Mike Benz: The CIA’s Use of NGOs to Coup Foreign Governments, and How They’re Doing It to Trump

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The U.S.

Institute of Peace was, think of it like the National Endowment for Democracy.

Is George Orwell in charge of naming these groups?

National Endowment for Democracy subverts democracy.

All these peace groups are like aggressively anti-peace.

You can check out these protests online.

They're hilarious.

It's people protesting in the streets so that they are not allowed to know foreign funding of of their own societies.

Put the blindfolders on me.

I am not allowed to know whether that is funded by a foreign government.

How much is funding?

The CIA was running a initiative to control the education space during the Cold War to stop the spread of communist-sympathizing teachings and curricula.

All of this was repurposed against right-wing populism when Trump won in 2016.

Noticed.

According to George Soros, the Open Society Foundation was to provide basically a tax loophole for his kids.

NIG became such a powerful force in Washington that we had to synchronize U.S.

foreign policy with the foreign policy set out by the Open Society Foundation.

NGOs, you hear the term all the time.

And in fact, the deeper you look into almost any news story, especially one that pertains to the destruction of Western civilization in the United States, you find something called an NGO at the bottom of the story.

NGO stands for non-governmental organization, but paradoxically, NGOs feel like a parallel government to me.

You've done a lot of research on this.

I don't think this topic's talked about enough, so I'm just going to stand back and let you explain what an NGO is, where they came from,

and

what role they occupy in the modern West.

Yeah.

NGOs are the stem cell of the government's central nervous system.

They are this highly flexible tool, just like a stem cell can transform into any of the 220 different cell types in the human body, and they self-renew, and they can generate all these new neurons.

That is really,

you can't disentangle or really separate the government from the non-governmental organizations.

This started in its origin really with the creation of the U.S.

income tax in 1913.

And then in 1917,

contributions to charitable organizations, to 501c3s, as we now know it,

became tax-deductible from this new income tax.

And so that gave rise to this money money flow into private foundations and into nonprofit organizations that would come to play a large role in the in both world wars, but in particular World War II, when humanitarian relief began to be a big part of

OSS and

the predecessor to the CIA and military

financial assistance to groups

afflicted by World War II.

And then in particular during the Marshall Plan after World War II, NGOs played a key role in being a deniable front to run money, to establish

contacts, and to provide direction and guidance to groups that the U.S.

government did not want to be caught necessarily doing directly.

And so you can trace this back, really.

You have all these,

or at least in part.

So it's a complicated relationship because

you have government agencies and then you have outside high-net worth individuals and families,

dynastic American families like the Fords, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, all starting these private philanthropies, all playing a role in U.S.

statecraft, all having international businesses that rely on foreign markets.

And so they're highly dependent on the State Department clearing the way for them, negotiating deals for them, acquiring territory, creating export markets,

maintaining laws in foreign countries that maximize profitability, securing mining rights, securing trade routes.

So there's this complex interplay.

This is why I always call ⁇ so the story is really about ⁇ I don't really think of it as a government being different than an NGO, as being different than this

corporate financial overclass.

When I use the term the blob, which is not my term, that was a term from Obama's deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, to describe a force within Washington that was bigger than the White House, that the Obama White House felt like it couldn't get its foreign policy done because this foreign policy establishment,

this blob structure seemed to be more powerful than that.

But I think of the blob as having

three levels to it.

You have the guts of it inside the government, which is the State Department, the Defense Department, the intelligence community, and USAID.

You can think of it, Hillary Clinton would call this the 3D model, diplomacy, defense, and development.

And then the IC plays, the CIA, for example, plays a supporting role in those functions.

And these are all merged together as one cohesive way of advancing U.S.

foreign policy is what we call it.

But it's really advancing the interests of,

generally speaking, insiders or national champions like our large multinational corporations.

But bring this back.

So you have this government structure in the center of it.

And then below that, you have the NGOs who are funded by the U.S.

government and who work alongside the U.S.

government and have a longer reach than the U.S.

government.

The State Department can't just walk into certain conflict zones and talk to the Indigenous community and get honest answers or tell them what to do without being on the record saying something they might not want attributed to them.

The NGOs can go in and do that.

The NGOs can serve as the back channels for diplomacy.

The NGOs can provide a plausible way of providing financial assistance or money or bribes to various groups to run shipments and arms and

to

create networks of assets that

then a Assistant Secretary of State can then liaise with.

So

there's this network creation level and there's this influence level at the bottom.

But

above that government level is what I call the donor drafter class, which is, and

everyone understands the concept of big donors having a big influence on politics.

Not only do they largely play the key role in determining who's president through the funding that they provide, but they I say donor drafter because they draft off the policies off of the U.S.

government.

They don't just donate into it.

Like in a bike race, you always want to be not in first.

You want to be right behind the guy in first so that the guy in first is cutting the wind for you so that you don't suffer the costs of

the extra exertion to cut the wind.

The Pentagon cuts the wind for companies, for multinational corporations.

The State Department cuts the wind for multinational corporations and private equity funds and the whole financial overclass.

The CIA cuts the wind for corporations and financial firms.

The USAID cuts the wind.

And so you have these figures like George Soros, for example, and Bill Gates,

who are now obviously very well renowned in the NGO world, the Open Society Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and then also Rockefeller,

Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation, all of these.

All of these have corporations and financial firms attached to their philanthropy.

And when they, so they will receive funding from the U.S.

government, from USAID,

or their portfolio assets will, or their portfolio NGOs or companies will, but they will also donate into it.

And I bring this up because

oftentimes they are paid by the government, but oftentimes they're actually actually paying into a government project that advances some other interest.

And I can go through a bunch of examples of this, but maybe I'll come back to the history real, real quick.

Yes.

So

in 1948, this was the start of the intelligence state in America.

It was NSC 10-2, authored by George Kennan, which gave the CIA its plausible deniability doctrine that

allowed the CIA to have a license to lie.

The CIA came into creation.

I'll just take a quick swig here.

The CIA was created because the State Department wanted dirty deeds done without being attributed to the State Department.

So they needed some outside agency which could do what George Kennan called two months before he authored the plausible deniability doctrine in NSC 10-2.

He called this the inauguration of organized political warfare.

This is a very little-known memo that was not declassified, I believe, until 2005.

It was written in 1948.

Everyone knows George Kennan as the head of the policy planning staff at the State Department as the author of the containment strategy against Russia and the Cold War, one of the most celebrated folks in U.S.

diplomacy history.

But two months before granting this license to do all this, to have the CIA operate through NGOs, through civil society organizations, through private foundations, through

these astroturf grassroots advocacy

nonprofits.

He wrote this memo called

the Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare.

And he argues that this is now April 1948.

We had just

effectively rigged the 1948 Italian election, April 18th, 1948.

We We had wanted, this was the first democratic election in Italy, which

after World War II had ended.

And we had

pitted basically a pro-U.S., pro-Western

democracy candidate versus a pro-Soviet autocracy candidate was how it was pitched.

And

the very first national security memo, 1-1, was on the central importance of Italy to the U.S.

position at the dawn of the Cold War, and that we could not afford to lose this election.

And so the very first covert action of the Central Intelligence Agency, because

under the 1947 Act, it was largely conceived of as being an intelligence collection agency, not so much operations.

The CI has two different career tracks,

intelligence, you know, they call it the analyst track and the operations track.

And they're very different breeds of people.

They're very, very different in what they do.

One of them, you know, you collect the intelligence and you synthesize it for policymakers at the State Department or at the White House National Security Council.

A lot of reading, a lot of foreign websites.

Yes, a lot of academics.

Yeah.

And the operations is where you get, you know, the Berry Seal, cocaine, cowboy types, and, you know, these,

you know, the kind of wild folks who go in and do the dirty work to overthrow.

democratically elected governments or to do the so when people talk about the ci they're talking about the director of operations really really.

Yeah.

That's what people, in the popular imagination, that's what a CI officer is.

True.

Although John Brennan was an analyst track his whole career.

And,

you know,

I don't know that that makes a more charitable case than the operations side.

But the fact is, is Kennan writes this memo in 1948, 12 days after the U.S.

had rigged the Italian election in 1948.

And that's what it was.

Miles Copeland, who was one of the leaders of that from the the CIA side, wrote in a biography later in his life that without CIA intervention in that election, we would have lost 60 to 40.

I believe his son went on to play the drums and the police, Stuart Copeland.

Well, and Miles Copeland,

I think I may be getting that wrong.

Well, the grandson actually

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Sting,

REM, a bunch of these major bands, and then teamed up with Donald Rumsfeld

in order to help do music diplomacy in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is a whole other, you know,

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What happens is, is

in the 1948 election, the CIA, which

did not really have the authorization to do what it did, it was a last-minute, last-ditch, hailmary effort to swing the election.

And they took the assets that they had had from World War II.

backing,

you know, at that time,

the OSS, the War Department, before in 1948, it changed to the Defense Department.

The War Department had worked closely with the Vatican, with the church, as well as with mafia organizations,

organized crime factions in Italy that were being prosecuted by Mussolini.

And we were teamed up with them.

They gave us access to ports, to infrastructure, to safe houses.

a big network pro-U.S.

network node

during World War II.

And because of their influence on unions, they allowed us to run arms,

run transshipments of supplies, food, assistance, all of that, which is one of the reasons that the Italian mafia was protected for 60 years.

It was very much a Cold War asset for the U.S.

But so the CIA

achieves this successful result in April 1948.

And they do so by using NGOs.

They use charity fronts.

They use philanthropic foundations to funnel money and assistance in.

They work through the unions and the trade labor associations, which are civil society organizations

that you can consider in the NGO fold.

They work through all of these charities, foundations, nonprofits, the NGO sphere

in order to run this election rigging in 1948.

So 12 days later, George Kennan writes a memo from the U.S.

State Department called the Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare.

And everyone can look this up online.

And he lays out how this is the model blueprint for the American power in the 20th century, and that we need to overcome the basic distinction between peace and war that Americans have long believed there was, because the average American does not understand the intricacies of international relations.

And

if we don't seize this initiative to build an organized political warfare apparatus through this State Department intelligence function,

then we will lose the American century,

we'll lose the 20th century to the Bolsheviks or to the British, who each have their own Department of Dirty Tricks.

And so it goes on to say that this is a State Department function.

Ideally, it would be within a State Department

Bureau of Political Warfares.

I think the Director of Political Warfare is what they wanted to call this until they decided.

And in the memo, he says, but there are problems with this, which is that because the State Department provides a public audit of its funds, we would not be able to conceal these funds in the State Department budget.

So it might be ideal to have an outside intelligence agency to take on this function.

And that's why two months later, the CIA was given the plausible deniability doctrine and given delegated these powers by that very author, George Kennan.

But at the back of this memo are fascinating exhibits of

contemplated ways to structure recommendations and proposals for structuring this CIA intelligence work through NGOs.

And it includes creating, for example, voluntary councils of an outside organization that would nominally look to the public like it was a grassroots organization that is helmed by fine upstanding members of the American establishment or people in great repute.

He actually uses the line:

members of the American business community of the caliber of Alan Dulles.

Of course, Alan Dulles was the CIA chief, but they would.

A true criminal.

Right.

And, you know, in the time his brother was running the State Department.

And it goes on to say that it would look to the world like it's an NGO, but it would be it would receive funding from the CIA, it would receive guidance from the CIA, and it would constantly coordinate.

And it was at that very year that the term NGO really

became a codified term when the term non-governmental organization was entered into the charter of the UN Declaration on Human Rights in 1948,

where the Economic and Social Council was directed to coordinate everything it did with

NGOs.

And that's really the sort of etymology of that term in terms of its explosion is when the UN codified that term.

And

that's what essentially set off this NGO arms race, this proliferation of cells within American statecraft, the American business community, within the American intelligence community, the national security community, to each create their own cellular circuitry in order to advance their interests.

And I can get sort of deeper into that story

if you'd like.

I can just take it from history there to present.

But I'd feel remiss if I didn't also note that there's a government and there's a business side of it.

And the thing that I think a lot of people are missing in this story and the attempt to take on the rogue elements of the NGO plex is that

last time we talked,

it was right after USAID had

announced its closure.

And I took what a lot of people, I think, thought was a somber tone on that, that I was celebrating its shutdown, but I was braced for impact about

the ramifications of this and how it might play out.

And I think I used the term that, you know, this is necessary to do this open heart surgery.

We also have to ensure that the patient doesn't die on the operating table.

Just because it's the right diagnosis doesn't mean

you can set it and forget it.

If you don't midwife the process diligently, you could kill the entire American empire.

And

I bring up that point here because it's not just American intelligence and American statecraft and the State Department, the DOD, the CIA.

It's also virtually every single major international corporation that we consider to be American that is wrapped up in this NGO plex.

And if you

and I can go through examples of how that manifests, but I can't think of a single industry on

that's domiciled in America, that people think of as great American companies

that is not deeply connected to the NGO plex and in some respects

dependent on the NGO plex to secure their markets, to secure their

profitability, to secure their revenues, to secure their interests.

And

while we are taking on the NGO plex,

there's also this, and now they're going to make their voices heard through lobbying, through pressuring Congress.

And this is what we're seeing.

Congress is now looking like they're not going to codify these Doge cuts.

We saw 26, I think, Republican members of Congress who are saying they're not going to approve the Doge cuts around USAID.

But a lot of this is, I think, to find the solution that is politically

possible, you have to understand, I guess, how the whole ecosystem works in order to provide, offer solutions that might have political viability,

if that makes sense.

Of course.

Of course it does.

So non-governmental is actually a sort of misleading description because they're paragovernmental, it sounds like.

Yes.

You know, they're not, I mean, we're led to believe they're like, you know, doctors without borders or whatever, you know, which I'm not against for the record, but like whatever the famous NGO is going into South Sudan to save people.

They're acting totally independent.

They're non-governmental, but that, as you just described so capably, that

that's a lie.

Well, this sort of gets down to the stem cell concept and what type of NGO cell type you're talking about.

I'll give you a couple of examples.

So there are these paragovernmental ones.

Like take, for example, the Open Society Foundation.

Started in 1979.

According to George Soros, it was to provide basically a tax loophole for his kids.

That was the idea that he said.

And then it quickly became wrapped up with the U.S.

State Department operating in all of the major Cold War hubs, especially in Eastern Europe,

and fomenting the turnover of those governments so that they would break away from the Soviet Union and join the U.S.

and Hungary, Romania, Poland,

the whole litany.

And meanwhile, he was running the

Quantum Fund and his George Soros management fund that was speculating on the foreign currencies of all these governments.

So while he's working with the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency and every U.S.

embassy and every country in Eastern Europe and using this foundation, this network to influence the course of those events so that their governments would flip, he's using his hedge fund to speculate.

Way before anyone knows that

this movement is even being cultivated by the State Department and by his own nonprofits, he's speculating on the direction of those currencies.

So he's got insider trading knowledge of everything that's going to happen in these countries while he's betting on it.

It's sort of like the Nancy Pelosi stock

tracker type of thing.

But by the 1990s, the Open Society Foundation had become such a powerful force in Washington

that Bill Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State, I think it was Strobe Talbot, who said,

we think of the Open Society Foundation as being an independent but allied partner country like the UK or France or Germany.

And so we work closely with the Open Society Foundation.

We consider them an ally,

but we have to synchronize U.S.

foreign policy with the foreign policy

set out by the Open Society Foundation.

This is a a quote.

Everyone can look this up.

It's on my timeline on X.

But so this is in the 1990s.

This is 30 years ago at this point.

U.S.

foreign policy is being synchronized with the George Soros policy recommendations.

And a lot of this is because

it's not just that George Soros is the largest donor to the Democrat Party.

And, you know, Bill Clinton was obviously the Democrat president.

George Soros provided two and a half times more than any other single individual to the Democrats in the last election cycle.

But it's that

just this last election?

Yeah, for Joe Biden, $100 million.

I think the second largest was $40.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

And although that may be the 2020 election, actually, that I'm referring to with those numbers, because I think those were the numbers in 2024 pre-election.

So that may have been the 2020 election cycle, but I'm sure it's comparable for 2024.

But

so the other part of it, though, is that the Soros Foundation,

so it drafts off of those policies.

And I can give you some crazy examples of this.

In Mongolia

is a particularly perfect example of this.

But we'll come back to that in a second.

So it's not just that Soros donates to the political candidates.

who's running for president, who's running for attorney general, or who's running for district attorney.

It's that the Soros Foundation is also a co-investor and a co-sponsor in government initiatives and government projects.

At USAID, you will frequently find, almost constantly find,

that the Open Society Foundation is a donor into USAID initiatives, a donor into State Department initiatives.

And this is what you frequently see when a government agency cannot get sufficient funds allocated from Congress, they need to reach into

the NGO sphere or into the private sector with multinational companies to effectively co-sponsor and provide the top-up capital to get the amount of money they need to run this operation.

That's legal.

Not only is it.

Can I just fund a war if I want?

Can I just like send a check to the Pentagon to buy more bombs?

I mean, we can have privately funded government.

Yeah, we've had it since the Banana Wars.

We've, you you know, we've, we've had, uh, we've had this relationship for in Honduras.

Yeah, Honduras, Guatemala.

This has been a constant feature of American statecraft

almost since the beginning, which is that

you have a government national security interest or a government commercial national interest, but then you also have the profiteers of

that government action in the private sector, in the the for-profit space, and also at the NGO layer to the extent that they're getting funded to do this work, or it satisfies the wants of the sponsors of the NGOs.

So, and this is what Wars of Racket was about.

If, you know, the Smedley Butler 1936

book about how all the major multinational corporations were on the take for World War I.

All of them were on the take for, you know, when he's talking about how he toppled governments in South America for,

you know, what was it, City National Bank and, you know, the petroleum companies and

United Fruit.

But may I ask?

I mean,

yes.

I mean, of course, I knew that.

I read it, but I didn't understand that they are not only the beneficiaries of these policies, but also the funders of the policies.

Yes.

Yes.

So, but that the problem with that conceptually is that it puts

it's all beyond Democratic control.

There's no, I mean, that's like, there's no way to vote out,

you know, whoever, George Soros or Larry Fank or whatever.

There's just kind of right?

Right.

Well, it's a tectonic plate.

It's something that shapes the fabric of what we consider democracy to be.

And it's

and I think arming

everyone in America with the knowledge of that topography can shape the kinds of democratic action that you propose.

I'll give you an example.

I mean, this was just yesterday.

The nation of El Salvador announced a 30%

tax

on all foreign funding of domestic NGOs within El Salvador.

This is a shot heard around the world.

There have been many attempts by countries to contain the NGO plex.

Yeah, most famously in Hungary.

Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia.

Every time they've been confronted with

street protests protests and attempts to pressure the parliament using civil disobedience and these same sort of

State Department, USAID, Soros Foundation type renta riots.

We saw that in Slovakia, Serbia.

In Hungary, when they passed their NGO transparency bill, it was blocked by the EU.

The EU intervened and said that you cannot enforce this NGO transparency law because

what?

Yes, yes.

And they threatened to cut them off of EU funding if they Hungarians aren't allowed to know where the money's coming from into their own country.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They called it the Russian law, by the way.

The Russia law?

Yeah.

It's bad, therefore it's Russia.

Well, the idea was Russia had banned USAID, had banned the National Endowment for Democracy.

I think in 2015, around then, this was after the pussy riot incident.

Yeah.

You know, this is sort of a little bit pre-Navalny when they, when the regime change was sort of from the right-wing nationalist side, we attempted a sort of left-wing,

you know, left-wing Antifa type coup in Russia through,

you know,

the whole pussy riot and associated with the Well, that wasn't like an organic artistic expression, is that what you're saying?

I mean, you can look up online the lead singers pictures with Tony Blinken and standing at the State Department podium and all the National Endowment for Democracy literature on it and the USAID, everything.

Just look up USAID.

That wasn't just like an especially empowering form of feminism.

It was tactical.

It was tactical feminism.

And it always is with people.

It always is.

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But what happened was, is after all this stuff,

Russia passed this, you know, basically banned

foreign NGOs or at least banned a huge subset and required all these

transparency around it.

And they banned USAID and NAD.

And so when Hungary and Slovakia, and Serbia, and all these Eastern European countries who were in the post-Soviet orbit tried to pass transparency laws so that they could get a sense of how much of their own civil society

cellular body was actually foreign assets of a foreign government, this was called,

these were referred to as

Russian laws, the Russian law, because Russia had done this.

But think about this.

This is so insane.

But think about that framing.

And you see, and you can check out these protests online.

They're hilarious.

It's people protesting in the streets so that they are not allowed to know.

foreign funding of their own societies.

I demand

I am not allowed to know.

Put the blindfolders on me.

I am not allowed to know whether the newspapers I read, whether the union I'm a part of, whether the lawyers association I'm a part of, whether the private company that pays my paycheck, whether the public health sector and my hospitals, whether that is funded by a foreign government and how much is funding.

And, you know,

the Russians are not complaining about that because the money is not coming largely from, if the money was largely coming from the Russians, the EU and the U.S.

State Department would be demanding this.

We have this in the the United States.

It's called a FARA registration, the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

We consider that to be a criminal violation where you can spend five years in jail

if you don't file a FARA registration.

But if Hungary or Serbia or Slovakia tries to pass a Foreign Agent Registrations Act law there, we call that an attack on democracy.

Why?

Because it reveals, it takes the mask off of the NGOplex and

reflects and shows to the people what it really is.

It is the long arm of U.S.

intelligence.

It is the long arm of U.S.

statecraft.

And it's the long arm of that corporate financial donor drafter class with all of their own secular private.

If I could just interject and say, you know,

what I find so infuriating is that none of this helps the America that I live in or want to live in.

I mean, a lot of the agendas being pushed are not just like,

you know, we want to grow our bananas in your banana-favorable climate, or we want cheaper coffee, or, you know, we want your oil fields.

It's like pushing stuff that is just terrible, like awful, like blowing up families, attacking Christianity.

It's like, why does it have to be that too?

Why that agenda?

This is where it gets really complicated.

The idea behind this positive synergy between the corporate-sponsored NGOs and the government-sponsored government-sponsored NGOs, and them all working together as a common blob, was that

if we secure American business in a country, American contracts, American rights to minerals, or American rights to mines, we're boxing out the Russians and the Chinese.

That's not a crazy goal.

It's not a crazy goal.

And

that, however, gives a license to some of the dirtiest stuff.

And this

total profiteering, especially because the multinational corporations have no footing.

We're still living in Milton Friedman land.

And this is something, Milton Friedman was a huge influence on me as a kid.

Huge, huge, huge.

I watched

all 10 hours of free to choose.

I think he's an incredibly

I think he's a high integrity guy and he means what he says, but I think he fooled a lot of conservatives

with this concept of maximizing total shareholder value, which is now codified effectively

into

our corporate law that you have a

statutory.

It's the law.

It's the law.

You have a statutory, you have a duty to maximize total shareholder value.

That does not mean value for Americans.

When your

markets are abroad and your labor is abroad and your factories are abroad, but you are getting billions of dollars from the U.S.

government to advance your own private interests.

And you are

toppling many

solid parts of the world order to do so.

You're overthrowing governments.

You're bribing media.

You're controlling organized crime groups and

conflict zones.

all narco-trafficking, all of the dirty work that goes into making the sausage in a lot of these countries.

It's not trickling down

per Ronald Reagan to the people that live there.

These companies all got extremely rich while the heartland turned into the Rust Belt.

That's right.

And

so to me, it's no surprise when you see that John Bolton on Piers Morgan held up his USAID hand grenade when he was the head of USAID policy and budget under Ronald Reagan.

He showed this a few months ago on Piers Morgan, that his parting gift from USAID after he left running the policy and budget there, John Bolton,

humanitarian assistance guy,

was a USAID hand grenade.

So that was the parting gift they gave him, a golden hand grenade with his name engraved in it.

But that is.

And what did that imply?

That he was trying to blow up USAID or that

they're in fact using fucking game?

I think the idea was that

they are hard charging about it.

But what it represents to me is this development, defense,

they call it the three Ds, the

diplomacy, defense, development.

The idea that USAID is absolutely critical to U.S.

military operations.

It's absolutely critical to U.S.

diplomatic operations.

It's absolutely critical to U.S.

intelligence operations, which supports the diplomacy and defense.

And so, you know, while you're masquerading as this humanitarian NGO sponsor, you're the embodiment of of the hand grenade.

And that to me, you know, that's a Reaganite philosophy that we're fighting the ghost of.

This idea that

you deserve a slot within this government apparatus, U.S.

government apparatus, when you are not representing the interests of the United States, or at least there are no conditions on it.

There's no bounds on it other than you need to be in the good graces of that government.

For example, the U.S.

embassy in Brasilia did nothing to stop Brazil's attack on X or Brazil's seizure of assets from Ukraine.

Exactly.

That's exactly right.

But

this goes back a really long time.

I mean, Gonzalo Lear is a U.S.

citizen, was murdered by the Ukrainian government, and like nobody said a word about it.

The U.S.

ambassador to Ukraine didn't say a word.

None of the million NGOs populated by Americans in Ukraine said a word.

Like,

I don't see how they're on the side of America at all.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Well,

the Soros example is really interesting.

Can I share a few anecdotes?

Gosh, I hope you will.

So when I went into the Wikileaks archive to look at all the State Department cables that referenced George Soros or the Open Society Foundation or any of its associated groups, the Open Society Institution, the Open Society Forum,

I was surprised when I saw the communications and the State Department cables start in 1973, because the Open Society Foundation did not start until 1979.

And when I looked at the State Department cables, they were all related to Soros Associates, which was

the firm operated by George Soros' older brother, Paul Soros,

who is,

according to his New York Times

obituary, one of the greatest titans of the

shipping and port and infrastructure development world.

And Paul Soros is all over these State Department cables in tons of countries, Gabon,

Iran.

Remember, this is pre-1970.

This is

pre-revolution, yes.

And

so the State Department is

working with

Soros associates, Paul Soros,

in order to secure contracts for him, in order to secure favorable loan terms to foreign governments,

and in order to intervene on the bidding process for port construction, for lucrative port deals.

I think one in Gabon was, I think,

like a, I think it was like a $700 million to a billion dollar port project.

You know, huge money for a

Gabon, a project in Gabon in the early 1970s.

And one one of these cable State Department cables is really interesting.

It's the U.S.

Embassy there.

And they are talking about how

three senior executives from Brown and Root are going to be coming to Gabon

that week and are looking to have arrangements made to meet with, I think, the president of the country and other influential leaders in government and in civil society,

and for the embassy to arrange

everything from their travel to their hotel to introducing them to all the senior leaders in the country.

And

Brown and Root was working together with

Soros and Associates on this port project, and they were bidding against other foreign

infrastructure development companies from other countries.

And one of the cables basically suggests that the embassy should relay back to

Soros and Brown and Root the status of the bid going to them and anything favorable that can be done to nudge

that contract going to Brown and Root and Soros.

Now, what's interesting about this is a few things.

So, this is the example of what you were talking about, which is we're doing this because we want to stop, you know, there's a a big fight over Africa with the Russians and with the Chinese all throughout the Cold War.

You know, a lot of Africa had sided with Russia, and the Russian communism was seen as an egalitarian counterweight to a sort of racist United States, and there was a big diplomacy push there.

So getting Brown and Root and Soros to control the infrastructure in the country and to get those contracts and to get the proceeds and remits was advancing U.S.

interests under U.S.

national security and U.S.

national interests, which means there's a State Department interest in doing favors for Soros and Brown and Root.

Now, Brown and Root,

which would later become Halliburton, or

Brown and Root is, I guess,

Halliburton, I guess, acquired Brown and Root.

Yeah, Kellogg Brown and Root.

Yes.

Right.

Which, of course, is, you know, Dick Cheney was the, I think, CEO and president.

And Brown and Root in the JFK files, it was very interesting.

The ones that were declassified just a few months ago by Tulsi Gabbard,

they have a whole section on the CIA's,

all the CIA influence nodes over Brown and Root.

And it was fascinating.

I believe both

Brown, Sr.

and Jr.

held covert security clearances with the Central Intelligence Agency.

There's a memo in these new unredacted JFK files, and it was a CIA internal fact check, a crisis communications.

How do we respond to this new piece in Ramparts magazine

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And,

you know, so this is the Houston Republican CIA power base.

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And so Ramparts writes this piece, and it accuses this, the CI of running this vast network through the petroleum industry and through a web of ngos and uh and trade associations all over houston and and it focuses on this brown and root network because brown and root also had something called the brown found the brown foundation uh which was a ng you know a corporate sponsored ngo and

in this they actually reveal that both Brown Sr.

and Brown Jr.

had covert security clearances for work with the Central Intelligence Agency.

So while you have

one of the world's premier infrastructure and development firms, which would later

go on to work with Soros in Africa, and then would later spawn Vice President Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, who started off her career in USAID and comes from that same

Halliburton Brown and Root lineage, they've direct ties all over the CIA.

And

I guess I bring this up to say that in addition to that, you had this web of adjacent NGOs around statecraft there.

So for example, in that same files, again, the CIA is doing an internal fact check in this memo, where they say Ramparts has accused all of these people of being CIA.

And it's a memo, I think, to one of the local directors saying,

here's, we reviewed the files.

Here's what's true and false about the Ramparts article.

And in one of these they describe something they called the vernon fund which was a private philanthropy well it was created by the central intelligence agency to look to the public like a private foundation and it was set up to fund the uh webs of you teachers unions all throughout the world they sponsor something called the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession.

The CIA was running a initiative at the time to control the education space during the Cold War to stop the spread of communist teachings or communist sympathizing teachings and curricula, especially in Cold War conflict zones all over Europe, all over Africa, all over Latin America.

And so to do that, to control

to make sure that students and young people and every person in society who comes up through the education system is ideologically aligned against communism.

They had to control the teachers' unions and what was being taught, what was being promoted.

And

I bring this up.

Again, I hate communism, but all of this was repurposed against right-wing populism when Trump won in 2016.

I noticed.

Because instead of this same blob being threatened from its communist socialist left, it was being threatened from its populist nationalist right.

But so the CIA, so in this memo, the CIA says, yeah, they're right about the Vernon Fund.

Ramparts is right.

That was ours.

We set it up to look like a private philanthropy.

We recruited the daughter of the Texas governor to bundle money to the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession in order to influence the National Education Association and create, I think it was like 140 different trade associations that they all work through.

Now, the National Education Association is the largest of the teaching union associations.

And the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession is still around today.

It's called Education International.

They rebranded the name, but it's the same organization.

And by the way, in these CIA files, they explicitly say the president of the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession

has a CIA covert clearance to do this work.

The treasurer, the executive secretary.

So the thing is funded by the CIA, by a NGO that was actually created by the CIA, the senior leadership of the trade association doing the work,

our CIA at every part of the layer.

But how many people in Education International, how many teachers in that union, you think, know that story?

How many fifth grade teachers?

How many administrators at the union level?

How many people in the schools know that?

So when you see Education International today come out in Germany, because it branches in every country, in Germany, education internationals come out and said, AFD, no one affiliated with AFD should be allowed to be a teacher in Germany.

And they petitioned the German government to not allow AFD at any of the.

You can't have a job if you vote for the party.

Right.

But this is exactly what our CIA has been calling for, because AFD has been trying to revive the Nord Stream pipeline and trying to restore relations with Russia.

So from the national security

side of this, there's a predicate to say, yeah, we're authorized to run this operation.

But what do you do there?

Now you've got the AFT, which is the most popular party in Germany right now in polling.

It's got, I think, 26%.

They

doubled their votes

in the recent election.

But since then, polling shows that they are now the most popular party in Germany.

They were declared an extremist organization by their own national security state, which is effectively our national security state.

We gave birth to Germany as a unified country in the 1990s and midwifed its entire intelligence apparatus.

The center of U.S.

intelligence in the Cold War was in Germany.

And

so

you have

this blob interest in banning AFD.

The German government declares the most popular party in the country an extremist group.

If the definition of extreme is that it is a departure from what's popular.

And so, by its very definition,

it's a contradiction, is what I'm getting at there.

But that,

and thank God for Marco Rubio and Senator Tom Cotton, to his credit,

was fantastic on this.

He directing, he,

and Tulsi Gabbard, he, I think, directed Tulsi Gabbard at ODI to threaten to not to discontinue intelligence sharing with German intelligence for this domestic surveillance because this extremist label allowed the German government to spy on every member of the AFD as if they were al-Qaeda.

And so

because of U.S.

diplomatic pressure from our State Department, our ODNI, our Congress, Germany has temporarily put that in the enforcement of their surveillance dimension on pause.

But what I'm getting at is

this is a CIA proprietary, Education International, who's doing active work to do exactly what the Bill Burns CIA, the John Brennan CIA wants done in Germany.

And of course, who was the U.S.

ambassador

to Germany while this all played out with the Nord Stream pipeline blowing up?

It was Amy Gutman, my dean at the University of Pennsylvania.

You know, Amy Gutman,

when I was there 20 years ago, she was the dean then, then she became the U.S.

ambassador to Germany, head the State Department in Germany during the Biden administration.

And meanwhile, what's the University of Pennsylvania doing?

It's housing the Penn Biden Center, which is this major foreign policy coordinating node at the university layer.

Again, universities are just super NGOs.

The universities will organize.

the international exchanges of ideas with civil society in all these foreign countries.

They will produce the white papers that get picked up by the media.

They will liaise with, meet with government officials to advise on economic policy, don't you know, in the region?

You know, this is the whole Jeffrey Sachs, Harvard Institute of International Development.

And it's all tax-free.

That's the part that, I mean,

because you began this history of the NGO, and thank you for doing it with reference to the tax code, the introduction of the income tax in 1913 and then the tax-exempt statutes of 1917, right in the middle of the First World War, not surprisingly.

But like, isn't the whole idea of it, my understanding of a 501c3, well, I know because I ran one.

The idea is that this helps America.

We're encouraging charity.

But you're describing nonprofits that are arms of the Intel community or are

you know, working to increase profit to American businesses that may not actually really be American.

A publicly traded company is not American.

It's owned by the Sovereign Wealth Funds of nine different countries.

You know, it's like the whole thing is fake.

So,

what in 2025 is the justification for continuing to subsidize these?

Because, I mean, a tax exemption is a subsidy, in effect.

Someone's got to run the government, someone's got to fund the patent office.

If it's not you, it's going to be me.

So, but why should we subsidize these things?

They give three reasons:

national security, national interest,

and securing export markets.

And

the idea is: what does America look like if we don't do this?

We're in a competition right now with Huawei

in the telecom space, in the IT infrastructure space,

major State Department initiatives to try to

get neutral third-party governments to do away with Huawei and sign up with ATT, or if not that,

other kind of 5G light providers like uh like LG and Nokia in Finland and South Korea, to so that at least it's not China, Huawei.

And there's lots of reasons given for this.

Um, but the idea is, is if you can, if you can get ATT to get those contracts, well, ATT is an American company, and this will help American GDP, and this will help American jobs.

And so, like a great example of this is what just happened in Syria.

So, um,

there's been this big fight over this group.

The,

well,

also,

Syria has, we just lifted sanctions on Syria

last month.

Yes.

Mohamed Al-Jalani, the ISIS commander, turned al-Qaeda commander, turned Idlib, you know, rebel,

moderate rebel

leader, you know, who, who became, you know, the de facto head of state in Syria.

Now meeting with the U.S.

president.

Yes.

Yes.

Meeting with the U.S.

president, meeting with every major world leader.

The U.S.

just declared that we're lifting sanctions on

Syria after Syria pledged to open up its market to basically use U.S.

and Western

companies and contractors for its services rather than Russian or Chinese ones.

So, for example, one of the pledges was to use AT ⁇ T for its wireless and telecom services rather than huawei

where are they going to buy their pagers

it's a question it's and yeah it goes without saying that when you know the state department lobbies to allow at t to do your your wireless infrastructure that you know that we're monitoring it of course right but you can see how like what would america look like if at t now there's i think what 25 million people or so in Syria.

So AT ⁇ T has just secured 25 million customers, effectively,

at the, at the, you know,

barrel of a gun, effectively, with the,

they've drafted off of the U.S.

Defense Department who funded the paramilitaries in Syria.

They've drafted off of USAID and the billions we funneled into Syria.

They've drafted off of State Department diplomacy on their behalf.

And

a great example of this is Let me just say, I mean,

well, I definitely don't think that the ISIS guy is in any real sense better than Bashar al-Assad, you know, the ophthalmologist.

That's just my opinion.

I don't think that we should be friends with the ISIS guy or the al-Qaeda guy after they murdered 3,000 Americans.

Like, I don't understand that.

I do understand it, but it has nothing to do with the United States.

So that bothers me.

On the other hand, since we are doing that, I think it's great that AT ⁇ T is getting the contract.

I don't have a problem with that.

And what you're describing is a pretty conventional process where the U.S.

State Department, White House, and DOD all kind of combine forces to help American business abroad.

Great.

In general, great.

I don't like the constellation, the mushy constellation of, quote, nonprofits that operate in a very shadowy way.

Like, why do we need them for this?

Well,

let's stick with the Siri example for a second

and go over one of the shadiest of the nonprofits, which is the U.S.

Institute of Peace.

The U.S.

Institute of Peace.

By the way, if you fly into D.C., into National Airport, Reagan National Airport, which is like the closest airport to any city in America, but it's right there, right across the river.

And you come in from the north, you fly directly over the U.S.

Institute of Peace.

And it's a kind of clamshell type.

It's a beautiful building.

It's a modern building.

what's probably the only pretty modern building in washington and you think to yourself what the hell is that and where'd they get the money what is that well international peace is a a funny piece and international peace has a funny history with u.s intelligence work in the jfk files for example in the recent declassifications it showed uh a group that the cia um infiltrated and directed called the Catholic Association of International Peace.

And there are all these files that show that, yes, we have our assets in here and they're doing this for this.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

not the Catholic Association for International Peace, but a second international peace group, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

was run from 2014 to 2021 by Bill Burns.

the guy who would leave the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to run the Central Intelligence Agency.

What qualifies you as running the Endowment for International Peace as your very next job?

You hadn't worked in government for seven years.

You were cold.

And he had never worked at the CIA formally.

He was in the political affairs section, which according to the JFK files, 47% of every person in the political affairs section in 1961

was not actually working in the State Department political section.

They were actually called

Confidential American Sources, which is the term for

CIA agents operating under diplomatic cover, saying they work for the State Department.

That's still the case.

Today, it's a joke in D.C.

What's your dad do?

Oh, he works at the State Department.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

People say that about me.

Yeah.

And I don't blame them for thinking it.

I mean, it's so pervasive.

And of course, who was the head of political affairs for the Biden administration?

Victoria Newland.

And who would then go on to be on the board of the National Down for Democracy, which is another group that was spun out in 1983 by the Reagan administration when they were trying to get the CI's old powers back, but the Democrats in Congress were blocking that because of the CI's work against the anti-war faction in the Democrat Party during the 60s and 70s.

So in 1983, Reagan creates Ned.

1984, they create the U.S.

Institute of Peace.

The U.S.

Institute of Peace has had this crazy showdown with the U.S.

federal government recently, and it's an unbelievable drama that's been unfolding now for several months.

So the U.S.

Institute of Peace was

chartered by Congress in 1984

in order to do, it was sort of a, think of it like the National Endowment for Democracy,

but more.

Is George Orwell in charge of naming these groups?

I mean, National Endowment for Democracy subverts democracy.

All these peace groups are like aggressively anti-peace.

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Well, you know, the quote by the National Down Endowment for Democracy founder, I believe in 1986, the New York Times, was that

it would be terrible for groups to be seen as subsidized by the Central Intelligence Agency.

We saw that happen in the 1960s, where it was revealed groups were funded by the CIA and it caused embarrassment.

That's why the endowment was created.

It's literally a direct quote saying that the endowment was created to fund the groups that it would be embarrassing for them to, for it to be publicly revealed that they got CIA funding and of course it was conceived in the office of of reagan cia

um

william casey and uh raymond green there's a whole cia backstory to that the whole net thing but in 1984 another layer of

gongo you know

so the u.s institute of peace

was set up to be to be a national endowment for democracy but really focused on conflict zones and those whereas the national endowment for Democracy operates everywhere.

They'll operate in, you know, very heavily in Hungary or,

you know, Brazil, places where there's not real dark, you know,

terrorist conflict

or hyper-active DOD operations, for example.

So they, in those places,

it's a different track of influence for the NGOs because they're working with these communities in these,

they're working with the farmers where the coca leaves for cocaine are being grown.

They're working, you know, they're working.

You mentioned coffee.

USAID has spent hundreds of millions of dollars

on the coffee trade sector.

And USAID does all this joint work with Starbucks, all this joint work with Kurig.

They operate in conflict zones in the drug zones in Colombia and Peru, the Central African Republic, Republic,

Sudan.

And

what they're doing here is,

sorry, they're,

well, I got distracted by the coffee thought.

Sorry.

What the U.S.

Institute of Peace is doing is they're building giant networks and serving as a back-channel diplomacy.

They're doing field work.

So they are, you know, If you're in Foggy Bottom or Langley, Virginia, if you want to know what's happening on the ground in Syria, you need the people in the field to report it to you.

You need either the U.S.

Embassy or you need the NGOs connected to the embassy to provide the field work.

We want to know

what is happening economically in this region, which is the economic

breadbasket that's supporting the U.S.

military operations or the mercenary troops so that we can keep them funded.

We want to keep the industry in Afghanistan going, the industry in Syria in these sections.

So the U.S.

Institute of Peace will do those surveys.

They'll work with the local populations.

They'll build giant networks.

And

in June 2023, the U.S.

Institute of Peace, after the Taliban took over Afghanistan, they wrote a piece called Why the Taliban's Successful Opium Ban is bad for Afghanistan and bad for the world.

And they openly called on the Taliban.

We're not getting enough opium.

Yes.

Mike, it's a problem.

Right.

But the opium was funding

the entire

paramilitary network in Syria.

Everyone says, oh, ISIS traffics in drugs.

Al-Qaeda traffics and drugs.

Well, guess what?

ISIS and al-Qaeda,

with the full backing of the Biden government, just successfully overthrew the Biden administration's top enemy in the region and now have opened up all their markets to Chevron and ATT.

And

what I'm saying is, is they were openly, this same group that is working with these Taliban networks and these Afghan special forces and is deeply, deeply involved in Syria, is openly calling.

And this is not that they got busted paying these Taliban officials when Trump tried to assert control over the U.S.

institute peace because it's chartered by Congress.

It has 15 members of its board.

Three of them are mandatory.

The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the President of the National Defense University are three reserved spots.

So think about this.

This is the U.S.

Institute of Peace, but required on the board is the Secretary of War,

the head of the War Institute, and the Secretary of State.

And then there are...

12 political appointee spots.

Now, the Trump administration tried to assert control over the U.S.

Institute of Peace, as it is statutorily entitled to do.

And the response from the U.S.

Institute of Peace was to barricade the doors, to delete, Doge said, a terabyte worth of financial data, which Doge says it recovered and showed payments to those very Taliban networks that they were saying keep the drugs flowing.

And so

evidently, according to the Doge team, they found weapons caches inside, like a full military, you know.

They found found weapons inside the Institute of Peace.

That was what Doge reported.

As they said, back to Orwell now, right?

Right.

The peace people are stockpiling weapons.

But recently,

so this has gone through the courts because the whole blob resistance has been trying to stop all these shutdowns at every layer.

The outside general counsel for the U.S.

Institute of Peace

has he has been the outside general counsel for since 1986, just two years so he so the guy in in who's the head lawyer there uh has been the head lawyer there since just two years after it was founded since then since the mid-1980s um so has been

you know midwifing the the legal

dark dark arts of this thing uh since almost the day it was born and

He's the one who I believe has spearheaded or been leading this lawsuit to stop the federal government's because the because the Trump administration cleared the board

the U.S.

NHPS would not even allow the Trump appointed board members or its president to even go in the building that's why the federal police had to the FBI had to come in and in but what happened was is

That same lawyer also happens to represent the Wireless Trade Association

in the U.S.

and AT in that whole network.

So, while they are working for regime change in Syria, while the U.S.

Institute of Peace is taking U.S.

taxpayer money, $55 million a year, to build up this network of paramilitary groups and all these economic assistance programs and midwifing the political negotiations and creating a unified cohesive bloc against the Assad government in Syria

with

U.S.

Institute of Peace funds, the same lawyer who's now successfully sued because Judge Beryl Howe blocked the Trump administration's attempt.

Now we're back to square one with that.

He simultaneously is representing the Wireless Trade Association, where Syria just

turned over its IT infrastructure to ATT.

So,

I mean, just think about that.

You've got the U.S.

Institute of Peace organizing this regime change in Syria, including using these narco-traffic drugs while calling for the narco networks to keep going.

And simultaneously,

the senior executives effectively, I know he's senior, he's top outside counsel, but the senior executives effectively are representing the companies that are the direct beneficiaries of this regime change action.

So it doesn't matter if it's good for U.S.

national security or U.S.

national interest to topple Bashar al-Assad because they have a fundamentally unique and singular benefit, whether it's good for us or not, which is that they get rich from it.

I remember reading about the fascists, and

one of the criticisms that I thought really resonated was they eliminated the difference between the state and, you know, they were socialists,

truly,

and in Germany and in Italy.

And

you couldn't sort of tell where the German government ended and Krupps began.

And you know what I mean?

And that's bad.

I thought it was bad then.

I think it's bad now.

And I hate to see it happen here.

Well, it's funny you say that because

last week at the Council on Foreign Relations, I think the panel was titled

Reflections on the Post-Soviet Era and Implications for the Modern Day.

This Council on Foreign Relations.

And one of the questions asked to the panelists

directly was

there was a deep state in Russia in the 1990s, these oligarchs.

Yes.

We lost control over Russia.

They're basically analogizing Trump to Putin.

And they're saying

we had all this control.

We had total control over Russia during the Boris Yeltsin period.

And we had all these relationships with the Russian oligarchs.

But then Putin had a natural advantage as being the head of state, was somehow able to take over the Russian deep state.

And then we lost control over Russia.

This is right.

This is like the heart of it that nobody ever says.

It's Putin's decision to decapitate the oligarchy.

That's the reason they hate him.

Well, what they say is that he also

co-opted it and got the oligarchy working for him rather than for

outside.

And in the meantime, the Russian economy recovered and life expectancy went up and alcoholism went down and it became a beautiful country.

The oligarchy wasn't serving Russia.

That's kind of the point.

And the punchline to this is at the end of setting this question up,

the guy at Council of Foreign Relations asks,

so with those lessons, given that that's what happened with Putin, how can we preserve the deep state against Trump to save so that the deep state can save us?

This is a direct quote.

Sick.

And this is sick.

But again, look at like, you know, Choubeis and the Russian oligarchs that were working directly with the USAID and the Harvard Institute for International Development.

And it's the same thing with Brown and Root.

That story of Brown and Root and Soros.

in Gabon in the 1970s.

It was the same thing in Russia there, where we justified because it was in U.S.

national security and national interests to make Russia a democracy and to privatize all their state-owned assets.

USAID paid half a billion dollars to the Harvard Institute for International Development, again, another one of these universities that's delegated by the U.S.

government to go deeper into Russian society than the U.S.

government was wanted to be seen doing.

Very clever name, right?

U.S.

Agency for International Development pays the Harvard Institute for International Development.

It's just a Harvard spawn of USAID in order to work with Toubais and all these

Russian oligarchs so that the Russian oligarchs got rich selling at discount bargain basement prices all these Russian state-held assets

in non-competitive bids where only two outside bidders were allowed to participate.

The Harvard Management Fund for the Harvard Endowment and the George Soros Quantum Fund.

So it's just looting.

It's looting.

And by the way, it, it really, the country, I mean, look at the numbers.

Like the life expectancy for men in Russia in

1996 was like 55.

I mean, it was,

it was awful, awful to do that to people.

Like, what did your average Russian do wrong?

You know, they lived through 70 years of communism and this is what you do to them once they're, quote, liberated.

It's like, it's really a moral crime.

And

part of that issue is

as they were driving our own country on a similar path.

Exactly.

They expressed the exact same contempt that someone would try to do something to stop it.

And the other thing is, is they fully acknowledged it was a deep state before Putin.

They were just mad that they lost control of the deep state, which is why they were so, why a lot of these actions by the early Trump administration have...

terrified them around co-opting parts of the business community.

Exactly.

They hate, for example, Elon Musk.

They made this whole campaign to drive Elon

away or to go after Tesla.

The reaction to Jeff Bezos, for example, and his posture around reorienting the Washington Post.

The Bill Crystal class was apoplectic that these commercial drivers in the sort of

business community, but really these are this is the private for-profit sector that they would go along with Trump's foreign policy agenda, with Trump's reforms, maybe to be in in Trump's good graces, but the fact is, is that that state, which was such a powerful asset to them, they do not want that handed off to somebody who might oppose them.

The same reason that

they didn't want Matt Gates at the Justice Department.

They weaponized that Justice Department under Merrick Garland.

They don't want that baton handed off to someone else.

It's not that they have a problem with corruption at the Justice Department.

They want a monopoly on that corruption.

So

you're describing the mobilization of, you know, all the various arms of the U.S.

government, but the NGO community against Russia.

And I thought you made a really, really wise observation that too few make that Putin's original sin wasn't really lusting after Poland.

That's a lie.

It was kicking out the oligarchs and taking control of his own country, which a lot of people hated in the West.

So

here's the part where I feel like the NGOs destabilized the United States.

Like the war against Russia has been waged for over 10 years now, really by the NGOs.

Yes, completely.

And

they were, you know, as we discussed, they were authorized, deputized to do that.

We talked about the Harvard, the Harvard Endowment, the Harvard Institute for International Development, by the Open Society Foundation, which was simultaneously doing its civil society work, funding scientists, funding universities,

funding the intellectual class, funding the students.

And then simultaneously, Soros is operating a hedge fund that is buying up the assets of the Russian government and

of the failed Soviet state.

Yes, yes.

And this relationship is,

I mentioned to you

just now that there's a funny story about Soros and Mongolia and the State Department in Mongolia that is

like almost the perfect encapsulation of this

to see how this plays out in every country,

whether it's Russia or whether it's Poland or whether it's Hungary or you name it.

But Mongolia had discovered in the early 2000s the world's largest copper mine.

It's called the Uyo Tuigol mine.

And

this

was by far the biggest mine ever discovered.

Mongolia is the biggest mine in the world, primarily copper, some gold too.

And

a company called Ivanhoe

went in to negotiate a deal for the rights over that mine in tandem with the Mongolian government.

And

the U.S., so I found this in a State Department cable looking up all the Soros and Open Society Foundation things.

I believe the cable is from 2007.

And it describes how

this deal could yield billions of billions of dollars and could massively transform the entire Mongolian, Mongolian economy.

It could like double their entire GDP with a single mine.

And how there was an interest in making sure that this mine was acquired by Western companies rather than Chinese or Russian ones.

And in the context of this, the State Department references

a pivotal Open Society Foundation Mongolia

memo that had caught fire in the Mongolian press and was weighing heavily on public conversation about whether or not the Mongolian government

would sign this deal with Ivanhoe or

with the company for this.

And the Soros Foundation writes, and the State Department backs this in this cable.

They basically say, yes, this is all correct.

Basically, the Mongolian government wanted deal terms and was about to pass something hastily in parliament to secure a deal that the Open Society Foundation said was too extractive on behalf of the Mongolian government.

Basically,

the Mongolian government had problems with corruption.

They also mentioned that the deal might have environmental impact in terms of

the mine and its environmental impact on the ecosystem of Mongolia.

And they give seven reasons in this memo that

the Mongolian parliament should not has to be stopped from

doing

this deal on these terms.

So this is a...

The mine is in Mongolia.

Yeah, it's in Mongolia.

And the Mongolian parliament is the Mongolian government.

So George Soros, who's from Hungary but has British and American citizenship, is telling the Mongolians they shouldn't be able to do what they want with their own mind.

Maybe I'll start with the punchline first to make it more sense.

So,

the presumption there is a bit much.

The punchline is in 2009,

the George Soros Management Fund purchased an absolutely huge stake in that very company.

Come on.

Yes.

Yes.

It changed its name to Rio Tinto, but it was called Ivanhoe while it was negotiating this deal.

Now, the Open Society Foundation, they published an 174-page document, which went through everything they did inside of Mongolia

to kill the deal in 2007.

And what they described is that they networked with all these Mongolian members of parliament.

They

used their media NGO,

their nonprofit organizations, their advocacy groups,

their environmental NGOs NGOs to argue that the deal should be killed on environmental grounds.

And this culminated, and the Soros Foundation takes credit for its spawning street protests that destabilized the Mongolian government and incentivized

the parliament to not

ink this deal.

And again, the Soros Foundation logic was that it was too extractive on the part of the Mongolian government.

The Mongolian government was getting too good a deal from this.

On their own mind, in their country.

Yes, in their country.

And George Soros didn't own enough of it.

So the U.S.

Embassy in Mongolia is working with the Soros network.

Now, they're doing on national interest, national security grounds.

They're saying, hey, if a Western company doesn't get this, China's right next door to Mongolia.

They're big in the minerals, the metal space.

We don't want to lose this mine, the biggest copper mine in the world, to a Chinese competitor.

We want to make sure a Westerner gets this deal.

But the Open Society Foundation, which is underneath the, now it's the non-profit side of the Soros Management Fund.

The Open Society Foundation is saying, hey,

kill this deal because the company is not getting enough money out of this.

And then as soon as they kill that and get more profits secured for the mining company, the Soros Management Fund buys up the equity way before everybody else.

You can read about this in this,

no matter what happened with the mine, he would have like doubled his profit.

I think it went from nine cents to 17 cents before a deal was even inked or before they even got to one of the development stages of it, simply because everybody else hearing the news about this rushed into it.

But Soros had already bought up the stock because his own NGOs were on the ground midwifing the entire process with the full force and credit of the U.S.

government driving.

This is going to happen in Ukraine, isn't it?

Oh, I'm sure it's happened all the time.

Ukraine rebuilt the Ukraine rebuilding fund from BlackRock.

I mean, this is so if I want a piece of the trillion dollars that's going to be spent to make Ukraine a country again and, you know, and a piece of its resources, which are substantial, then I'm probably going to use NGOs

on my behalf, right?

Yes.

And this is where you get this curious line around gongos, government-organized NGOs, and

ongoes, I guess, you know, these oligarch-organized NGOs, and where they all sort of meet in the middle.

And where they meet in the middle is, I guess, what we just call

politics, the

topography of political factions in the U.S., in the sense that

every major company

has an interest

in sponsoring NGOs that, regardless of whether they believe in the mission of it, they advance something that helps

the business side of this.

So I mentioned Brown and Root

had the Brown Foundation.

And

the Soros Management Fund has the Open Society Foundation.

And

Microsoft has the, you know, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But

the last one was a little bit tongue-in-cheek.

But what I'm getting at here is, like, take the example of this Mongolia mine.

The Soros didn't care about the environmental impact of that Mongolia mine.

The fact that they could astroturf environmental protesters to take to the streets and to create a human rights predicate as to why the international community should intervene to stop the Mongolian government from signing this deal

was simply an NGO work.

It was simply an

now.

If the U.S.

government did that, that would have to come straight from the CIA.

That would be a covert action if you're going to run through front groups.

But if you have an ostensibly public one, but you're not seeing the classified State Department cables or whatever's CI underneath that making an argument from their Asia desk.

Well, this is going to help U.S.

national security because that's less minerals for China.

But then Soros is using that money and sponsoring.

So the real fear, though, is that that could happen inside our borders.

Yes.

That this combination of

government actors, strict government actors from the executive branch agencies and NGOs collude to like take down a president.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And so,

well, that's correct.

Right.

So they staged a little Mongolia right here in the U.S.

Yes.

And they're all the same groups.

They're all the same groups.

And a great example of this, we were talking about the U.S.

Institute of Peace.

The U.S.

Institute of Peace, we talked about it in the context of Syria

and how they were openly funding the Taliban and lobbying the Taliban to keep 95% of the world's opium flowing after the Taliban took over.

Do you know how high heroin prices would go if they shut that down?

I mean, I see their point.

Good point.

Yeah, more for the rest of the.

It's unbelievable.

But

they

so they are involved in these Astroturfed NGO rental riots very heavily.

If you go to the publications page.

The Institute of Peace is.

Yes.

The SUS Institute of Peace.

Now you have to understand they have a term for this.

Get ready for it.

Non-violent action.

That's the term.

Now, if you have to say that you're non-violent,

you're probably a little bit, you know, I'm not like non-violently drinking this water right now.

No, no, you're not.

But you have to understand where this came.

So this came from this same military network.

We talked about how the origin point for this was 1948.

The UN Declaration of Human Rights forbids military conquest,

territorial accession by military force.

UN Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter that 1948

establishes the NGO framework at the international level, intergovernmentally.

1948 is also when the CIA inaugurates organized political warfare through the use of NGOs.

But right at this time, you have

sorry, one sec.

I just had a second thought that just

crept up on this.

We were talking about the US and Soupies.

So right at this time, you have this move from direct military force to

topple governments through military coups or through military takeovers or through getting military defectors

to

instead of a top-down attempt to

induce regime change.

They created a blueprint.

This is the famous color revolution blueprint, the people-powered revolution.

You have lots of names for this,

which is the bottom-up method, which instead of getting at the military level with tanks and guns and fighter jets, you do it at the paramilitary street level.

You shut down the country by getting a critical mass of its civil society organizations to not cooperate with that government.

So the government

can't bring in any revenue.

They can't pay their own police officers or members of the military to quell the riots because there's no money in the government coffers, because they'll be sanctioned by the international community for cracking down on the protesters, and because the country itself is not.

The hospital workers have walked out.

The public health industry workers have walked out.

So the schools aren't open.

The hospitals aren't open.

The roads are being blockaded.

The only way to get rid of these people is either with hundreds of thousands of police officers in every region to drag them or to kill them, in which case you have the human rights violations.

And then every person is kicked off the SWIFT system and the international finance system and sanctions and threats of you know threats of a military intervention at that point.

So this was pioneered by the U.S.

military, this paramilitary street technique that they call nonviolent action.

And this was done through Gene Sharp and his cohorts.

It was at the Harvard CIA, incidentally, the Harvard Center for International Affairs.

It's a very cute, cute, cute nickname.

But Henry Kissinger was there.

They recruited Gene Sharp.

They got $50 million

in Pentagon funding to develop

the playbook that they now call From Dictatorship to Democracy, the idea that you can use

mass NGO action to organize the unions, the trade workers, the laborers, the media organizations, every aspect of civil society in order to encircle the government, to cut it off from its own sources of power.

And then

with the sitting government effectively

paraplegic,

quadriplegic, basically cut off from its arms and legs, it would be ousted by a street protest that effectively surrounds the Capitol and

takes over the buildings.

I mean, this is basically, it's a January 6th blueprint, if what they said about January 6th was actually true, which of course is not.

But, you know,

everyone can watch Bringing Down a Dictator, the PBS documentary about the State Department and U.S.

Institute of Peace, their work getting the Oatpoor movement in Yugoslavia to topple Slobodan Milosevic.

That was nonviolent action is what they call it.

Now, the ending scene of that documentary, you hear the whole documentary.

He says non-violent action, non-violent action.

The climax of

the documentary, which has soaring violins as if this is an

amazing thing, is the parliament building, the capital building in Serbia being set on fire,

its windows smashed, and a throng of hundreds of thousands of angry street protesters

flooding into the building and declaring themselves the new government.

This is cheered on by the State Department, USAID, the US NCOP, the USNCU of Peace was actually on the ground training them.

And

meanwhile, the narrator, Martin Sheen is the narrator in this documentary, and he goes on to say, it's all about nonviolent action.

And he says, and that's Oatpoor wears all black.

They have have tight leather.

They have a clenched fist as their symbol.

It is all intentionally sinister.

It's like intentionally sinister.

Molotov cocktails and police cars, setting the Capitol building on fire, breaking the glass, forcing the democratically elected president to flee by Helivac out of the country.

This is what they call nonviolent action.

And just again, nonviolent action just means mob violence action.

But to them, that is less violent than bombing Sarajevo.

So really, they're saying it's like it's mostly peaceful.

Yes, mostly peaceful arson, mostly peaceful.

So, I mean, you're describing Black Lives Matter.

Yes.

It's kind of weird.

I'm listening to this.

I'm like, if Black Lives Matter was

not a synthetic group, if it was an AstroTurf,

what happened to it?

It disappeared as soon as its usefulness ended.

Well, that's exactly what happened.

And I can talk all about the connections of this network to that, which is

the same.

And I remember Darren Beatty saying at the very beginning of that, this is a color revolution.

And I love and respect Darren, but I didn't quite fully appreciate how true that was.

No, it's literally the exact same network.

I have all of their planning documents from starting two weeks, you know, after the riots popped off.

We can get into that, that whole thing with the Transition Integrity Project and the U.S.

Institute of Peace program on nonviolent action oh incidentally that's a they were involved in that too yes and the international center for nonviolent conflict was a was a big part of these uh you know um how to leverage the blm protests to uh to shut the country down in case trump won the 2020 election on election day 2020.

um this is they also work through the union groups especially the afl cio which is the the top cia conduit in the union space around the world leftists in the the 1960s used to call it the AFL-CIA.

Remember, the AFL-CAO had a secret agreement with the Chamber of Commerce about protests to shut down the country.

This was published in Time Magazine by Molly Ball.

But on this U.S.

talk about the Uniparty, when labor and management are both colluding against you, you know.

Right.

But the Chamber of Commerce.

I mean, it really is.

Everything is the final scene in Animal Farm when the pigs and the farmers are indistinguishable from each other.

It's like, that's the deep truth.

Yes.

Yes.

But both of them were threatened by Trump's foreign policy.

The unions get hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department, from USAID.

We have multiple bureaus just for funding them.

The Department of Labor as an International Affairs Bureau, we spent $20 million funding unions in 2023 alone in Brazil, the AFL CIOs union groups in just one country in one year, $20 million to the union groups there.

Kind of weird there was an election that year.

Yeah, kind of weird there.

And it was specifically for

labor, for mobilization of the unions and help them better organize themselves.

You remember that Lula was the head of the Workers' Party?

Yeah.

Remember who broke him out of jail?

It was the AFL-CIO.

Who did the AFL-CIO name the man of the year?

I think it was in

2021 or 2022.

They named Lula the man of the year.

And what is the AFL-CIO?

It's not only was it, you know, directly sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency for 30 years during the Cold War, but now they don't even need that because they have the CIA spin-off, National Endowment for Democracy, which has its own union branch called the Solidarity Center.

The Solidarity Center is a formal part of AFL-CIO.

It is inseparable from it.

And the Solidarity Center

kicks them money.

So what I'm saying is

the Chamber of Commerce was threatened by a potential abandonment of

cutting the wind for them of Trump doing

liberal interventions, military interventions, humanitarian interventions in every country on God's green earth.

We would just go in, replace the government, and then

what would happen to AT ⁇ T if they couldn't get those contracts?

What would happen to Amex if we didn't have

USAID's DIA app in Ukraine?

I'm sorry, I think it's Visa, so that Visa gets all the credit card processing for all the transactions there.

What would happen

to Starbucks if we abandoned the USAID coffee programs in Peru and Colombia and the Central African Republic?

What would happen

to

the petroleum companies if we didn't

militarily step up our presence to...

So the Chamber of Commerce and the unions, labor and management had a

common enemy the same way Democrats and Republicans did when Trump first came on the scene.

Because anyone who wants to put America first

is going to run straight into everyone who wants to put their own interests first.

America be damned.

And nicely, nicely put.

So let's end by

Well, I hope you will end by explaining if you were to,

I don't know, defang these groups, drain the swamp, as as we say,

who would you go after first and how would you do it to restore democracy to the country?

The premise that the people rule, that elections matter, that there's the change people want when they get a new leader.

That is democracy.

There's three layers of it:

there's the executive branch layer, the legislative, and the judicial.

On the executive branch layer,

an unbelievable amount of positive

accomplishments have been

done

through the executive branch.

And I think that the Trump admin deserves credit, even as we're unsatisfied with how big this is and how many problems there have been with Congress and judges blocking things.

It took a lot of political capital to do what they did, and they were aggressive at almost every layer of it with some very big asterisks and exceptions.

The idea of the firing of 14,000 people at USAID, the closure of the offices, the funding pauses

was absolutely massive, both symbolically and in very, very real terms.

The restructuring that Marco Rubio has led at the State Department is absolutely massive.

Like 135

sub-agencies are being riffed,

totally killed, the reduction in force, totally laid off so that you don't even need the congressional approval because there's no job for firepeople to go back to because the division doesn't exist anymore.

Those include the Democracy Rights and Governance, the Democracy, Rights and Labor Bureau at the State Department, which is the number one coordinating web,

I guess, in tandem with the International Organizations Bureau, but Democracy, Rights, and Labor

is

the main place at state for the NGO Plex because they're all getting this funding and they're all coordinating with the state department getting the protection of the state department because they are promoting democracy as the state department wants them to do

the rights and it stands for the human rights because you know human rights violations in foreign countries and then labor is you know the unions and the and this is where you get the rental riots and all this and uh you can go online and see weeping videos from people from the democracy rights and labor bureau that uh they've been working there for 15 20 years and suddenly it's gone and it is going to have a devastating impact of course it never has a devastating impact on these things.

A great example is the

AP

ran a story about, I think the initial title for it was Trump's Move to End USID AID Crushes

Cocaine programs dedicated to

combating the cocaine trade.

And the article is the biggest self-owned you'll ever read.

It's all about how we have all this money that goes to Colombia and to Peru and to Bolivia to stop the cocaine, to stop drug trafficking in the, you know, Colombia is number one, Peru is number two, biggest coca leaf, you know, cultivation in the world.

And

it goes on to say, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to cocaine is going to flourish.

Then they have a statement that they include because they reached out to the president of Colombia.

President of Colombia says, we're thrilled that USAID is gone.

They,

They made the problem worse.

Then they

go to Peru and the number two called

Coca Leave Cultivator.

And they said

the Peruvian government refused to comment, but we talked to the former head of the National Commission on

Narcotics Prevention,

the former head of the part of the Peruvian government that handles this.

And he said,

thank God the USAID programs are

on combating cocaine here are gone.

They were the primary problem in this whole thing.

Actually, the

and he gets an example.

He says, actually, not only did none of the money actually ever reach the groups, but they only slowed down action that the Peruvian government tried to do.

When the Peruvian government tried to do something to stop cocaine, USAID would step in and they would delay things.

They would drag things.

It's almost like they wanted the cocaine.

And then he gives the example of these, he says, and in

Bolivia, right next door, Bolivia banned USAID in 2013 and they drastically reduced the cocaine trafficking because there was no USAID cocaine program keeping the cocaine flowing.

And so anyway, but what I'm saying is, is this is all done through these,

you know, these State Department bureaus, which are now being reorganized.

And one of the, so at the executive branch level, I would say there's,

we huge wins at the National Science Foundation, which is a major

NGO and university sponsor for this.

A couple of big misses, though.

How the National Endowment for Democracy remains fully funded.

They were talking a big talk, the Trump administration, about defunding the National Endowment for Democracy, which I would say is one of, if not the worst of the worst, offender in this entire space.

Especially with Damon Wilson at the helm, who came straight from the Atlanta Council Digital Forensics Research Lab, which was the censorship super center of the Western world?

Seven CIA directors on the Atlanta Council's board, funded by the Pentagon State Department and USAID.

The Atlanta Council, where he came from, at that time, the Atlanta Council was running training seminars to get journalists to flag Trump tweets, including one seminar called I Call Bullshit, where the Atlanta Council Digital Forensics Research Lab,

where Damon Wilson was the head, they are training schools of journalists holding up Trump tweets on Jumbotron that says two words, witch hunt.

This is one month before the Mueller hearing.

So Russagate was at its apex.

They wanted to censor or call disinformation Trump's attempt to present his own case around Russia Gate.

And they provoked journalists to hold up Atlanta Council-sponsored placards with the word bullshit on it.

And that means sponsored by you and me, because we pay for them through 11 different government agencies, pay the Atlantic Council.

So why are they, why why is NED, National Down for Democracy, Atlanta Council?

Why are they still getting government money?

I'm not privy to those internal conversations.

I have actually seen the IR.

So there's four cores at NED.

There's the two political branches, NDI for the Democrats, the National Democratic Institute, IRI for the Republicans, the International Political Institute.

McCain ran for years.

Yep, McCain ran.

Mitt Romney is on the board.

Madeleine Albright, by the way, is the head of NDI.

Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board of NDI.

Nina Jankovitz was at NDI.

So those are the two political branches.

And then the other two core fours are the exact other two groups who signed that secret agreement around organizing, destabilizing street protests in case Trump won.

The third one is called the Center for International Private Enterprise, CPAY.

That's the U.S.

Chamber of Commerce branch of NED.

And the fourth one is called the Solidarity Center.

That's the AFL-CI Labor Union Arm of NED.

So, what do you know?

The Never Trump Republicans, the Democrats, the Chamber of Commerce, and the unions,

the exact group behind the Transition Integrity Project, which explicitly plotted in the height of the George Floyd riots,

ran a war game about how the Biden campaign, in case Trump won in a clear win scenario, clear Trump win was the name of their scenario, scenario three.

This is in June 2020.

How the Biden campaign could get racial justice activists from these riots to be, quote, receptive to a Biden call to take to the streets and plotted what needed to be done to resource them and to cultivate relationships with Black Lives Matter's senior leadership and community leaders so that they would owe the Biden administration favors in case they need to be called on.

And lo and behold, who paid them $50 billion?

dollars the chamber of commerce then flooded them with fifty billion dollars in contributions you remember that all the different chamber of commerce companies just flooded billions of dollars of donations to blm to destroy our country yes and meanwhile the afl cio and seiu were all on the streets with them

just like they are around the world when we want riots in georgia we want riots in serbia we want riots in hungary we go straight to the afl cio branch and

but those are the four corners of net are the exact four corners of the effective insurrection against Trump during turmoil.

I don't understand how that can remain.

I know IRI has made reforms.

Let me say this to their credit.

In full disclosure, they have reached out to me, and I think I've mentioned this publicly before, but I haven't really been able to say all that much because it just doesn't really come up much.

And I have seen them attempt to make reforms.

This is the Republican side of it.

And

I've heard from folks around its senior leadership that

they've recognized

how elements of what they were doing before were inappropriate, they'd gone rogue,

that certain people who were there are not there anymore, that they are trying to align

their actions with the foreign policy set by their sponsors, the U.S.

government.

And

I have seen genuine good faith.

They're trying to participate in democracy now.

Look, I'm not weighing into whether or not they're doing it for cynical self-serving reasons or whether, but frankly, you could argue they may have been doing the other, the bad stuff, or because the Biden administration wanted them to

do that, or because

Trump was on shaky ground in his own first term and didn't really control his own Congress or budget or

had a very strong coalition.

But the point is, is

NDI has not made those, has not made those reforms at all.

The Solidarity Center has not made those reforms.

And the issue is, is if you say, okay, IRI has reformed, the Republican branch of it has, but these other three are still rogue.

Well, then what happens, the whole purpose of NED is that it's bipartisan and

that it therefore sort of synchronizes U.S.

policy, U.S.

foreign policy on both sides of the political aisle because everyone's on the take.

So everyone has a reason to invade Ukraine.

Everyone has a reason to topple Assad.

But if only if IRI reforms, but NDI doesn't, what happens to Net?

Do you see what I say?

I do.

This is my last question, and you will know the answer.

So when I hear you talk, it's like it's my childhood.

You know, I just grew up around this stuff.

And,

you know, pre-91, the assumption was we're locked in an existential struggle with the forces of darkness, the Soviets on board with that.

Post-91,

you know, ultimately we came to realize that we run the entire world and that's like a huge management project to keep everything under control and sort of moving in the right direction.

And, but, you know, we're in charge of the world.

Post-2023,

there's like, there's no way you can tell yourself that.

It's just not true.

And the BRICS is now represents a bigger economy, bigger population, bigger military than the West.

So I guess my question is, do the people running all these different groups understand that their 1980s era assumptions are just like overtaken by events?

Do they see the world clearly?

Do they know the limits to their own power?

Do they know what's up?

I think they do, actually.

Good.

As I mentioned,

I'm reading Bill Burns' autobiography, the CIA director for Biden.

I'm a very close friend of Epstein's, by the way.

No, no, just a fact.

Yes, I know.

I just saw emails from Epstein to him.

Yes, I know.

Someone showed me.

I think Bill Burns is a very smart guy.

And I'm not for Bill Burns, but

I'm just saying friend of Epstein's.

Right.

But

I think there is recognition of that.

And I think this is also why you see this everything is alliance-based and why you see, for example, the Biden administration moving so deeply in tandem with the EU on all things

and using EU regulatory action to box out

populists.

Like the Biden administration was totally behind the EU Digital Censorship Act that is going to become

completely.

Yes.

Literally.

I think there are internal documents from their White House Information Integrity Working Group planning the whole thing, as well as the USAID programs to beef up the terms of it so that it can be used against domestic enemies in America.

But the fact is, is

I think

this is part of the global alliance structure.

And I actually don't think that the Biden administration really moved unilaterally, assuming unipolar power.

Almost every major foreign policy decision

would have the buy-in of the UK, France, the in-power parties and Germany and Canada, and paid very close attention to

and and in fact, partnering with in many ways China.

I mean, Trump blocked China from being able to import oil and gas from Iran.

He blocked that for four years, two months into Biden's term.

China inked the Iran deal for

$400 billion of oil and gas from Iran.

It's just,

so I don't think there is a kind of...

as much of the unipolar, there is some of it, definitely.

Like you hear the John Bolton types

talk about

almost presupposing that we can just bully everyone around.

But I think even that is done with an expectation that it's going to be NATO-wide.

It's going to have

allies

around the world.

But to your point,

I think that the Ukraine-Russia war

has been a humbling period, which I think is why there actually is an appetite for peace,

even within many aspects of the blob.

They just want peace on terms that are beyond their leverage to obtain.

And,

you know, that is a war of attrition that

gets back to the efforts to cut USAID and the NGO plex.

USAID spent $15 billion.

I think

it was one year alone on Ukraine on this.

USAID NGOs are funding the pensions of people in Ukraine,

are funding the salaries of municipal workers.

There's more welfare for people in Ukraine from USAID than

effectively American citizens who live here legally.

But the fact is, if that USAID spigot gets cut,

things will go south very quickly.

This is why the EU is creating its own army,

a trillion-dollar budget that they've announced for the EU to effectively create a parallel NATO in case Trump dips out of that.

But in the heat of this,

I mentioned a few of the failings.

One of them, Ned.

Another one is a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget

is

hard for me to imagine that that does not go to prolonging the war.

But the Trump administration is a tough choice.

If you totally deprive Ukraine of the lifeline that they've had, everything crumbles immediately, but then

you lose the deal terms

in the sense that there's no hope to

have

territory in eastern Ukraine

flow back to control by the Kiev government.

There's no hope to recover all the petroleum resources in Ukraine.

Ukraine is the third largest shale

reserves, I believe, in all of Europe,

especially in the Donbass and

offshore in Crimea and the Black Sea.

And so,

you know, I think Trump is between a blob and a hard place.

You know, he he has to, if he wants a budget done, he needs Congress to approve.

We do not have a populist supermajority in Congress.

We have there are more populists now in Congress than there were under Trump 1.

So I don't think Trump will get as rolled as he was by Paul Ryan, but there will be rolling,

undoubtedly.

We've seen 26 members of Congress, I think, have said that they're not going to approve the Doge cuts, just the Doge cuts.

While you're getting handed even more money from a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, and how much of that trillion is going to be civil military, i.e., NGOs, because the military funds these NGOs.

As I mentioned, the Secretary of War is on the

board for the U.S.

Institute of Peace.

The Pentagon pays the Atlantic Council.

The Pentagon pays for NATO, which has all the

societal resilience and social cohesion grants to the NGO space to do all this.

And so a lot of, you can shut down USAID,

but you can just call it civil military, and the civil society NGOs will be funded by the Pentagon.

So

Trump has to keep his coalition together.

And so

he can't get everything he wants.

Just as we're not a unipolar power anymore, Trump is not a unipolar president.

So I'm happy with singles and doubles

as long as the direction line is

towards a better country.

The question is,

are we even going to get the singles or doubles?

Or is you know, is the blob going to get enough home runs and triples on the other side of it that on Met, nothing comes to pass?

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: When you next come back, I'd love to hear what a trillion dollars a year buys.

Considering that we're separated from our enemies by two oceans and face no invasion threat, I'm thinking that's a pretty big budget.

And I know that I'm probably not a good Republican for pointing that out.

But but uh,

I guess I'm not a good Republican in general.

But, like, what is that?

So, here's the problem: it buys votes.

No, no, I know, it buys votes in Congress.

If you want, if you want to fire people at the Justice Department, if you want to get people approved by the Senate for their positions, if you want to get rid of the Department of Education, hey, you might need to give them a you might need to give them a Pentagon bone.

Um,

and it's a very dirty soup.

Mike Benz, a very clean man.

I appreciate it.

Thanks, Doctor.

Thank you.

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