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Jeet Heer Profile picture
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7 May, 5 tweets, 2 min read
1. CIA has always been (to use this misappropriated terminology) "woke": the liberal wing of the national security state because top-heavy with Ivy League grads. CIA top brass was Yalie liberals when they carried out Operation Paperclip & recruited countless Nazi war criminals.
2. "The CIA is too liberal" is one of the foundational complaints of movement conservatism, which was formed by a group of ex (or "ex") CIA agents who disliked CIA's support of non-communist left (Buckley, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall etc).
3. One core mission of CIA from start in 1947 was winning over the non-communist left (NCL in CIA jargon) in Europe and decolonized world: hence CIA support of literary journals & cultural modernism as well as AFL-CIO assisted infiltration of unions.
4. The story of CIA has long been quarrels between elite liberals with movement conservatives on best way to fight enemies & ideological interpretation of data: McCarthyism, Team B in 1970s, WMD in early 2000s.
5. If you want to know where the so-called intersectional CIA came from, here's the true story: jeetheer.substack.com/p/the-intersec…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
7 May
I have a hard time seeing how you can hold these two positions. I suppose you could if you made a distinction between supporting democracy/rule of law & substantive police positions. But that's a false distinction: democracy & rule of law are also policy matter.
I think this is a usefully sophisticated way of thinking about the "moderation" issue -- going hard right on some issues allows a Republican to be more moderate on others. But I'll add that a lot of Trump's supposed moderation was in level of rhetoric.
mean to put in this link on the "usefully sophisticated way of thinking about moderation issue"
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
6 May
1. The usual contrarian clowns -- specifically Greenwald and Fang -- are trying to muddy the waters on the Liz Cheney business, so it's worth spelling out why Bernie is right.
2. You can easily believe, as I do, that Liz Cheney is wrong about nearly everything but that she's right to oppose Trump's attempts (which are ongoing) to overturn the 2020 election results & subvert American democracy.
3. Saying that Cheney is right about Trumpian authoritarianism and using her as a wedge to divide GOP does not entail supporting anything else Cheney believes. To suggest otherwise like the numbskull argument that being a vegetarian means supporting Hitler.
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
6 May
1. With Liz Cheney's pushed out of GOP leadership, worth remembering just months ago she was a super-star. Last November Politico wrote of her prospects to be Speaker or even President, complete with Margaret Thatcher comparisons. What went wrong?
2. Liz Cheney has fallen because she stood up to Trump: it's a very consistent pattern over last few years that any Republican who does that is either swept aside or surrenders to Trump (as Lindsey Graham). The GOP's heart and soul belongs to Trump.
3. Given Trump's near total control of GOP, it's hard not to admire those Republicans who at real political cost oppose him. But we have also to be clear-eyed that Never Trump Republicanism is a political dead end. There's no sign it has a constituency inside GOP.
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
3 May
1. So, the CIA intersectional ad has been getting some polarizing reactions (Left: look at this shit, the right: oh, no, the CIA is woke, some liberals: actually it's good CIA is anti-racist).
2. It's all too telling that Glenn Greenwald takes the right wing position (see, the woke left is running the show). This seems to be a pretty naive understanding of how intelligence agencies use ideology.
3. We actually have a great historical precedence on this since the original CIA of 1947-1968 was heavily invested in shoring up what was called the non-communist left (liberals in USA, social democrats in rest of world). That was NOT because CIA was progressive.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
1 May
1. 60 years ago, in April 1961, a group of French military officers led a failed coup against Charles de Gaulle, with the goal of stoping the decolonization of Algeria. Now a group of retired French officers have picked the anniversary of the coup to threaten French democracy.
2. The open letter was written by the former head of the French Foreign Legion and signed by 19 other retired general, 80 officers & 1000 lower ranks. It warns that anti-racism is destroying France & the military might need to restore order.
3. The letter is having repercussions in France and the USA. Marine Le Pen praised it. The Claremont Institute (the leading Trumpist think tank) translated it and suggested it carries a message for America.
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
30 Apr
1. This is a shattering memoir by Eve Crawford Peyton of predatory male mentorship & assault. It has to be front and center of discussions of the Blake Bailey scandal. slate.com/human-interest…
2. Bailey's biography of Roth is now in limbo as abandoned by the publisher. I hope this status doesn't stop introspection about how only a very few of the early reviews (most notably @lmlauramarsh's) grappled with the misogyny of the book.
3. Stuff that was unsettling in Bailey's book now looks even worse in light of Peyton and other women coming out with their stories: the idealization of what Bailey calls "Pygmalion" relationships between Roth & much younger, poorer women he mentored & slept with.
Read 4 tweets

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