Taking Back the Narrative: Reality Winner in Her Own Words

What happens when telling the truth collides with the full force of the state, and who gets to be called a patriot when the dust settles? 

In this episode, Josh and I sit down with Reality Winner, former Air Force linguist, NSA contractor, and author of I Am Not Your Enemy, to talk candidly about the choice that changed her life and the system that tried to define her. Reality walks us through why she leaked a top secret document in 2017, what the Espionage Act does and doesn’t allow a jury to hear, and how her time in federal prison during COVID reshaped her understanding of justice, race, and power in America. We talk about sentencing disparities, the economics of incarceration, and the quiet ways local policy shapes people’s lives far more than a single president ever will. 

We also explore how her new memoir lands in a moment when government secrecy and document mishandling keep making headlines, and why her story resists neat political boxes while still pushing us to ask better questions about transparency and accountability. Along the way, you’ll hear about her family’s grit, her work rescuing dogs in Texas, and why she’s betting on local change over national theatrics. 

If you care about truth telling, faith in public life, and the human cost of our systems, this one will stay with you. For context on the new book’s release and coverage, see the publisher page and recent features that situate her story in today’s debates. 

Whistleblower Aid: https://whistlebloweraid.org

Find the book on Bookshop to support local stores: 
https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781954118843

Guest Bio: 
Reality Winner is a former U.S. Air Force linguist and NSA contractor who, in 2017, leaked a classified report on Russian interference in U.S. elections. She served more than four years in federal prison, the longest sentence ever imposed in the United States for leaking to the press. Since her release, Reality has become a voice for prison reform, government transparency, and mental health awareness. Her memoir, I Am Not Your Enemy, offers an unvarnished account of her choices, the legal

Transcript

0:17

Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers, everyone watching on our YouTube channel. We are so glad to have you. I am your political host, Wright, and I'm joined by your ever faithful, faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? Doing great, thanks Will. Hey, and today we have returning back to us reality winner who is a former US Air Force linguist, a polyglot and NSA contractor who in 2017 leaked a classified report detailing Russian interference in US elections. She was arrested under the Espionage Act and was sentenced to more than five years in prison, which is the longest punishment ever for a whistleblower. Since her release in 2021, she's become an advocate for prison reform, transparency and mental health awareness. And she is out with a book, I Am Not Your Enemy, which is offering a deeply personal account of her life, her choices, and her hopes for justice. And we are just so glad to have her back. Welcome back to the show, Rely. Thanks, I'm really glad to be here again. Yeah, I gotta ask, I follow you on Instagram and other places and for a while you were having some issues getting rid of some puppies. uh Did we ever solve puppy gate? oh So not quite. We still have too many puppies right now. I have one, two, three, four, we have four, five fosters. um Yeah, always have too many dogs. Well, yeah, if there's a place that you want people to go to try to adopt these puppies, yeah, I'll make sure I get that from you and we'll put in the show. We will push some puppies dog on it on the show if we do anything. anyway, hey, so uh in this book, you wrote a phenomenal book going into detail of. Yeah, just your entire experience. So why don't we just start there? Like, why did you choose or why did you want to kind of write a book, uh you know, now five years after uh leaving prison? Well, we actually started the book in 2021 going into 2022 and finished the book in about a year and then waited another year and a half for the NSA to give us the manuscript back because I had to go through the pre-publication review. And so that's kind of what pushed publication back so far. But my goal always was to kind of close the door on this whole experience and to kind of answer all exhaustive questions about who I am, where I came from, and all the life events that kind of led up to me making that incredibly impulsive decision. oh But most importantly as well, it's also a prison memoir. It's one of the first mainstream accounts of what it's like to be in a federal prison during the COVID pandemic. And I just felt like that was really important to get out as soon as possible. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Just so you know, reality, we're getting a little bit of a delay. So if you notice a delay in us, can you mark this well? And OK, so you notice a delay in us. That's what's going on. But we're good. It's recording locally on your end. So we're good to go. We'll just keep moving if you're good. yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. m I wanted to kind of give people some more context because again, 2017, you know, that is what now eight years ago, we have the memory of a goldfish in this country, right? How many things have happened since then? But I would love for you to kind of talk about what was this Russian as much as you can without getting yourself or us in trouble. How can you explain what was going on in this? spear phishing voting software that was happening in this. I don't get it. That's why I'm asking you what was going on. Help us understand what was happening in what that brought you to in terms of a decision moment. So another part of the government's attempts to make sure that this information remains. uh just unknown to the public is the fact that I have a lifelong NDA that I cannot discuss anything that was within the four pages of that document. What I can say is that at the time it was top secret. At the time almost everybody at the agency had seen it. It was one of the most widely talked about intelligence reports. and that it felt incredible that our elected officials had not seen it. I was under the impression that they had and so it really felt like the entire government was kind of just like in on a joke, which is why I took the document to a journalist. uh And there were many government entities that actually had no idea that document existed. And so it was compartmentalized within the government in such a way that while it was simple for us to see it, members of Congress had not yet seen it. oh Got it. So when you took it and I watched the... the documentary um that had you in it. So a lot of what I'm going to be describing is it's just going to be what I remember from that film. But when you took the document, you took it out of a sense of patriotism, I believe. And I'll let you kind of expand on that a little bit more. But then there was this moment where you're like, uh-oh, like, like. something really bad is about to happen. So I'd love for you just to kind of walk me through like that moment where you're like, okay, I have this document, the FBI are at my door. uh Like what's going through your head kind of at that moment? I mean, generally when it comes to patriotism in this country, like it doesn't have to be blind allegiance to a certain administration or a government entity. It just has to be an allegiance to the concept of the United States and the fact that we have been a refuge for people around the world for centuries now. And so. Part of that is also acknowledging that we can always be improved. And at that moment in 2017, there was one question that was threatening to kind of tear our society apart. And I just felt like... It was the National Security Agency's obligation as well as other government institutions to answer that question definitively and do so in an apolitical way, regardless of what the current presidential administration wanted. And they failed to do that. They failed to address the American people. And so I went above my pay grade and made the decision for the NSA and committed a felony by stealing that information and trying to get it to the American people. So how does the government... like treat intent like how is intent treated in in this right because we watch movies and we look at the person and the person who has the secret you know they go and they tell every you know the right people and and then all of a sudden there's the climax of the movie and he's like no you did it and then everyone sees it and everyone realizes that they're telling the truth and the intent and they're trying to be a good patriot or trying to be a good civilian or whatever it was the whole time and all is forgiven. And yet that didn't happen at all in your case. what was the intent? Talk to us about the tension that's there when there's intent to serve country, all of that, and yet the action is punished regardless of the intent. So with regard to my intent and the idea that I would be vindicated, it was my impression that this information, this document would be given to the American people first and then an investigation into who leaked the information. would follow after it, meaning that after people had already seen how important that document was, then I would be discovered. And hopefully the story would still be about what was being withheld from the American people and that the consequences would be less severe if positive outcomes were reached and if the American people were more sympathetic with having received information they thought was being withheld from them. And unfortunately, because of some things that happened within the intercept and their initial reluctancy to publish, my identity was known first and then the document was known second. And as far as some of the constitutional or the legal issues with the Espionage Act under which I was charged is that it is not a true espionage act. I was charged and treated the same as if I had sold nuclear secrets to North Korea. uh for money and had profited from that or had done so maliciously with intent for loss of uh American or even just human in general life as uh you know my simple release of one document to help the people. And that was where it got so heartbreaking and so frustrating in court is that the prosecution and the government, they are allowed to wildly extrapolate every detail from your life to make you seem like you hate your country. But because intent has no legal relevancy to the charge, My defense team was not allowed to go up there and say, actually, she's kind of a good person. She's never hurt anybody before. uh She is a patriot. Like, we have it in her own words that she was trying to help. uh We were not even allowed to say that out loud in that courtroom because legally, it's not relevant. You know, much of your story is about... um other people labeling you and I think that you sort of alluded to it um earlier about, know, it's hard to really kind of consider yourself a patriot, especially when you've got a country that is prosecuting you for something in your mind that you're actually doing something because you're a patriot. um So I'd love for you just to kind of like help us better understand like. How is this book helping you kind of reclaim this identity or this narrative for you? Because I'd imagine, you know, since the time, since 2017, you've probably have had, you know, just about every major group in the country, you know, want a piece of reality for their own purpose to either, you know, say, you know, reality is here to fight for us, you know, or... reality is here and she's a traitor or a terrorist or something like that. So how does the book kind of help you uh reclaim kind of like your own identity of who Reality Winner is? Yeah, so for eight years now, my identity has been sort of limited by oh the media platform on like from which who's reporting from like it's either got to be I have to be summed up in two sentences. I have to be summed up in a 90 minute feature film. And, you know, none of that is at my discretion. I can choose to participate and I can choose to help them get it right. But at the end of the day, for eight years now, any impression of me has been limited and distorted by everybody else telling the story. And so for me, this was sort of a way to be self-indulgent, to write 350 pages of, you know, everything that shapes how I think and the life experiences that sort of put me in these positions. oh Like a lot of people are like, you're such a pacifist. How'd you join the Air Force? And it was like, well, I became a pacifist in the Air Force, but you can't find that in like a news article or stuff like that. And it was like the only way to find a long format. oh method to just tell people everything and whether people want to read it or not, whether they have the intention span to do it or not, whether it makes money or gets clicks or not. This is what I'm putting out there because it's been eight years and I haven't been in the driver's seat. That makes a lot of the sense to me why you'd want to do that and I would love to just give you a chance here like Who is reality winner you can you can just? Go on stream of conscience talk about conscious Conscious that's what stream of conscious talk about what's going on and who you are and what you feel like is misunderstood and we have questions of course and you can pause as we need but Tell us who's reality winner. Yeah, I I'm just like a quintessential American millennial. I mean, those are the three words I kind of think of because, oh know, everything before 9-11 is Pokemon, it's Britney Spears, it's, oh you know, whatever we went through in the 90s, just so much just like happiness and then uh 9-11 happened and all of a sudden the world is a really scary, threatening place. And for somebody who was like 11 years old with very politically minded parents, it's like it became something that I couldn't ignore. I couldn't ignore in school. I couldn't ignore at home. And even after it seemed like, you know, the schools had kind of moved on from it. my father never stopped talking about it. two years later, we had the war in Iraq and we had the wars in Afghanistan. for me, I had just always paid attention. I had always wanted to see what was going on outside of our borders. um And I had always wanted to be part of... the most important thing going on in the world at that time. And so because my life was so shaped or my impressions of the world were shaped by conflicts, my entire identity was based off of, how do I become a part of these conflicts? How do I ah be a force for good for the United States? I think that deep down inside, all I wanted to do was be part of the team that was preventing the next 9-11 because that was like, I guess in my like very small childhood mind would be like that was the only way I could fix my childhood was to prevent the next major um, act of violence. So it doesn't shape me again. But in all of that, it was just somebody who You know, I struggled with mental illness. know, like many young women, I had an eating disorder. I had a toxic first serious relationship. had... You know, and like so many girls, I just always feel like if you have a bad breakup, just start running, you know? And if you talk to women who run a lot, they went through something really hard and they started running half marathons and now they're running 50 miles a day. I mean, that's just what we do. And I just became part of that. became part of the yoga scene. I fell in love with Baltimore. And right around the years leading up to my arrest, began then to study social inequality and the justice system and racial inequality in this country in a way that oh at no point in my public education in Texas or my education in the US Air Force had ever supplied me. So for the very first time, I am getting a different point of view. I am looking at the parts of America that aren't necessarily worth protecting, the parts that are flawed and then beginning to understand, these things aren't flawed because they're broken, but they were designed to keep, you know, entire demographics in our country two steps behind the rest of us. And so understanding that right at the time that my prefrontal cortex was fully developing, you know, as I was approaching age 25, being shaken to the core about my identity as an American and questioning that even, I think that is another thing that kind of led me to then question all authority and kind of take the release of that document a lot less seriously than someone who just only drinks the Kool-Aid and has only seen the unquestionable allegiance to the United States. I love that. um And I want to dig more into your thoughts about the justice system, because you have a bit uh of a unique insight in the sense of you studied up on it, you became a part of it, and we're sort of like on the receiving end of our justice system, the prison system. So like, what about kind of like that experience uh changed or? um you know, maybe modified how you thought about like our prison and our justice system here in America. So I think that I had just understood that jails and prisons were an extension of plantation slavery, not in the labor that they're extracting, but in the consumerism that you cannot avoid in these systems. Phone calls cost $3 for 15 minutes. know, one company makes all the products that you use to shower. You know, they're making a profit even off of the tiny tubes of toothpaste that they give to the indigent inmates, right? Let alone the 300 % markups on the products that we are allowed to buy. And so it's like the housing of these bodies, I know that for a fact that county jail was receiving $72 per day just for my body to be in that system from the federal government. We're paying about $32,000 a year per federal inmate. And you know, the resources are not going to rehabilitating that inmate. They're not going to preventing further trauma on that inmate, certainly not going to preventing sexual abuse. uh And so by the time that we are out of the system, we are traumatized. We are on these probationary systems that only lead us going back into these jails. and just a constant reduction of our life and It's another way of preventing people from voting, but it's also prison gerrymandering where we are pulling citizens out of uh more densely populated areas like the inner cities and shipping them out to these rural communities. People are like, well, where else do they build a prison? Well, they're going to build them in rural white communities and kind of double the population of these counties of individuals who cannot vote while they are living there, but it's increasing that county's representation in Congress. And so when you understand that, it is just a continuation. It's like, how can we continue the Jim Crow era, but make it look like we're helping everybody? another thing that I had learned, like reading in prison, I read The Sum of Us by Heather McGee. And what my message is to white Americans, people who look like me, who are like, well, it doesn't affect me. You know, maybe people should stop committing crime. It's that when they affect these systems that they are using against vulnerable populations, especially black Americans and especially Native Americans, indigenous populations on reservations. They perfect them in such a way that they are going to then use them on us. So in that rural county in Georgia, it wasn't just like, only black women are being brought in. It was every poor woman, every woman with mental illness, every woman who was struggling with addiction, every woman who was beaten by her significant other. If the police go to the scene of a domestic assault or a domestic incident and the woman is hyped up, she gets arrested too, right? If she's like yelling like, he hit me, I'm going to hit him back or something like that. They're charged with terroristic threats. And then if you know anything about like inequality, like just like assuming the men get bonded out first. So the man beats his wife, the police go to the scene, the woman's hyped up, both are taken into custody. The man having better access to finances. or having his mommy in his life gets bonded out and then the woman's in jail six to eight weeks longer than him. And so this system is being used kind of equilaterally in rural communities. And it is a system that was perfected in the Jim Crow era against black women. And so like in The Sum of Us, Heather McGee is talking about how... things like healthcare and the justice system. Once it's perfected to oppress one group of people, it's going to be used to oppress everybody that corporations need to oppress. And so that's how I got wrapped up into it. That's why as a white woman, I had the same dirty drinking water, the same single cell that everybody else had. Because once you are deemed part of that powerless minority, once you become a target, in the same situation that everybody else is in. And so we should have been fighting for a more equal justice system so that all of us are treated to a gold standard when we are accused of a crime. Yeah, I totally agree that everyone should be treated according to the same standard when they're accused uh of a crime. em Absolutely. Would you say that, as we're digging, you've dug into this a lot more than I have and probably anyone in our audience. em I would love for you to go even deeper on the injustices that maybe you've seen. know you were alluding to that, but like people that you knew their story, you heard them, it was credible. And like this was this clear injustice where like say a woman, a black woman was treated in a clearly different way. like in your experience and what you've seen. I'd love for you to get even like more detail on that for us so we can wrap our minds around. Because the reason I'm asking is I can see all sorts of people trying, well, I don't know, maybe that was just one person or how is that really systemic or the kinds of things that come out. And I would just love for you to give even more of the case that it is systemic. that there are clear issues here that anyone could look at and say, yeah, that's a problem that we need to solve. Yeah, I mean, this is gonna I have a real concrete example and I'm going to go into that one second, but I am going to go into something really, really dark simply because it seems like we can't go a day without talking about the Epstein files and the fact that when we talk about sex offense crimes in the United States and I've seen it firsthand because the federal prison that I was at in Texas, because I dared choose a federal prison that was with 500 miles of my parents. The only one is called FMC Carswell and they are one of the only federal prisons for women that has a life connection program which is a faith based program that is primarily used to rehabilitate female sex offenders. And unlike the men's prisons we are not separated based on our charges. So I did you know four years primarily surrounded by sex offenders and I can tell you that it's a white crime. It is an overwhelmingly white crime and it's obviously overwhelming a white male crime which is why we don't see it oh as persecuted because these men are in positions of powers. They've sought out positions of powers to have access to children but when it comes to these federal prisons what I was seeing is that women accused of trafficking meth you know, three to one were sentenced to more years than women who are trafficking children. women who had abused their own children. These women have release dates and women who were accused of selling methamphetamines, even if they weren't caught with a single gram, are getting two to three times the number of years. um And so it kind of just has to go with who our society just deems better mothers or more sympathetic to. uh But drug assault crimes uh that are generally more relegated towards minorities ah do not receive the same amount of years as like white pedophiles do. Another example of an actual concrete sentencing disparity has to do with one of my dearest friends. She was committing like wire fraud from Georgia to Florida. And I think the total amount was $32,000. And they gave her like 13 years for this. And another woman that I did become close to, oh She embezzled like 2.3 million dollars out of a scam company and she only got seven years. And so it is kind of like I don't understand that maybe there's more to the case but we do not pursue financial crimes. in a way that's appropriate. I also don't think either of them should have been in prison because they didn't hurt anybody. And as long as you remove their access or ability to uh embezzle or commit wire fraud, they don't need to be incarcerated. And both women actually were then negatively impacted equally because they both had very severe life-threatening chronic illnesses. However, they were both determined security-wise to be deserving of a lower security, higher dignity, more privacy prison camp. Kind of like Jalane Maxwell is in, um Unfortunately, they said that because of their illnesses, they needed greater access to the medical staff, which were on the prison compound. So they did time with people like me, the worst of the worst, right, I committed espionage, the most dangerous woman in America right here. But they had to do their time with these sex offenders, with actual murderers, with people who were in the Aryan Brotherhood or Aryan Brotherhood adjacent, violent crimes, simply because... the prison felt like it would be more convenient for them to have access to the doctors on the compound than what their federal judge actually decided was their security level. So it kind of goes back to what I was saying where it's like, if we're okay with treating one woman in a dehumanizing way because of her skin color or because we just feel like having this really dehumanizing system because we're not worried about who winds up in it. Now we have every woman being subjected to kind of substandard inhumane treatment. Well, I want to shift gears just for a moment to talk about the Espionage Act because since 2017, there seems to have been a lot more public cases of individuals that have been found with top secret documents near Corvettes and ballrooms and bathrooms and what have you. I'd love for you just to kind of, one, just. tell me what you think about that. And then, what sort of reforms do you think are really kind of needed to make sure that, I don't know, there's more transparency, there's better security. I'm not even sure what the reforms would look like. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yeah, I thought Trump's indictment on the 31 or 33 documents was stunning. I thought that the prosecution went above and beyond in detailing each document and how it was a piece of national defense information because the statute under which we were charged did not say classified information. It just says national defense information. And the Espionage Act itself actually never follows up and provides a legal definition of that. So it's kind of like an eye of the beholder. You you can have a piece of paper that says where the troops are, and I can have a piece of paper that has an email password. And we can both be charged equally. oh And so when they indicted him, they made it pretty airtight on how these documents were related to national defense matters. And so that would have actually, if he had been convicted or if that had gone to trial. could have provided more limitations on the use of that particular statute in saying like only these types of documents or under this definition of national defense information, my clients, whatever leak is not the same. It would have really almost changed the way we use that law in the future. Also the power differential of charging former president with that, he probably would have been in a better position than any other defendant to question whether or not this is national defense information, to question whether or not it matters uh in terms of espionage if these documents had just gone from Air Force One or whatever plane he used to that bathroom in Mar-a-Lago. If nobody had seen it, Did espionage occur? Is this going to be willful retention and disclosure of national defense information? So he was in a really good position to set a lot of precedents, especially with uh Judge Cannon being so sympathetic to his case, where if he had pushed back and been allowed to push back in that court, I think it would have changed the law moving forward for whistleblowers and leakers alike. And then he could have actually forced the government, like the NSA, to prove how they know or if they knew foreign nationals had seen some of those documents. Like if a document was uh related to country X, do they have concrete evidence to prove that a foreign national from country X or country Y not only saw the information but benefited from it in a way that harmed our national security? And I think that in order for espionage to occur, there should be some negative effect of espionage documented. And I do think that if Trump had gone to trial for that, he could have been the first one ever charged under that law to force the government to disclose that information. So I was really, as somebody charged under what I believe to be an unjust law or an inappropriately used law, em I was really excited to kind of see. um what he and his legal team would be able to do against it, that would provide leakers and whistleblowers in the future more protections against it. Because ultimately that law is incredibly vague. It's almost too vague. There's no modifications to it. Like I said, there's no clause for intent. I always say like my attorney, within a week of meeting him, he kind of looked at me one day and said, you know, this would be easier if you had just killed somebody. Cause at least we could explain why you did it. There's more clauses or subtext for killing a person, right? Is it manslaughter, voluntary, involuntary, first degree, second degree, is it capital? Did you plan it out? Was it a crime of passion? You know what I mean? Like there is no espionage of passion clause. So like I said, I was just really interested in seeing if a defendant, Donald Trump, could actually force them to become a lot more specific with how they use the Espionage Act. Yeah, but there's like, it seems like, you know, Biden finds top secret documents in his garage, know, John Bolton recently, Pete Hegseth with, you know, boom emoji. Like, it does seem like there is a disproportionate level of, uh I don't know. of like justice being applied um to you and not like say your male counterparts that are doing something very adjacent to what you're doing. I'm wondering like if that's just the system, if that's just powerful people never get punished or what? Like, I just don't know. It's definitely the system. It's systemic. um You know, when a man does it, he's just doing it, right? Men don't necessarily have to explain their actions nearly as much as women. um But yeah, any other law like CASEL laws, self-defense laws, women technically don't like... They don't win. If somebody were to try to assault me and I had to use lethal force against them, that's just murder. know, men typically get to use self-defense or the furthest retreat clauses. And that is systemic. Yeah, I was definitely treated differently being one of the few women, if only accused of leaking under the Espionage Act. uh But powerful people typically don't get held account unless there's a political incentive for them to be held accountable. oh For me, particularly though, I am the world's dumbest criminal. I just blatantly did something. And I can never say like, well, I deserve to be innocent because so and so wasn't charged. If I wanted to be innocent, I shouldn't have walked out of there with that piece of paper. oh You know, it's always like, yeah, it is unfair. The deck was stacked against me. But at the end of the day, I did do the crime and I'm never going to deny that. Yeah, I mean, I admire that. And I think that's very honorable. um I do think, like, yeah, the questioning of this actual law. And it makes me wonder, is it the Espionage Act is intentionally left vague so it can be weaponized? Is that the case that you're making? that it's intentionally vague so it can be weaponized and so they don't want to actually separate things because that would actually give too many loopholes or too much, like it would take away power from the state. Is that what you're saying? It is and it has been proven by historians that the year it came out in 1917 that while it's very obvious during the context of World War I telling the Germans where our submarines are, like that's espionage, that's not good, don't get American soldiers killed, but domestically within the United States, it was used for people interfering with the draft because that was one of the very first times that the draft was instated and used to go fight kind of like a If you're like a World War I buff, it's like the United States involvement in that war was a little vague. It wasn't necessarily that the threat was coming to American soil. So a lot of Americans did not want to be drafted for World War I. And so people who were oh interfering with the draft process or who were trying to tell others like, not to go do not to go sign up for it. They were hit with the Espionage Act of 1917 the same way that individuals who were selling secrets to Germany were. sorry, Will, it's you. If you, I can keep going. Sorry, I totally forgot. Go ahead. Hey, I want to talk about something that we did talk about the last time you were on. But I think if we've got new listeners, really just think this is important. Your family was a big part of, I'm not really quite sure, your rock, maybe just your reality when you were in prison. I'd love for you to just talk a little bit more about how they played into just your mental health, well-being. Spend a little time talking about how awesome your mom is. I'm pretty sure if I were to rewind the tape, I'd ask, hey, if your mom is looking to adopt, I've got a mom. If you want a black brother, hey, we can do this. Talk about your family. Yeah, she'll have you in a heartbeat, but I cook a lot better than she does so oh I think the most important thing about my mom is, I don't know if it was just like a 90s thing, but nobody used the word resilient because she was just doing the thing, right? She didn't have time to describe herself. We didn't have time to describe her. She was doing everything. She was a child protective services investigator. oh She was the first person in her entire family to graduate from college. She came from a very poor family and she got out of there and came to Texas and obviously my dad is my biological father was very toxic and unique in his own way. But for her to go through with a divorce and stay working and completely move on and not let that derail her or her career and then to have another fulfilling marriage afterwards. And the fact that she was strong enough and intuitive enough to pick a stepfather for us, that would not just be another statistic of abuse. That just proves how intelligent and intuitive and strong-willed that she is. And she never had to say that's what she was doing. She never had to be like, I'm strong, I'm still going to work, I'm doing this. She just... did it and I think that the strongest women in the world are the ones that are just doing the thing and we learned from that like My sister has a child. We've thought about relationships and families and all like the soft happy things in life. But growing up my sister and I all we wanted to do was have meaningful careers. All we wanted to do was get educated to the furthest extent possible. And we wanted to have careers that left other people in a better place than before. And I think that that isn't something that was ever put into words. My mother will always say like she didn't know we were straight A students. Like she would sign the report cards, but she didn't realize like my sister was going to have a PhD by 27 or that my sister doesn't have any student debt, but she also didn't get any government financial aid. Right? Like she did that on her own. You know, my mom didn't know that I was going to be an intelligence analyst for the NSA, but we kind of just got that from her from osmosis to just go out and do things and kind of seek out these really difficult positions in career fields that aren't happy. You we didn't want to be happy, but like we wanted to, we wanted to be investigators. We wanted to be, you know, my sister got her first degree in forensic chemistry. So she wanted to be like a NCIS, like the people that are in the lab with the corpses and stuff like that. And for me, I went from wanting to be somebody interrogating terrorists, like trying to figure out why they did it oh to kind of trying to figure out a way to get these contracts overseas, to work humanitarian aid, to bring fresh water to children, to get children out of abusive environments, but also get them out of war zones. I think secretly I'd hope that that would kind of turn into like a war crimes investigation. I kind of wanted to work for the Hague someday. oh Like neither of us ever wanted happy careers. And I think part of that we just got oh by living with a woman who her entire life purpose was protecting children. I really think that's super inspiring. love hearing that actually it's motivating even just hearing it. I really appreciate you sharing it. You know, one of the things that's a lesson to me from your life is the importance of allowing... uh whistleblowers in the organizations. uh And even like we shouldn't like it's weird because it feels like to me we shouldn't even have to have laws that protect whistleblowers because we should have enough transparency and honesty and all that that we would talk through things in that there would be an open feedback loop for people to call things out. right? um I think that's one of the concerns I have with what's happening in the Republican Party and what's happened over last five years, 10 years really, um is that I felt like I was a Republican and voted Republican my whole life and then it kind of left me, the Republican Party. And I thought I was conservative and then all of a sudden I'm not all of a sudden because of, you know, I'm not all in omega. So it's like I've thought about that quite a bit and it's like, why would you, one of the worst things you could do is remove people that are going to ask hard questions and, you know, kind of like bring in criticism from the inside. that are committed to this overall mission, right? Like committed to the country, committed to like our culture, our nation to have a place. Like I feel very committed to that. And you were obviously committed to that. And yet we don't have like the apparatus or the tolerance or the accept. I don't know what it is culturally. Maybe we're too afraid to actually allow critical feedback to come. We stamp down the opposition within and then demonize the opposition without or outside. So it's like. What do you feel like is the importance of that kind of feedback loop and the kind of thing from which whistleblowing, I think, emerges is this sense that we should have people that are willing to speak out critically against the status quo. What are your thoughts on the importance of that right now in our time? Well, I'm just going to drop this here. It's a website whistlebloweraid.org. If you have critical information that you think will cost you your career or life to get out to the American people. go to them, they're not gonna ask for the information. They don't want your information, they are not journalists, they're not publishers. They are a legal team who will find a secure way to contact you and work with you before you make a leak, before you try to blow the whistle legally. And they're going to make sure that you have protections in the court of law and that you have an attorney by your side at day or night in case the feds roll up on you looking for documents like once upon a time happened to me. oh And they will kind of tell you like, okay, we don't want to know the information you had. oh How are you thinking of getting that information to the public? and then kind of walking them through well actually these are your legal options these are the safest options these are going to protect you these are going to protect your family ah if it's not top secret or national defense information that is illegal how do we put you in a position to make the this information known or brought forth to your supervisors in a way that you cannot legally be fired from your job for So I have like a good example. have somebody close to me that works for the FAA. And I don't know if y'all remember a few years ago, but some really big Boeings kind of fell out of the sky. And they said it was a software defect. And a lot of congressional hearings went through and Boeing swore that they were ready to use those planes again. And they weren't. And so this person that I know tried endlessly to make that known. Um, and then eventually sent a report to his Congressman and was, you know, he didn't break the law, but he was fired from the FAA for it, took them to court and said, I didn't actually violate any company policy. I didn't break the law. You can't fire me. It's like, you know, like they were embarrassed, like obviously those planes aren't safe and he embarrassed them. And so because he won the lawsuit, they had to take him back. He was only like two years away from retirement. So really kind of like it was a big personal deal that he wasn't trying to throw away his career by questioning their authority. When he got back to work, they showed him to a desk and there was no computer on the desk. And they said, clock in at nine, leave at five. This is your job. And it's just an empty desk. He's not allowed pencils, paper, anything that could have information on it. He just clocks in, sits at an empty desk, and collects a salary because they lost the lawsuit that said they couldn't fire him. so whistleblower aid. would probably be there to help him win the lawsuit to get his job back, right? Like, this is kind of like the most success that you could get, right? You got the information out and now you have your job. But when it comes to like our military members, people who are, you know, receiving verbal orders in privacy, like, hey, you're about to go onto the streets of DC, Portland, wherever you are, Chicago. um If you were receiving illegal orders, you should have a legal means to tell the American people we were just ordered to shoot civilians. And the way that in our country we have decided that people who question authority or who want to tell people that this is what's going on behind the scenes, I do think it's by design. I mean, we've always said this about World War II. The reason why the Nazis were so powerful as they were rising in the 1930s Germany was not because they used so much violence or they were just so big and strong themselves. It's that the majority of Germans were complicit and they didn't question it. Wow. Yeah, so I will make sure that that link and that website goes in our show notes because I think that that is really, really important, especially given the, I don't know, the scaling back of IGs and all the other stuff happening within this administration. I want to this is my last question, but I want to I want to know like what's what's next for Reality Winner? I mean, 10 years from now, you know, this book will be New York Times bestseller, right? Multiple times over, you'll be living the lap of luxury. What do you hope will be the outcome of this? If you are moving on, and you are moving on, what's sort of reality winner 2.0 or 3.0, whatever Virgin you're on now? Yeah, so my dream is to someday have a salary. Because of the plea deal, I am not making a single cent off of this book. And I am currently using my military benefits to go to college. I got into a veterinary technology program. I'm very interested, obviously, in rescuing dogs, but I also want to work in systems that can reduce stray dogs, especially in Texas. It is a huge problem. Down here, Um, so I wouldn't want to work in a clinic or animal control. like I said, my goal is to actually have a salary and not be at like the lowest taxable income bracket, which is where we're at right now. Um, not trying to bitch, but it's kind of hard. I do want to be in a position to buy my parents' house and we have some, you know, we have 10 acres. Um, I would like to start what we're going to call St. Rocco sanctuary for stray dogs because St. Rocco is the patron saint of stray dogs and it is, yeah, it's kind of my favorite. He's actually the patron saint of communicable disease and stray dogs. Yeah, yeah, two things that I really, really enjoy. um But yeah, so I definitely am looking for like a dog sanctuary, working and controlling animal populations, local government, know, something in my hometown that I see I wanna fix. I wanna start there. think one of the things that has been so toxic with the media environment is that we're always looking to Senate and Congress and president. I've never in my life imagined like the president of the United States is personally going to fix my problems. oh instead of looking to like, maybe my mayor and city council should provide better drinking water, right? I mean, we know everything is Obama's fault, right? He is the cause of the universe fracturing today. I'm kidding for anybody who doesn't understand sarcasm. oh But the United States was never designed to have a single president make or break the entire country. And I think that because of the media setting people's expectations and that it's been something they have been doing for 20 years now that probably even longer that we think our entire country is identified by one individual and that everything in my life depends on what that person in the White House is doing right. Biden was the reason why I couldn't afford eggs even though I don't even eat eggs. Things like that. It's just like. We weren't meant to be that way. And so my goal is to inspire more people to become active in local office and then maybe state Congress because the states are making laws that are causing more oppression than federal laws, especially when it comes to women's rights and abortions. The really insidious S H I T that's happening against us women is happening in individual states. um So I definitely plan on being more involved in the government of Texas and trying to turn Texas blue because I don't know if you've heard, but we are a blue state. We are just gerrymandered to hell and back to where, you know, the 65, 75 % of us that believe in human rights and healthcare are not represented at the ballot. um So, you know, wherever I'm going to be, I'm going to have too many dogs to handle and too many thoughts to handle. I hear that, I hear that. Thank you so much, Reality, for coming on the show, spending some time with us, sharing your insights, sharing your life. Man, it's been a challenging and a really insightful and enjoyable conversation. Thanks for doing that. Thank you so much. These always wind up being my favorite interviews. Yeah, we just love it. you know, it's amazing to see someone who is almost like a phoenix, you know, coming up from the fire kind of vibes, know, like having life. mean, I can't imagine something worse, except maybe, you know, being a prisoner of war or dying than having to go and face what you faced. And I'm just sorry that happened. am. I'm glad to see that you are making progress, although I know it's really hard right now. Is there any way that people can support you? Is there any legal way that they can support you right now that you would want to put out there or a way they can follow you? I mean, I know you've talked about what you're going to be doing, but how can people support you in a legal way that... You know, obviously we're, the only reason I say this, with all these NDAs and everything, I don't know what is good and bad. So I just, what, how can people support what you're Yeah, so people can support me by spaying and neutering their animals. uh And I do. work with a rescue called Kingsville Animal Advocates. We are a nonprofit um and we do have dogs that can be adopted. We do accept donations and those donations go directly to the dogs. They're probably going to go to other fosters. I've always been really proud of taking care of my own fosters like food and um you know supplies that they need but we do have a lot of medical needs. We do pick up dogs with medical emergencies but other than that Find causes that you really believe in and never shut up about the genocide in Congo and Gaza There's multiple things happening in the world and we can't be quiet about any of it Yes, I hear you. Thank you for saying that. Well, really, thank you again for coming on and spending some time with us. Again, we really appreciate it. Absolutely. And to our viewers and our listeners, guys, thanks for joining us for another episode of Faithful Politics Podcast. Make sure you like, subscribe, do the things that hacks the algorithm, gets this stuff out there, because we want to give you thoughtful content. You don't have to believe everything you hear. That's not what we expect or want. We want you to engage it, but do it in a critical way. um Don't just be emotional. Anyway, I just felt like I had to say that. Anyway, guys, until next time, keep your conversations not right or left, but up. God bless.