There is no value system the CIA won’t exploit, writes Caitlin Johnstone. 
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
Social media was ablaze earlier this week over a CIA recruiting video which you should definitely watch if you haven’t seen it already, because it has to be seen to be believed.
The video features a Latina CIA officer proudly describing her ascent to her position in one of the most depraved institutions that has ever existed using a jaw-dropping fountain of social justice buzzwords and appeals to Latin American culture while wearing a T-shirt featuring a girl power symbol and the caption “Mija, you are worth it.”
“I am a woman of color, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder,” she says. “I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. 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.”
“I did not sneak into the CIA,” says the officer over inspirational-sounding music, adding, “At 36, I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.”
“Know your worth, command your space. Mija, you are worth it,” the video concludes.
“People in other parts of the world who make even modest efforts to ‘command their space’ often end up murdered by the CIA or its proxies,” someone commented under the video.
Listen to this article.
It’s honestly one of the most appalling things I’ve ever seen. To see ideas and values that are intended to protect and elevate disempowered members of the human community exploited to promote an immensely powerful government agency notorious for its down-punching assaults on those very populations is horrifying, to put it mildly.
The Same CIA That…
This would after all be the same CIA that has inflicted many murderous and catastrophic interventions upon the world in general and Latin America in particular. The same lying, drug-running, warmongering, propagandizing, psychological terrorizing institution whose extensive use of torture has reportedly included “Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock (‘the Bell Telephone Hour’) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the ‘water treatment’; the ‘airplane’ in which the prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.”
So it’s understandable that a video promoting this agency using language intended to uplift women, Latin Americans, and those struggling with mental illness has been met with widespread ridicule and mockery. Of course, it was only a matter of time before this outrage elevated the video to the attention of mainstream conservatives and it was turned into another vapid partisan issue.
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“China and Russia are laughing their asses off watching CIA go full woke,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr. “‘Cisgender.’ ‘Intersectional.’ It’s like The Babylon Bee is handling CIA’s comms. If you think about it, wokeness is the kind of twisted PSYOP a spy agency would invent to destroy a country from the inside out.”
China & Russia are laughing their asses off watching CIA go full woke. "Cisgender." "Intersectional." It's like @TheBabylonBee is handling CIA's comms. If you think about it, wokeness is the kind of twisted PSYOP a spy agency would invent to destroy a country from the inside out.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 3, 2021
Yes Junior, the CIA is trying to destroy the very empire it exists to defend, using “wokeness.” Moron.
“The CIA once had a mission against the Soviets, then Al Qaeda, but it is now a slothful, wasteful bureaucracy, overrun with politically correct slogans and militant mediocrity- as is the whole ‘intelligence community’,” tweeted radio host Buck Sexton.
Yeah, the CIA was awesome when it was murdering and torturing Muslims and communists, but now it’s just a wasteful bureaucracy. Putz.
To be clear, here are the things we learned from the CIA’s “I am intersectional” video:
- The CIA has unbelievable audacity.
- There is no value system the CIA won’t exploit.
- The politics of identity are not in and of themselves enough to meaningfully challenge power.
Here are the things we did not learn from the CIA’s “I am intersectional” video:
- Inclusiveness is bad.
- Republicans are smart.
The video is significant because it shows an agency staffed entirely by sociopaths using extremely manipulative language to advance its predatory agendas, not because it vindicates your dopey ideology. It’s so dumb and depressing how everything real gets twisted and bogged down into fake partisan bullshit.
The CIA can use, has used, and will use any ideological position to advance its agendas. That’s what’s so creepy about the video: it’s a high-budget, in-your-face example of how predatory manipulators operate, and it sets off our predation alarms. It’s not because “woke bad”.
Why I love working for the CIA. pic.twitter.com/Frs3OnNgP3
— blaire erskine (@blaireerskine) May 3, 2021
Sociopaths don’t use language like normal human beings; normal people use language for connection and communication, while sociopaths use it for manipulation and control. Seeing it laid out openly, with language toyed with in a way that is entirely divorced from human value, is shudder-inducing.
Still, it is in some sense comforting to know that after all this time, after all that practice, after all that research into the mechanics of the human mind, and even with all its vast resources, the CIA can still make a sloppy propaganda video that is subject to viral disgust. They might be sociopaths, they might have an immense budget supplemented by their own covert drug trafficking programs, but at least the missing empathy centers in their brains sometimes make it difficult for them to understand normal human beings enough to manipulate them effectively.
It’s crazy that people still support this warped, perverse institution. It says so much about the power of Hollywood brainwashing, and about the power of denial. People assume the CIA no longer does the profoundly evil things we know for a fact it has done in the past, and this assumption is based on literally nothing. It’s based on no factual evidence whatsoever. It’s believed because it is comfortable.
You can be sure that when the next revelation comes out about some unfathomably evil thing the CIA did in the past, people will say “Boy I’m sure glad it’s not like that anymore! Today’s CIA is intersectional!”
Inept sociopaths go to prison.
Mediocre sociopaths become cops.
Effective sociopaths become CEOs.
Clever sociopaths join the CIA.
Intersectional Omnicide
Our weapons will be manufactured by corporations
that have pansexual CEOs and Muslim shareholders.
The bombers will be emblazoned with rainbow flags
and flown by empowered women of all colors
who will scream “YAAASSS QUEEN!” as the mushroom clouds arise.
The desert sand will turn to glass in the blasts,
and that glass will become a ceiling,
and that ceiling will be shattered
by a lesbian CIA Director.
People will be vaporized on the spot,
or watch their own bodies fall apart like sandcastles,
but they will never be misgendered.
We will march as equals,
white, black, Asian, indigenous,
and whatever miscellaneous extras we can find
(so long as they’re photogenic enough for Instagram),
arm-in-arm singing “Fight Song” in one voice
beneath a drone-filled sky
to the edge of extinction
where we will leap together
screaming “This is all Susan Sarandon’s fault!”
into the face of the abyss.
It won’t be pretty,
it won’t be wise,
but at least,
for one glorious flash,
we will get to feel like we really tried.
Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium. Her work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following her on Steemit, throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of her sweet merchandise, buying her books Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
This article was re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Thanks for pointing out the absence of the normal mind in the victim of sociopathic pathology, with the reminder that the real trouble starts when the psychopathic pathology takes over.
They are not normal and it seems the older they get the brazen they become driven by the fear of being exposed as phony failures.
I see these ads as CIA being a result of that.
CIA has some definite issues these days.
Speaking of sociopaths, and I guess we are, there is a book about the creation of the CIA and its behavior that everyone should read. The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government by David Talbot is a fascinating book that reads like a John Le Carre novel only it’s all true and documented with 66 pages of notes. The Dulles brothers, but particularly Allen, were sociopathic traitors to this country. Everyone should read it, but unfortunately few will – it’s 600 pages long. If you venture into it, I guarantee you will be gobsmacked.
Go over to Moderate Rebels and watch Anya Parampil’s perfect parody of this abomination.
“I am a mom…”
Touching to imagine her cradling an infant in her left arm and pushing a student dissident out of a helicopter with her right arm.
There’s something about this video that smells of fish. A truly “woke” woman would never join the most evil institution on the planet. “Wokeness” by any definition would not seem to mix well with torture, coups, assassinations and drone attacks. Either the woman who appears in this video is play-acting, or she has a perverse notion of what it means to be “woke.”
Another tidbit the young soldier told me was if you are in the middle east or Africa etc. and you see a super beautiful, athletic, fit, self possessed young western women–stay away from her. She’s an operative, and dangerous. MI6, Mossad, CIA.
Another fine and right on the money post from everybody’s beloved, Caitlin Johnstone! How in the world does she manage to crank out such thought-provoking posts nearly EVERY day? It reminds me of something Alfred Kazin wrote in his incisive study of Henry Thoreau; “It Is Not Natural For a Man to Write This Well Every Day,” only in this case it is a woman, not a man, who manages the task, although she can only with violence be reduced a mere “woman’s writer,” but manages consistently to outshine and show up critics from the “rougher sex” as well, as she explodes the lies of facile “Identity Politics and Intersectionalism” tossed around so glibly by the latest generation of the intellectually hebetic.
Nor has Caitlin any time to be phased by the many ad hominem accusations of being “cis-gendered,” — whatever the hell that is even supposed to mean exactly! — since her mind is hardly fixating upon her own internal plumbing, but forever concerned instead with more important matters apropos the discovering and thematizing of myriad real social, political, cultural and psychoanalytic problems none of which can hardly be reduced to issues of identity alone without doing serious distortion to the subjects at hand.
I also especially appreciate the way in which Caitlin has been stressing in many of here recent articles that the single most critical and crucial issues in the world today, even more urgent than global warming, are the struggle to prevent the “sociopathocracies” on all sides, especially the Intelligence Community and its captured DNC Party mafia, from taking us deliberately or accidentally into an infandous and civilization terminating nuclear war, while the other cause, which is related, and nearly equally pressing, is putting a final end to the heinous blood-drenched hundred year reign of a ruinous “American exceptionalism”-besot U.S. imperialist foreign policy. Insofar as neither of these issues seem to have been placed front and center on the agenda of the American left, or any other political perspective for that matter, her works reminding us nearly daily of the horrendous possible consequences of dropping the ball on either of these two ever more parlous matters are undoubtedly doing us all a great service, provided, of course, that we finally awaken ourselves, and awaken ourselves in time, from nodding back off into our wonted insouciant fantasies of remaining free and safe from such dire existential threats.
All I can say, Mija, is that the SS had the same pride of identity in their time and place. Your kind thinks anything is permitted because of your group membership. Guess what? Except in your mind, Americans do not have exceptional rights above all others on this planet. Do not think the world will forget what went down during this period of history. Right now, self-congratulatory enforcers like yourself have the world by the balls and you love to twist and squeeze, but everything eventually comes round full circle. The ruthless self-serving Washington regime will be remembered and reviled in the history books as it so richly deserves.
Since Americans are largely illiterate and clueless when it comes to history you probably don’t know, Mija, that the Nazis had a three-word proverb that they posted on the gates of their death camps. It read “Jedem das Seine,” meaning everyone eventually gets what he deserves. It was meant to intimidate the inmates, of course, just like the more widely known “Arbeit macht frei.” Turns out the “joke” was on the Nazis, as they were describing their own future judgement by history. Your hubris is taking you down the same path, Mija. You’re running with a bad crowd, no matter how glam it may seem right now to you.
It would be nice to think that the Nazis were judged by ‘history’, whatever that is, and found wanting. Sadly, the reality is that many prominent German Nazis were richly rewarded by the Allies, others were knowingly assisted by the Roman Catholic Church, and denazification by the US was reluctant and brief. Later and now, overtly Nazi political movements have achieved substantial successes and their less overt counterparts are doing very well in elections around Europe. Unless the Left can unify and build a mass movement of workers to seize power and keep it, the CIA and its allies will continue wreaking havoc.
Caitlin: You got it right – again!
We are ruled by sociopaths, of course. But what this thing also shows is the unbelievable manipulatability of a very large segment of the population. How else could such a criminal organization get away with such a campaign?
BTW, what is cisgender? I am losing track. Poor me….
Cisgender, for those unable to enter the term into a search engine, means identifying as having a gender that corresponds to the sex one has been assigned at birth; not transgender.