(Mises Institute) Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson sat down for a three-hour-plus discussion on the Joe Rogan Show last week, covering everything from UFOs, to religion and artificial intelligence. But perhaps the most important topic they covered was the insidious and dangerous role played by the US regime’s intelligence agencies in America.
Specifically, Carlson suggested the CIA continues to lobby for keeping the JFK files secret, possibly because the CIA had a role in the assassination. Tucker also brought up how the FBI’s second-in-command was responsible for taking down Richard Nixon. Carlson described how intelligence agencies hold immense power within Congress because members of Congress—who are generally disreputable people with many secrets—are terrified of being blackmailed. After all, in a post-Patriot Act world of nearly unrestrained spying by the US regime, there is no privacy in America.
I’ll let you, dear readers, listen to the full interview and make up your mind for yourselves as to the details of the discussion.
What I want to highlight here, however, is how remarkable it is that two major media figures—Rogan and Carlson—are announcing to their millions of listeners and readers that organizations like the CIA and the FBI are despicable agencies committed to undermining the legal and constitutional institutions of the United States.
This is long overdue.
Deep-state agencies like the CIA and the FBI have for far too long been considered reputable organizations just trying to “keep us safe” or somehow defend the United States from alleged foreign threats. Conservatives have long been among the worst offenders. Libertarians know this well, and have observed for decades the breed of “small-government” conservatives who one minute claim “the government can’t do anything right” and then the next minute simp for “heroic” CIA and FBI agents. People such as these have long checked their critical thinking skills at the door as soon as the discussion turns to the regime’s spy agencies—or the Pentagon, for that matter. This is not to say that Leftists are guiltless on this. While historically it was the Left that actually made some efforts to expose intelligence agencies and their crimes in the 1970s, that is now ancient history. The Left in 2024 has rarely met a regime spook it didn’t like. This was made explicit last month when Adam Westbrook and Lindsey Crouse declared in The New York Times that “the Deep State is actually kind of awesome.”
The job of opposing these contemptible enemies of freedom at America’s intelligence agencies—especially the FBI and CIA and NSA—falls to the minority of Americans who actually care about law and human rights enough to seek true restraints on regime power. Those of us in this minority must never miss an opportunity to disparage, doubt, question, and generally express loathing for these organizations and for every single agent and employee at these agencies who collects a taxpayer-funded salary.
A Danger for Many Decades
Since at least the early 1960s, many have understood that the post-war intelligence agencies have posed an especially dangerous threat to the people of the United States. For example, exactly one month after Kennedy’s assassination—surely, just a coincidence!—former president Harry Truman expressed alarm about the CIA’s meddling in domestic affairs. He wrote in The Washington Post: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. …I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”
Then as now, however, The Washington Post was an arm of the deep state and the editor buried Truman’s op-ed on Page A11. The CIA was outraged enough by the column, however, that CIA director Allen Dulles lied and claimed that Truman had been “quite astounded“ when he saw his own article and that the whole thing was really the work of a Truman aide.
This bizarre attempt by CIA operative to “retract” Truman’s article was nonetheless contradicted by Truman himself who reiterated in a 1964 letter that Truman had only intended the CIA to be an informational service for the president, and that “[I]t was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.” Truman would later tell an interviewer that “[I]f I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have [created the CIA.]”1
Of course, Truman may have known about many of the CIA’s “strange activities” by the late 1950s, such as MKULTRA, and related “mind control” experiments with LSD and other drugs. The CIA was known to drug the agency’s victims against their will, such as seven black inmates in Kentucky who were were fed “’double, triple and quadruple’ doses of LSD for 77 straight days.” One might also mention the very suspicious case of Frank Olson, a bioweapons expert who was given LSD by CIA agents without his knowledge. Olson later “fell” to his death from a hotel window in 1953. The agency lied about drugging Olson for 22 years.
The CIA faced some scrutiny in the wake of the Vietnam war as the Left began to rein in the deep state which had spent years attempting to destroy American opponents of the war through a variety of dirty tricks. Yet, the agency had hardly been “reformed” by the time the US’s “war on terror” was launched in late 2001. The CIA returned to its illegal medical torture—assuming it had ever stopped—with new medical experiments on regime prisoners. Documents uncovered by the ACLU have shown that CIA doctors are still used to provide a veneer of scientific legitimacy to CIA torture programs. In the age of vaccine passports, this alliance between doctors and the CIA should alarm any defender of human rights.
In spite of all this, the CIA continues to fail spectacularly at its original mission of collecting useful information. The CIA failed to see the Iranian Revolution coming. The CIA was clueless about Soviet Missiles shipped to Cuba in 1962. The CIA believed the Soviet Union was an economic powerhouse in the 1980s. And, of course, the CIA let 9/11 happen right under its nose.
Given all this, even conservative stalwarts have seen the light on the CIA in recent years. The late Angelo Codevilla, for example, penned a 2020 article calling for “breaking up” the CIA. The CIA, Codevilla notes, is now so “ideologically partisan,” so “obsolete,” and its record of failure so undeniable, that the agency is now “inherently dangerous and low-value.”
End the FBI
The CIA isn’t alone in its war on American freedom and decency, however. The FBI is almost equally dangerous, which is why Codevilla also calls for the FBI to be “restricted to law enforcement.”
