John A. Gentry

And secondly, you've got a number of people who are materially benefiting from DEI policies.

So time is passing.

It's 2014, 15, 16.

You're into early 2016, mid-2016.

All the polls are showing that Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president.

That's wonderful because we all know she's going to continue the policies of President Obama.

All right, well, in the summer of 2016, this upstart fellow from New York, Donald Trump, looks like he might actually be a viable candidate.

Not really, but you've got to be careful here.

He might actually be a threat.

A threat to what?

A threat to DEI policies on ideological grounds, on material interest grounds.

So in August of 2016, in fact, the 5th of August of 2016, you had the first of the big politicization episodes.

So this is when Michael Morrell, who was then fairly recently retired as the deputy CIA director,

wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he said, roughly, my intelligence experience tells me that Hillary Clinton will be a better president than Donald Trump.

So what he did was violate the longstanding norm of aversion of

of former intelligence officers to partisan politics, and he made a claim that was factually incorrect on two grounds.

One, he didn't do domestic anything.

His intelligence career was entirely foreign-oriented, not the United States.

And he also did not recommend policy to anybody, including recommendations on voting.

So it was this event that triggered my question.