#0011 Mike Benz

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience number 2272 with guest Mike Benz.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is a show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan is one of the most listened-to people on the planet whose interviews and opinions influence millions.

He's regularly criticized for his views, often by people who have never actually listened to Rogan.

So we listen and where needed, try to correct the record.

It's a show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well as anyone who just wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence.

I'm Cecil Cicarello, and I'm joined by Michael Marshall.

And today, we're going to be covering Joe's February 2025 interview with Mike Benz.

Marsh, how did Joe introduce Mike in the show notes?

So according to Joel, Mike Benz is a former official with the U.S.

Department of State and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, a free speech watchdog organization dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open internet.

Almost feels like that type of foundation would be something that would play an infomercial very late at night on your television.

Is there anything else that we should know about?

Yeah, we should know what he might mean by a free and open internet because according to NBC News, Mike Benz also has a secret history as an alt-right persona who interacted with white nationalists online and posted videos espousing racist conspiracy theories like the great replacement theory.

He went by the pseudonym Frame Game and Benz claimed to be a white identitarian who rallied against the idea of diversity, made montages urging white viewers to unite under the banner of race, blamed Jews for controlling the media and a bunch of other stuff too.

He actually admitted that he ran this account.

So this isn't just speculation linking him to it, but he claimed his account was a covert effort intended to combat anti-Semitism.

He wrote, quote, the account in question was a project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews.

Let me be clear, I am extremely proud of this, unquote.

Okay.

All right.

Well, that's

a lot to take in, but let's focus on this episode.

What did they talk about?

So they talked about USAID.

They talked about the CIA, NATO, investigative journalism, opium, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Romania, Poland, feminism, classical music, rap, rock, gangster rap, Jew and Leper being a NATO asset, Taylor Swift being a Pentagon influencer, Pussy Riot being a tool of the CIA, and a load of other things you can find if you just pull up Mike Benz's Twitter page real quick and do some searching for some keywords.

All right.

Well, looks like we got a lot to get into, but before we go to our main event, we want to say thank you to our Area 51 all-access pass patrons, Stone Banana, Laura Williams, definitely not an AI overlord, Chonky Cat in Chicago eats the rich, am I a robot?

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Fred R.

Gruthius and Martin Fidel.

They all subscribed at patreon.com slash no Rogan, and you can too.

All patrons get an early access episodes and a special patron-only bonus segment each week and this week we're going to talk about rudy giuliani dua lipa and how music penetrates so you can check that out at uh patreon.com slash no rogan but for now our main event

huge thank you to this week's veteran voice of the podcast that was a girl named al announcing our main event.

Remember that you can too be on the show by sending a recording of you giving us your best rendition of it's time.

Send that to noroganpod at gmail.com.

That's a K-N-O-W, noRoganpod at gmail.com.

As well as how you'd like to be credited, I will say as someone who edits it, loud is better than soft.

So if you're going to send it in, loud is way better than soft.

You're talking over music.

So if you sent in one with you whispering, it may not get used.

I'm sorry.

There's no way to use a whisperer over that.

I can't make your whisper louder.

You have to yell it.

So please yell your it's times to us.

And we, and we'd love to get yours.

So please send them in.

Marsh, before we get into this episode, I did want to talk really quickly about the tone of this episode in comparison to the Brett Weinstein episode.

Now, in this episode, we're going to be covering a lot of what USAID did and a lot of money that USAID used.

And also, they will be linked when there's no link whatsoever.

So he will be talking about USAID and there won't be any link at all to USAID.

He'll be talking about Pentagon money and other things, et cetera.

Yeah, State Department, a lot of stuff like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he's conflating a lot of different money in the government, which is what Joe was doing in the other episode that we talked to when we covered Brett Weinstein.

Now, I want to say this is a totally different tone because in the Brett Weinstein episode, they were talking and hand-waving about frivolous spending.

So there was a lot about, oh my gosh, what are we doing?

This is the, you know, we're talking about giving Sesame Street to kids who live under the Islamic State.

They were making fun of them in a way to say like, this money is wasted money.

It's frivolous spending.

But in this case,

this is very nefariously spent money.

Yeah, that's the allegations here.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

So his allegation is totally different than

Brett's when he was on the show.

His show, his was, oh, it's just, it's just a wasted money.

But in this case, that money is actually spent in a totally different way and i know that they are talking in some in some cases and often about different types of projects and where that different money went but i think the tone is important to point out here that throughout this whole episode he's not talking about it being a waste yeah no i think that's fair and i think the thing with the brett weinstein uh episode was very much that they were reporting on stuff they'd seen that was coming out of elon musk's work and various other bits and bobs so they were reporting sort of secondhand in this episode michael claimed to be the firsthand source who's figured out how the real, as he puts it, dirty tricks are being done by the US government and done through USAID in particular.

So he's claiming to have the inside scoop and he's claiming to have the receipts.

So we'll spend a lot of this episode with him bringing up the quote-unquote receipts onto the screen and then talking about direct screenshots of documents and things like that.

All right, so we're starting out with the first clip, and this is about an organization called OCCRP.

There's a group called the OCCRP which you can think of as the Corruption Reporting Project.

This is a group that half of its funding comes from USAID and the U.S.

State Department.

OCCRP has to

the USAID and the State Department have a veto right over the staff that it can hire.

This is the largest consortium of investigative journalists on planet Earth.

This is the group that broke the Panama Papers, you know, that got all these hacked documents.

They got special access to it.

I don't have any facts on this.

I'm simply noting that it's an oddity that

a group funded by a major CIA funding conduit, USAID, while the CIA has the ability to hack any target around the world that's authorized by the National Security Council.

They're getting these special access documents that are reportedly either hacked or leaked, and they're being sponsored by

the group that's connected to something with a hacking power.

But I don't know that for a fact.

I'm simply noting that for investigative purposes, for oversight bodies who may want to ask questions.

So I think there's so much to unpack here that I thought this was really valuable for us to begin with.

Because he's talking about the OCCRP, which is the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which is an international collaboration of journalists who specialize in investigative journalism looking at things like corruption.

Okay, so that's what he's taking a shot at here.

And when he says half of its funding comes from USAID and the US State Department, well, he's got that claim from a website called Media Part.

And that's a, that, this MediaPart website has an article written by somebody who's pointing out all these different issues with UCCRP, OCCRP, and you can't trust them.

What he's not disclosing is that the person who wrote that article was previously a paid contractor with OCCRP who left acrimoniously.

So this is someone who's got a beef with a former employer, essentially.

And when all these allegations, which is what Mike Benz is recounting here, when they were put out, OCCRP actually responded to that media part article to make it very clear that when it came to funding, for example, OCCRP has a lot, it says here, there's a direct quote from their response.

OCCRP has a long history of holding power to account and insisting on transparency, even in difficult circumstances.

And they say, we've always been open about our funders.

We list them on our website, in our published audits, in our annual reports for the past 17 years, and in our IRS 990 forms, which all US-based nonprofits are required to file.

All of these documents are publicly available.

So, Mike is talking here like he's managed to root out some dirty tricks, money that's been going on, and to doing some dirty stuff, bad things all around the world, but he hasn't rooted anything out here.

Media Part have published something, and what they've published is based on the fact that

the funding is completely transparent here.

I did look into the funding.

The annual budget of the OCCRP is $22 million.

With that budget of $22 million, they've contributed to the seizure of $10 billion dollars in corrupt assets around the world which you know it's even said in this interview is a pretty good return on investment and it is if what you're doing is seizing is is helping authorities seize money that has been laundered or corruptly stolen and you're able to kind of push back against that that seems like a pretty good use of 22 million dollars or 11 million dollars of u.s funding it doesn't seem like uh an outrageous kind of uh spend here i don't think and i think too i want to point out you're absolutely right in the in the episode they pointed out, but it almost feels like they're saying, wow, isn't that a good return on investment?

Almost like, it's almost like I got you.

And I was like, wait, what are you talking about?

It feels like actually, I don't understand why you're making it seem like that's a bad thing.

I think what they're trying to allege is this is the U.S.

like illegally or very dodgily acquiring this money, acquiring $10 billion.

But this is very specifically, you are funding investigative journalists to go after criminals.

And when you find that they've done crimes and they get convicted of those crimes, their assets get seized.

So this isn't on nothing at all.

This is, you did actually find something.

And so he also makes the allegation that USAID and the State Department have a veto right over the staff that OCCRP can hire.

So it's saying this is clearly just a proxy of USAID, a proxy of the State Department, a proxy even of the CIA, as Mike Benz will kind of come to.

This makes it sound like it's a dirty tricks campaign in other countries.

Except that isn't true because OCCRP retains full control over all editorial staffing decisions and the hiring and firing of all staff is entirely independent of donors without exception.

That is very clearly stated.

And you can actually just read the financial report of this organization.

It's on their website.

I did that this morning.

The US government does indeed give OCCRP $11 million, which is half of its budget for the year.

So they're not lying about that.

But the split there,

that $11 million is split between USAID and the U.S.

state, the U.S.

Department of State.

So they don't say what percentage splits.

When he says he's talking about like half the funding coming from USAID, we don't actually know what percentage breakdown there is.

It's certainly not all just coming from USAID.

There's no way that could possibly be true.

But the funding in those documents is listed very specifically as a donation without restrictions.

It means it's not subject to any clauses, like, for example, the editorial sign-off by the funder.

The OCCRP are even transparent about having a clause in their contract that stipulates, if you give us money, you have no rights to any editorial input at all.

And if they, when they publish articles that involve, that are in the same areas, the same jurisdictions as people who given them money, they put on the article that the article was produced in part with funding from organizations in that area to be transparent.

So this is all kind of rumor mongering and trying to sort of point fingers here.

And then there's another interesting thing that he does because he dances around suggestions.

He says, oh, here it is this kind of this USAID-funded organization that's, you know, a group funded by a major CIA kind of funding conduit.

Well, you haven't proven that USAID is a CIA funding conduit at all.

But what he's sort of saying is, isn't it weird that this organization keeps getting access to leaked documents when they're so aligned with the CIA, who've got all these amazing hackers?

I'm not saying that they did it.

I'm not saying proof.

I'm just saying that there's something weird there.

But this is absolutely just rumor mongering.

This is just trying to sort of like, you know, just asking questions this.

One of the projects that they worked on was the Panama Papers.

Now, the Panama Papers, OCCRP, were working on and there absolutely was a leak, but it wasn't leaked to the OCCRP.

It was leaked to the German newspaper, so Deutsche Zeitung.

And it was only when they realized they had such a massive amount of information that that newspaper couldn't handle it alone, they shared it with journalists from 107 media organizations across 80 countries, one of which was the OCCRP.

So like sometimes leaked documents are going to make their way into the hands of investigative journalists.

That isn't a sign that the CIA is hacking people on behalf of those investigative journalists at all.

But Mike Benz needs to paint this as dirty tricks.

And if you wonder why he's got a motivation to paint this all as dirty tricks, well, it's worth noting, even with just the Panama papers, One of the key names that was exposed in that investigation as having vast undisclosed wealth was Vladimir Putin.

So that's the type of person we're talking about that the OCCRP will go after.

And we'll actually come to more of their cases in a moment, too.

Yeah, and I think that's a really important piece to point out, is that throughout this, I want you to pay attention to how he paints the United States, how he paints our foreign, foreign interests

and how we're dealing with soft power, et cetera, and then what that soft power is going against, right?

So, pay attention throughout this entire episode and listen to the entire Mike Benz episode if you want to push yourself through that and listen to every single time.

I will point, you know, it's going to be easy to point out that it's that there is a twist here.

And the twist here is that Russia is a good thing doing good things and if russia is getting power we shouldn't be out there trying to stifle that power in any way and so this is this is statecraft between two different two different uh you know large countries two of the largest countries in the world and there's there's two guys monday morning quarterbacking that on joe's show there absolutely is but also if if that is what's happening here statecraft with with someone monday morning quarterbacking it sort of feels like he's supporting a particular side he definitely is wearing one jersey over another, Marsh.

That is absolutely true.

You know, and also just pay attention to how he prefaced this, right?

I don't have any facts on this.

I don't know the facts on this, but yet he's able to, you know, push pens and photos, draw some yarn between the CIA and this.

He doesn't have any facts.

I'm just telling the people who might be able to ask these really hard questions what you should be looking for is what he asked.

That's how he frames it.

But if you don't have any facts, you don't have a lot to say.

Yeah.

And the problem, one of the issues here is if he doesn't have those facts and he is just pushing people to ask the kind of questions that he once asked, it's worth understanding that one of the reasons that Elon Musk's department went after USAID, in part, was work that someone like Mike Benz has been doing in alleging this stuff previously.

And we'll come to that too.

All right.

So we got a couple of pieces here again on OCRP.

So this is another bit.

They're continuing the conversation.

They've won hundreds of awards.

Their name has been so pristine for so long.

They've been around for almost 20 years.

And they were sponsored in order to do, they do investigative hit piece journalism about corruption.

And what they do is they go after all of the State Department and USAID and DOD's opponents in the region.

So for example, Jamie, I texted you this beforehand, but if the first thing you want to put on screen are the first two images that I texted you.

This is from the USAID.gov website.

And I think this will shock people

when they see this

with the USAID.gov URL right there.

And so that you can see how yeah so if you go if you go to the the the first page that i texted that i texted you and then we'll we'll we'll get to this one this is the first thing you said okay i'm sorry the second one then yeah okay so here it is this is usaid's strengthening transparency and accountability through investigative reporting program okay

what you'll see here is you'll see the life of the activity this fund is they are still being funded through this grant and this is for europe and eurasia and you'll see the countries eastern partnership armenia belarus georgia moldova ukraine and western balkans if you scroll down you'll see usa spending us aid spending USAID funding is $20 million.

$20 million

that our taxpayers paid to every ⁇ listen, they don't report on kittens being saved from falling out of trees.

Everything they do is a hit piece about an instance of corruption that can be used by prosecutors in the area to arrest the political opponents of the State Department.

I know you have a lot to say about this, Marsh, but I want to jump in before you do and say.

If you listen to this episode, it is 45 minutes of Mike Benz trying to talk Jamie into how to land a plane.

That is really what it is.

It's 45 minutes of, no, scroll up, scroll up, no, no, scroll down.

No, this, no, I need you to go to my Twitter feed.

Okay, now you just type in Google, use Boolean, and it's just like on and on and on, and it's constant throughout the entire episode.

I, man, he could use an editor.

That's all I'm saying.

Well, he could, but also they could use a pre-production conversation because what this kind of really shows is that Mike Benz has been invited to come on the shore and just do anything he wants on the shore.

There is no editorial standards here.

This is just come on and talk me through your Twitter feed, and he can make any claims that he likes.

He hasn't said up front anything about the stuff he's going to touch on.

So, Jamie's having to sort of do this on the fly.

And I also want to just point out, real quick, he says, you know, you can go to the archive.com link for the USA.gov website.

And I just want to ask, why can't I go to the usa.gov website?

Why can't I go there and look these things up?

Why are all these things taken down?

And it's because they cut that department by 99%.

Yeah.

And

in the name of transparency, in the name of transparency, we now can't go to the website to check if what Mike Benz has said is true.

It's true.

And notice, so what he's saying here, he's saying this is hit piece journalism.

Now, I think that's a really interesting kind of thing.

He's saying, you know, this is all just hit piece journalism.

First of all, I'd like to know what he thinks the difference is between investigative journalism and hit piece journalism.

And also what he thinks is the difference between hit piece journalism and what he's doing right now, which to me seems very much like hit piece journalism.

I'm going to find some things that I can allege of facts and then I'm going to paint them in the worst possible light.

This is, in my opinion, an excellent example of what hit piece journalism looks like from Mike Benny.

You got to take his word for it.

You're right.

And is the only thing they're doing is what he calls quote unquote hit pieces.

You know, perhaps it's true that they are doing, you know, what he's saying is they're going after very certain people, very pointed investigations at very certain people.

But it's also true that

they're also doing some of the things that this link that he suggests, and I'll put the link in the show notes to this, strengthening transparency and accounts through investigative reporting program that he mentions.

We will put a link in the show notes, but they say, you know, these things that they do include addressing malign influence, revitalizing support for democracy, human rights, and inclusive development, and fighting corruption as an entry point for malign influence, a barrier to U.S.

investment, and a corrosive societal force.

So there's a ton of stuff that they do.

They list it all on

this particular website that it's actually a PDF that he has suggested.

So, you know, you can go read it for yourself.

Do I think that all the time the United States is

some sort of angel actor out there?

Absolutely not.

I don't think that that's the case at all.

But listen to how he paints every single U.S.

interest thing here.

And you can tell that there's got to be something else that he's sort of pushing for.

One of the things that's listed as what they're trying to do is to support a free press in other countries.

But isn't that what Mike Benz, the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and Free Speech Watchdog?

Isn't that what he's meant to care about, the free press?

That's what this OCCRP and the STARE program are meant to be funding.

He should be at the very least interested in those goals and questioning where those goals were taking place.

But he seems to be counter those very goals at all.

Yeah.

And it also seems to suggest that the people that are prosecuted or have their fines levied against them or are fired are innocent and they're just victims of the United States government, right?

Like that's, he keeps on framing it like that.

Yeah, exactly.

He says specifically, quote, everything they do is a hit piece about an instance of corruption, unquote.

But corruption's a crime.

Does he think that other countries should just allow corruption?

And also, bear in mind, isn't corruption by the government meant to be the reason he's here?

That he and Joe thinks USAID is government corruption.

So is he thinking that what he's doing is just hit piece journalism about an instance of corruption?

No, he thinks corruption is bad and that's why he's here.

But it's not bad when it's someone else who's rooting it out.

Yeah.

And, you know, you got to pay attention too that this is not the United States trying these people.

These are done in their own countries, right?

So this is a, you know, quote unquote hit piece piece of journalism.

tried by that country's own standards.

So, you know, it's often the United States will act as a sort of moral arbiter for other places on the world.

We'll look at another place and be like, like, that's a horrible thing you're doing.

And then we'll make a decision on how to handle that, whether it's sanctions or sometimes just directly invading people.

You know how things work.

You know how the United States

work, Marsh.

You know how we're playing play.

I've seen it in play.

You've seen it in play.

But, you know, like, so there is some, some, some thought to, oh, well, are they just treating everyone else as like, you know, this moral relativist, you know, how should we treat these little countries that are doing things that we might not think that we might think are corrupt here, but might not, might be just sort of how it works there.

No, these are these countries acting within their own laws, reporting in their own countries, and then prosecuting these people under those own laws.

So it's not like we're coming in and saying this needs to happen this way.

And we will come to more examples of what they've done, but it's especially in countries where there may not be

a good funding for a free press, places like the OCCRP will help journalists, help journalists investigate stories.

So people, so journalists in different places will come to the OCCRP and also help journalists stand stand up to legal threats designed to try and silence their stories, which again should be the kind of thing that Mike Benz and Joe should be all in favor of.

We're still working on the OCCRP here, so this is another clip about that.

Now, it goes on to say 21 resignations and sackings, including of a president and prime minister.

Now, the head of OCCRP in this documentary openly says that their reporting caused, I think it was five or six different governments to topple and turn over and be transitioned.

Proudly.

So this is state-sponsored media hit pieces so that prosecutors can arrest presidents and prime ministers to regime change their government and install a more pro-U.S.

political vassal figure in the region.

And then the last one is 456 arrests and indictments.

And this, again, is listed as a U.S.

aid achievement.

We don't know what these people did.

We don't know

whether they're guilty or innocent or whether or not these were political prosecutions like you see right now with the New York District Attorney's Offices, which is a whole nother USAID-connected can of worms.

But these are state-sponsored hit pieces for hire in order to

give the justice departments, the prosecutors in a region, the ammunition to arrest the enemies of the state.

The prosecutors don't have the capacity to do a whole investigative journalism dig.

They might not have access to hacked documents that, for example, the CIA, the NSA, or deeply connected political insiders might be able to give to a group like OCCRP.

And again, you have not proven that the CIA or the NSA has given those hacked documents to the OCCRP.

And the OCCRP are pretty clear that where those documents often come from.

But what's interesting, right back at the start here, he says, you know, the head of the

OCCRP is he openly says that they're reporting caused these things as if the editor has been called admitting something shady.

But to be clear, those numbers, about like 456 arrests or whatever, those numbers are listed in the annual impact report that the OCCRP publish to their website every year.

This is them saying,

what have you been doing all week?

Essentially, this is them answering that question, which they do all the time.

Email.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's full transparency.

And so he says, you know, all these different arrests, we don't know what they did.

Okay, but should you therefore assume it's nothing?

If you don't know, do you assume it's therefore innocent?

Because maybe what you could do is read some of the journalism.

Because this isn't the OCCRP, isn't a prosecution wing.

It's not rogue prosecutors around the world.

These are journalists.

And what journalists tend to do is publish what they find.

So you can actually go away and see what kind of stories were actually produced in partnership with the occcrp so from the occcrp's annual report swiss prosecute here's a few examples swiss prosecutors charged gulnara karimova the daughter of uzbekistan's former president with running an international crime syndicate that laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes the authorities seized assets worth 857 million dollars occcrp revealed karimova's corrupt business practices and money laundering activities in several investigations Feels like she did a crime there.

It feels like they've uncovered a crime.

Here's another one.

Austria's Green Party called for a special investigative authority after the Rottenberg files showed that a chalet was financed by a Cypriot company, clearly traceable to the sanctioned oligarch Arkady Rottenberg.

So here's someone undergoing sanctions who owns property in that country that they're not allowed to do.

This is a crime, and it was investigated as such.

Here's another one.

The OCCRP say, our 2020 stories about the massive offshore wealth of Lebanon's central bank governor Riyadh Salameh continues to see results, including official investigations across Europe and asset seizure.

In 2023, the US, Canada, and the UK all imposed sanctions on Salameh and three of his associates for embezzling $300 million from the central bank during his tenure.

Embezzlement is a crime, especially at that level.

So these seem like very worthwhile things.

I'll give you a few more because I think it's really important.

I'm very passionate about investigative journalism.

I think it's one of the most important forms of the free press that we have.

So here's from the first page of just the current news on the OCCRP's website under elections.

Those are just the first ones where they've been involved in exposing corruption in elections.

So here's one.

Peru's Congress accepts corruption charges against President Pedro Castillo.

Accordingly, prosecutors, Castile headed a corruption ring in the Ministry of Transport and Communications, together with former Minister Juan Silva Villagas, as well as with other other officials and businessmen to favor the bids of the Puente Torata Consortium and other companies when awarding contracts for public works.

As part of the investigation, Peruvian authorities arrested five former Castillo advisors and raided the house of his mother and sister.

We can look to Africa.

Congo opens trial against former presidential advisor Shimanga.

Former special advisor to the Congolese president Vidya Shimanga facing charges of passive corruption and influence peddling.

He resigned on September 16th after a tape released and analyzed by all CCRP showed him negotiating a corrupt mining deal.

And finally,

from just literally from the first page of their stories on under election fraud, ex-FIFA executive Jack Warner financed election engineering campaign in Trinidad.

Disgraced former FIFA vice president Jack Warner personally funded an ethnically divisive disinformation campaign in Trinidad and Tobago, designed by an election engineering firm to discourage black Trinidadians from voting.

Marsh, you read this laundry list off of all these different things that they're doing.

And I come from a state in the United States where our government for many, many years, when you were governor, After you were governor, most of the times there would, instead of like a limo to take you away after you stepped down, there would be a police car to take you to the prison for several years.

A couple of our governors, high-ranking officials in our state, kickbacks, money.

The governor, the previous governor, tried to sell Barack Obama's seat on the Senate after he had stepped in.

Not if you watched the Joe Rogan interview with him.

He didn't do that.

I will say he's been pardoned for that, but he went to prison for that.

And sometimes it's not actually like...

prosecutors that are breaking this case.

It's people who are doing investigative journalism who break this case and who wind up, you know, and then the people who are prosecutors see, oh my gosh, this is happening.

And then they have, you you know, ways in which to go get more evidence and subpoena things and get and you know, lay it all bare.

What I don't want is to live in a, in a, in a state where my money goes to paying for something that it shouldn't, kickbacks when they shouldn't be.

I don't want anybody in my government getting enriched off of me, right?

I don't want that to happen.

And I know other people in the world feel the exact same way.

What I think is happening here, and you can tell by this throwaway line that I'm going to read, I'm going to reread what he said Cause he says, we don't know whether they're guilty or innocent, whether these are political prosecutions like you can see right now in New York, district attorney offices, which is a whole other can of USAID worms, right?

So he says that, but I think this is a hat tip to the things that happened in New York with Trump.

Trump was tried in a state court for a, he went to a civil trial and he went to

an actual state trial, trial very specifically for corruption things that he was doing that was corruption and part of me wonders maybe they're hand-waving away all this corruption to show well it wasn't true against trump either it wasn't true against the guy that we like and that's in office now and that's why we're trying to hand wave corruption away all across the globe Yeah, yeah, I think so completely.

And again, what he's trying to do is conflate the investigations that uncovered wrongdoing with the political trials of these people.

The OCCRP does not hire prosecutors and judges.

It just hires journalists.

So if these weren't crimes, the people would not have been found guilty for them in those jurisdictions.

So now we're going to shift our discussion here to talk a little bit about Romania.

But what is actually the most important strategic objective for the military?

It's actually not a military one.

It's a civil one.

See, there's an election going on in Romania right now.

You may have heard about this, the canceled election in Romania with Georgescu, this right-wing populist figure who has pledged neutrality in the war.

He doesn't want to antagonize America, but he doesn't want to kill the Russians.

He wants to basically back NATO off, and he doesn't want to allow this military base to be made.

Well, that is a civil decision by the elected government of Romania, decided by the hearts and minds of the voters of the Romanian people.

But that civil action will either, in NATO's eyes, win the war or lose the war.

So the problem is, is it would kind of be something of a diplomatic incident, shall we say, if NATO rolled in and did

Slobodan Milosevic-style

strifing of airstripes against the Romanian parliament building and

rolled into the capital with tanks and troops just because

the president was responding to the Democratic will of the people.

So you need another mechanism to influence these civil affairs.

Enter civil military.

This is where you get U.S.

aid in this, as well as U.S.

aid for psychological operations.

So if you were to listen to this story, what you would take away is that Romania were about to elect a guy who was anti-NATO and NATO got scared.

So they used USAID to cancel a Romanian election because they knew that the war in the Russia's war on Ukraine would be won or lost based on what this guy did.

And he was the will of the people.

That's what you would take away.

That is not at all what happened in the Romanian elections.

On the 6th of December, the 2024 presidential election in Romania was annulled by the constitutional court of romania not by nato not by usaid but romania's constitutional court 48 hours before the second round of balloting was going to be held and the reason they did that is because colleen georgescu who he's talking about here as the guy who just didn't want to kill russians he was he was um taking a shock lead in the first round with 23 and the reason that was a shock lead is that prior to the election he's like an independent candidate prior to the election he was polling at five percent so this guy came absolutely out of nowhere to be the number one candidate after the first round of ballots.

And that seemed to be an issue.

So, they paused the nulled the election pending further inquiry.

Now, it wasn't cancelled at all because he, quote, didn't want to kill Russians.

That is not at all what was cancelled for.

It was cancelled because they suspected Russian intervention in trying to install him as leader, partly because he didn't want to kill Russians.

That's part of why Russia didn't want to install him as leader because he was anti-NATO.

He was pro-Putin.

And CSAT, the CSAT, the Supreme Council of National Defense in Romania,

they are responsible for the country's defense and national security.

They said that his campaign was identical to the online campaign launched by Russia before its invasion of Ukraine.

And that's what led to the cancellation of his candidacy at that point.

And by identical, I mean like Romanian, like they declassified intelligence documents that showed a mass TikTok campaign that that was there to swing votes to Georgescu.

And it was organized via Telegram and Discord channels through a network of 25,000 paid posters.

And let me add to that.

This is from an AP article.

An analysis of documents revealed that presidential candidate benefited from massive exposure due to preferential treatment granted by the TikTok platform.

And earlier this week, Romania's National Audiovisual Council asked the European Commission to investigate TikTok's role in the November 24 vote.

He said that

they would request TikTok suspension in Romania if investigations find evidence of manipulation of electoral process.

And

like Marsh says, there's just an intense, you could see that the way that they were saying it was like there was hundreds of thousands of these being sort of pressed into people's algorithms very specifically at a very certain time.

You also have to bear in mind that Romania is a former Soviet state that borders Ukraine on the opposite side to Russia.

So installing a pro-Russia leader in Romania would be massively in Putin's favor and is definitely one of his strategic goals.

Like it would potentially cause

Ukraine's defense against Russia to collapse because they would have a Russian ally on the opposite side of their borders.

And, you know, this might seem like to some like a military coup, that the Defense Council has cancelled an election.

And it would have drawn very serious international attention and potentially even intervention, except the replacement election has already been announced for May.

So they've already said, well, we're just going to pause it for this amount, but we're going to announce a new election at this time.

So any international intervention would have been to try and force a second election, but that second election is already slated for May.

And so far, it's not even clear whether Georgescu is going to be allowed to run again because of the intelligence that he's being propped up by hostile foreign powers.

But he seems to think that he can run again.

And that might have something to do with the pressure that's currently being applied to the Romanian government by the Trump administration and its essential proxy, Elon Musk, who is also trying to tweet about how this guy should be allowed to run again.

Yeah.

It sounds, and also, you know, when we think about this in a larger lens, it sounds like Russia is doing a lot of the things that Mike is accusing USAID of, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, they're meddling in all these elections.

You're like, wait a minute, hold on a second.

Let's take a look behind the scenes and see what's happening.

Yeah, but it's only a problem if he can say that it's the U.S.

doing it and not anybody else.

And we're going to shift our focus here just to talk a little bit about Poland.

And I'm just going to share something because it's now in the news.

Elon Musk this week

tweeted out about a horrible situation where someone from the PIS, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, I believe is now facing arrest for clicking the like button on a social media post.

Jesus.

And

what was the post?

I don't actually know what the post was.

Admittedly, one of the funniest things I've ever heard Joe say.

Now, that's not, it's not a very funny thing, to be honest with you, but it's the funniest thing I've ever heard Joe say.

Yeah, and also ironically, the post was way worse than somebody can get it put up as well, or arguably way, way worse.

So yeah, like if I was going to raise this on Joe Roganshaw, first of all, I didn't more than just browse Elon's Twitter feed.

So the second Joe asks, oh, what was it?

Because that's Joe asks, fair play to Joe, he asks a crucial question here.

All he did was like a post.

What was the post?

Is exactly the question to be asking.

And we have here, Mike Benz does not know what the post is or says he doesn't know at all.

I think that's kind of very, very, uh, very indicative of his approach.

It's funny too, because he spends the whole time talking about his Twitter feed.

I don't know why he doesn't memorize Elon's feed, uh, but any good, and and this is a perfect opportunity to direct Jamie, land, Jamie, land this plane, let's find the post.

You could have done that, he did that for half the show for his tweets, so he could have done it for this one.

He very specifically chose not to.

Marsh will illuminate why in a second, but I will point out very specifically: if I was going to mention this on a show, I would mention what the post is.

That feels super relevant.

So what's the story here?

Well, Patrick Jacke is a member of Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party, PIS.

In 2018, the party put out an election ad that purported to show mass crime and violence being committed by Muslim immigrants.

And the ad claimed that Muslims were more likely to commit violence and sexual violence than native Polish people.

And that if their opposition party won, Poland would be flooded with refugees and even that by the year 2020, the country would see violence on the streets at the hands of Muslims.

That's what this video.

If you replace that with Mexicans, that could play in Texas here.

Yeah, absolutely.

It absolutely could.

100%.

Yeah.

But like, but this is the video that was out there.

Now, this was a video from his party.

And he, among other members of his party, clicked like on that video.

So that's what they're saying.

All it was is he just clicked like on

a Twitter video and now he's facing arrest.

It's not just any Twitter video.

All of the politicians who endorsed the video by clicking like on it were accused of violating Article 256 of Poland's Criminal Code, which punishes those who incite hatred on the base of national, ethnic, racial, or religious differences with up to three years in prison.

So that's the three years that he's facing.

So this absolutely was not just random person getting

threatened with prison for hitting like on a tweet.

This is a politician being accused of inciting ethnic hatred based on the video that his party created and published and he endorsed.

So you can't punish a video.

You can't send a video to prison for inciting hatred.

You've got to find out who's behind it.

You can't punish a political party.

You can't send a political party to trial for inciting racial hatred.

You've got to find out which politicians, which people involved in the party endorsed it and were behind it.

You can punish the members of the party who broke that racial incitement law.

And by saying, I like this video from my party that I'm representing, that's an indication that you are supportive of it.

You can disagree with the charges.

You could say it should be perfectly fine for a political party to put out an incendiary kind of video that's all in political speech.

And for him to click like doesn't mean that he made the video.

It doesn't mean that he necessarily endorsed it.

He might have been whatever.

You can disagree all you like, but what you can't deny is that this is substantially different to person likes a tweet and gets arrested.

Yes.

That's how Mike's putting it out there.

That is not what the story is here.

So if you want to have a conversation about this, have a conversation about the actual story and not the cartoon version that Mike wants you to believe.

Because

if the No Rogan Experience Blue Sky account published a death threat aimed at Joel Rogan and I hit like on that death threat, I can't say that I'm just being accused of liking a tweet because I'm sort of pretty closely affiliated with where the death threat came from.

And just to point out one of the frustrations with this whole, this whole episode is that that throwaway sentence you heard from Mike there, it was like 30 seconds of speaking, took 25 minutes of research to point out what was really going on here.

I think they could have had a good conversation on whether or not that's a good thing.

They could have had, this is a guy who's supposed to be this free speech expert.

Have a conversation with your free speech expert and Joe Rogan, talking about whether or not someone in another country likes a tweet about a very specific thing and be very specific about what they liked.

And then have that conversation on whether or not that is a good or a bad use of prosecution.

Because I think you could have a good conversation about that, on whether or not that's something worthwhile.

But instead of just hand waving and waiting, oh, it wasn't anything.

It was just, it was nothing.

That's a real problem.

And I, you know, another thing you have to consider, you have to consider.

Poland in this, right?

We look at this from our own goggles.

Somebody looking in the UK is looking at it from their lenses.

I'm looking at it from an American lens.

But it's important to point out that they have in their past had a history that includes

hatred on the basis of national ethnic and racial and religious differences in a much bigger way than many other places across the globe and it's it's it's within a lifetime of memory there are people who lived through that stuff that are still alive now granted there are there are very few of them left but they are still people who live through that who are still alive so to have a law in Poland against something like this is a very different thing than having that law here or in the UK yeah just in the same way that there are laws in Germany about displaying a swastika or doing a Hitler salute.

That is a crime in Germany.

It's not a crime in America.

It's practically endorsed these days in America.

But like, it's not a crime.

But it is a crime in Germany because of how tied it is to the darkest periods of that country's history and that a period that they want to be able to put behind and say there is no space for that anymore.

Right.

Now we're going to talk about

maybe what he came there to talk about.

Here's some conversation about Russian gas.

Poland plays an absolutely huge,

probably the linchpin role in all of Eastern Europe with everything that's happening with Ukraine, because the whole play was to kill Russian gas, and then you need an alternative gas supply into Europe to offset that.

And there's only two ways to do that.

One is Ukraine builds up its own gas infrastructure and exploits its endogenous

hydrocarbon supply, which it has a lot of.

It's the third largest in Europe, but it's underexploited.

Fortunately, they can't do that right now because Russia reconquered that exact territory in Eastern Ukraine that those sit on.

Yeah, that's tough.

The language here, I think, is is sort of giving a bit of the game away so first way saying the the play the play was to kill russian gas well no the play was to stop russia's invasion including through sanctions and one of the things you can sanction is russian gas but the play wasn't just to kill russian gas the way he frames that makes it seem like he's saying that that the rest of the world the western world went out of its way to try and stop russians russia's dominance in the gas market what they did was try and stop russia invading and trying to occupy and take over ukraine that's the play here He also says, unfortunately, Ukraine can't exploit their own gas because Russia has reconquered

Marshall.

It's not, it's, it is deeply unfortunate.

What an absolute snafu.

No, like, Russia has invaded Ukraine for its natural resources.

In part, that's the reason that they've done that.

It's nothing unfortunate.

It's very deliberate from Russia.

And it's, and the idea that they've reconquered those territories.

Reconquered is a much, is a very, is a word that's doing a lot of weight carrying for for invaded and is occupying.

Like that, that is very much showing that he doesn't think or suggesting that he doesn't think that Russia's invasion and occupation of Ukraine is illegal or is against international law or is wrong in any kind of way because they've just reconquered that territory.

They've conquered it before.

They've had it before.

They've conquered it again.

It's theirs again.

Yeah, it's almost like it's an accident.

Like, or that Russia is a bull and the United States has a cape right over where

Ukraine is and we just pulled it up and they they just ran around oops we didn't mean to invade sorry we didn't mean to invade and take all these strategic places that we know are full of resources we had no idea whoops yeah that's it's yeah they tripped and landed on ukraine's mineral wells

all right so now uh we're gonna hear mike and joe talk about what should happen after government after a government change in poland Yeah, so there was an election in Poland.

There was a government change.

And Mike is talking about the things that should be happening here.

And Mike claims, as we're going to hear, his source in this, he claims it's a journal that's funded by the CIA through USAID called the Journal of Democracy.

And he claimed it's an instruction list for what the incoming Polish government have to do in order to keep money flowing from USAID and the USA more generally.

So they're saying, like, if you don't do these things, we will starve you of your money.

And those things include seeking to lock up the old leaders on false pretenses to stop them getting into power again next time.

And to be absolutely clear, what he's reading, it's not formal policy at all.

He does acknowledge that a few times, but then he sort of treats it like it is still formal policy.

It's an article from the Journal of Democracy titled, How to Dismantle an Illiberal Democracy.

And he says, well, it's only illiberal because they don't like it.

That's not what this says.

It says it's illiberal because the previous democracy was committing human rights abuses.

And that's what made it illiberal.

And he also doesn't mention, he makes this out like this at the CIA, he doesn't mention that the article is written by Jaroslav Kuysz and Karolina Vigura, who are two associate professors at the University of Warsaw, so at the University of Warsaw.

So these are Polish professors.

Mike's trying to paint this as the USA telling Poland what to do.

But maybe this reflects more insight into what Polish people think about their previous government than what the USA think.

And in it, Mike will he'll throw up screenshots all the way through, but he can't even read out the scant paragraphs of his screen graphs without pausing to insert like his own distortions throughout.

And you'll notice that as he's doing it.

And he leaves off crucial parts of the sentences as well.

Because these Polish professors are not calling for USAID money to be withheld from Poland until Poland does what the USA is.

They're saying that the party that ruled their country and committed documented crimes should be held accountable for them.

So I'm going to play the first clip.

This is about a Poland mail-in election.

So here are the cases.

These include the 2015 appointment of judges.

So going and arresting people for appointing judges.

Here's another one.

To arrange a supposedly unconstitutional presidential election by mail-in voting during the pandemic.

W2PF, we hate mail.

It was practically a crime to not support

mail-in voting with the National Down for Democracy here, but over there,

they're saying it's a crime to have done it.

They arranged a supposedly unconstitutional president election by mail-in voting during the pandemic.

Wow.

Yes.

Wow.

Wow, indeed.

So a supposedly unconstitutional presidential election by mail-in voting.

Well, the issue here isn't that they tried to allow mail-in voting, it's that they tried to make it exclusively mail-in.

You could only do mail-in voting.

It was the only form of voting allowable.

And when he says supposedly unconstitutional, is there any way we could check whether this was constitutional or not?

Well, how about we read the Polish constitution?

I did that.

I went off to the Polish Constitution to have a look.

And it is against the Polish Constitution.

I'm not the only one who thought that.

The National Electoral Office disagreed and said, you can't do that.

It's against the Constitution.

And when the NEO disagreed in that way, the government tried to overrule them, which is in violation of the law because the people who get to decide what an election should look like in terms of its administration are the national electoral office.

It is their legal duty to do that because you don't want the ruling party to have a carte blanche to decide what an election could look like because that is a way that corruption could seep in.

There's a quote just from just from Wikipedia about the whole thing.

On the 15th of September 2020, a court in Warsaw judged that the decision of Prime Minister Matteus Marowjecki to hold the May elections exclusively through mail in voting was a gross violation of the law and was issued without legal grounds and violated Article of the Polish Constitution, Article 157 paragraph 1, and Article 187 paragraph 1 and 2 of the Electoral Court.

And I went away and read them and yeah, they're right.

They do.

All right, well, let's talk about a little bit.

We're going to, Mark's now going to shift to talk a little bit about arrests that had happened in Poland.

These are just illustrative tips, cases, and maybe just the tip of the iceberg of who our CIA front group, our USAID operations arm, is saying must be done.

Naturally, the leader of the Law and Justice Party himself, the Democratically elected president, hey, does what happened to Donald Trump now after the transitional justice that happened when Biden Justice Department took power starting to make a little bit more sense now?

Should be held responsible.

But legally proving allegations against him will likely be difficult.

Damn, the problem is we don't have a case.

We want to arrest him, but we actually don't really have anything good to get him on.

So let's get all his lieutenants.

And again, the objective, pacification, stability.

You don't need to worry about them winning the next election.

Populism as a political possibility in Poland will be stamped out because the intelligence networks and the money arm of USAID and the corrupted and warped prosecutors are all on the take.

Jesus.

So he's reading from the document here, but he's reading very selectively.

And you can hear the tone in his voice as he switches from reading to adding his own version of reality in here.

But this is not a front of the CIA.

This is what he's talking about.

This journal of democracy is a CIA front group of our USA operations arm.

This is two Polish professors who are experts in Polish law.

You can argue that this being in a US journal means that there's US money behind it, fine, but it's still not the CIA.

This is still two Polish professors.

They say this in other places too.

And if the cases that they're talking about are legitimate, then it's two Polish experts listing real crimes from their country that they feel

should be prosecuted.

And one of the crimes he just glosses straight over, he says at one point, you know, oh, the 2023 visa scandal in which members of the PIS government had illegally sold visas to non-EU citizens.

That's there in this document that he glosses over.

But that feels like a crime.

Selling citizenship at a price is corruption.

Selling a passport to your country is corruption.

Hold on a second.

The United States just offered a $5 million green card yesterday by our president.

So I don't know that it's corruption.

If the president

was corruption under Polish law at the time.

If Trump changes the law,

it can be done.

I think there are states around the world that do offer offer

citizenship at a price.

I think like Malta, for example, is one of them.

But in this case, it's different, right?

Yeah, because it was illegal in Poland and they were still doing it.

So the best, and obviously the exclusively mail-in election in contravenance of the Polish constitution was also a crime that they're saying needs to be prosecuted.

So the best case that he's arguing here is that an incoming election shouldn't ever be able to investigate any crimes committed by the previous party,

which would be an incredibly dangerous precedent to insist upon.

That is how you embed corruption.

And my favorite bit of this, he says, well, he reads out legally proving allegations against him will likely be difficult.

And he stops there and says, oh, damn, the problem is we don't have a case.

We want to arrest him, but he hasn't done anything.

Oh, let's fake something.

All that stuff isn't in the document.

What is in the document is the very end of that sentence, which is

legally proving allegations against him will likely be difficult as other PIS politicians have been taking blame for his crimes.

That's how the sentence ends.

So it's not, we don't have a case here.

Yeah.

It is, we can't get the mafia boss for this hit because one of his lieutenants keeps confessing to it.

Those are two completely different situations.

And the text for this is right up on screen as he's talking about this.

It's not hidden away anywhere.

It doesn't take any further like reading or digging.

It's on the screen.

He's just not telling the Joe Organs' listeners about it.

Yeah.

And, you know, he even says in here he's like oh well they're just gonna have to well we can't get this president we're just gonna have to settle for these lieutenants we're gonna have to settle we'll just have to arrest all the people around him and you're like oh that's because they keep confessing to the things and you literally told everybody that except for you didn't read that part out loud and that's the thing is these things are up very quickly i want to point out the speed at which some of these things are put up because they come up very quickly and then they disappear immediately.

You have to pause the screen on certain occasions to actually catch them all now i am listening at like 1.25 1.5 speed but even still i have to pause the screen because jamie doesn't leave it up there for five minutes jamie doesn't leave it up there the entire time they're talking about it he leaves it up there briefly and then he takes it down immediately and in fairness jamie jamie had no idea what was going to come up because if this isn't like he sat down and said jamie here are all the things i'm going to talk about this one first so jamie could plan out like any producer would be able to plan out and leave on screen as a reasonable time this is jamie look to my twitter feed and look for certain keywords to bring things up.

So, Jamie's been hiding.

I'm not, I'm not saying, I think we should be fair to Jamie.

It's not on him here.

Yeah.

But it's also every one of these screen grabs, Mike has highlighted with yellow and even underlined in red the bits he thinks are important, but they aren't the full sentence.

And he leaves off the part of the sentence that completely explained what we're talking about here.

He's doing a magician trick, right?

Where the magician will, they have in their one hand a thing that they want you to look at.

So Mike will underline in red on MS Paint a thing with his mouse.

It looks all weird and doesn't look very well, but it looks like sort of scraggly red line underneath something.

And he will highlight it in yellow, and then he will very distinctly leave that other hand that's hiding where the coin is behind him.

And this is a perfect example of this.

I also want to point out, too, again, we talked about, you know,

why are they spending so much time talking about what seems to be pro-Russia points?

Here's another point, because this is who does the populist party align with?

European populists back Putin as they roll out their anti-Ukraine positions.

This is an article I'll include in the show notes.

This is very distinctly someone who is pro-Russia, who is maybe getting some help from Russia in some ways to try to make sure that they get power there so that they can not support Ukraine.

That's what's happening again and again and again in all of these cases.

All right, so here's the last clip of the main event.

It's also daunting.

You know, it's just, it's so overwhelming.

How do you sleep?

No, I say I don't.

I left the pauses in there.

Yeah, because like...

The effect of this on Joel, I think, is a really, really useful thing for us to show here because I show this is overwhelming.

This is designed to be overwhelming.

It's designed to make you go, wow, there's just so much of this and it's so big and the things that he's saying are so important and massive.

But it's designed that way to stop you looking at the details or even to read the full screenshots that he's bringing up on screen, which undermine his point consistently.

And in a way, this is exactly the kind of capacity building that Mike Benz has been criticizing here because he is trying to build a narrative that will drive people to call for things that will harm their interests to destroy parts of the government based on all of this spurious stuff that he's put together.

And he doesn't want you to actually intellectually look into it.

He wants you to feel the effect of how much of this he showed you, even though if he looked into it for a moment, it all just starts to evaporate.

And it is that magician's trick that you're talking about.

And it feels too like everything he talks about.

feels like there's one guy at the State Department tenting his fingers and saying, excellent, every few minutes.

Like this is all so orchestrated.

And when you think about how conspiracies work, often we talk about conspiracies, how they are very orchestrated, how every piece is put into play by a very specific actor.

And the way he talks about a lot of this stuff doesn't feel like any of this stuff is organic at all, is that what's happening is

it's being all orchestrated by a very specific actor.

And in his case, it's USAID or it's the State Department that is the actor behind all this.

There are cases.

I'm not going to lie and say, oh, there's no cases where the State Department doesn't use its authority or push people in certain places or USAID doesn't fund things that might cause

something to happen in a country that is beneficial to the United States.

I'm not saying that at all.

Of course, that's almost certainly true.

But the way he's depicting all this, it's that tinting of the fingers that, oh, excellent,

our plans are in place.

And that's how it's all coming off.

You've got to question whenever anybody tries to present everything with this nice, neat little bow over it to try to say oh that's exactly how it's happening there's a lot of moving pieces here i think usaid absolutely will be funding things that are to the benefit of the us that is kind of the whole point in soft power and uh and as you say that kind of um statesmanship um and maybe they're only maybe they're spending more of their time uh funding things that look into corruption in in states that they have uh

existing adversarial relations with but that's not generating fake crimes.

Yeah, that's that's discovering what crimes are are there.

Yeah.

All right, let's jump into our toolbox section.

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Wow.

So that's the tool bag?

And something just fell out of the tool bag.

So Marsh, this time we're going to be doing quote mining or taking things out of context.

Yeah, this is something that Mike does all the way through this interview.

So quote mining or taking things out of context is where you say, so you bring up a point, you bring up a quote that absolutely is accurate in the sense that the person you say said it did say it.

but it's completely missing context that would make it make a totally different argument to what you're using it to uh to say um so if i was to say um cecil had said well i really liked uh i really liked the nazis i could say well here's a quote from from cecil saying that But if I then showed you that the real quote was Cecil saying, I would never trust anybody who said I really like the Nazis, you'd realize that I've quote-mined Cecil to make it look like he was supporting a position he absolutely does not support.

And that's what we see with Mike all the way through.

We've already discussed it a couple of times that he brings up a screenshot and even the end of the sentence tells you a completely different narrative to the one that he wants you to think.

And so that's what we'll look at for the rest of this toolbox.

All right.

So here's the first

clip that we'll play.

Yeah, because all this stuff is open source.

You didn't need to be an inside guy to see this.

If you knew where to look, these are USAspending.gov.

I used to joke as the main difference between, or was, I think, until Freedom opened up when Elon acquired X and a few institutional changes began to happen

in the government and with Congress.

But I used to joke that USAspending.gov was the main difference during the height of this censorship

total control era, was the main difference between us and Russia and China, which was that we have this sort of autocratic control over information information and institutions by the U.S.

government.

So do they.

The difference is, is we can go to usaspending.gov and look up how they do it.

You really can't, actually.

I mean, I was there yesterday.

I was digging around in this thing, and

it's kind of Byzantine.

It's difficult to understand.

I don't know.

I didn't know everything that was happening.

There's tiny little line items you can't click on to like detail.

It'll just list something very quickly as a budget expenditure.

So it's what was in a ledger.

It's not really, there's not really anything linked that can lead you to certain things.

It's actually a difficult site to lean into.

And I think what a lot of what happened mostly was people were going there, seeing a line item that caught their attention and then bringing that out and saying, oh, look at what I found.

Yeah, I think so.

But it does show you that his approach is this kind of quote mining kind of thing,

finding stuff out of context.

You've got this massive amount of data that's available, but unless you really know what you're looking at, it's almost it's very difficult to really fully understand it but if your goal isn't to fully understand it but it's to find as you say the odd thing that if you quote it out of context looks particularly bad this is a gold mine for this for this kind of approach that mike has but also this level of transparency should also be a sign that maybe he's wrong about this like he should be thinking this is a sign that's maybe maybe that i'm not quite right because why would the big scary evil agency that uses dark tricks to overturn democracies abroad as mike believes then be honest about how they're spending that money or be transparent about spending that money.

Wouldn't they find ways to hide that away in ways that Mike couldn't just jump on their website, spot a line, and go, oh, that must be the time they tried to topple

the Polish government or whatever.

So I think that level of transparency itself shows that maybe Mike's version of reality should be questioned.

Although, I think you're missing that every single conspiracy needs to have some sort of way in which you could decode it.

And this is the way in which you decode this conspiracy, right?

It's like, you know,

everybody who has a conspiracy, you know, there's always like, oh, the reason why we know this is because the dollar bill has a pentagram or a pyramid on it or whatever.

And then people will say, oh, yeah, that means the Illuminati or that means something else.

And that's why they're connected.

And you're like, well, why would they do that?

Why would they announce

their plans?

But to conspiracy theorists, this makes a lot of sense.

And so this is also, I think, programmed to go after people in the audience that are more susceptible to conspiracies.

Oh, 100%.

And And as we've seen, Mike Benz is someone who is very comfortable spreading conspiracies and has been for quite some time.

Next bit is about drugs.

They're talking about, they spend quite a bit of time here talking about heroin.

USAID has been busted multiple times for actually cultivating the poppy and heroin production in

Afghanistan, exactly in Afghanistan.

This was actually the inspector, you know, there was a, it was one of the, one of the adjacent units, not, I don't think it was directly overseeing USAID, but they published a whole report on this that basically USAID

was keeping the poppy production alive by doing what was said to be irrigation and agricultural sustainability, but targeting it

in the heroin network.

And by the way, remember, the Taliban

banned poppy production.

And it was after that ban that Afghanistan became the source of 95% of the world's heroin.

So USAID was growing those crops.

Now.

Yeah, so they're saying here that, well,

the USAID was paying for the Afghani heroin.

As you covered before, what they paid for was irrigation to try and get Afghanistan's farmers off the heroin trade and into other crops.

Now, it failed and it got co-opted, and you could say it wasn't a well-done program or a well-thought-out program or anything like that.

But to pretend that it was designed to fund opium based on what the outcome actually was is completely wrong here.

Yeah, there's an article, and I'm going to read from it.

quote, in some areas, development programs inadvertently supported poppy production.

One One example of this was the rehabilitation and development of irrigation systems.

USAID reported that ADP East and South rehabilitated canals that increased the productivity of 113,000 hectares of land.

And, you know,

so yeah, you're right.

There's, there's a, just like we mentioned before, they, they will sometimes co-opt it or sometimes it fails, and that's okay.

But like the way he's presenting it, he's saying USAID was growing those crops.

That's how he says this.

That's how he finishes his sentence.

And I just want to point out, and I know that this is something that we should be pointing out throughout, because whenever it's convenient for him, and he does it throughout the episode, whenever it's convenient for Mike, he will point out what year this was happening because it was happening under Biden.

Whenever it happens under Biden, it's important to point out that it's happening under Biden.

This happened in 2018.

Who was president?

Remind me who was president in 2018.

He doesn't mention it then.

He only mentions it when Biden's president.

He'll keep bringing it up, and he does it multiple times.

Again, more, this is about Afghanistan.

I want to show you something now from an adjacent U.S.

aid network group, which is funded 100% by the U.S.

government, created by an act of Congress.

If you go to my ex account right now and you type in U.S.

Institute for Peace, or you just put in Institute Peace,

you'll see this.

This organization gets $56 million a year from U.S.

taxpayers.

So this is 100% top to bottom, a direct organ of the U.S.

government.

Okay,

click that, click that.

There you go.

Okay.

Talban's successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world.

The ban is not a counter-narcotics victory and will have negative economic and humanitarian consequences, potentially leading to a refugee crisis.

How can they say it's not a counter-narcotics victory?

Look and look at the date, 2020.

This ain't ancient history.

This is less than two years ago.

That's crazy.

This is the State Department saying, yeah, listen, 95% of the world's heroin

flows from here.

Keep the heroin flowing.

So

quick thing to point out, we did do a little bit of a trend there, but it's mostly because he's trying to instruct Jamie on how to find the rest, find this on Twitter.

But again, what we've got here is this idea that here is this one place that is being funded by USAID, and it is saying that it's bad to stop the heroin.

And having just learned that USAID was growing the heroin themselves, mike puts two and two together and says they were spending the reason they want to tell you not to keep the not to stop the heroin is because they were the ones making the heroin they were the ones growing the heroin but he's taken this completely out of context here because the the article that he reads out um has actually we found the source for it it's actually changed to a less pro less provocative title at some point and now uh instead of saying that it's that stopping the uh the heroin would be bad for afghanistan it says what the taliban poppy ban means for afghan poverty and migration this is is from the United States Institute of Peace.

But what this says is Afghanistan's farm-level rural economy has lost more than a billion dollars per year worth of economic activity, as calculated, including as much as hundreds of millions of dollars that's accrued to poorer wage laborers and sharecroppers because of this pop because of the poppy ban.

These people and their families, already at the margin of subsistence and lacking other job opportunities in Afghanistan's very weak economy, will be at even greater risk of hunger, malnutrition, and associated health problems.

That's why he's he's saying the end of

the poppy seed industry would be bad for Afghanistan to just kind of immediately stop it, because you've got people, not the ones selling the opium, but the ones who are the farmers growing it, are the ones who are going to lose their jobs in the short term.

It goes on to say, most Afghans don't achieve food security by growing their own food.

Rather, people make ends meet by going cash crops or producing other agricultural products, livestock or dairy.

The cash crop also previously would have been poppy, which can then be sold to provide resources to purchase food needs or by working other jobs.

Wheat, which is what the USAID was trying to get farmers to grow instead of poppies, wheat is a low-value crop and a poor substitute for opium.

Fruits and other tree crops would be more viable substitutes for opium poppy over the long run, but they require significant time and investments.

That's why this argument, this article is arguing that just stopping the poppy, that this the current plan to just stop opium exports immediately and replace it with wheat is not going to do well for Afghanistan or its people.

And it goes on to say, final quote here, another related outcome is that more people will try to leave Afghanistan, going to nearby countries and then onward to Turkey and Europe.

So if you can't make ends meet because your cash crop that you were relying on just as a regular farmer is no longer viable and you're being told to grow wheat instead, you can't do it that way.

So you will either starve or undergo a malnutrition or try to leave and cause a refugee crisis.

That is what this is arguing here.

But he takes it out of context context to say we need to keep the opium flowing because USAID is the one growing that opium and profiting from it.

Yeah.

And they say, they even say in this article, quote, there will probably be a counter-narcotics-driven, knee-jerk response that effectively implemented the Taliban opium ban is a good thing.

However, history amply demonstrates that banning opium in Afghanistan by itself is not sustainable, nor does it address the drug problem in Europe and elsewhere.

And it won't stop rampant drug use with Afghanistan.

Supply-side measures will not work if not backed up by sensible development interventions to help make them sustainable.

And so again,

this is one of those moments where you need to work from the ground up to try to change things.

You have to change things from the ground up.

You can't just have a top-down

way in which to implement this change.

This has to be meaningful change from the ground up.

And I feel too, you know, this is one of those moments where I think, you know, Joe has spoken in the past to other people and has agreed that what we need to do is make sure that we develop in some of these places so that there isn't this migration that happens.

And this is a perfect opportunity to develop in those places.

And who is the major buyer of those things?

It's the Western world that is buying this opium.

We're doing a bad job of making it so that opium is either available or we're not stopping the people who are selling it here.

We're also the market for that.

So we're doing a bad job by making them a pawn in this and then treating them badly and then expecting us to rug pull them and then be like, oh, well, that's, you know, that's exactly how this should work.

We should absolutely be able to

beat up on the weakest link in this chain.

All right.

So now we're going to do another short clip here.

This is about how to promote peace through opium.

You're showing this.

Do they give any examples of how it would promote peace to keep the opium flowing?

Well, because the way they're saying it, it's like this Orwellian speak.

Well, you always have to invert it, right?

When they say peace, it's war, right?

So

this is war.

Yeah, no, did they give any examples?

Yeah, they do.

Specifically, in the article that Mike Benz is citing here, the article is all about exactly that.

So has he not read the article that he's citing, or does he just not want us to know those bits are in the article?

He's taken bits of it out of context.

The rest of the context will not be brought up here because it undermines his argument completely.

And as you say, Joe would understand this if he read the rest of the article.

If he had the opportunity to know what this article is arguing, Joe would be more likely to agree with it because he's agreed with it previously.

Yeah, and here's a Time article, a different article.

It says, Quote, Either way, it's clear that cutting off supply doesn't end use.

It just forces those with substance abuse, a substance use disorder, and without treatment to switch to more dangerous drugs or new suppliers.

For these reasons, the Taliban should not be praised or encouraged to persist in a drug ban.

Certainly, no diplomatic recognition of the Taliban regime should be awarded for it.

But the international community should increase humanitarian aid and explore strengthening the Afghan rural economy through local investment.

This is exactly what we're talking about.

And also, this is kind of exactly the stuff that USAID was built for, right?

Changing the landscape there.

Again, bottom-up approach to trying to change how they deal with crops.

that could absolutely change how the production of that dangerous crop like opium is being economically viable.

And it's providing it through a transition where you not only get the dangerous drugs out of the ecosystem, but that you also create a less hateful Afghanistan to your country.

It's a win-win in both cases if you build it from the ground up and you do the right things with that USAID money.

Now, don't get me wrong, we've seen sometimes that USAID money, it doesn't go well, right?

The opium co-opted some of that irrigation and took it away.

But if you make it viable for them, if you invest in a way to make it viable for those opium farmers to realize that there's more money to be made over here, they will do that instead of making the opium.

Yeah, exactly.

And the point here as well is that none of this stuff should be above criticism.

None of this stuff should be above scrutiny, but we have to scrutinize what it actually is and not this caricaturish version that Mike Benz is presenting.

We can say this was not a successful scheme.

This was not a successful project because the irrigation was then co-opted, as you say, by the farmers of poppy seeds and it wasn't designed well enough to be sustainable in the long run and therefore was probably a failure.

We can say that.

But what it absolutely isn't is an attempt by USAID to take over the drug business of Afghanistan in order to keep the opium flowing and keep profits moving towards the USAID and US government.

So this next bit, Marsh, this blew me away when I heard this.

This was genuinely one of the most egregious things I've heard on Joe's show thus far.

A complete distortion.

And we're going to get a chance to hear it here.

There's two nice long clips that we're going to play for you.

I did do a little bit of editing, but a lot of this is him trying to get Jamie to land a plane on his X feed.

So I did cut some of this

clip out, but this is discussing what is essentially a pitch book from the United States Special Forces.

So the United States Special Forces created a PDF pitch book about sort of here's the stuff that we can do.

Here's what we could do for you or do for the country.

You know, if you have some need, here's a chance for the United States Special Forces to fill that need.

This, you know, sort of justify your existence.

It's a little longer than an email to Elon Musk, but it's still kind of a justify your existence thing.

So let's play these two clips.

We'll start with the first one.

USAID does that work.

So for example, I've been showing a military document from the Biden-Mark Milley era published in 2021 about how to plan race riots in Africa

in order to stop the construction of

a port by a foreign government that would allow their force projection into the Atlantic Ocean in a sample scenario where the U.S.

ambassador tries to get this West African country

on the Atlantic coast there

to cancel the port construction in partnership with the foreign government, but that government doesn't want to do it.

And so they refuse the U.S.

ambassador.

They refuse the State Department.

So this is literally in the planning guide and pitchbook for the U.S.

Special Forces.

It's available online right now.

Everyone can look this up.

It's all over my ex feed.

I've posted the link a million times in all the screenshots.

But they show the role of special forces.

They're pitching this basically to get more grant funding.

We can help in near-peer competition, actually, with foreign countries by having special forces destabilize the country, inflame racial tensions between the Africans who work in the factories and the business owners of the foreign government in the local regional development, cause mass walkouts and strikes.

If you want to pull this on screen,

I can just show you these two things.

And what they propose is that as they are inflaming these racial tensions to cause these riots and boycotts of the local businesses, that USAID would play the role of swooping in.

Again, they're in West Africa.

Now, this is a sample scenario with a hypothetical African country.

So, yeah, this is a hypothetical exercise.

I know he does say that, but it's really important to stress it because I don't think he always stresses it enough that this is something, not something they have done, but something they say is a possible playbook but he keeps going on about race riots he says race riots and boycotts and things like that now nothing anywhere in this document mentions race riots no it doesn't mention race at all

He's the one introducing the racial element.

And when he says about inflame existing racial tensions, it sounds a bit like what he's talking about is tensions among locals in this African country.

What he means is that this foreign Chinese factory, this foreign Chinese Chinese construction rather, is coming along and using native workers.

And so he's assuming that any tensions between the country who's running the construction operation and the native workers who are working for it would

by default be racial tensions.

Not any other kind of working condition tensions that they had.

They would immediately be racial tensions.

Those tensions could be about worker exploitation, but that sounds less unreasonable.

So he has to paint it as something more inherent and

something that chimes with his audience which is this rate this idea of racial division it's got echoes of black lives matter absolutely i think in here of like oh this is these these race riots that are inflamed he also talks about boycotts boycotting the the local uh companies i think he says but what he means is the workers going on strike against the construction company they're working for which is the one he was saying a second ago the foreign construction company but he wants to talk about boycotts because it plays into the the hands of joe's audience but it's not boycotts of a local company.

It's not an African boycotting a local African business.

It's an African worker here boycotting an international project by a, in this case, Chinese, hypothetical Chinese government that was exploiting them.

So this is completely twisting what is in this playbook completely, 100%.

He says, he prefaces all this by saying USAID does this work, right?

USAID does this work.

This is a military document.

This isn't USAID.

This is a special forces document.

And he also pitches it as, this is how they get grants.

Well, the United States military has the largest budget next to any other entitlement program in the United States.

They have an 800-plus billion dollar budget.

What do they need a tiny scrap from USAID from if they have an $800 billion budget?

He's painting this as if this is a

USAID thing.

That's not true.

This is a military thing.

The military put this thing out.

The military created this hypothetical, and it's only one section of this.

This pitch book is long.

It's got a lot of different things in it.

It talks about a lot of different capabilities of the special forces, and it works its way through a whole bunch of different, you know, very slickly graphically designed pages until you get to the last piece, which is clearly a hypothetical scenario on how maybe the United States Special Forces could work in a scenario like this.

Yeah, and it's like two paragraphs in this entire document.

And that's why this is out of context quart mining.

It also makes me wonder, how did Mike Benz find this?

Like, what was his process for finding this?

Because this is such a niche part of what is an incredibly niche document that he's now blowing up to being huge.

Yeah.

I have no idea how he'd even come across something like this.

So here's the second piece of what he's describing in that pitch book.

And I want you to pay attention when we listen to this.

He's going to stop using the word hypothetical in this.

You're going to start, it's going to start sounding like this is an actual thing.

And they say the plan is we need to buy the ambassador more time because this port is going to be, they're going to close on it, and we need to give the ambassador more leverage at the negotiating table.

So this is a support operation for the State Department in order to secure an agreement from the African government to shut the port down.

But right now, the ambassador doesn't have the smoke, doesn't have the clout, doesn't have the leverage.

So the military will come in and provide that leverage by destabilizing the country,

inflaming long-standing friction between the African workers and the foreign corporations, popping off protests and then using their swarm army of internews, USAID, you know, the social media campaign and media articles that are led actually in the background by the Information Warfare Center at Fort Bragg to illuminate the controversy to a global audience, right?

This caused international financial pressure and sanctions on the.

But if you go to the next slide, and here we go, USAID.

So this is again, U.S.

military document 2021, Biden administration, to make sure this thing really pops off.

USAID is going to swoop in, along with other NGOs, to establish job fairs near the protest areas

so that when these racially inflamed African workers

want take to the streets, they don't need to worry about losing their careers at those companies they just went on strike at because they're going to be on U.S.

taxpayer dime, baby.

It's going to be U.S.

truck drivers, median income, you know, $45,000, $50,000 a year, paying for striking African workers to get no-show jobs as a part of a race riot operation for the U.S.

Special Forces to give leverage to the U.S.

State Department ambassador in order to stop a random port construction in West Africa.

And it says here within two weeks, the construction company lost 60% of its required labor pool.

So it's effective.

So yeah, pretty much feels like Joe does not realize this is just a model exercise and this didn't actually happen.

This didn't really happen.

It's effective.

It's not effective.

It's effective on paper.

They've made that number up.

It's a pitch book.

Like, there's not none of it.

It's not even real.

Like, what are you talking about?

Yeah, it's incredible.

But again, you know, Mike Galls throughout here saying like these, this racially inflamed thing, the racial inflamed contentions, nothing in this document is about racially inflaming anything.

That doesn't come up at any point.

Nor is it about at any point providing no-show jobs for striking workers.

He's made it out like there's a USA job fair will go there in order to provide no-show jobs while they're on strike.

That's not what it says.

Like the strategy they're outlining here is to destabilize the Chinese construction company by providing other sources of employment in the area.

Not necessarily no-show jobs, just real jobs in those areas, which sounds to me a lot like market capitalism.

You know,

if your priorities involve not wanting other countries to have locals work for them, you give those locals better jobs so they don't work for your rivals because that suits your goals and you fulfill your priorities along the way.

That's just market capitalism, but they're painting it out like it's incredibly nefarious.

And he has to do that by introducing these racial tension elements, by introducing these no-show jobs to

inflame that sense of, look,

we're getting them on the U.S.

taxpayer dime baby.

All of that stuff is just smoke and mirrors to hide what is, in this case, a hypothetical situation of if you don't want the hypothetical African workers working for the Chinese government, you can give them a local job there yourself and they won't.

Yeah, your hypothetical tax dollar is hard at work.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I also want to point out, too, there's an interesting point here where he's talking about, oh, it's these $45,000, $50,000 a year people paying for all these striking African workers.

You're like, yeah, you're also paying in this hypothetical scenario for the special forces, too.

You don't seem to mention that at all.

You seem to mention the striking workers, but you don't mention the difference in your paycheck for if we took out the U.S.

military amount of money that comes out of your paycheck versus the USAID money that comes out of your paycheck.

And USAID is mentioned one time in this document.

like they suggest, but it's also, it's like working in conjunction with, it's not asking them for money and it's not using their money for this It's working in conjunction with these other things in order to do soft power stuff while you're doing real power stuff.

All right.

Uh, this is the last piece of the tollbox.

This is really interesting.

This is talking about a term that I don't know that he understands or he is distorting and uh and we have doctrine, we have a whole field of scholarship at the State Department, at USAID, uh, and that is carried out in covert ways uh through civil military DOD and NSCIA called transitional justice, which is weaponizing the Justice Department and creating the criminal predicate to eliminate your political adversaries you just narrowly vanquished in a nail-biter vote in order to stop them from ever rising to power again.

And I'll show you some great receipts on this so that everyone can see this with their own eyes.

Transitional justice is a whole field at state and in the NGOplex to make it cheap to manage the course of and result of foreign elections by making sure anyone who's a serious challenger to you ends up in jail.

So that's his definition of transitional justice.

And he's played that out in the conversation around Poland about how you have to bring this lawfare case in order to keep down the opposition so they don't get back in.

And we pointed out that even then it was talking about places where there have been real crimes committed.

Here is what transitional justice actually is.

Here's a quote about transitional justice.

I think from just the Wikipedia page.

Transitional justice is a process which responds to human rights violations through judicial redress, political reforms, and cultural healing efforts and other measures in order to prevent the recurrence of human rights rights abuse in a region or country.

That's what, whenever the transitional justice is being talked about, that's what it's talking about.

So, yeah, it does make it easier to arrest the people who were just in power if they've been using that power to commit human rights abuses.

Who here is saying, well, if you commit crimes, you shouldn't be sent to prison for it.

If you commit human rights abuses,

you should be absolutely fine and get off scot-free if you were in power previously.

Nobody should be supporting that.

Yeah, and important to pay attention to his framing here because he's making it sound like how Mark Andreessen talked about debanking, right?

Weaponizing a department to eliminate your political adversaries.

That's how he's talking about it.

And that really appeals to Joe.

And it's really easy to slip one past the goalie if you hit on these hot-button issues that Joe is excited about.

And in this case, it's free speech.

So he comes in talking about free speech.

In this case, it's talking about, you know, protecting our previous president, who is now our current president,

President Trump, from these,

you know, this weaponizing of the Justice Department.

That's an easy play on Joe.

It's real easy to get one past him here.

So he's weaponized, he's saying that they're weaponizing these things.

And doesn't that remind you of something, Joe?

Doesn't that remind you of how President Trump had to deal with the weaponizing of the Justice Department?

They'll say these types of things all the time and connect them because if they can do that, they can slip all this stuff past Joe, who doesn't pay attention the moment you distract him very briefly.

I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

So, Marsh, you got something good on this one?

Okay, so I had to rethink about this one.

And this might be cheating a little bit, but hear me out.

Okay.

The fact that he brought everything he talked about up on screen was at least better than him just assuring us that he's right.

It meant in many cases, I could actually pause and find the specific document he was citing, find where that quote was taken from, and then point out all the bits that he was deliberately ignoring.

All of that would have been much harder to do if he hadn't been showing us his quote-unquote receipts throughout.

The problem, of course, is that 99% of people will never go and check.

It's not designed for people to do that.

They'll just see a document, see that he's highlighted a bit, and assume that it's proof what he's saying.

So even this vague something good is something bad.

It's something really bad.

It sure is.

And if I had to pick something, I guess having someone who's like quasi-qualified to talk about the State Department and government funding, but his rhetorical techniques left a lot to be desired and he clearly had an agenda here.

So

it's a wash for me.

And it's also not, it wasn't a great conversation to listen to, but it also very specifically feels like a wash in the sense that while you might have been at some point qualified, all the ways in which you're bringing this information sort of wipes that all away for me.

Yeah.

And I think some of the criticism I've read of Mike Benz is that he's overstated the amount of qualification he had as well.

So he may not be as qualified or the amount of experience that he actually has.

He might not even be as qualified as that.

Yeah.

Okay, well, that's it for the show this week.

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Did you see the game last night?

Of course you did because you used Instacart to do your grocery restock.

Plus, you got snacks for the game, all without missing a single play.

And that's on multitasking.

So we're not saying that Instacart is a hack for game day, but it might be the ultimate play this football season.

Enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

Service fees apply for three orders in 14 days.

Excludes restaurants.

This fall, let your home smell as good as it looks.

Pura's app-controlled diffusers bring you premium scents from brands like Nest New York, Capri Blue, and Anthropology.

From Spice Pumpkin to Whitewoods, your fall favorites are just a tap away.

It's home fragrance that feels as elevated as it smells, and right now, it's the perfect time to stock up.

Visit Pura.com and bring home the best scents of the season.