Meet the CIA’s Diverse Media Whisperer

The ad follows an unidentified 36-year-old Latina CIA agent, who identifies as a “woman of color” who has been “diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.”

“I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise,” the agent says in the video, later adding that she “refuse[s] to internalize misguided, patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.”

In the ad, the agent says she previously struggled with imposter syndrome but has since become proud of her accomplishments.

“I am a walking declaration, a woman whose inflection does not rise at the end of her sentences, suggesting that a question has been asked,” she says, adding that she can “change a diaper with one hand and console a crying toddler with the other.”

The video, which speaks little of the qualifications needed to work at the CIA or what the job entails, was mocked on Twitter by users who slammed the ad as an appeal to “woke millennials.”

All that to say: the CIA has been shoving identity politics down the public’s throat (surely for nefarious purposes, probably to divide the country along identity lines) for a long while now.

Anyway, in 2024 the agency has a diverse new mascot to parade, one who’s been quite ubiquitous of late on the alternative media/podcast circuit, Andrew Bustamante, founder of “Everyday Spy.”

Why anyone would believe a single word that comes out of a professionally trained liar’s mouth is beyond me.

There is, of course, nothing inherently dangerous about a rank government propagandist allowed to speak in public — in fact, it can be productive and educational — provided the audience knows that what it’s hearing is propaganda.

Related: Tucker: Mike Pompeo Should Be in Prison for Trying to Assassinate Julian Assange

Relatedly, one of the biggest setbacks in the information war — from a common-sense populist, constitutionalist perspective, at least — is the repeal of longstanding law around a decade ago that unleashed the floodgates of Deep State propaganda — formerly reserved for our geopolitical opponents — on the American public.

Via Foreign Policy, 2013 (emphasis added):

For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?

Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It’s viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran, self-immolation in Tibet, human trafficking across Asia, and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.

The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long-standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 1970s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they "should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics." Fulbright’s amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who argued that such "propaganda" should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. "from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity."