In November 2024, journalist Dan Boguslaw interviewed DCF Director of Research Operations Brett Carollo for an article concerning the Hollywood-DC relationship. Below is the full text of the interview.

I wanted to start off by asking what the most surprising FOIA revelations have been. You mentioned ATF, are there any other agencies that returned materials that surprised you?

The ATF release, confirming that the agency supported Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006), was definitely a surprise, particularly as it came almost a year after I submitted the original request. And you don’t usually get on-set photos and unused press releases, as I did in that case. According to Roger Stahl, who certainly has more expertise than me in this field, it was the first release of its kind from the ATF.

Certainly there have been other surprises, including the hundreds of pages of “Multimedia Agreements” recently released to me by the Department of Homeland Security. The extensive lists of collaborations I’ve gotten from NASA were also much more than could have been expected.

The reason I FOIA’ed these agencies and other agencies outside of the Department of Defense and the CIA is that most researchers specializing in the Hollywood-DC relationship have largely ignored them. This is because they tend to confine themselves to the “militainment” model to explain that relationship. We at the Decoding Culture Foundation, by contrast, study cultural engineering, which is about changing people’s values and worldviews and so is not always immediately or identifiably “political.”

In our investigations into cultural engineering in the entertainment industry, we are certainly interested in these formal, documented collaborations between Hollywood and the various agencies that comprise the administrative state. But we see those collaborations—vast as they are—as merely the surface of a much deeper and more extensive informal network that has long bound the entertainment industry to what nowadays is referred to as “the deep state.”

I give several examples of what I’m talking about in my editorial intro to the first issue of Cultural Engineering Studies, the official magazine of the DCF. These include family relationships and institutional relationships of various kinds. John Badham, for example, the Yale-educated director of WarGames (1983) was the son of a Yale-educated Brigadier General. And Tommy Lee Jones is the first cousin of Chase Brandon, a celebrated CIA operative who went on to become the CIA’s first official liaison to Hollywood (and probably wrote much of the script for the 2003 movie The Recruit by himself). As I also mention, there is a variety of consulting firms, composed of “former” Feds, that advise on Hollywood productions—but you won’t learn anything about that through FOIA docs.

I’m also curious to hear your thoughts on why people like Guy Fieri and Mr. Beast pursue PAAs. Don’t they have enough money as things stand?

Entrée into Hollywood-DC is good for one’s career and future prospects in the entertainment industry. The Feds, for their part, are interested in insinuating their influence everywhere. I first became aware of these kinds of fluffy collaborations when I heard Jay Dyer mention that even “Cupcake Wars” collaborated with the Pentagon.

I am pretty impressed by Trump’s national security appointees, not because I agree with their politics, but because of their threat to perpetual war and the Pentagon’s status quo. I’m curious if you see these nominees as the final form of cultural engineering (a chiseled marine talk show host chairing DOD, an attractive “aloha mist” media savvy soldier at ODNI) or something unrelated. 

I hope you’re right about them being a bona fide threat to the military-industrial-intelligence complex’s infinity wars, and I am relieved that we may step back from the brink of a nuclear confrontation in Ukraine (unless the diehards in Biden’s State Dept. have something to say about it in the interim). But, unfortunately, these people are all Zionists of one stripe or another, and the infinity wars will never really end until the tail stops wagging the dog and the United States and its national security apparatus break free from Mossad blackmail and the Israel lobby.

As for Tulsi, I harbor some very dark suspicions about her. Apart from the fact that she was a WEF “Young Global Leader,” she was transferred from the Hawaii National Guard to the California-based 351^st Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, a psyop outfit that was once commanded by Paul Vallely, who wrote what could be described as the deep state’s grand strategy of psychological warfare, From PSYOP to MindWar, co-authored with Satanist and Temple of Set founder Michael Aquino—a man very credibly accused of engaging in ritual abuse of children at the Presidio in San Francisco in the 1980s. As far as I know, she is also still a member of the cult-like Science of Identity Foundation. And if you’ve just read Tom O’Neill’s Chaos, I probably don’t need to tell you about the intersection of cults, intelligence, and psychological warfare. And as is so often the case, it’s the silence that’s deafening. Even the alternative media ignores these facts about Tulsi, as Thomas reminds me.

I think there is some genuine “populism” in the Trump movement, but it’s mostly in the service of Israel and getting our military establishment to switch gears in order to fight Israel’s wars for them.

And Israel, to me, is just another head of the same hydra as the Atlanticist establishment that was dealt a blow in the last election.

On this same point, how does Trump fit into this idea, the power of media, to shape our cultural beliefs and politics. Do you agree with the thesis that he is a TV president, shaped, forged, and elevated by 21st century media? Or again, is it something else. 

It’s a very broad question. I’m definitely in the “something else” category. I don’t put any stock in what passes for wisdom in the mainstream media or really in anything adjacent to that, including much of the alternative media, left and right. As Thomas points out to me, while “it’s easy to grant that MAGA-consciousness has been in some measure shaped by right-wing television,” it’s “probably not to any greater extent than Resistance Lib politics have been shaped by their left-wing television counterparts.”

For my part, I don’t see why the above thesis applies any more to Trump than it does to Ronald Reagan.

I’m wondering if you can expand on this idea: “breakdown of social trust and its relationship to the rise of intelligence culture; the replacement of the classical knight with the spy as a heroic ideal; voyeurism, surveillance, and pornography as intertwined indicators of decadence;. “

That’s from the synopsis of Professor John Stroup’s series of talks on espionage and culture, inspired by a 1965 American Scholar article by Jacques Barzun, and Stroup also wrote a fine—and very funny—article on this topic for the first issue of the magazine.

At the end of The Good Shepherd, a CIA-supported movie about the origins of the CIA, there’s the implication that the CIA is now “God”:

I remember a senator once asked me when we talk about CIA, why we never use the word “the” in front of it.
And I asked him, “Do you put the word ‘the’ in front of God?”

This is psyop 101 stuff, right out of Vallely and Aquino’s playbook: you become invincible by convincing yourself and others that you’re invincible. Plus, “criminals love to brag,” as someone I won’t name likes to say.

The CIA is not God, but after WWII, the CIA and an associated network of intelligence agencies effectively took over the operations of government, and we’ve been living in an unaccountable cryptocracy ever since. I don’t want to oversimplify the matter—after all, the intelligence agencies arose in large measure out of an alliance between the banksters and their hired spooks and goons—but step by step this clandestine world also took control of the culture, which is ultimately a greater lever of power than the formal organs of government. In doing so, they infected the rest of the population with their values and their worldview.

From WWII on, media depictions of the clandestine world have proliferated, to the point where it is the text or subtext of just about every other film being made. To be sure, some of these movies portray that world in a rather cynical way. But even many of those movies, like Three Days of the Condor (directed by confirmed Mossad agent Sydney Pollak), still receive at least backchannel support from the intelligence community (Richard Helms paid a visit to the set of that one). Even the more visible “critiques” of the intelligence world seem to come from inside, like Bourne Identity-director Doug Liman’s American Made, the Yale-educated Liman being the son of the Yale-educated chief counsel for the Senate’s Iran-Contra investigation.

The net effect is a glamorization of this increasingly ubiquitous and powerful world and the replacement of the heroic ideal of the knight with the spy, as Barzun long ago observed. More disturbing still is what happens in the later stages: a fetishization of trauma and mind control, a la Bourne. The message is that if you want to “be somebody” in this culture, turn your soul over to the clandestine world—be a slave.

During the Cold War, critiques of cryptocracy and intelligence culture were exponentially more likely to come from the left. As far as I know, Walter Bowart, a dyed-in-the-wool hippie and the author of Operation Mind Control, coined the term “cryptocracy.” For several reasons, including the hard shift to pure identity politics among the dominant sectors of the left, the situation has changed considerably. But the left has always had trouble diagnosing the deeper causes of the social and cultural problem, of the “breakdown of social trust” and so forth, because “decadence” is fundamentally a conservative concept.

One of the turning points for me was reading (leftist) Dave McGowan’s Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, a book which, as I write,

confronts the reader not only with the incredible proportion of epoch-making Laurel Canyon musicians and celebrities from military intelligence families (Frank Zappa, John Phillips, Jim Morrison, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and on and on) but also with the patent absurdities in the accounts of the formation of the various groups and the composition of their music which were peddled in rock magazines and other venues and mostly gobbled up without an abundance of reflection.

Political conspiracy is fine on the left, as long as they perceive themselves as out of power, but cultural conspiracy is typically unacceptable, because leftists constitutionally embrace the premises of this cultural revolution and don’t want to think about where it all might be coming from. One might regard the sexual revolution as a great leap forward for humanity, but the fact is that it was not a bottom-up affair in anywise.

As for McGowan’s book, even if one rejects the notion that the counterculture (as opposed to the anti-war movement, which was only successfully merged with the counterculture around 1968) was a psyop, one is still left with the fact that it emerged out of intelligence culture, or out of an intelligence class, if you like, from people newly aware that only they and other members of their new class possessed the state-of-the-art tools of culture creation. Remember that Stewart Copeland and his brothers, who are arguably the prime movers of the entire post-punk scene of the 1980s, are the children of charter CIA member and psychological warfare specialist Miles Copeland, who once implied that “the Police were a psy-ops outfit who played shows to ‘70,000 young minds open to whatever the Police decide to put into them.’”[1] Miles Copeland III’s record label was called “I. R. S. Records,” and its logo was a stereotypical Man in Black. Stewart was the drummer for a band called The Police. What does that tell you about the rock and roll revolution?

 It seems to me from talking to people in the intelligence world that the agencies are struggling to recruit, that nobody wants to be a drone pilot in an AC storage container, that the old myths are dying and nothing has emerged to replace them. What are the cultural trends you are seeing emerge? What is your prediction for the future of cultural engineering? Are the masters losing their grip? Is cultural engineering shifting to tech? Is there a new archetype that will replace James Bond/Jason Bourne?

That’s good news! It makes me think of Xenohon’s great dialoguethe Hiero, wherein the eponymous Syracusan tyrant explains to the poet Simonides how tyranny and corruption at length drive out everything good, decent, courageous, and noble, and finally the tyrant is surrounded by low-level sycophants and foreign mercenaries that he can’t even trust.

I don’t have any pithy predictions for you, but from my personal experience and from the anecdotal information I’m able glean, I gather that the worm might be turning a bit in terms of intelligence culture. What the DCF is trying to contribute to, in some humble way, is breaking the spell, because these cultural psyops are most effective when people don’t believe they exist and thus don’t see the next one coming.

What we always have to be on the lookout for, though, is what Jasun Horsley refers to as “the Second Matrix.” The Trump phenomenon is surely an indicator that people are more earnestly “tired of the baloney” than they have been in recent memory, and that they are distrustful of anything that smacks of “the deep state.” So, at least on the fringes of the culture, another sort of protagonist is being accentuated, the noirish super-sleuth conspiracy theorist, like the Andrew Garfield character in Under the Silver Lake. In that movie, however, and in a number of related portrayals (I’m thinking of the Adrien Brody character in Hollywoodland, for example), the audience is either misdirected into another controlled worldview or inculcated with the message that it is better not to have searched at all, a la the exoteric side of HP Lovecraft.

If you want an indicator that the “masters are losing their grip,” it will be that people invest less and less attention in the entertainment media. Now that may be true when it comes to the film industry, but it looks to me like video games have already outstripped cinema as a primary engine of cultural engineering, to say nothing of social media. Virtual worlds are apparently envisioned as the next phase in Second Matrix programming (see Spielberg’s Ready Player One).

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Sources

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/my-dad-the-spy-stewart-copeland-on-his-father-s-secret-life-as-a-cia-agent-1.4322721.