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Re-launching the Collective Evolution podcast was one of my favorite things to do this year.
I re-launched for a few reasons. I wanted to talk about important ideas with other people, it gets boring talking to a camera lens by myself. I also happen to feel that long form conversation tends to be the most useful form of dialogue – especially when it comes to controversial topics.
The other big reason I re-launched the CE podcast was because I wanted to have a place where I could begin with a thesis of sorts. When people ask me “what do you do exactly?” I absolutely cannot say “I’m a journalist.”
I just don’t see myself that way, nor is that what I do. I’m a big picture thinker and am inspired by the idea of contributing to a mass shift in consciousness in our world. I believe we can live in a society that truly thrives, and often see an ecology of ideas that form a ‘guide’ on how we might get there.
In re-launching the podcast, I wanted to discuss some of these ideas, and put them out in a bitesize format that gives people the opportunity to connect with them easily.
Thus far, the re-launch is going well.
So without further adieu, here are the episodes people listened to most in 2022. The rest of the list was tightly behind these but these few edged them out. Of, I have a number of great guests lined up for 2023 so stay tuned!
In this introductory episode of the Collective Evolution podcast Joe brings together the thesis that began CE and the wisdom of experience gained over 15 years of running CE. This episode is meant to layout the foundational themes that will be the backbone of future episodes, interviews and conversations on the show. Things like the meaning crisis (shift in consciousness), sensemaking, censorship, consciousness, well-being, embodiment, future technologies, human potential and more.
In this episode we’ll explore what sensemaking, the conversation of fake news, the rise of censorship and perhaps some ideas on how we can improve this important skill both individually and collectively.
One of the simplest ways to think about the meaning crisis is to ask whether humanity is going through a moment where our experience of life feels increasingly less relevant and meaningful. Do we feel withdrawn from our world? A sense of disconnection from it and others? Perhaps this is at the root of our mental health crisis’ as John Vervaeke suggests. Perhaps there are other biological factors like nervous system dysregulation at play here as well. Regardless, are we experiencing a collective felt sense of meaninglessness?
This is playing out in everything from our relationships to our societal structures. Things are up for re-questioning and re-examination, and while this can be an uncomfortable and awkward place, it can also be a great opportunity.
One of our senior journalists, Arjun Walia, and I chatted about using discernment with Elon Musk, Twitter, and his Neuralink project. We also discussed The Great Reset and how to discern the difference between the solutions they present and solutions coming from others trying to make society better. This is important because things sound remarkably similar at times.
Of course, we also dove into a couple big topics around COVID as well.
I sat down with nervous system and trauma expert Irene Lyon to talk about wellness, nervous system health, ayahuasca and perhaps the missing link to wellness.
This was round 3 for Irene and I, and it was a good one!
(Natural News) There are many addictive substances on planet earth, and most consumers never meant to become so hooked that they can’t find a way to quit, or even cut back. As with most addictive substances, the more often the frequency of use, and the more potent the substance, the more dopamine is released in the brain, but over time, this fuels serious mental and physical health issues.
When trying to cut back or quit addictive, dopamine-heightening substances, a person’s dopamine levels are quite low, waiting for the addictive ‘crutch’ to assist, and that’s when stress, depression, and anxiety drag most people right back into their bad habits.
Dopamine correlation linked to depression, anxiety, and multiple mood disorders
Dopamine is a chemical released in the brain that helps nerve cells send messages that are important for both the brain and body. This ‘feel good’ hormone is regulated by the body, but addictive substances disrupt normal production, causing dysfunction of neurotransmitters, and can create a roller-coaster effect of thrilling highs but intolerable lows.
According to scientific research, dopamine plays a vital role in anxiety modulation in different parts of the brain. Low levels can make someone feel less motivated, less excited about things, and can lead to mental illnesses, including depression and psychosis. As part of the brain’s reward system, dopamine helps us feel pleasure, and activities we already enjoy (like sex, roller coasters, special foods) get boosted with a “dopamine rush,” sometimes triggered by even just thinking about them.
Dopamine plays a role in many functions we often take for granted, including learning, attention, mood, movement, sleep, libido, and more. It’s produced by a two-step process where the amino acid tyrosine is converted into another amino acid called L-dopa, and then the L-dopa is converted into dopamine by enzymes.
How many dopamine “crutches” are you “hooked on” right now?
Alcohol, sugar, caffeine, marijuana, nicotine, cocaine, prescription opioids, heroin, and crystal meth (methamphetamine) all have one concurrent underlying effect in common – they can drastically influence dopamine production and feelings of euphoria. The science behind this is solid, as published in many studies by the National Institutes of Health. Even low amounts of these substances, foods, or drugs can lead to addiction when consumers lose self-control and give in to immediate gratification, repeatedly.
Sugar is known to cause the brain to produce huge surges of dopamine, just like the hardcore drugs cocaine and heroin. Nicotine is known to activate structures in your brain called receptors, playing a major role in the addiction process. Whatever “crutch” people are using regularly to boost their dopamine production can serve as a detriment over time, because these are all stimulants in the short term, but depressants in the long term.
What most people DON’T KNOW is that there’s a superfood herb that grows in tropical climates that boosts dopamine levels naturally, with no addiction, no withdrawal, and no crash. Mucuna pruriens, also known as the Ayurvedic dopamine bean, has been used extensively in one of the oldest health care systems in the world – traditional Indian medicine.
Superfood Evolution: Join the natural remedy revolution and rid yourself of addictions, including alcohol, sugar, caffeine, and nicotine
The problem with mainstream medicine and mainstream media is that all natural remedies and natural cures are BURIED and censored because they’re inexpensive, work very well, and are not patented by Big Pharma. Still, there’s a natural remedy revolution going on right now, as we witness organic foods, superfoods, and functional beverages absolutely exploding in sales across the globe, and especially in America.
Superfoods are abundant and deliver high-powered nutrients to the body and brain. Some of the more well-known superfoods include garlic, ginger, turmeric (curcumin), medicinal mushrooms (chaga, reishi, cordyceps, lion’s mane), spirulina, chlorella, and seaweed. Superfoods can be classified as fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, roots, beans, seeds, nuts, or berries. Some are sold in powder form or as herbal tinctures.
Many superfoods can heal the body from sicknesses, weaknesses, and addictions. Though often called an “herb,” Mucuna is a type of legume that grows in tropical climates, including India and Brazil. The seeds, roots, and beans are used as dietary supplements and medicinal purposes, plus for naturally boosting dopamine levels.
Mucuna is the ultimate dopamine-boosting superfood
While there are many species of the genus Mucuna, superfood Mucuna pruriens is one of the highest natural sources of L-Dopa, an important precursor to the neurotransmitter dopamine. Mucuna is known to calm and relax the nervous system, providing a buffer that helps the body ward off stress. Mucuna helps replenish dopamine deficiency, common for those recovering from addictive substances. It is important to supplement Mucuna with clean foods (natural and organic) and physical activity (improved lifestyle choices).
Whenever someone is trying to cut back or quit alcohol, sugar, caffeine, nicotine, or the use of hard drugs, their dopamine production levels in their body are very low, waiting for stimulus. Without the usual ‘crutch,’ most people feel helpless and get dragged back into the ‘undertow’ of addiction.
Fortunately, there’s a natural way to boost dopamine, and it’s surprisingly been available thanks to Mother Nature for millennia. A tropical bean called mucuna pruriens contains l-dopa, a precursor to natural dopamine production in the human body, that assists in recovery of normal dopamine levels in the body when trying to quit smoking, vaping, sugar, alcohol, and drugs.
A new functional beverage called Krave Kicker contains a non-addictive, potent extract of mucuna that serves as a handy tool on the belt for cutting back or quitting alcohol, sugar, nicotine, and even hard drugs. The high-powered mucuna in Krave Kicker is also known to fight depression, provide an energy boost, heighten the libido (sex drive), and help with focus and concentration.
Special Note: This article was authored by Herbal Remedy Insider, a researcher for Krave Kicker, the manufacturer of a functional beverage that contains a natural, herbal remedy for nicotine and sugar cravings. This publisher was NOT compensated in any way for carrying this article. It is not a sponsored article, but the author is receiving publicity of this news item in exchange for providing the article at no cost.
ICE’s Supervisory Paralegal Specialist Brian Hearn made the admission as a response to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request of Syracuse University‘s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which requested data on those in ATD custody from the start of the fiscal year 2019 to August 2022.
“ICE’s response that they could no longer find records of immigrants in ATD that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data. The agency really needs to come clean. The American public deserves to have accurate data about the ATD program,” TRAC’s Austin Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF).
ATDs are defined as “any legislation, policy or practice, formal or informal, that ensures people are not detained for reasons relating to their migration status.”
ICE started the said program in 2004 to monitor illegal migrants released into the country using ankle monitors, GPS tracking and cell phones. With limited detention space, ICE relies on the program to hold those awaiting the years-long backlogs in immigration courts.
DCNF previously reported that ICE had privately disclosed wrong data showing over 18,000 percent discrepancy in public data on those not tracked with any technology and another 600 percent difference in publicly disclosed GPS tracking data. The agency later apologized for providing wrong information and proceeded to update the data.
“When Congress ordered ICE to publish data on immigrant detention, perhaps it should have been clearer that it expected ICE to produce accurate data – not inconsistent, error-ridden, and misleading data that the agency currently provides to the public on a regular basis. These sloppy, uncorrected errors – more of the norm rather than the exception – demand immediate attention from both the public and from Congress,” TRAC stated.
Biden approves health insurance for undocumented immigrants
These things happen when the country’s chief executive has a loose policy on illegal immigration.
Biden even approved an application by Washington state to expand health insurance access for all residents regardless of immigration status by allowing it to forgo requirements set by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of the Treasury later approved the state’s application for a State Innovation Waiver, issued under Section 1332 of the ACA. The waiver application was submitted in May.
“The waiver will help Washington work towards its goals of improving health equity and reducing racial disparities by expanding access to coverage for the uninsured population through the state Exchange, while not increasing costs for those currently enrolled,” the departments said in a statement.
About $50 million was allocated for the program in 2023. An additional $5 million will become available for the program following the waiver’s approval.
Follow InvasionUSA.news for more news related to illegal immigration.
(Natural News) We all know that failing to pay your taxes can have repercussions, but you may be surprised to learn that 12 states regularly seize dramatically more than what they are owed by homeowners who have fallen behind on their property tax payments in a practice that has been termed “home equity theft.”
A new report from the Pacific Legal Foundation that illustrates “the injustice of home equity theft through tax foreclosure” shows how homeowners across the nation lost more than $777 million worth of life savings on thousands of homes through transactions from 2014 to 2021, and they note that the real number is likely higher as data was not available for every state. Homeowners lost, on average, 86 percent of their home equity in such transactions.
To understand how it works, imagine that you owe someone $12, and they take a $100 bill from your wallet and keep the change. This is exactly what is happening when these states take people’s homes to cover delinquent real estate taxes.
For example, when 93-year-old Minnesota woman Geraldine Tyler failed to pay roughly $2,300 in property taxes, Hennepin County foreclosed on her Minneapolis condo and sold it for $40,000. Instead of refunding her the $25,000 that was left after paying the delinquent taxes and related costs such as penalties and interest, the government kept all of the money for themselves.
When Nebraska man Kevin Fair fell behind on property tax payments after quitting his job to care for his dying wife, Scotts Bluff County sold the property tax debt to a private company that tried to collect the taxes plus 14 percent interest. When he was unable to get a loan to cover it, the county treasurer deeded his home to the investor. This left Fair with nothing, even though his home was worth around 11 times more than the debt he owed.
In one of the more outrageous cases, a Michigan man’s home was seized over an underpayment of just $8.41, leaving him with nothing, although he is one of the lucky few who successfully fought the move in court.
Stories like these are all too common, with the “End Home Equity Theft” report noting that nearly 8,000 homes were taken as payment on property tax debts that were worth only 14 percent of the home’s value. This means private investors and government bodies have been keeping millions of dollars’ worth of equity that people have built into their homes. Unfortunately, it is often the elderly and those who are struggling financially who are the victims of these actions.
Can your state rob you of your home equity?
In Vermont, Mississippi, Virginia, Michigan and New Hampshire, state supreme courts have ruled the practice unconstitutional. In states like Florida, the property may be sold to pay the debt, but the money left over is returned to the former owner.
However, New York, Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Minnesota, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Alabama, Maine, South Dakota, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. view the situation differently and allow people’s homes to be stolen via home equity theft. These laws have enabled investors and governmental officials to take homes that were in families for many generations, leaving some people homeless over a tax debt that is sometimes less than 1 percent of the value of their property.
Pacific Legal Foundation Strategic Research Director Angela Erickson said: “Home equity theft is robbing thousands of people of their homes and all the equity they’ve built. A system that allows governments and private investors to take more than what is owed creates a perverse incentive to work against the homeowner—not with the homeowner—to get the tax debt paid.”
Government entities collected around $26 million more than they were owed during the time period studied, while private investors who buy tax liens racked up $250 million more than they were owed in this appalling practice.
Groups across the political spectrum are strongly against the practice, with only those who profit from the system coming out in favor of it. The Pacific Legal Foundation notes that most people do not even realize this is happening, and they are hoping to raise awareness of the issue and get all states to outlaw this unreasonable practice.
(Natural News) FTX diverted $200 million worth of customer deposits to fund a pair of venture deals in a move that caught the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In March, the cryptocurrency firm reportedly invested $100 million through its FTX Ventures unit in the fintech company Dave, which had just gone public a few months prior. The companies announced at the time that they would be working to enlarge the “digital assets ecosystem.”
In another deal that caught the SEC’s attention, FTX made a $100 million investment in the Web3 firm Mysten Labs in September. This ended up being a $300 million funding round for the company that saw Mysten Labs valued at $2 billion and was also joined by Binance Labs and Coinbase.
The Financial Times reports that although FTX Ventures was involved in dozens of different transactions, their investments in Dave and Mysten Labs are the only disclosed investments of $100 million.
Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has been accused of carrying out widespread fraud after the company went from a valuation of $32 billion earlier in the year to bankruptcy in November. At the heart of many of the charges is the fact that the 30-year-old diverted FTX funds to his hedge fund, Alameda Research, who then used the money to carry out risky trades and make questionable loans.
While Dave and Mysten Labs have not been connected to Bankman-Fried’s wrongdoings, the investments serve as proof of FTX and Bankman-Fried using customer money for venture fundings. It is likely that these and other investments from FTX’s $5 billion venture pool will be under heavy scrutiny as investigations into the use of FTX funds continue.
The SEC has set the stage for clawbacks by linking these two big investments to customer money. Should FTX bankruptcy trustees prove that client money was used to fund investments by Bankman-Fried, they could choose to attempt to recover those funds in their efforts to retrieve customer assets.
While representatives for Mysten Labs declined to comment on the situation, Dave CEO Jason Wilk informed CNBC that the company has already scheduled to repay FTX’s investment in Dave, with interest, by 2026. FTX made their $100 million investment in Dave using a convertible note, which is a short-term cash loan than FTX could choose to convert to shares in the future. However, they never made the conversion, which has left Dave with a liability of $101.6 million to FTX and its successor companies.
Dave noted in a statement that there are no terms in the note that require Dave to repay the investment before the maturity date. However, Wilk emphasized that the firm was not aware that FTX and Alameda had been using customer assets for their investments.
The investment Bankman-Fried made in privately held Mysten Labs is said to be an equity deal.
Questionable investments
These investments have not performed very well, with shares of Dave falling more than 97 percent since they went public. They were warned by Nasdaq this summer that they would be delisted if their share price did not improve; it is currently trading for 28 cents and has a market cap of about $100 million.
Meanwhile, their poorly timed Mysten Labs investment came amid the crypto meltdown, at a time when Ether and Bitcoin were down by more than half for the year and countless lenders and hedge funds were filing for bankruptcy.
Last week, Bankman-Fried’s lieutenants, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, pleaded guilty to federal charges over their illicit use of customer funds for venture investments and trading. Both are reportedly cooperating with the federal investigation into the FTX collapse and the actions of Bankman-Fried. Ellison, who was the CEO of Alameda and once dated Bankman-Fried, apologized for defrauding investors. Both individuals said they knew that what they were doing was wrong, which could destroy Bankman-Fried’s defense that his wrongdoings were unintentional mistakes.
(Natural News) The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.
(Article by Victor Davis Hanson republished from AMGreatness.com)
“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.”
Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda.
The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.
The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”
The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The FBI is now, tragically, in freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.
Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was.
Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself.
While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember,” “could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax.
Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election.
Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.
Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified.
While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:
As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.
McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.
Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists.
Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”
Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints=—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes.
The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution.
Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s own admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.
Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information.
The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year old-law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions.
During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed.
Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper.
Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.
The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s own preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.
In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.”
Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy” means of denying Trump the presidency:
I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.
When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.
To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”
“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,” Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.
What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, or mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers? What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor? What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence?
What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists”?
The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption.
Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.
Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI.
There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau.
The three reforms most commonly suggested include: 1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections; 2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or 3) break-up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas.
The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes.
The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax.
Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics.
We are left with the dilemma of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers?
