Sleepwalking into Tyranny: How the FBI Got Weaponized Against ‘Political Enemies’

over the last several years and especially after the adoption of the Patriot Act in 2001 well many people have come to the conclusion that the current situation right here in America it resembles that of a police state more and more unlike what the founding fathers of this country had imagined it appears that the federal government has been ballooning and increasing in size and giving itself the ability to both Monitor and control the American citizens more and more every single year and so whether it's controlling what you and I can and cannot say through their Partnerships with social media companies whether it's things like the NSA spy program which allows for the actual warrantless surveillance of Americans or the Cory abuse of the fisa Spy warrant system which allows for government officials to effectively spy on American citizens whether it's the FBI allocating their precious resources to track down parents who happen to speak up at school board meetings whether it's these domestic terrorist plots which get foiled only to later be revealed that they were actually just cases of government entrapment or whether it's these Federal bureaucrats within the intelligence agencies going ahead and influencing American elections well all these seemingly disperate examples they reinforce the idea that if we're not already living in a police state we are perhaps well in our way and so with that as the general background a new film has just been released exposing exactly this problem it's called police state and essentially it serves as a wakeup call exposing the threat to the American way of life and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to sit down and speak with Mr Desh duza he is the director of the film and we had a phenomenal and far-reaching discussion about not only what he was able to uncover throughout the course of his investigation which ultimately culminated in the film but also what the truth is like behind the scenes at these agencies and also what can actually be done to turn back the tide it was a phenomenal discussion that I hope you'll enjoy and so take a super quick moment to smash those like And subscribe buttons and take a listen dases thank you so much for joining us uh maybe to start with for the audience members who haven't seen the film yet can you please define what a police state is and tell us whether in your opinion we're already living in one a good way to define a police state is simply to look at police states around the world I think obviously of North Korea China Iran the old Soviet Union and ask what are the characteristics or traits that these countries these states have in common well they have mass surveillance of the citizens they have systematic censorship they have political indoctrination in the schools and in the media a lot of propaganda they are onep party States they sometimes allow elections but they never allow effective opposition if an effective opposition leader comes up they try to block him to arrest him in some cases to Exile him uh uh police States also tend to undermine religious liberty uh to go after their church and they also have political prisoners so that's a pretty good working definition now apply those characteristics to America and you will see that to one degree or another all those traits are now present in the United States so I'm not saying that we are a full-fledged police state but we certainly are on our way to becoming a police state D let me ask you this you know when myself and a lot of other people think about the federal bureaucracy we often times think that well the federal bureaucrats are overwhelm in ly left wing I mean you can see from the uh you know the political donations uh that something like 95% of political donations from the federal employees typically go to leftwing uh or Progressive candidates right but then on the flip side when we think of law enforcement whether it's at the local level or even at the federal level we oftentimes think of those individuals as more conservative leading and so is is that something that you uncovered throughout the course of your investigation for making the film are they more conservative leaning like is that correct and if so is there any push back against what's happening from the rank and file well the typical law enforcement guy uh is not a leftist is certainly not the same type of guy as say a staffer on a Dem on a democratic committee on Capitol Hill or even somebody working in the Biden Administration as a political appointee by and large people in law enforcement are very similar to people in the military they tend to be people who go by the book they've been trained all their life to sort of be Company Men organization men to follow instructions to do what they're told to sort of Rise within the system and within the hierarchy so their conservatism is not so much ideological it's operational and and I think the police state the problem with this is that if you are able to corrupt the system corrupt the leadership have strategic people who are giving you bad instructions saying for example to an FBI agent hey look our Focus now is not for example on on MS13 and its child trafficking operation we're now focusing on the sub verses the sort of domestic extremists who pose who are the kind of people who went to the capital on January 6th so here's a grandmother she's 70 years old but don't really worry about what she did your job is to bust into her apartment grab her twist her arms behind her back arrest her if she resists pull her down the stairs pull her into the street if necessary let her neighbors gawk at her and we'll let the courts figure out her real level of guilt or innocence so you see how by and large a good guy who's an FBI guy as a family as a normal house can somehow be recruited to do something that is so barbaric but it's because the police state has ways of making good people do very bad things that story you you just told was that a real story that you came across in your investigation it it mirrors many uh so we have for example two or three very emotionally powerful profiles of political prisoners from January 6th but we also show a lot of other ordinary people who are just going about their lives uh and they're involved in some Civic matter or the other they might be involved for example as as parents concerned about what their kids are being taught or maybe they're pro-life activists or maybe in some cases just some guy who went down to Washington DC around January 6th but wasn't even involved in the events of January 6th and is still nevertheless on a kind of suspected terrorism watch list so the problem with police States is they become very bureaucratic very stupid they don't try ultimately to distinguish between even the guilty and the innocent they become ultimately a machine for subjugating people and reducing them to a certain kind of servitude all right let's just pause here for a super quick 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around the country should be on high alert for increased uh activity uh potential terrorist warnings um and of course the open Southern border sort of adds to that I'll ask you two questions the first is do you think that resources have been shifted away from terrorism towards more like domestic threats like parents uh political enemies such that it might actually weaken the response towards a terrorism attack by the FBI do you believe that's the case without a doubt and it's not so much that I am um conjecturing that that is the case um the FBI director Christopher Ray has gone gone before Congress and said our top priority is domestic terrorism and domestic extremism we think that for example white supremacy poses a greater threat than any other uh threat to the country today so there is a open profession on the part of police agencies of government that they are moving uh toward a domestic focus and toward a focus really on the political opponents of the Biden regime so it it's not too surprising to me that they completely missed this Hamas attack I mean just think about the magnitude of a thousand people being able to get past the is I mean it's an isra Israel intelligence failure to be sure but it's also a US intelligence failure and I think that the latter is due to radically misplaced priorities and if if that premise is true and these misplaced priorities potentially leave a gap for something I would hate to say but something similar that that happened in Israel to happen in the States where there's a surprise terrorist attack could just be a lone actor could be a small small group would that justify Patriot Act 2.0 I can imagine a scenario where there's a terrorist attack all the media would overwhelmingly begin to question why you know how do we miss this how did the intelligence Services miss this there would be a large you know hoopla about it and the end result I can easily imagine being to give more money and more power to these agencies not not to investigate them for their failure but to instead just give them more Authority do you envision that being the case and if so is there any way to avoid it well I mean I think that there is a danger of what you say but on the other hand if there was a terrorist attack let's just say by Hamas in America this would cause a problem for the left the the reason that causes the problem is that the immediate Target would be of course American Muslims uh in other words who how did Hamas established these cells who are these people and where do they live and so on so for the left remember the left was actually very aggressive in defending the civil liberties of Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11 and to some degree they were correct but those same or organizations that funded lawyers and erected a massive apparatus to defend uh Muslims in the aftermath of 911 have gone totally silent when the target is conservatives and Patriots and of course the defendants of of January 6th so I foresee the left trying much more to Fan the Flames of fear in other ways so for example climate change is very good for them so because because it is events of fear that cause people to want to say all right I'm willing to give up this Liberty if we think about the events that have caused the greatest subtraction of Liberties in this country 911 was one of them fast forward to coid that was another January 6th was a third so the left has opportunistically realized that fear is a great weapon to get people to say all right I'm willing to exchange a good part of my freedom in exchange for the security and safety that you're promising me let me ask you this in um in the film you were during the one part you were discussing the hunter Biden laptop story and how it was suppressed by by the intelligence services and this is something you said in the film this is a quote the police agencies of the government acting on behalf of the bidens moved to suppress public discourse of the contents of the hunter Biden laptop so here you said acting on behalf of the bidens in in your investigation how do how do you figure that is it is it the case that you believe that they're acting on behalf as in like Joe Biden or Obama or or someone else set tells you know this is the objective this is what I want you to do or is it just kind of a coalescing uh sort of ideology that drives everyone in the same direction and looking outside it sort of seems like it's being directed but it could not be it could just be a bunch of different people who are driven by the same ideology moving towards a common goal which are the two no I actually am referring to things in a very specific way the police agencies of the US government are part of the executive branch they are it is true funded by Congress but they answer to buy I mean who does Merrick garland work for he works for Biden he is he is Biden's in a sense chief lawyer I remember in the Obama years he referred to Eric Holder who was Meritt Garland's equivalent as his wingman this is his wingman like a uh you know kind of an analogy from uh from um from being a pilot and um so I think that these police agencies recognize that they are answerable to Biden so they are working on behalf of him in that sense but they're also working on behalf of him in a different sense and that is that the police state any police State uh any tyrannical regime is always going to say who are my friends who are helping to build the police state and then who are my enemies who are threatening the police state so I think from the point of view of these police agencies of government not just the FBI but the Department of Homeland Security and also the CIA they basically say the Democrats and the left are helping us construct a police state they are our friends they are in fact protecting our crimes so we need to protect their crimes uh and by contrast Trump Trump the conservatives these this is a problem uh you know if Trump comes back in who knows what he's going to do who knows he's who he's going to fire how he's going to dismantle and reorganize the FBI for example so he poses a mortal danger if you will to the police state and so the police state relentlessly goes after him sometimes when we say oh there's a double standard the police state is treating Trump differently than Biden well that's only if you assume that the police state is somehow impartial and aspires to hold itself to A single standard of abidingness but if the police state is looking at it differently who are my friends who are my enemies then the police State's actions are completely consistent and so when you say the police State's actions are completely consistent you're I guess I I imagine talking about sort of the upper echelon of the decision makers not necessarily the rank and file but the people like mayor Garland right who who are at the top making the decisions so let me ask you along that line are you familiar with project 2025 I've heard of it it's it's a project such that one once if a conservative president were to take uh take power in 20 well 2025 uh he would have um a database to pull from to replace some of the people in government uh to to to be more conservatively ideologically aligned do you think that's a an actual solution to replace the people at the top uh or would that just be a Band-Aid because then when the administrations change to towards the left it would still be the same problem what would be the actual solution would it be stripping power from these agencies you need need a uh this is a battle on many fronts uh so for example when you take censorship uh this is something for the Supreme Court to handle and happily the the case of Missouri versus Biden is making its way to the court the court has already granted CT they'll be hearing the case they'll be issuing a ruling in the spring uh these things move more slowly than I would like because I know millions of people have been censored over the past few years millions of people are being censored now the court is allowing millions of people to continue to be censored until they make their decision in the spring but nevertheless they have a chance the Supreme Court does to administer a massive dropkick to the to the uh police state now there are other things that you can do uh if you win the presidency you can revamp agencies of government you can you know if you and then if you have the house and the Senate there are things you can do legislatively even if you don't have those things but you have Republican Governors and secretaries of state and Attorneys General there are things that can be done at the state level there are things that we as individuals can do so there's this is a case where there's not a single solution but the police state need needs to be resisted on all fronts and that's the way to roll it back about a month ago my team and I were doing a special segment on what took place over in Michigan with the entrapment uh of course you're aware of it with agression Whitmer in that case and we reached out to an individual he's a reporter uh named Traver Aronson he wrote a book called the terror factory inside the FBI's manufactur Ed war on terrorism now we thought that we would reach out to him and get him get his expert opinion on what happened in Michigan but he sent us back an email and it really it surprised my team and I I want to read this email to you and and get your take because it it sort of uh fits into the motif of the film he wrote this to us quote conservative media have done a very good job of amplifying the Michigan case to make it appear as if the FBI is disproportionally targeting conservatives when in fact things like the one in Michigan are exceedingly rare compared to to the hundreds of stings that have targeted people of color and leftwing activists over the past two decades he says I can count on one hand the number of terrorism stings that Target the right-wing white men in America by contrast more than 350 defendants mostly people of color have been caught up in international terrorism stings what would your response be to to a criticism like that well look uh Trevor arenson has done some really good work in showing real abuses of Power by the police agencies of Government after 9/11 Visa Muslims uh and I think what happened is that the FBI and all these agencies got a big Trove of cash from the government to go after terrorism and then after 911 they might have expected there to be a lot of other incidents but there weren't and it may be because us bombings abroad and so on had immobilized those groups and they weren't able to carry out that kind of attack but the bureaucratic agencies of government were like okay well our funding is going to dry up so we need to manufacture some terrorism and so that now they started their their their entrapment campaign and they become really good at it and Treva arenson has actually documented it pretty well so I agree with him going all the way in the years after 911 the the the FBI and these other agencies became really sneaky about going to I'm just talking generally here but they'd find some students who are radical and denounce America and then the FBI informan goes well hey you know have you guys thought about joining Isis no not really man well you know you you're saying all these things you want to be a soldier for Islam and so on why don't you join Isis well I don't know how it would join Isis well guess what there's a training camp that's going on in Pakistan have you ever thought of going would you like to go well I don't have any money well how about if we give you some money well I don't have a passport well how about if we get you a passport so you see what's going on here the FBI is luring someone who might be radical but into doing something that they would not otherwise do and then right before they're set to do it bust them oh we are amazing we just busted a dangerous terrorist so Trevor arenson has done a good job exposing this now interestingly when the target becomes conservatives Patriots Christians Republicans Trevor Aronson has kind of gone silent and so this guy is not as it turns out a consistent defender of civil liberties if he were he'd be defending them across the board but he is ultimately concerned about the Civil civil liberties of the left let's remember the left was a big defender of free speech in the 60s why because they were the ones who were being targeted but the moment that they got power in the universities they were happy to turn around and suppress the free speech of conservatives so it turns out that these leftists are not committed to civil liberties per se they only mean civil liberties for them notice that when Elon Musk banned a couple of left leftists on X then called Twitter for one day they were screaming what about our Free Speech quoting John Stewart Mill so they value Free Speech but they value free speech for themselves and yet they're happy to trample on the free speech of other people so you mentioned the 6th cases um we we ran a story recently uh just earlier this week about Jake Lang he's been uh well insolid well in semi solitary confinement but jailed for the last 10,000 Days basically uh since uh 2020 2021 so shortly after uh January 6 he was jailed in Upstate New York they took him over to Virginia he's been there ever since in your investigation did you uncover how or why this is happening because the more I look into it the more it just seems like these judges are put putting these individuals into indefinite confinement pending trial uh but there's no real reason other than hey there a flight risk or there a danger to the community even though that does not on the surface at least seem to be the case do you know do you have any insight into that yeah it it all comes down to the validity of the original narrative if January 6 was truly a kind of insurrection to overthrow the government then these are dangerous insurrectionists including by the way someone who strolled in the capital for 5 minutes didn't harm anything didn't do even a graffiti uh was there while officers were present and left without harming anyone even that guy is part of this Insurrection so then judges look at that and go well I'm looking at an insurrectionist well how can I let that guy go home to his family who knows what he's going to be plotting he might be concocting the next Insurrection right now for all I know now to you and me and and in a normal frame of mind this is like a form of lunacy that is actually not a correct judgment that is not who that guy is that is not why he went to Washington DC that's not even why he found himself in the capital so there's a driving falsehood that has to be attacked and that's really what the movie does is it doesn't try to parse if you if you accept the Assumption then the individual cases all fall into line you have to attack the rude assumption and and that's what the movie does it really asks what is the true meaning of January 6th and it and it explores the police state in many dimensions that go Way Beyond the current debate Desh can you leave the audience with a bit of Hope leave them with a bit of Hope for the future what what what are some positives on the horizon what can be done well the hope is that the um awareness of an emerging police state will bring out a certain aspect in the American character that has long been in the American character and that is that we will not put up with tyranny we are not those kinds of people we want to be left alone we want to live our own lives you know I remember watching many years ago on the nature channel the idea that although the Predator is fast the antelope is actually faster but the antelope needs to know that there's a predator in the trees and if the antelope knows that the antelope is going to take off and the antelope is going to be able to save itself it's only when the antelope is lulled into a false sense of security oh I hear a movement in the trees but you know toes it's the wind or yeah there may be a predator but he's going to land on somebody else's back not mine this is the mentality that the police state loves they love to get get you because you're gullible and so my movie is sort of an antidote to this kind of gullibility Welles thank you so much for anyone watching we'll throw a link to the movie it'll be down there in the description box below otherwise thees thank you so much for joining us my [Music] pleasure