Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed international relations expert and contributor for The Epoch Times, Dominick Sansone, to review his personal experiences that headed toward a career in the national intelligence agencies.
Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line now our very good friend Dominick Sansone, who is now a PhD student at Hillsdale and has reported extensively on Eastern Europe and the Russian invasion of Ukraine for us. Dominick, welcome.
Sansone: Hey, Michael. Good to talk to you.
Leahy: Are you up in the far north in Michigan?
Sansone: I am back up north, over the Mason-Dixon line.
Leahy: Do you miss Nashville already?
Sansone: I do. (Leahy chuckles)
Leahy: How cold is it up there? It’s probably nice summer weather up there.
Sansone: It’s not too bad, but I can already feel it in the air that fall is coming on.
Leahy: You can feel it in the air. And, of course, Hillsdale is a beautiful place up there, but it’s sort of isolated, right?
Sansone: It is certainly a gem, that’s for sure. It’s been excellent so far.
Leahy: Have you begun your Ph.D. studies yet this week?
Sansone: This week we’ll begin. But I’ve met all my classmates, my professors, and I’ve got to say it’s really refreshing seeing that there are still people out there who love this country and are willing to fight for it.
Leahy: You have a couple of columns at The Epoch Times I want to talk about. I want to start with this first: “Firing FBI Leadership Isn’t Enough.”
What I found interesting was also your own personal experience. I guess you had been on a track to go into the national intelligence agencies. You were at Johns Hopkins for a bit.
Sansone: That’s right. I was at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, which is a pretty renowned finishing school, sort of for people to get on a track to get into the intelligence agencies.
Leahy: Now tell us about why you left there after a year.
Sansone: So from my experience – and there were good people, of course, and professors – but there was just a kind of trend that ran through the entire program that really didn’t look too favorably on the American founding, if it was talked about at all.
And sort of focused on, which we’ve seen obviously over the events of the past couple of weeks, this feeling and this general sentiment that the proper locus of power, of control in this country, lies with experts – with the federal bureaucracy. With the technocrats who have these advanced degrees and are credentialed.
Even if they don’t necessarily like anything about the United States in particular or feel that we’re an exceptional country in any way, they believe that they are the ones who should be pulling the strings.
Leahy: Yes, that’s a theme here that comes throughout. Now, at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, you write…
Graduates of the school regularly joined the intelligence services, and many of my (your) colleagues, have such aspirations. I can promise you that few, if any, were driven by a love of country unless that country was defined by LGBT art exhibitions in Williamsburg or by Washington Beltway cocktail parties. These were firm believers in the Mueller investigation and Russian collusion hoax. Defending the Constitution, please; ask them about the right to bear arms or their views on hate speech.
Leahy: Elaborate on that if you would, a little bit.
Sansone: So again, I think it’s sort of this cosmopolitan-type mindset where people do not necessarily have any roots in the United States outside of these major metropolitan areas like New York or Washington.
Which is kind of what I tried to say in a witty bit of a way there. When it comes to the Constitution, the idea was that they were in it to defend the right of the citizenry to choose a leader, that was laughable to me.
Again, like I said, with the Russian collusion hoax, with anything, I mean, these are people who had RESIST stickers on the back of their laptops. So, you know the ideological type these were, and that’s what they really were.
That’s what I found at least. And that’s what I think is speaking in that article when I talked about trying to really look at the people who are being hired into these agencies and what qualifications they’re being hired on.
I think that a certain ideological mindset is mandatory. Forget about being neutral. I think you need to actively exhibit that you are of the right mindset … (unintelligible speech, blurred by static).
Leahy: Dominick, we’ve lost you … I think we’ve got some static here. This is a problem that we’ve had a couple of times … . We don’t know if it’s the National Security Agency or somebody else messing with our communications. …
Well, right now we’re going to call you back, Dominick. But while we’re doing that, I’m going to read a little bit from Dominick’s story about his time at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
He says, at his orientation, he said he and his colleagues received a talk from John McLaughlin, former acting director of the CIA and a resolute anti-Trump activist. He was one of the proud signees of the abject lie that the Hunter Biden story was Russian disinformation.
No, the laptop was real. It really was. But what Dominick goes on to say is “this is the operating procedure of Bolsheviks. The truth is relative, the ends always justify the means and they are the only ones who properly know how to wield power for the betterment of all. Your job is to shut up and accept their benevolent rule.” Dominick, your thoughts on that statement you just made?
Sansone: I think that’s accurate. And what a convenient time for my phone to cut out before, huh? (Laughter) No, but that’s correct. I think these are individuals who, again, Victor Davis Hanson, I quoted him at the end, really summarize it very eloquently.
They believe that this is a matter of national security, or really that it’s a threat to the republic. That’s what they’ve tried to impress on the American people through J6, now through the Mar-a-Lago raid, through all these things.
So for them, it’s a revolutionary time that requires revolutionary means, and I don’t think they are really hiding that anymore, which is why you have people across the political spectrum – I mean, you had Andrew Cuomo come out, and Alan Dershowitz, people who are not necessarily anywhere close or friendly to the Right come out and say that this needs to be explained, we need to investigate what’s going on here.
Leahy: Compare and contrast the difference between your colleagues when you were at Johns Hopkins School of International Studies with your colleagues up in Hillsdale, where you’re in a PhD program. What’s the difference between your colleagues?
Sansone: Well, it’s drastic, that’s for sure. Here at Hillsdale, everyone I’ve spoken to is genuinely interested in not only defending the United States of America but also the Constitution and what this country was founded on, its ideals and principles, but really understanding them.
Understanding them in their fullness, in context and what’s going on and how it relates to the day. How we should interpret current events through what the country was founded on and what we have to do to try to return to some semblance of limited government and a constitutional republic as this country was founded upon.
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
