because President Trump came in saying he would drain it. He didn’t have any idea what he was up against. He didn’t have a team. Yeah. He didn’t have a strategy. He didn’t have blueprints. He just went ahead and thought he could do it. And then look what happened. So the swamp is stronger than ever.

Tucker [00:13:32] What is the opposing side, the Republican side, the campaign, the super PAC, the RNC, the, you know, the institutions of resistance to the Biden administration. What are they doing to prepare for this onslaught of lawsuits if and when Trump wins?

  1. Michael Waller[00:13:47]I have no idea.

Tucker [00:13:49] What do you mean you have no idea?

  1. Michael Waller[00:13:50]I am not aware of anything that’s being done at present. At all. At all? On the outside. Yeah. So Heritage Foundation has action plans. America First Policy Institute has action plans. Some other groups have action plans, or they’re putting them together now. But there’s nothing for the campaign or the party at all. No, no, the RNC is useless. They’re no good.

Tucker [00:14:12] What? But I thought, Ronna McDaniel I mean, I know she was flying private. What was she doing with her time?

  1. Michael Waller[00:14:17]I don’t know, but she had a big, you know, florist bill and limousine bill. I don’t really know what she was doing to organize, to attack against the these corrupt, entrenched interests. No idea.

Tucker [00:14:31] What do retired military officers. I think a lot of people on the right. I’ll speak for myself, you know, always respected the military. And it’s no longer true in my case, for sure, because you sort of wake up and you realize a lot of the flag officers and the people in charge of the Pentagon are political actors, you know, how did that happen and how did we not notice it happening? I mean.

  1. Michael Waller[00:14:53]Like people who don’t take care of their health.

Tucker [00:14:55] Yeah.

  1. Michael Waller[00:14:56]They even know that something’s happening, but they don’t do anything about it until it’s too late. And then they wonder why they need amputations or chemo or whatever. That’s the state we’re in as a country right now. So if you look at the military, it’s a self-selecting elite. So senior officers select their underlings for promotion. Yes. And they unselect other ones to not be promoted. And then if you’re if you’re not promoted after a certain number of years as an officer, you have to leave the military. Yes. So you have the Obama generals in. And this is where when people say Donald Trump’s going to politicize the military and stage a coup, he never tried to politicize the military, right? It was Alabama.

Tucker [00:15:34] He believed in the military.

  1. Michael Waller[00:15:35]As an institution, that they would do the right thing.

Tucker [00:15:38] Right.

  1. Michael Waller[00:15:38]Thinking. Yeah, okay. They were appointed under Obama, but they’re not, quote, Obama generals. Well, so many of them were. He didn’t understand that people around him didn’t understand it. Or even if they did, it can’t be true, right? These guys look at the stars on their uniforms, look at their ribbons on their chests. They’re not politicians, but they are. They call themselves, you know, grade scale. It’s beyond my my, my pay grade rather. Right. So what’s your pay grade? Not what’s your rank? What have you done? It’s. What have you done to get ahead to Brown Nose your way up to the top.

Tucker [00:16:14] So of, you know, the the senior generals in among the branches of the armed services. What percentage do you think might actually sign on to the idea that we need to wrest control from Trump? If he becomes president, we need to stage a military coup.

  1. Michael Waller[00:16:31]It’s hard to say because you just need a few, because then by law, everyone else must follow. Unless it’s an unjust order, but then you get stuck in a legal limbo. If you’re arguing that I’m not going to follow an unjust or an illegal order. But if the chairman of the Joint Chiefs or all of the Joint Chiefs order something, you’re bound to follow orders. And this is where we are today. We have a just following orders mentality in our military, like we do in the CIA, like we do in the FBI.

Tucker [00:17:00] But the military didn’t follow Trump’s orders. Of course. They defied him at every turn. He didn’t do anything about it. Right. Totally passive and weak. But, you know, they said we’re not going to protect the southern border, for example. Period. Okay. But they. But do you think it’s possible that they actually would move on the white House?

  1. Michael Waller[00:17:20]It’s really hard to say. I mean, before I would have thought, this is crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff. Even though I know the military well, I’ve worked as a civilian contractor with the military for a long time. Yes, I know the intelligence community and the FBI pretty well, and I would have thought a few years ago, this is just crazy talk, but it’s not.

Tucker [00:17:40] It’s not crazy talk. So it sounds like there are a lot of changes to our, at the state level, to our voting systems. Maine, for example, just voted to consolidate its two congressional districts and award its electoral votes on the basis of the national popular vote. So these are these are big, consequential changes that no one’s paying much attention to, but they bring us a lot closer to the possibility of a tie of a really, really messy election where it’s going to be extremely hard for Trump to just win outright. If that happens, if we get to, you know, basically tied or within two electoral votes in the popular, popular votes really closely, we have a 2000 replay. Trump v Gore, Bush v or rather, what role does the Election integrity project play in that?

  1. Michael Waller[00:18:34]They have the lawyers.

Tucker [00:18:35] Yeah, the law professors.

  1. Michael Waller[00:18:37]The networks of federal prosecutors, Justice Department attorneys, federal judges as their circle of friends. Yes. So they will make sure there’s integrity to this transition. They’ll make sure the votes are counted, right. They’ll make sure the processes are managed right, and then they will have a huge say. In. Who is our next president?

Tucker [00:19:02] Is it a little weird? Just the composition of the 2020 team? She had Bill Kristol, you had David Frum, and you had Max boot.

  1. Michael Waller[00:19:12]Soviet import Max boot.

Tucker [00:19:14] And Canadian import David Frum. But all three of them, you know, no interest in United States, have contempt for United States, but all three of them became famous pushing more, you know, killing. So their foreign policy people, their neocons. What would they but their their business is promoting violence. And Rosa Brooks, I think is like some sort of like part time para cop or something carrying a gun around like a tough guy. These are all people whose day job and their obsession revolves around hurting other people physically. Kind of weird that they all wound up in the same in the same project. Like that suggests that their goal is hurting people physically. Yeah.

  1. Michael Waller[00:19:57]And of course it’s bipartisan. So they can call themselves a bipartisan project. Yeah. And then Georgetown keeps its 501 C3 status because it’s doing it all bipartisan. It’s not out to get a Republican president because it’s a bipartisan, bipartisan effort with Max boot and Bill Kristol and your cast in one of their exercises also.

Tucker [00:20:16] I’m cast one of.

  1. Michael Waller[00:20:17]You, according to The Atlantic, you were you were up there on the border raising militias to fight illegal aliens, to, cause state national guards to go to war with one another, essentially in this recent exercise.

Tucker [00:20:30] And what and I assume I go to jail for that or I’m killed or something.

  1. Michael Waller[00:20:33]I don’t know what they decided to do with you.

Tucker [00:20:35] It’s just not a bad idea, by the way. But interesting. So are you worried about what’s going to happen in November? Yeah.

  1. Michael Waller[00:20:46]Because again, you have the Democrat Party apparatus. They’re really well mobilized for this. They have great legal teams for this. Mean. Donald Trump is on trial now because of this. They have plans to make sure that the government will not function under under their transition integrity plan. So it’s going to be a terrible mess. And then when you have the same individuals like Mary McCord who runs the the this program out of Georgetown University Law Center. She’s on the UN with a Homeland Security connected program on extremism to decide who the extremists are.

Tucker [00:21:30] I don’t want to give people the impression that there’s no hope at all, but it does feel like it’s the majority of the population in the country against its power centers once again. And the power centers are even more powerful.

  1. Michael Waller[00:21:42]We have a good opportunity right now because we have a lot better lay of the land back in 2020. Not much attention was paid to the Transition Integrity Project. It operated semi secretly. Now it’s come out of the closet and we know who more of the characters are. We’ve had four years to look at who these actors are and how they operate. We know a lot more about their game plan. They’ve gotten a lot of, they’ve gotten careless in a lot of areas. So we so if you do have an organized team and I and, you know, President Trump, now that he knows what he’s up against, he can focus on it more. And then other supporters of him. Some of them have been victims of this personally. They can focus on it more. So I think between now and transition time we’re going to be a lot wiser. Last time they were just blindsided. So that’s that’s one part. Second part is there are teams out there who have already writing action plans. And two of the last chapters in Big Intel show action plans. What do you do with the FBI? What do you do with the CIA? What can a president do with executive orders? And then what executive orders can be made into law so they can’t easily be reversed? Trump didn’t have that the first time around.

Tucker [00:22:52] Well, that’s good news.

  1. Michael Waller[00:22:53]Yeah, it is good news. But then we also have something, at our local levels, especially in parts of the country where the county sheriffs are very strong. Yes, because the sheriff’s in the last line of defense, constitutionally between the central government and the local people, local jurisdictions. And since sheriffs are democratically elected from the local level, they can determine whether or not to help federal authorities if the feds come into an area and abuse their power. They depend on the sheriffs and the local cops. The sheriffs can put a stop to that. So it matters for us to be empowering our sheriffs in states where the sheriffs are strong, and then getting rid of sheriffs. So we’re going to be weak about it.

Tucker [00:23:33] It. So I want to ask you about the thesis of your book, Big Intel How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War heroes to deep state Villains. Since you’ve worked in and around this world, a lot of your life, summarize force, if you would, how that happened, how do you think that happened?

  1. Michael Waller[00:23:51]It began. And this is something that J. Edgar Hoover warned about back when he was a 25 year old State Department or Justice Department lawyer. His job was to identify and round up foreign communists, anarchists, radical socialists and deport them back to Russia. That was a job, and this was at a time of anarchist terrorist violence, where they tried to assassinate the attorney general of the United States and so forth. So you’d had a president, McKinley previously assassinated.

Tucker [00:24:22] Killed the mayor of Chicago and killed a lot.

  1. Michael Waller[00:24:24]Of people. Yeah. So this was all going on. So he was the number one person in the Justice Department to fight against this? Marxism and anarchism. Yeah, but not just the violent stuff, but the subversive parts. By infiltrating our institutions, our schools, our universities, our news media, Hollywood, legal professions, churches, you name it. He was warning his entire career. That’s why he was so reviled by the left. He was warning about this the whole time. So the FBI, as he created it, was not there simply to enforce federal laws and fight spies, but in Hoover’s idea to defend the American way of life. I gave that up a long time ago. Yeah. So the penetrations of our institutions that he warned about became fact because he saw them happening, but it wasn’t stopped. We just the US kept bringing them in from mainly from Europe, importing foreign communists from Europe who were being so-called, you know, victims or real and imagined victims of different types of totalitarian, whether they were escaping from Stalin because they didn’t like his cult of personality, or they were escaping from Hitler, who was going to wipe them out anyway. We brought them in here, but we didn’t require them to become real Americans. Instead, they were set up at Columbia University to teach the teachers to bring these Soviet created institutions, import them completely to American universities, to teach the teachers and to discipline the radicals. And then you have people like Angela Davis and other hardcore radicals who were taught and mentored by them. These guys gave the intellectual basis to New Left radicalism in the 60s, to bring us what we now call critical theory, critical race theory. This is where D comes from. So it all comes from these former Soviet operatives from a century ago.

Tucker [00:26:24] So. But how does you know the CIA abroad, FBI domestically were designed and, you know, consume enormous budgets every year in order to defend us from that stuff. How did they become captured by it?

  1. Michael Waller[00:26:38]It was first the precursor to the CIA. So it was during World War II process with the Office of Strategic Services and Bill Donovan, who was a wonderful guy. His job was to fight the Nazis and their allies.

Tucker [00:26:50] Yeah.

  1. Michael Waller[00:26:51]But he needed experts who spoke the languages and those occupied parts of Europe and elsewhere, who had motivations, who had academic expertise and linguistic expertise. And he brought in a whole lot of communists into the this, you know, German Communist Party members when a lot of others and when they came in their job was to settle World War two, not on American terms, but on Stalin’s term.

Tucker [00:27:14] Which they did.

  1. Michael Waller[00:27:15]Which they did. So when, you know, with the Yalta Conference, with Roosevelt, that was all run by Stalin agents or Stalin supporters, and the anti-communist liberals like George Kennan were just kept out completely. And Stalin got his way on practically.

Tucker [00:27:30] Oh, I notice. Yeah, we we joined the fight against the Nazis because they invaded Poland and then handed Poland to the Soviets. Oh. What?

  1. Michael Waller[00:27:39]Yeah. And this is the logic coming out of.

Tucker [00:27:41] Like, you.

  1. Michael Waller[00:27:42]Had even the CIA, to this day says one of its, one of its original intellectuals from the U.S. was Herbert Marcuse.

Tucker [00:27:50] Yeah.

  1. Michael Waller[00:27:50]And Marcuse was a Stalinist who then broke with Stalin, but he still became a communist. And America imported him to become a professor in the United States to teach generations of college students, including law students, including diplomats, including community organizers. He built the theory for a lot of this stuff, and we’re seeing it now with DEA, and that’s being imposed on has been imposed on the whole intelligence community and the FBI, just like we see at every place else.

Tucker [00:28:18] But I think for most of us who weren’t paying super close attention, even though I’ve been around it a lot, just living in Washington, knowing people who work there, I don’t think most people really understood that the Intel agencies play in domestic elections. They’re subverting elections around the world. They’re stopping democracy to save democracy in other countries, which is we probably should have paid more attention to that. But I don’t think most people I know ever imagined the CIA would have the brass to try to influence an American presidential election, or the FBI would ever do that.

  1. Michael Waller[00:28:49]It’s a crime.

Tucker [00:28:50] Of course it’s a crime.

  1. Michael Waller[00:28:51]That means a federal felony to do what they’re doing, and they’re doing it all the time. Every time they leak classified information to the press, someone in the apparatus is committing a felony. It’s almost never investigated.

Tucker [00:29:03] What’s so interesting, though, is I had a long conversation with the CIA director about this, under Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, and he’s outraged that, you know, the people be telling the truth about the CIA is doing and actually threaten me over it. Through his lawyer. And I remember saying, but wait a second. First of all, you’re the one committing the crime a be you leak against your domestic political opponents all the time. And I thought that was a fair point, actually. And I’ve said it on television. And yet Mike Pompeo was treated like a non criminal by everyone I know. Like, how does this. No one seems to care. I guess that’s the point I’m making.

  1. Michael Waller[00:29:40]Yeah. It’s and people are afraid of it. They’re afraid to touch it. Why I’ve been writing this book. They’re saying have you are are they going to get you. They really think the FBI is going to somehow, you know, get me in a car accident or, you know, make me drink polonium tea or something.

Tucker [00:29:52] But does that happen?

  1. Michael Waller[00:29:55]Who knows?

Tucker [00:29:56] What do you think?

  1. Michael Waller[00:29:58]I honestly don’t know what to think anymore. I used to think it was crazy talk.

Tucker [00:30:02] Yeah. Me too.

  1. Michael Waller[00:30:04]But if you think you know, why does. Why does the whole intelligence community still have the Kennedy assassination files classified? They’ve declassified almost all, but there’s still over 1000 pages that are not declassified. Why, after all this time, has it not been fully declassified? I don’t know. I’m not saying the CIA was behind it. I don’t think that you can get a marine who becomes a communist, who who defected to the Soviet Union, who marries a Soviet wife and is allowed to shoot at a Soviet rifle range to come back to agitate for Fidel Castro. I don’t think the CIA was ever clever enough to pull off something like that. Right? And Kennedy really gave the CIA a lot of free rein. Both Kennedy brothers did. But. But why? Why is the intelligence apparatus still keeping those secrets? There’s no reason to protect.

Tucker [00:30:50] So it’s only been 61 years. Yeah. Every source is dead. Yeah. Well, of course. But do you think so? I’ll just speak for myself. I didn’t realize that this was happening until 2016. You’re saying that these agencies were corrupted ideologically in the 1940s? So do you believe that between. Let’s just say CIA was founded in 47 ish 46? Something like that, I think. Right. Do you think between then in 2006. They were trying to influence domestic politics. Sure.

  1. Michael Waller[00:31:27]They were doing it originally in the name of fighting the Soviets and fighting communism by leaking to the media and by co-opting American reporters. But when you’re doing that, you’re influencing how Americans think, you’re influencing public opinion.

Tucker [00:31:40] And therefore influencing election outcomes.

  1. Michael Waller[00:31:43]Exactly right. But it wasn’t make it like this. I mean, FBI Director Hoover gathered intelligence for four political opponents of whatever president wanted him to do, Democrat or Republican. That was Roosevelt, FDR, and the Kennedys who really wanted him to work for them against political opponents and Lyndon Johnson. To a lesser degree, Nixon. But, you know, FBI got the best of Nixon after Hoover’s death.

Tucker [00:32:08] Yeah, I noticed.

  1. Michael Waller[00:32:08]So, so but the FBI wasn’t infiltrated by this cultural Marxism that has penetrated everyplace else because Hoover had defended against that infiltration. FBI was a hard target after really after in the Clinton administration when attitudes began to change. That’s when you saw the just cultural byproducts of American education and American popular culture and critical law theory being taught now in almost all American universities. So this is Herbert Marcuse and the communist interpretation of using the law as a weapon at manipulating the Constitution as a weapon for a different end. This all started happening now, when these lawyers start populating the Justice Department in large numbers, and then the rest of the bureaucracy by the 90s. But they didn’t have a critical mass to get together, because our intelligence community was divided up into many different agencies, so it could never abuse its power effectively until after nine over 11, when President George W Bush centralized everything and created an FBI with a super management of 60 new management positions at the top, and an office of the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate what we’re now 18 different intelligence agencies. So he set up a vertically powerful centralized apparatus. Notice that a revolutionary like Obama could come in and politicize.

Tucker [00:33:33] So I would you know, I was there for all that in Washington covering this stuff. I knew the people and they used 911, of course, to achieve this. And they told us in the weeks and months after 911 that the main problem, the the error that allowed nine over 11 to happen was lack of communication between different federal agencies. CIA is not talking to FBI. They’re siloed. And that’s how nine over 11 happened. That, in retrospect, seems like one of countless lies they’ve told. But also it seems like a calculated lie in order to increase their power over American society.

  1. Michael Waller[00:34:10]Yeah, it was a combination of lies and distortions and then certain truths. Well, the FBI had, of course, the CIA had information, but they didn’t share it, so they couldn’t connect all the dots.

Tucker [00:34:20] I mean, I think that’s proven.

  1. Michael Waller[00:34:22]So so you take, let’s say that the good people who are or at least were in there, they were trying to do their jobs, but they couldn’t do their jobs and they weren’t allowed to talk to people in other. Right. There was no mechanism. Then you get the cynics in there who are the power grabbers? You centralized the FBI now with 60 new management positions. That means you’re incentivizing the brown nose’s in the system to fight their way to the top. Right. It didn’t happen that way before.

Tucker [00:34:49] So so you’re saying and this is what I think people who know a lot about the system conclude after a while. The structure matters. The nature of the bureaucracy drives the policy in the end. Yeah. Yeah.

  1. Michael Waller[00:35:03]And now you have an incentive system where if you don’t subscribe to all the tenets of diversity, equity and inclusion and whatever other things they’re adding on to this, you don’t have to just go along with it to be a good professional or a decent colleague. You have to actively live it. And if you don’t, that’s a mark against you in your promotion.

Tucker [00:35:24] Right? So you got to buy the trans thing 100% or you’re just not going to get a raise.

  1. Michael Waller[00:35:29]Yeah. And not just buy it. You have to be what they call an advocate now.

Tucker [00:35:32] An ally.

  1. Michael Waller[00:35:33]Yeah. Ally. You know advocate. Ally. There you go. You got it. Yeah. And, and if you’re not an ally, that’s a count against you. But what if you have moral qualms about it? Of course. Because that’s what the whole thing. That’s what made the FBI one of the better of the American federal institutions, was that it tried to recruit people of character. It’s not. It gave up on that a long time ago.

Tucker [00:35:54] Well, right. It’s recruiting people with no character. So what about Chris Wray? What is that? You look at Chris Wray, and he doesn’t have a background that suggests evil, but he’s obviously doing evil. It’s like how.

  1. Michael Waller[00:36:05]He he’s just your typical weaselly Washington attorney who makes a lot of money through the Washington game. Yeah, it’s all ultimately at taxpayer expense, even if the client isn’t necessarily the taxpayer. Then he gets a fancy government position. He parlays that into a bigger interest in his law firm, and now he’s got added prestige. And then boom, he becomes a new sort of nonpolitical. Chris Christie recommended FBI Director.

Tucker [00:36:30] Chris Christie recommended him. Yeah. But you look at Chris Wray and you think. You know. How can he allow this?

  1. Michael Waller[00:36:39]He’s just weak. When you have the whole nerve center taken over by militant crazies. Yeah, the management system. And then you have one very loud mouth person with a few advocates inside the apparatus to say, we need now a senior leader for diversity, equity and inclusion. And this must be incorporated in every single aspect of FBI life.

Tucker [00:36:59] Right.

  1. Michael Waller[00:37:01]He goes along with all of this stuff.

Tucker [00:37:03] And it’s a short hop or maybe an inevitable hop from there to, hey, let’s control the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. Yeah.

  1. Michael Waller[00:37:11]Because their biggest case in FBI history is rounding up people who are being charged with nothing more than misdemeanors. Forget the felons being charged. Right on misdemeanor counts. You don’t. That’s not what the FBI was for, to hunt down people for misdemeanors. But you’re now raiding people’s homes for what, you know, unauthorized assembly and, you know, unlawful parading and trespassing, and you’re running Swat teams against them, and you’re wrecking their families, and you’re wrecking their reputations and their lives over Mr. Mike. Misdemeanors. This is the FBI’s biggest case, and it’s January 6th in its entire history. So you have agents, and you had some of them here with you who have who have been pulled off, you know, child sex trafficking cases and counterintelligence cases going after foreign spies. Know now to round up misdemeanor people.

Tucker [00:38:01] Yeah, 65 year old people with diabetes who live in trailer parks who like Donald Trump. Yeah. Yeah. The weakest, most vulnerable people in our society.

  1. Michael Waller[00:38:09]Yeah. And it’s to set an example and to make people afraid, to make people feel isolated and then depressed and helpless.

Tucker [00:38:17] But if if January 6th is going to be your biggest case, why would you ignore the pipe attempted pipe bombings on Capitol Hill that day? What is that?

  1. Michael Waller[00:38:28]I don’t know, they just had a FBI just put out a statement the other day about the Unabomber being busted 29 years ago. So they’re bragging about one single case from a generation ago, and they can’t even find someone who was caught on camera supposedly putting, you know, pipe bombs at the RNC.

Tucker [00:38:45] And it seems pretty clear that was the intelligence’s doing that. Yeah. Do you think that’s possible?

  1. Michael Waller[00:38:51]I would have thought it was crazy. I was I was at the Capitol that day. I was on the Senate side. So I live on Capitol Hill. And I thought, well, I’m just going to walk over. And I was kind of bummed because, you know, our country is going to change forever now. And we thought, well, let’s just go one last time and see real Americans, you know, and yeah, so we just went because I’d been to tons of these different protests. And I know the Capitol Police really well because they’re my neighbors. Yes. And we were three blocks behind the leaders of the group because we just happened to walk into it on, on Constitution Avenue. And I heard something’s wrong. The hurricane fence is gone. There are no canine units for the Capitol Police. There’s no Capitol Police visibility at all. And just follow the crowd right up to the Capitol. And it was a pro-police crowd, and there was no trouble until it was either the Capitol Police or the DC Metro police who started firing tear gas and flashbangs into the crowd, you know, 50, 60, 80ft away from where there was trouble. And we didn’t know there was trouble up in the front.

Tucker [00:39:49] What do you think that was? Why? Why was there no, on the day of a planned protest, that every law enforcement and Intel agency in the United States had conference calls about for weeks? Why was it no hurricane fencing or K-9 units?

  1. Michael Waller[00:40:04]I can’t speak about the K-9 units, but the hurricane fencing, it turns out, was taken down. But there was no police presence at all. There was no manpower. In fact, on the way to to the to the march. I walked past Capitol Police headquarters, had a chat with a Capitol policeman who was putting on his shin guards. Any other Billy club and I was admiring is Billy Club because it was an old school kind and, they were really relaxed. Even the Capitol Police were relaxed. They were not prepared.

Tucker [00:40:31] Yeah. They had no idea. No.

  1. Michael Waller[00:40:34]Now, some of the Capitol Police, I think, did have an idea. Yeah. Yogananda Pittman, who was in charge of intelligence for the Capitol Police. But the Capitol Police doesn’t have an intelligence unit. They get their stuff from the FBI and the Secret Service and Homeland Security. So she got what was being, supplied by the federal executive branch agencies. But she didn’t tell her, chief.

Tucker [00:40:56] No, no, I’ve talked to him at a great length. And then she was rewarded by Nancy Pelosi with a very high paying job, apparently. And the University of California system. Yeah. So, yes. So if you were just to end with the big picture question, if you were to guess on the basis of deep knowledge. Is this system ever reformed? It doesn’t seem like you can have a democracy in a country where the big decisions are made by unelected people whose budgets you don’t know and who operate in secrecy.

  1. Michael Waller[00:41:27]Right. And with with even a House of Representatives that will vote for continuing resolutions to continue to pump cash into this machine.

Tucker [00:41:36] Well, they’re because they’re afraid of the machine. Yeah. You know, if you’re committee chairman, if you’re Mike Rogers, maybe you’ve got some things to hide. You’re afraid of them. I mean, I witnessed it personally.

  1. Michael Waller[00:41:46]Yeah. Oh, I have to. I’m not going to mess with the FBI, the CIA and congressman tell you that. Of course. Although, you know, now you’ve got Congressman Pete Sessions. Yes. He’s chairman of a subcommittee that has jurisdiction over what’s going on at Georgetown University, because Georgetown University Law School is they get a ton of federal money, of course, Mary Records program or her law school here gets not only federal money, but Chinese money. They just got a $30 million grant last year from a Taiwanese businessman who made his fortune as a financier of the Chinese Communist Party on the mainland. Yeah. So he puts $30 million into this, Georgetown’s biggest gift in its history since it was founded in the 1700s. So you have all this happening. So, anyway, Congressman Sessions is investigating this. He had a very fast response to that Atlantic article and to the other, articles, American Spectator, RedState coming out about Mary McCord and what she’s doing, and the federal, the federally paid people or groups that are part of this plan to actively discuss how to stage a coup against our constitutional government. And beyond that, you have retired generals. They’re not civilians. They’re subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And they’re here as coconspirators in these gaming events about overthrowing our government. Yes, this is deep stuff. Sonny sessions is leading the charge on that.

Tucker [00:43:13] And do you think he’s got a shot of making meaningful reform?

  1. Michael Waller[00:43:18]That remains to be seen in terms of exposing things. Yes, in terms of making any meaningful reform. You need a president to do it. Armed with executive orders, like when Obama came in, he had an army of executive people writing his executive orders during his transition, so that his first days and weeks as president, he was fundamentally transforming the government by fiat.

Tucker [00:43:38] Yeah.

  1. Michael Waller[00:43:39]Trump didn’t do that. Biden has done it. And then it withdrew Trump’s executive orders and then imposed more of its own, even on the first day. A lot of the censorship, of course, and, and, weaponization of intelligence was first order of business stuff in Biden’s first hours is in office. And it came. As a straight continuum from the Obama team beforehand. So, you know, it’s all the same people. And he appointed a lot of the same people. So we know this in public. Now you have that type of apparatus working with Georgetown University Law Center to overthrow all this. So so does can Congress change it? No, not with a one vote majority in the House right now. And Chuck Schumer running the Senate. Schumer is fine with this. And in some ways, Schumer seems to agree with this. Remember what he warned Trump in 1917 when he 1970 2017, when he was talking with Rachel Maddow? He said, if Trump messes with the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday, from coming to come after you. And he wasn’t just talking about a Republican president, he was talking about any elected officials.

Tucker [00:44:47] So, I mean, maybe everyone should stop pretending it’s a democracy. Maybe everyone you know who uses that term unironically should have it burn on his lips like this. That’s not a democracy.

  1. Michael Waller[00:44:57]Or even a constitutional republic, right? You can’t have it this way. So you have. So, I mean, Congress is funding things that they know are unconstitutional. The Justice Department is enforcing things that its lawyers know are unconstitutional. And now you have Mary McCord in her group at Georgetown Law. Writing the whole orchestra for the transition after November of this year. To rip the constitution to shreds.

Tucker [00:45:26] Well, on that happy note, J. Michael Waller, big Intel how the CIA and FBI went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains. Thank you very much.

Michael Waller[00:45:34]Great to be with you. And thanks for your interest in the book. There’s a familiar name on the cover. Thank you.—