Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)

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So you more than anyone for the past couple of years have been awakening the rest of the country and the world to this nexus between public and private sector, NGOs, nonprofits, U.S. government agencies, whose acronyms you don't recognize, and you've described an entire complex that affects censorship, regime change, all kinds of sinister, unconstitutional outcomes that most Americans don't know they're paying for.
And I'm from D.C., so as you've explained this to me a couple of times, it all has made total sense. But sometimes I wonder, like, do people believe what Mike Pence is saying? And now, over the last week, since the USAID files have dropped, mostly on X, people are discovering what you have been talking about and learning that it's 100% true.

And I just wanted to ask how that feels for you. it's it's a sort of somber moment actually more more than anything and it's i found myself very reflective this week and hit by the weight of history of it, if that makes sense.
And there's a lot to this. I mean, a lot of people have said, aren't you so happy? You've been fighting for this so long and how it's happening.
And so they expecting, you know, cartwheels and spiking footballs. And that's not how I feel really at all because because the task here was to break the halo of this angel that turned into an angel of death.
I don't think we've had the success of the 20th century without having a soft power influence arm. I think this is how we add cheap gas and affordable homes and middle class prosperity and export markets for our manufactured goods here.
The task is to be able to make it be righteous and virtuous again, but you couldn't do that while it had this halo. And so the halo had to be broken.
The mask had to be taken off in order to implement reforms. And there have been, I feel the global impact of fundamental changes to U.S.
foreign policy that are happening now, because, you know, as I've been saying for so long, I mean, there really is a sort of USAID Truman show that much of the world lives in. Many people found out for the first time this week that 90 percent of media in Ukraine is funded by USAID.
Many people just now finding out the extent of U.S. media organizations that are that are funded by by USAID.
They're finding out the reach of it and everything from the unions to social media censorship, to pandemic and gain of function research to, you know, strange ties, even to things like terrorism and the drug trade. And there, there's that sort of these institutions that everyone thought were private and independent being corrupted by USAID's $44 billion-odd-dollar-a-year budget.
And when – I think a lot of people – that was a process that I felt was necessary to tell the story of internet censorship because for me my journey of discovery on this was like everybody else I thought internet censorship was a domestic story at first and so I start following the trail of it and then I see oh that's weird this at this disinformation conference the next panel is on energy geopolitics what are they doing together huh that's. And then you go over to the energy geopolitics people and you see, okay, well, their fellow panelists are all military contractors.
Okay. All right.
So the military has something to do with social media censorship and the energy pipeline politics and in Ukraine have something to do with it. Okay.
That's interesting. And then you keep going down the line and you see, okay, there are these Chamber of Commerce partners.
And then you see, oh,

there are these suite of humanitarian aid organizations

like USAID, NED, the whole suite of NGOs,

State Department grantees,

National Science Foundation grantees.

And you start to see that this is,

in order to tell the story I felt of internet censorship and what to do to stop it, you had to explain a totally different world than the one people thought that they lived in. And for the first several years of this, when I would do my little private briefings and bring my PowerPoints around the country, it was very hard.

It was impossible, frankly, to crack through even when people saw. I, you know, little private briefings and bring my PowerPoints around the country.
And it was very hard.

It was impossible, frankly, to crack through. Even when people saw the receipts on screen, they saw the source documents.
And they just couldn't conceive that the world actually works this way, that our country does these things. and they have a hard time squaring the morality of it with the operational side, if that makes sense.
Like they don't want to believe certain things. And so even if it's six inches in front of their face, they won't.
But I guess getting back to this sort of why am I neutral rather than happy right now is because we are conducting open heart surgery on the vital organs of the American empire. And I am pro empire to the extent that it helps the homeland.
I don't think we'd have a prosperous homeland without an empire. And the patient needs open heart surgery.
It has to be done. I am 100% agree with the decisions that have been made on

policy so far on this. But I want to make sure, and I feel a great sense of duty and obligation

to try as best I can to help identify the organ you're operating on because in the zeal to carry out radical reforms, you can, if you don't, if- Take out the wrong organs. Yeah.
Or if you don't even know, you know, how the atriums, how the organ works, it's directionally correct to do the open heart surgery, but the patient can die on the table if you do it wrong. And all of that has to be, like this is just the beginning of the fight to reform this in my view, but we are now in the arena and a blow has been struck.
This is, in my view, this week is really the first time maybe in American history with few exceptions, maybe in the 60s and 70s, that the blob, the foreign policy establishment that impacts so much of domestic affairs and sometimes controls it, has had to answer to the people that fund it. This is a shot across the bow.
There have been so many tactics that they've been able to deploy to shift the course of domestic politics in order to ensure that their global vision stays the course and there's been a blitzkrieg i don't think they saw this coming i i understand exactly what you're saying i don't think americans even now really understand the degree to which our foreign policy establishment use uses other countries particularly the five eyes, the other English-speaking intel services against us here.

You know, I've almost never met a British reporter in the United States who wasn't acting on behalf of some intel service against the United States. It's like, it's absolutely crazy.
I dealt with one today, actually. Do you know what I'm talking about? I don't know the individual you're referring to, but...
You're familiar with the trend trend um so but i guess what i hear you saying is americans when they learn just how corrupt the system is may lose faith in their country milton friedman gives this example about the pencil have you ever seen this video no he um he talks about it in the context of libertarian economic theory. He says, look at this pencil.

And he holds up a pencil and it's got a lead tip and graphite and gum.

And he goes, no, no single person in the world can make this pencil.

The gum comes from trees in Malaysia.

And the lead comes from some mine in Africa. And the graphite comes from graphite miners in South America.
And it's the magic of the market that all makes it possible. Everyone doing it for their own self-interest economic gain, but it creates this magical web of cooperation where everyone profits, and that's how we get cheap pencils in the U.S.
And I think what we're about to walk in on is the flip side of that, which is that people have been lied to in this country where they've thought that, they've been sold that this was humanitarian aid and co-signed it.

And let me come back to this point about the pencil

because maybe that'll just appear a little bit later in the story.

And I'll just sort of hint at it now.

But right now, the people who are trying to defend USAID

are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

They want to defend it on humanitarian grounds, and then they get totally deluged with all the ways that it has gone wrong and all the horrible things that's funding. So then they then turn to layer two.
This is sort of like Lindsey Graham defending our operations in Ukraine when it was, you know, we need to do this for democracy, democracy. And then we say, okay, well, you canceled elections.
You know, you've, you're, you know, there are all these non-democratic things that are happening. And he goes, okay, okay, layer two of my defense is there's $14 trillion worth of natural resources under the soil there.
So, you know, having it be a U.S. vassal state is advantage to us because then we can exploit those $14 trillion worth of resources.
I mean, that's what's implied there, right? Why would Americans benefit from Ukrainians exploiting that $14 trillion? Now, by the way, that's not a knock on Ukraine, but you simply saw that shift happen when, you know, as it got harder and harder to defend it on the basis of democracy promotion, the mask had to slip in order to defend it at the deeper level. It was to let people in, okay, here's why we're really doing it.
And every USAID program operates that way. it is getting back to this rock in the hard place analogy is that

they want to say it's humanitarian aid

but it's clearly

done is getting back to this rock in the hard place analogy is that they want to say it's humanitarian aid, but it's clearly done so much harm in so many places. It's doing such terrible things, funding the Wuhan lab, not to mention the whole rest of the USA Truman Show.
But then they go, okay, okay, well, it's U.S. soft power.
It advances U.S.

strategic interests. And so you say, oh, okay, so it's not aid.
And then it becomes very

schizophrenic to defend this thing because it's a labyrinth of lies. USAID's access and its

reputation completely depends on its perception as being a kind of quasi charity, even though

Thank you. And by the way, growing up, my dad worked with USAID.
It was called USAID, not USAID. To make it clear to everybody, it was not an aid organization.
Now they call it USAID. Right.
Well, I mean, I'm sure in the Ronald Reagan building, but how it's colloquially known, I mean, and how it's described to the voters, it's described as humanitarian assistance. And you go, okay, well, you know, and we can get into the depth of the scandals.
But I guess the fundamental feeling that I have right now is this is going to get a lot worse as people go through this self-discovery process of what's happening. We were talking a little bit earlier where I mentioned eight years ago when I was writing my little book attempt to try to explain everything that was happening in censorship and I felt like I had to explain all these other, you know, tectonic plates of American society and global affairs just to understand who and what and why is why they're censoring the internet.
But, you know, I would, I would spend my whole day in USA spending.gov, you know, to the exclusion of everything else, friends, family, a social life, and just going through that, this can't be true. This can't be true.
Oh my God, it is. Oh my God, it is.
And there are, there's a sort of five stages of depression that plays out as you discover it yourself going into these grant databases and seeing the receipts with your eyes like that, because that's what I've seen on my newsfeed this week. It's been just hundreds of people, all with huge megaphones who are just spending their day like saying, hearing about, oh, wow, there's all this corruption at USAID.
Let me plug it into the search database. Let me fish around a little bit.
Oh, here's what I found. And now everyone's contributing to this common knowledge, which is really amazing.
But I still feel already faith has been shaken, but there are layers to this that I think are going to truly shock people when they begin to try to put their their minds around it and i i believe fundamentally in u.s soft power i believe in soft power projection i believe there is a role for projects in foreign countries that have a dual function of helping the people there and helping secure import-export markets for us,

helping secure natural resources,

helping secure U.S. national security goals in the region.
There is a role for that. And I just, I feel that many came into this movement around MAGA and nationalism because they cared about their schools and the woke agenda in their schools.

They cared about their streets and their neighborhoods and whether they were safe.

And they cared about, you know, corruption from the U.S. president or their local representatives.
They never had to think about Pakistan, Bangladesh, Estonia, Tanzania. They never had to think about how you make a pencil and how the goods and services that give them the advantaged life that we have in the United States versus other countries depends on the battering ram of this blob apparatus.
And so as they learn more and more the depths of depravity of the blob, I myself a hard, sort of between a rock and a hard place where more than anyone maybe in, that I know have been spearheading and trying to lead the charge to break the blob's halo. Now I'm in a sort of curious position where I feel I'd be remiss if I didn't spend this time at least fleshing out that I don't believe that it should be vanquished entirely.
It's family, if that makes sense. I was thinking about this the other day with, we talked about Ukraine several times when we've spoken, and we've talked about the 2014 Maidan toppling of the democratically elected government.
Coincidentally, the person on the pro-USAid side who's leading the charge to fight the White House's reforms is Senator Chris Murphy. Chris Murphy bragged on live national television that the U.S.
toppled that government. It was only because of U.S.
pressure and U.S. support on the ground for the movements there that toppled that government.
But leaving aside the morality of whether that was the right or wrong thing to do in the name of democracy. When Victoria Newland made her speech in December 2013, two, three months before that, those protests changed world history, she bragged about the $5 billion that USAID and NED and related humanitarian assistance orgs had given to effectively the very same Ukrainian civil society organizations that would lead that charge.
And when she did so, she was at a sponsored event by standing in front of signs for Exxon Mobil and Chevron. And I've reflected on that picture because it's very easy to look at Victoria Nuland as a sort of angel of death figure who knocks on European countries doors and tells them, hey, we're about to topple your democratically elected government.
And it's very easy to look at the excesses of big U.S. corporations.
But we do need oil. We do want cheap oil and gas.

We do want energy dominance.

And so, you know, I'm at this moment when we're seeing really the first vulnerabilities,

certainly in my lifetime, of this blob monstrosity, I feel a strange sort of sympathy for the devil,

which is that they've done terrible things,

and we should not do them again, and they've gone rogue, and there's no oversight, and horrors beyond your wildest imagination. At the same time, these are still parts of the American family.
There is some vestige of a function there that I believe our foreign policy planners have to at least know was there and was responsible for much of our prosperity before it's, as they try to reconstruct the patient. Does that make sense? Of course it does.
And I think maybe that's the whole point of this, is that any nation, particularly a big one like ours, that controls a hemisphere, has a foreign policy and has all sorts of ways to affect it, including the soft power that you referred to. There's nothing wrong with that.
In fact, it's essential. The question is, why are you doing it? Are you doing it, A, to serve your own interest, to preserve, you know, import and export advantage? Are you doing it to secure energy that you need to have a functioning society? Those are all, are you doing to, you know, bring peace to your hemispheres? You don't have a lot of like craziness and lawlessness and civil wars and all that? Yes, those are all good things.
Or are you doing it to sow chaos for its own sake? So, I mean, I guess the problem that I have with USAID and with the State Department and with CIA and with all of the ways that we project power abroad is not that they exist. It's that they're not serving us and they're not serving sort of like the basic goals you would want for any great power, which is like peace, security, sort of continuity, reasonableness, freedom, democracy.
Like they're not doing any of that. They're like sowing bizarro destabilizing sexual politics into other people's cultures.
Like why would you do that? I don't. Like, what U.S.
interest is served by having all of those agencies that I just named go to some other country and say, no, you need more traneism or some, you know, we need to structure the family differently. Like, why do we do that? Who wins when we do that? Well, I'm really glad you asked because that is the exact example I've been using to try to to try to give a window of entry into into this larger sort of point about we need a much larger vision about the role of U.S.
foreign policy if we are going to get rid of the shortcuts that USAID provides. And so, you know, you just mentioned, you know, why would USAID be promoting, you know, take the example of transgender dance festivals.
That's something I've been talking about a lot this week. Take the example of transgender dance festivals.
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www.merchantspaymentscoalition.com. What is a transgender dance festival, I having never been? So that is when USAID or USAID's Companion Star, National Endowment for Democracy or other related NGOs will fund an event in the form of a sort of cultural exchange.
And they will bring together people from that country to come to a dance festival that's comprised of transgender individuals and is intended to both create a sense of unity within the transgender population there and to expose and normalize and curry favor with other parts of the demographics there in order to expand the network node of U.S. entities who are working with the activists and leaders there why what american interest is preserved or protected or advanced by pushing transgenderism or any kind of sexual politics or family politics including family planning why is it our business how many kids other countries have i don't i've always been confused by that like what is that why are we doing that i i wish that was rhetorical but and and i do believe in in many instances it is ideological excess you know driven to madness but well give an example from just a few months ago i believe it was this this august um this year there was a um a prime a prime minister in Bangladesh who was basically ousted in a sort of military coup coupled with a color revolution.
And Grey Zone News, Max Blumenthal's outlet, published this report that I've been talking about a lot for the past week because it's just a really, really clean example of all the different facets of the dynamics I'm talking about, which is so basically starting in about 2028, 2018 through 2020. It appeared that that US statecraft was not particularly pleased with with Sheikh Hasina winning this, you know, the prime minister winning the election.
And baseline assessments were submitted to the State Department about how to prop up the opposition group, the Bangladesh National Party, the BNP, which was considered more favorable to U.S. interests.
The leaked documents don't get too in the nitty gritty about what U.S. national interest has served, but there were many conflicts between that Bangladeshi prime minister and the U.S.
foreign policy establishment. For example, it was revealed in WikiLeaks that Hillary Clinton, while she was Secretary of State, threatened to have the IRS do an audit of her son while she lived in the U.S.
And that prime minister has come out publicly and said that she believed that she was overthrown because of, or basically there was a conflict around the construction of a U.S. military base in the region, which is a very common conflict that we have.
Oftentimes foreign countries don't like having a big fat U.S. military base installed, you know, on.
They don't want foreign troops on their soil. Who does? Right.
They don't want 500 acres of their land. You know, they don't want to provoke, you know, foreign powers.
This is's playing out in romania with george's cue and the the you know the cancellation of the elections and he it's just like a giant nato base right now right well they're building the world the europe's largest nato base i currently which you know faces straight out of the black sea at crimea but there was this but but she had been refusing to build a u.S. military base.
So let's just,

but as I walk through this, let me just make some assumptions and make it a harder issue than,

or something a little bit more, I guess, accessible. Let's just say it really is vital to U.S.
national interests to build that military base in Bangladesh to counter Chinese influence

and the Bangladeshi prime minister doesn't want to do it. And so our foreign policy planners decide we need to do regime change.
And whether or not you agree that's a good or an evil thing to do, I'm not even weighing into the morality of it. What if it is the declared or discrete policy of the U.S.
government, the State Department and the White House and the National Security Council all agree this government, we should pursue regime change, all options to destabilize that country in order to weaken the existing government and to build up our network of democratic institutions and activists in order to either win the next

election or in order to, you know, do a color revolution style, you know, ousting where the, you know, the prime minister has to flee in a helicopter. And what was done in this case in Bangladesh, and these leaked documents from the gray zone and show this in gratuitous detail,

is that the National Endowment for Democracy's Republican arm, the International Republican Institute, they have four core fours, but two of them are political branches. There's the NDI, the National Democratic Institute for Democrats, and there's the IRI, the International Republican Institute for Republicans.
And what the IRI submitted to the State Department in 2019-2020 after they got walloped trying to back the Bangladeshi National Party in the recent past election was a plan to destabilize Bangladesh politics. That's a direct quote, destabilize Bangladesh politics.
By working with, they listed 170 pro-democracy activists, 304 key informants, and then they did a baseline assessment of the different ethnic groups and cultural cleavage points that they could exploit in order to effectively, you know, either destabilize the country's politics or prop up the political alternative. And in the process of doing that, they sought the LGBT population two Bangladeshi ethnic minority groups, and young students and student groups who had already been protesting earlier that year because of a local politics issue there.
And they noted that rap music was popular and young people were listening to rap music in Bangladesh. So what do they do? They turned around and they took US taxpayer funds.
They get 100% of their money from the State Department and they work closely with USAID. They actually administer USAID programs all over Bangladesh and all over the world.
And they funded Bangladeshi rap groups to produce songs and music videos insinuating that people should take to the streets and do street protests and, you know, the classic peaceful protest that has the upside of being a riot.

one of the songs they paid for was designed to sow resentment at the sitting government and basically undermine the popularity of the government. So you have one sponsored song to get people to take the streets, another sponsored rap song to get people to distrust their government.
And then basically the baseline assessment revealed that these groups were the ones who would be receptive. Those were the contacts in the region.
They do field work when they do these baseline assessments. What if the baseline assessment or the strategic assessment happens to reveal that the highest ROI for soft power projection is with very unseemly groups and activities? This is, for example, how we end up funding terrorist groups and paramilitaries and very extreme because oftentimes when you have a popular government, it's the coalition of the fringes and the extremes and the weirdos and the criminals and the prostitutes.
This was in an NED memo in 2009 for Cuba, where they were the National Dome for Democracy. They have something called the Journal of Democracy.
And they talked about this exact phenomenon that they might be able to mobilize the Afro-Cuban community to leveraging racial animus against the mostly white Cuban government and taking note of proclivities for, I think it was prostitution, crime and drugs and how USAID might be able to swoop in and mobilize these people because a lot of them are really unemployed. And also USAID should fund the rap groups there because these populations all listen to rap.
And they did. And this is another great gray zone.
You're making the hair on my arms go up because you're describing what's happened in our country. Yes.
You're describing the 2017 Charlottesville march, the Nazi march. You're describing what happened on January 6th.
You're describing the riots after George Floyd was murdered. You're describing the rise of rap music and drugs in our city and all of it.
You're describing, you know, tranny story hour. And, you know, like you're describing all the trends in our country that seem to arise out of nowhere whose net effect is to destabilize America, defray the social fabric, to divide people from each other, to make them easier to control.
And in the case of Trump's first term, to undermine the White House, right? I mean, I don't know that any of that's true, but like what you're describing that we did in Bangladesh is what's happened here. And so it raises the question, like, was that all by design also? And of course, of course it was, right? Well, there's a lot there.
USAID gave... Am I crazy to ask that? No, not at all.
I mean, that is, to me, the final blow. It's bad, and there's the moral question about whether to do do this sort of dirty work abroad and that comes down to different schools of foreign policy thought and to different views on the relative morality of different ways of attacking the issue of of u.s soft power influence abroad but then there is the the breaking of the firewall where our foreign policy hounds are never supposed to bite the owner who feeds them and that is to me why this is a no brainer the reforms that are happening but do you think it's look just to go through them the 2017 Charlottesville march where a sudden out of nowhere, there are all these Nazis.
Like, who knew we had so many Nazis in our country? Right? And guys, one, I'm thinking one particularly. Yeah, USAID has never funded Nazis, by the way.
Yeah, right. Right, so but like out of nowhere, Trump gets elected, and all of a sudden, Charlottesville, Virginia, home of UVA, not a right wing town.
There are all these people showing up led by a couple of people who are just so obviously feds. It's like not even a question in my mind.
And they're like marching with candles and we're going to restore the Fourth Reich or whatever. And then that the next day is used to delegitimize Trump.
And we're thinking we're supposed to think that's like all organic. I mean, that sounds like exactly what groups like USAID do in other countries.
Well, I don't know about the Charlottesville case. You know, I can see enough domestic antibodies on that with the FBI and whatnot.
And the fact is— Well, I'm not saying USAID did it. I'm just saying it's the same template.
Oh, right. Oh, oh no well the ability for the the battering ram of our cloak and dagger dark arts only supposed to operate abroad to be laundered at home yes is is is really the the reason that i believe the current open heart surgery is a no-brainer and i fully support the total abolition of USAID as an agency and talking it under state and putting it through, you know, having it mended.
And then if at some point it needs to be rolled out and spun out into, into a different independent agency, again, with, with reforms in place and the, and the appropriate, you know, staffing structure, we can have that conversation at a later time. There is the domestic one is a huge one.
There's so many data points there. I think it's going to be terrifying to a lot of people who are just now experiencing this.
but I do sort of want to close the loop on this foreign side because my concern is when you try to attack these things

at the level of there's no U.S. interest that served in it at all.
It's totally crazy. You're going to encounter very strange layers of resistance trying to attack it from that argument.
So here's an example I've been giving this week, and I'll hit you with the thought experiment. Let's just assume, and I have no inside knowledge about this.
I don't talk to folks at that level or anything. But Trump has had a very contentious relationship with the government of Venezuela during his first term.

We declared Juan Guaido the sitting president, the elected president. He was standing ovation from both sides of the aisle.
I could see a situation where this White House where where president trump and secretary of state

marco rubio um either in a declared or discreet fashion seek to um deploy u.s soft power

institutions to pursue a policy of regime change in venezuela again i have no inside knowledge

about that i do have inside knowledge and they've been working on that for years there are americans

in venezuela fact because i talked to one of them um as of last year they're americans

and then we'll seeing. what if the State Department and together with its new USAID function puts out basically a request for proposals to all the different NGOs for how best to capacity build civil society institutions and activists and people who will be willing to, you know, spread pro-democracy media and take to the streets and protest against the police and live dual lives effectively as, you know, working with effectively U.S.
spy craft while nominally being Venezuelan citizens or doing the daring and dangerous deeds of, you know, transporting supplies despite, you know, Venezuelan counterintelligence monitoring them. And what if the strategic analysis or the baseline analysis that comes back from these NGOs is, well, the transgender population in Venezuela? I know nothing about this in Venezuela, but I'm using this as an example for everywhere.
What if the cold hard fact is the demographic in that country that is most effective at destabilizing that country's government or that will be most um the highest return on investment for foreign assistance funds given you know what if 2.7 million dollars to a series of 12 different transgender dance festivals if they if the analysis reveals that we need five million votes you know to win this next election that we don't have. And everybody who converts from being heteronormative to transgender effectively goes from being a Maduro person or to a pro-US one.
And everyone who normalizes or is, or believes that, you know, transgender people being oppressed by the government are more likely to vote against the government, you could see a cynical, self-serving, cold, hard, calculated decision for a MAGA State Department to fund transgender dance festivals. And this is important to keep in mind in bangladesh it was the iri who funded that it was the republicans who funded the transgender dance festivals and rap groups you know republicans are not known for loving rap john mccain i mean mccain ran it for years i mean they're actually all for that but trump is a winner trump likes to win and think of the feather in the cap that it would be for marco rubio to be the person who brought democracy defense what i'm saying is is leave aside the transgender issue this is going to happen in everywhere and and i think people just don't understand the that aid is a dirty deed with donald trump returning to the white house this country has a unique maybe our last opportunity, to save ourselves from the anti-American and anti-human left.
But our efforts may be stymied by the deep state. That's what happened to the first Trump term.
Permanent Washington stands in the way of all efforts to approve the lives of ordinary Americans. And right now they are scheming to do the same thing to the second Trump administration.
They are determined to keep their stranglehold on power, regardless of elections, anti-democratically. That is a fact.
So what do you do to fight them? How do you defeat the deep state? Well, one way you can is by supporting the Heritage Foundation, which is in Washington and understands exactly how it works in such a way that they're a threat and they're under attack. You know who's effective because they're the ones under attack.

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I think I have a macro problem with this, which is, one, it's not at all clear that overthrowing Maduro is in America's interest. I think there's a a loud exile community in Florida that wants it.
More foreigners have come here, bringing their stupid feuds into our country and using political donations to make the U.S. government settle their scores.
It's like, get out of here. This is totally not our problem.
Leave us alone. That's how I feel about the Cubans, the Venezuelans, all of whom I like personally, but these are not our problems.
And I feel that way about the Gaza thing. It's like take it to Gaza, okay? Not our problem.
I think it's fair, as an American, I think it's a fair position to have. So there's that.
Is this actually in our interest or are we just being paid to care about this? Two, there is a moral quality to it. If you're going to say the United States is better than other countries, then you can't just, you know, assassinate people you don't like.
You can't just like totally destroy their social fabric. You have to make a straightforward, honorable case and allow the people of that country to decide using democratic means because you're for democracy.
And if you're not for democracy, then don't say you are. And I do think that there's something so morally corrupting about the means that our foreign policy establishment uses to achieve its goals, that it actually does affect our domestic life.
Like January 6th was an op by, you know by the i think primarily by dod is my impression uh and it like kind of wrecked our country and put all these people in prison and like who would even think to do something like that well they've been trained for years doing that sort of thing in faraway nations that's my view right i totally agree sense yes and and i'm i'm glad that you're saying that because that is ultimately, we need to square the circle, which is that, you know, imagine a situation.

I think right now the thing that I'm heartened by more than the technical victories is the national consciousness raising that USAID does infect all these institutions and that there is this bleed over between foreign foreign and domestic when people see that media companies that are writing hit pieces on them are being funded by USAID when people see that you know the what I've written about the you know social media censorship and the USAID you know, primer documents in the USAID SEPs program that, you know, the what I've written about the social media censorship and the USAID primer documents in the USAID SEPs program that formally plotted to get foreign countries to censor to pass censorship laws to target U.S. tech companies.
It's the sort of thing that we would typically, you know, have run a sort of USAID covert covert operation to stop another entity from doing.

And it's our, they're doing it. And so, but, you know, from all the way down the line, from the unions to the universities, to the for-profit companies, to the media, to the social media, to the terrorist groups, to the, you know, gain of function and, you know, pandemic.
I mean, there's, you know, how corrupt does an agency need to be?

Drugs, terrorism? gain of function and you know pandemic uh i mean there's you know how how corrupt does an agency need to be drugs terrorism pandemics uh i mean but it corrupts the country after a while of course of course you don't allow your cops to just like they knew all the drug dealers are but you don't allow your policemen to walk up and execute them right because that, that's not our system, and we become as bad as the criminals we're fighting if we behave like that. But part of the reason there has been such little transparency about USAID, and I always say, you know, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID for a number of reasons.
Yeah, yeah. And I think if there really is a sort of USAID files that we get from this administration, I think this is why I'm saying I think people are going to want to not necessarily put a new heart in this patient when they see how deep it all goes.
So just to recap some, I think you're making a really important point and I just want to make sure it doesn't get lost in the details. Correct me if this is not a fair summation, but I think you're saying when we look at, we were discovering all these things, all the transgender dance contests or whatever that they're funding, it's easy to say, well, they're just like dipshit liberals who are like doing dipshit liberal things.
And what you're saying is, no, these are hard edged instruments of policy. Yes.
Now, of course, the personnel night, you know, 97 percent of USAID employees donate to Democrats. Of course.
Right. But but, you know, Liz Cheney started her her career.
You know, she is at the at USAID at the Eurasia portfolio of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary. And a lot of this is destabilizing.
Have you noticed? Like, I thought a great power. The reason the US is better than the Soviet Union was we brought stability, predictability, markets, democracy, and they brought, you know, war and instability.
And I always thought that, like, good leadership, good stewardship, good parenting brought stability. And it does seem like we are intentionally sowing stability, you know, disunity and instability around the world.
Oh, I mean, I literally just quoted you a IRI document implementing USAID programs where they literally wrote to the U.S. State Department that the purpose of this baseline assessment was to gather as many activists and informants and network nodes, quote, to destabilize, you know, Bangladesh politics, but apply that everywhere.
You know, this is, you know, fundamentally what I believe happened during the picture. Do you really want that? Like, isn't that shameful? Of course it's shameful.
But I think people don't fully understand how products arrive on the shelves around them. I was mentioning Milton Friedman's pencil example.
Well, what happens if Malaysia decides to nationalize, to block exports of gum from the gum trees. And the African miners decide that they are going to go on strike and not allow, you know, not allow, you know, graphite or lead, you know.
No blob, no pencils. If you don't have a mechanism to influence that foreign government, to stop the nationalization law, to hit it with carrots and sticks, or if it's a problem within the population, sub-government.
If it's a particular, this is what happened in the Cold War when the CIA was breaking up union strikes in France and the docks and the longshoremen strikes and the CIA infiltrated the unions and they worked with the AFL-CIO slash AFL-CIA and they all have union arms. And so you need a method to be able to go into the unions if you want to be able to have pencils.
Now, okay, you might say you can live without pencils, but how about no petroleum? What if it's something that's, what if these are really critical resources for us to be able to have microchips, for us to be able to have renewable batteries, for us to be able to have, you know, build computers, for us to be able to put gas in our car or heating in our home? There is a potential necessity. And this is why I feel it's so imperative that what's happening right now is happening.
And I'm thrilled that it is. But there's still much more to internalize about this because you're going to need to reconstruct the history of the entire past century as you disentangle this whole thing.
If we had not toppled so many foreign governments in service of big oil, would we have had cheap oil? Well, does a president want to, this is where I come back to this Venezuela example. Trump wants to win.
And again, we don't have to call it Venezuela. We can call it random country X.
We're going to be hit with a choice as we reduce the USAID function, if we reduce the USAID function. To my knowledge, the staff has been radically cut from 14,000 to something like 290.
But my understanding is that most of the grants, it's $44 billion. At 14,000 employees, it's about a billion dollars of employee overhead a year.
So 43 of the 44 billion, presumably, are still going to all these Frankensteinian monster projects. But you're going to be hit with that choice of do you you want to win fighting dirty or do you want to potentially lose fighting fair? And that's going to play out in every industrial sector, in every region.
And what I'm concerned about is that- So you're saying the U.S. economy can't continue, or prosperity can't continue unless we, like, wreck other people's countries? No, I'm not saying that.
I'm saying that that is something. There's a micro-fractal portion of that argument that is going to play out and is going to be a sort of siren song every step of the way at every regional desk at the State Department, at every National Security Council interagency coordination.
And there are some lines that I believe we cannot ever cross. Like, for example, on the social media censorship side, the fact is, is it was, according to Biden's foreign policy, Biden declared populism a threat to democracy his state department did his usa did and so the best populists were popular online in europe so the white house had a whole information integrity working group to have the u.s funded ngos lobby the european union effectively and push uh the different uh sort of influence and spindle groups comprising the regulatory body around the EU Digital Services Act to add more and more censorship regulations to target their political opponents.
And what you're doing is these people could not do that at home because we have a First Amendment, but Europe doesn't have one. So they so declare populism to be an attack on democracy, then it's easier to win by advocating censorship.
But that, to me, is a violation of fundamental American values. And not just censorship, but putting a lot of people in jail, using violence.
That is a form of violence, incarcerating someone, putting them in handcuffs. And That's what USAID does.
USAID's role with the prosecutors

is unbelievable,

the depth of that rabbit hole.

If I can just complete this point here,

because I want to make sure I'm...

There's a lot of nuance to what I'm trying

to say here, which is that

people need,

and especially at the policymaker and White House and House Senate Oversight Committee side, they need to get a sort of topographical map of the scope and spectrum of our dirty deeds done in the name of USAID in order to make a triage assessment of what kind of things can be dual purpose. Because everything USAID is dual purpose.
It has to be. Everything has to advance U.S.
national interest in some respect, whether we're irrigating poppy fields or doing poverty relief programs or public health, something about doing that act has to advance some sort of U.S. national interest.
Now, part of the reason it's been so difficult to oversee USAID or get answers from them is because they can't tell you those dual interests honestly in a public forum. Take this transgender dance festival in Bangladesh thing.
Imagine a hearing on USAID and a high-ranking Republican Republican senator holds up, you know, you're funding Bangladesh, you know, you're funding transgender dance festivals and you're spending two point seven million dollars on this.

What possible U.S. interest does that serve? Can that USAID administrator on live television say to the world, well, that was a cynical, you know, we determined actually we were running a covert operation to uh overthrow that country's democratically elected government and uh it actually wasn't about that you know the that at all this was just uh the whole thing was was a total front for we were building a coalition to challenge the government in power because we didn't like that government right but saying that undermines the efficacy of all other usa programs no i guess it becomes i get it right but my concern is there's some things you can't do assassinations uh you know promoting internet censorship uh you know full-on you know regime change you know that mobilizes the ugliest assets in a society like terrorist groups or, you know, you know, full on regime change, you know, that mobilizes the ugliest assets in a society like terrorist groups or, you know, extremist groups sort of thing.

But there's a lot of squishiness in between that.

And I'm not sure that the MAGA foreign policy establishment being very new other than not Marco Rubio, but Marco Rubio is newer to MAGA than, you know, than, than the rest of, of the white house. Um, and, and he, you know, when he was approved, what, 99 to zero or something in the, you know, he was, he was in, in the Senate, he was the, you know, the easiest one to pass.
And he's, and I think he's done a phenomenal job so far, by the way, if I can say that, but I feel like most of the people who came to the MAGA movement came to that for domestic, for nationalistic reasons and don't see, understand the interplay between the national and the global. And as they are finding that out, they are seeing how horrible the deeds are done of the global and there is going to be this impulse to destroy this thing, completely destroy this thing.
And by the way, that's not even my principal fear because I actually think, you know, the other part of this is that I could very easily see most of these grants being preserved simply through the trench.

State Department.

Yeah, right, simply through the State Department. I mean, this is what happened with Brexit.
Everyone who was pro-Brexit celebrated Brexit the day it happened. That, to me, is like the closure of the USAID building.
But the fact is, is they effectively stopped Brexit. Yeah, it never happened.
Because there's so many layers of resistance and implementation. And we're going to run into that here, which is why I'm, I'm, I'm using this time to be able to talk with you today on something that is, that's on this, which is that you're, you're going to need to understand the purpose for these things and the scope of it and be able to look at just how bad it is with clear eyes and not necessarily, I mean, have your rage boiling, your anger moment.
And when that clears, a fundamental reorganization of the way we carry out soft power is going to have to replace what we used to do if we don't do these dirty things anymore but it has to be in the service of goals that you know are worth achieving you know like having a strong and free country right the the only problem with that is trump represented something very different than that vision that was expressed by the Bush-Biden blob uniparty that had been there. And in countries that are not stable, elections completely change everything.
And this maybe gets to whether or not the problem is not necessarily just the institutions, but rather the sort of legacy of momentum of all these previous political forces, because you could see a situation where then, okay, every time a MAGA-type populist candidate wins an election, All of our foreign policy institutions switch radically in one direction,

calling that American interest.

And then a sort of internationalist blob,

a globalist person wins an election.

Then all the institutions switch all that.

And so, you know, you can't even build permanent structures

in foreign countries or permanent networks

because everything's so schizophrenic.

Or on your own. I mean, this is the problem with our system is that it doesn't have continuity.
And the whole purpose of the deep state is to provide content. I mean, no one ever says this, but I grew up around it.
The purpose of the deep state is provide continuity in a democracy in which leadership changes every four or eight years. So how does that work exactly? So you have the political structure that runs everything at the request of the population.
That's called democracy. But then you have longitudinal interests that have to be represented regardless of who's in power.
And so the deep state arose in response to an actual need. You have to have continuity.
Right, politics stops at the wire's edge, right? That's exactly right. Yeah.
But then, unfortunately, but at the same time, the deep state has to be in some deep sense responsive to the population or else you have tyranny. Right.
So, like, it's a very, you know, democracy is not an easy system to administer. It's an easy one to talk about.
And it, you know, it doesn't work that well in some ways, obviously. I want it to.
I'm not against democracy, of course, being an it you know it doesn't work that well in some ways obviously i wanted to i'm not against democracy of course being an american but it doesn't it you know it's hard yeah so um no i agree i think the big change is the deep state these institutions were taken over by incredibly dumb short-sighted selfish people i don't think the problem is you know having an elite an elite. The problem is having an inadequate, mediocre, selfish elite that doesn't actually like the country they're running.
So that's just my personal editorial position on that. But I see what you're saying.
I mean, I've seen it a lot. But here's, I want to get back to something you said at the very beginning, which is the corrupting effect on America, the country, the place of 350 million people of this kind of behavior and the bleeding over of these tactics into our country.
Yeah. So, like, for example, I was, the one thing that really shocked me about these disclosures was that a lot of our domestic media is government media.
I didn't know that Politico, which is garbage, utterly garbage publication. And it's become much worse, I would say, in the past five or six years, takes $8 million a year from the government to secretly sort of semi secretly.
Well, what's that? Well, there's a distinction, I think, that's useful to draw here between public agencies paying for premium services of U.S. news websites.
So, for example, the State Department pays for premium subscriptions to various news sites in order to be able to have access to, you know, all of the, you know, New York Times or Politico, you know, to be able to get behind the paywall for their employees so that while they're doing their job of soft power from abroad, they have the maximum amount of knowledge at their fingertips. It's the same thing with.
But that's all fake. I mean, Politico Pro, there's literally it's written by 25 year olds.
You know, there's like nothing in there that's real. They're paying off Politico.
Well, that's right. But there's two forms of that.
And I'm just also trying to educate people as they go through this discovery process about the extent of it. Because you're going to see it's everyone.
But there are two forms of it. One is, you know, 100% it's pernicious.
The other one has, there's smoke, but there's not necessarily fire. And so when I say the smoke, it obviously creates an incentive to please the people giving you these government procurements.
For example, if the this is this is what I published, for example, about Reuters, you know, the Biden administration, you know, government agencies, you know, tally something like $300 million to, to various Reuters sort of sister, sister company groups between their, between their news agency, between their, their Westlaw arm, and between their forensic and accounting services. But you see these big $60 million worth of grants from the Justice Department.
And now the Justice Department is paying for Westlaw, which is a Thomson Reuters thing. It still makes Reuters richer, but Reuters is writing hit pieces on the very people that the Justice Department is going after.
And so it's softening up the enemies. And in fact, Reuters won a Pulitzer Prize for its hit piece for its investigative series on malfeasance by Elon Musk and all of his portfolio companies, Tesla, X, Neuralink, SpaceX.
And meanwhile, the Biden administration had 11 different regulatory agencies going after all those. And so the media getting paid by the government was providing the ammunition for prosecutions and regulatory and disciplinary actions against the very stated targets of the government.
And so you don't have a stated agreement in that case. You have a very, very perverse incentive.
But there are places where you have – where it's even worse because, again, there's sort of two forms that can take in the form of paying for services. But then also there is the affirmative sponsoring of media.
So, for know, for example, the state, I believe it's the State Department, maybe USA does pay like the Reuters News Agency for work abroad, but it's a lot less than the premium services, but more, more to, like, here's a really clean example that gets to the heart, I think, of what you're talking about with this domestic and how this all ties together. The world's largest consortium of investigative journalists is a group called the OCCRP.
You just think of it, the Corruption Reporting Project. They have, since the very beginning, been – they were initially, I believe, fully funded by the U.S.
government or they were the anchor fund. And now I believe half of their funds come from a combination of USAID and the State Department.
And these are supposed to be independent journalists. And they're investigative hit piece writers covering the topic of corruption.
If there's something that's published on OCCRP's website or through their media network, it's never about the sky was blue today and someone saved a cat from a tree. No, it's all investigative hit piece work exposing some aspect of corruption in a country.
And this was something that the U.S. began funding really, I mean, this type of work over a decade ago and really around this before OCCRP, around the time of Yugoslavia and whatnot, because we wanted to create a predicate to arrest the political enemies of the State Department in the region by cooking up corruption scandals that prosecutors can then use to arrest them on the basis of corruption.
and so the problem is prosecutors don't know what to look for. And also it's not necessarily politically feasible to prosecute somebody who's got a halo on them.
So the halo has to be broken by hit piece news articles, by investigative journalists who often get proprietary access. For example, the OCCRP, this corruption reporting project has gotten very strange special access to hack documents while they're being funded by, you know, what many believe to be a CIA front group, you know, in the form of USAID.
You know, when they get special access to documents hacked from a computer and use that as the basis for the Panama Papers, well, you know, they're reporters, you can't ask them their source, but the interests align. These are the targets of the U.S.
State Department who happens to be funding them. They are mercenary media for the state.
Now, I want to mention two aspects of this scandal because this plays out everywhere, but this one, it's just, it's simultaneously clean and dirty enough that I feel like it's just an anecdote everyone should remember forever. One, directly on U.S.
politics and targeting of Trump, as you mentioned. OCCRP got their Eurasia, you know, covers like seven or eight countries that they're supposed to dig up dirt of, you know, of corrupt politicians and corrupt, you know, oligarchs in those territories.
and they're Eastern Europe, 20 million dollars for their Eastern European operation. And so that covers Ukraine.
And so what did they do in 2019? They dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani. And then that dirt ended up being used as part of the impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019.
So this is the State Department funding mercenary media to then dig up dirt on high-profile U.S. citizens, metastasizing into that very evidence being entered into the congressional record to successfully impeach the president of the United States.
So in that case, if there was no, you know, if there was no State Department USAID funding to OCCRP, they wouldn't have, you know, presumably had the Capitol to go out and dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani. And then Americans wouldn't have been hearing, you know, these And they also, you know, wrote hit pieces on Paul Manafort and in his I believe his relations with Julian Assange.

But basically, you had this foreign policy blob apparatus who hated Trump and wanted to take him out. and just like state and USAID were paying OCCRP

to dig up dirt on foreign oligarchs

and foreign presidents,

the net result,

and we don't know if there was any sort of,

and I'm not saying that there wasn't necessarily a direct agreement to do that. I'm not privy to that.
But the fact is, that is in effect what happened. The faction of the foreign policy establishment that most detested

trump and wanted him out he was being impeached because of his foreign policy around russia and ukraine and it and so usa spending to journalists in ukraine comes back to be used to impeach trump well and and and to smear me as a russian agent right that's been reported it's out there It's proven. So my tax dollars go to impugning my character and calling me a disloyal American.
At a certain point, you're like, we kind of need a revolution. I mean, that's...
Why should we put up with that for a second? Well, we're in a sort of... you can feel the passion around this this week and people sensing how much of their world has been usurped without their consent by these institutions.
just to complete this on on the corruption reporting project that gets half of its funding

from the state department in the and USAID, and the

U.S. government has the formal

yes, you know, yes, yay, yes,

no, about who they can bring on

as staff, and they have

to, you know, submit basically, you know, what they're

going to do, you know, the year

ahead. But

on USAIDspending.gov, I'm sorry, on

USAID.gov, the USAID website,

before it went down this weekend, but I have all the receipts and I have all the PDFs on my social media feed. They have a whole document on this corruption reporting project and how amazing it has been for USAID's anti-corruption humanitarian work.
And it shows the entry. It says $20 million, and here are the seven or eight countries they operate in.
The next page has something which is just absolutely devastating to the concept of the firewall between our humanitarian aid organization and prosecutors. It's called the accomplishment section.
And there are four bullet points in this accomplishment section. Again, this is on USAID.gov publicly boasting about hit pieces for hire, mercenary media to call people corrupt, call citizens, call.
So the first line item is over a billion dollars worth of assets seized. So they're basically saying, hey, great return on investment.
We spent $20 million. We were able to seize a billion dollars.
But you did that by paying journalists to dig up dirt on people. What if the journalist got it wrong? You know, what if...
There's no legal process, by the way. I mean, it's not like people went to court and were found guilty or anything.
We just took the stuff. Well, this is...
We that we'll get to that actually that's bullet point four but bullet point two was it was something like a somewhere between 100 and 300 policy changes um in different government and civil society institutions in these countries so this usa saying us paying for political black ops hit pieces generated hundreds of policy changes at the government level and at the institutional level there. Well, we're presupposing all those are good.
I mean, they wouldn't be calling them an accomplishment unless the USAID thought they were good. So they have a catalyzing change they want to do to the policies of foreign countries.
And they think the way to do that is to pay mercenary media outlets to dig up dirt on people and then use that as the predicate to force through policy changes. Then they have a section on all the different government officials that they got that that were forced to resign because of their states, USAID state sponsored media.
And I think the list was like six or seven, but they said, including a president and a prime minister. So they, they are bragging effectively in this, in this document that, Hey, what a bang for the buck for $20 million.
We were able to topple two governments. And then the fourth bullet point is, is the one that winds through its whole, So, you, hey, what a bang for the buck.
For $20 million, we were able to topple two governments. And then the fourth bullet point

is the one that winds through this whole USA prosecutor story. It says 456 arrests and indictments generated on the basis of OCCRP's reporting.
So this is the State Department bragging about the incredible volume of human beings whose lives and liberties have been taken from them because of sponsored hit pieces by the U.S. government.
We don't know how many of those people were innocent. We don't know, you know, what even they were charged for.
When you read that USAID.gov document on OCCRP, it doesn't even list their crimes. We just know it's a good thing that 456 people got arrested because we paid for— What do their families think now? Right.
And prosecutors then use that as the basis for criminal indictment. They really become hated in the rest of the world by behaving this way.
Well, how many foreign leaders have you seen other than maybe one I can think of, but how many foreign leaders have you seen who have been making impassioned floor speeches this week about the tens of thousands of people who are going to die if USAID leaves? I'm wondering where all the leaders of African countries have been this week or low-income Central Asian or Western Hemisphere countries are. Why are they all either silent or like in the case of El Salvador, relieved that this is happening? None of them are getting the money.
In fact, many times USAID is forced on them as a condition. Oh, I know.
I know some of those leaders and they don't want our aid at all.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

Oftentimes USAID institutions are forced into their country or forced into different regions in their country as part of a compliance measure that the State Department is imposing. You know, you need to have a certain level of human rights, you know, you know, monitoring or, you know, your your water levels have to have this, you know, certain percent purity or you need to be able to maintain, you know, this, you know, your energy development has to be this consistent with climate change or else, you know, we're going to, you know, destroy you in the in the, you know, with the with our trade relations or we're going to put sanctions on you unless you put our humanitarian aid organs in there and so boom just like that under the banner of aid we're in control of your energy infrastructure we're in control of your river systems yeah so you know i i think the reason that the only people that we really see who are who are from defending us aid right now are people here in the United States or in NATO that are directly or indirectly on the take or their donors or constituents are.
So in September, we went across the country, coast to coast, 17 different cities on a nationwide live tour. And it was amazing.
We brought the entire staff with us like we always do because we've all worked together for so long and enjoy traveling together. And one of our producers is a documentary filmmaker.
And so he decided to make a documentary film about our trip, a full month across America with some of the most interesting people around. Different people join us every single night.
Bon Gino and Russell Brand and Bobby Kennedy and J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, et cetera, et cetera.
We had the best time. And the fruit of that is a documentary called On the Road, the Tucker Carlson Live Tour, which is available right now on TCN.
On the Road, Tucker Carlson Live Tour. It is hilarious.
You will like it. So I got an email from a friend of mine, a text from a friend of mine yesterday is such a wonderful guy actually conservative trump fan but um a recipient of usa money and uh he said it's totally corrupt you're right um but he goes they don't understand you're going to tank the economy of northern virginia if you shut this bigot off right and i thought maybe that's the one perspective people watching in the u.s don't understand is how totally dependent the dc metro area is on foreign policy spending yeah it's not making it to congo it's stopping in arlington it's well that's why i said donors and constituents right because those are considered like think about the congressman in those representing those districts and uh you know you you see that that's exactly right right.
It's our own economies. And then the point I was making earlier is that you are gonna have this sort of follow on, trickle down economic impact if many of our multinational corporations who form the bedrock of our, you know, stock exchanges and chamber of commerce, if the dirty deeds that USA does are cut out, are they still going to have as, will that impact their profitability? And so that's why I wanted to spend the time in the beginning just talking about that tension because in the oil and gas case, like Trump has a plan around that drill baby drill, right? Like we might not need to fund transgender dance festivals in order to, you know, like you go to the CIA world book, you know, everyone go on CIA.gov and just look at every country and the has a world book of all the strategic resources in every country.
And so, you know, Burma is top strategic resource petroleum. Okay, let's just, we don't need to necessarily have the sticky issue about whether or not we need to extract those foreign resources from Burma if the sitting government there doesn't, if we are drill baby drilling.
Right. There's creative offsets that can be done to replace dirty tricks.

You know, for example, like, you know, with with ISIS and and the dynamics in Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan, if there are ways to reconceptualize the way we do trade in the region or do creative joint partnerships or or try to make inroads into other parts of the population that we're not.

Thank you. we do trade in the region or do creative joint partnerships or try to make inroads into other parts of the population that were not tested as robustly.
But you're going to need to think a lot more creatively about that when you don't have access to the dirty deeds done dirt cheap. and that and so that's just feel like that, I just want to impress that point because I think a lot of MAGA Republicans are going to think that it's easier than it is to reorganize that.
And there's just a lot of surgery that needs to be done if you're going to cut that function out, which I totally support doing in nine out of 10 cases. But there's going to be a remnant and we need a doctrine that's cohesive and sellable to the American people because the problem was is we'd built such an elaborate labyrinth of lies that you couldn't even honestly talk about it with people.
This is the whole oversight thing that I mentioned. This happened with the Zunzanillo scandal with USAID from 2009 to 2014-ish.
USAID and NED were at the forefront of the Arab Spring and toppling democratically elected governments in Tunisia and Egypt and all over, you know, in these street color revolutions that were powered by digital diplomacy. You know, we've discussed this before, you know, where USA was funding people in, you know, to do youth engagement for how to use Facebook hashtags and, you know, and how to mobilize street protests so that everyone knows where to go and what kind of, you know, slogans and slang to use.
And so, you know, they wanted to. Kind of like the George Floyd protests.
Yeah, kind of like the George Floyd protests. Yeah, kind of.
Wait, can I just ask you to pause and just remind us why exactly the Obama State Department would want to topple, say, the government of Egypt? There's a lot.

My understanding is a lot of it has to do with the natural resources and the sort of Middle East, North Africa.

I mean, the fact is, Egypt is sort of the lip of Europe that way.

But I think there's probably Middle Eastern politics that play into it as well. and it's a

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Oh, right. No, totally.
I don't see how killing Gaddafi, the Iraq war, like I don't know that any of this, what's going on now in the Middle East, Syria, etc. I don't see these are obvious victories for us.
I don't think they do either, actually. There's been a lot of where did it all go wrong in the years post-revolution.
But in those early years, they were really jazzed up about this new internet social media superpower that they had deployed to topple those governments. And so they sought to do that in Cuba by creating what USAID called a Cuban spring.
And the problem was at that time, Cuba had banned US social media companies, calling them a tool of US imperialism. And so there was no Twitter allowed.
And so USAID pulled off this operation to create a company called Zunzanio, which is, it was a Twitter knockoff. It had the same user interface.
It had the same like and retweet button. And that was, I believe, like the Cuban slang word for hummingbird.
So it was basically even had like the bird. And they knew that it couldn't be an American company.
So they had to convince, I think it was two Cuban businessmen to set this up. And they ran it as, they ran it through USAID.
They ran it as, what they did is they took humanitarian relief funds earmarked for Pakistan. And they ran it through a Byzantine labyrinth of shell companies and money laundered through Cayman banks and Panamanian banks and, and, uh, you know, BVI banks, uh, in so that it got to these Cuban businessmen to set it up so that Cuban counterintelligence would not suspect that it was a U S thing.
They, this USA contracted out to a group called creative associates, international CAI. It not CIA, it's CAI.
And they're very creative. And what the internal documents showed when this whole scandal blew up at USAID is that USAID's plan was to recruit about 100,000 Cubans onto this platform, luring them in with algorithms and vibes favoring sports music and hurricane updates were the main things.

And then they said once we've – but at the same time, we're actually going to be taking all their personal data on the back end. And we're going to be using AI for all the metadata and all the websites that they visit and all the cookies.
We're going to take that to aggregate a political receptivity map of the categories of users within these 100,000 that will be most receptive to take to the streets in a violent revolution against the government. And what they plotted is that at the appropriate moment, once the critical nodes, once they had a critical mass of users on the platform, and they had enough support from other civil society institutions that were being funded by USAID and state and NAD at the time that they would then activate what they called smart mobs.

They would switch the algorithms and they would selectively target news distribution of messages to users on the basis of their political proclivities in order to get them to take to the streets in violent street protests and overthrow their government. Basically the same, you know, pull off the same thing that happened in the Arab Spring, but do it in Cuba.
And all they needed was enough people on the user base. That was what they- Can I just pause again and just remind people that I think if most Americans had been aware that this was going on in 2020, the Black Lives Matter protests would have been instantly recognizable as a government-sponsored revolution, a revolution against Donald Trump, because that's what it was.
Well, I want to come back to it because there's actually a lot there that is, I think will be even more impactful after of finishing this, this one point on USAID here, which is that, because, you know, you mentioned if Americans had known this is going on, well, what was really interesting about the scandal is nobody knew that that USAID was doing this. This was clearly CIA style covert action, you know, the construction of a private sector for profit social media company that that gets its funds from nonprofit humanitarian relief funds earmarked for a country 13000 miles away.
and all with the express stated interest of doing diplomatic,

work with extreme diplomatic implications,

overthrowing the government of a foreign country. And so as this scandal all broke open, the media and what had happened was is Senate oversight had been completely blocked from any information about this operation.
And this is what you heard Joni Ernst, Senator Joni Ernst tell Elon Musk earlier this week when she was explaining how she was totally blocked by USAID. It was a total black box.
It's all in-house. It's all subject to the inspector general there.
And if the inspector general says no, the Senate gets nothing and there's nothing they can do. And it's less accountable in many respects than the CIA, because the CIA, when they do covert action, they have to get a presidential finding.
This is part of the reforms that were done, you know, in the 1970s when it looked like, OK, the CIA was going rogue. And so every CIA covert action has to be formally authorized by the president of the United States.
But what happens if the president doesn't want to approve something? Well, and you still deed done what if for example you know you belong to a certain wing of the foreign policy establishment that's a dodged with the president and you know the president's not going to approve it so how can you get that done like say for you know the funding of isis groups for example trump was wanted to crush isis hillary clinton and jake sullivan Sullivan said ISIS is on our side in Syria. The Biden administration kicked billions of dollars in the aggregate to ISIS and Al Qaeda groups just are now the sitting government of Syria.
And in fact, right now, the current head of the government in Syria, Mohammed Al Jalani, there was a $10 million bounty on his head as being a Al-Qaeda terrorist. That tweet is still live on the U.S.
Embassy in Syria. But he's now our friend.
Right. But if Trump wouldn't authorize the CIA covertly running funds to ISIS, but that cell within the CIA still wanted to do it, all they need to do is walk on over to their friends at USAID and USAID can do it without a presidential finding.
They can call, now they can, all it takes is creative structuring. They can just do it through humanitarian, you know, relief funds to, you know, to a certain, you know, part of the, you know, certain region that has a, you know, disproportionate amount of ISIS-K in it.
They can fund, you know, the educational institutions or they can water the, this is another thing USAID got in trouble for is when they were, they were, they were essentially sustaining the heroin, the world's heroin supply. 95% of the world's heroin supply, you know, came from Afghanistan.
Why were they doing that? Well, so USAID's one of their close partners is another USAID adjacent entity called the U.S. Institute for Peace.
Its office is right next to the State Department in Washington, D.C. It was created by Congress.
it gets 56 million dollars a year from taxpayers and in uh last in in 2023 the u.s institute for peace um wrote a white paper that said uh that told the taliban not to shut down the the heroin not to shut down the poppy fields because it would create a quote economic and humanitarian disaster uh that basically um i mean this is this is the state department they're fully funded by the u.s state department they are they are sort of the policy arm uh of you know many many of the aspects of us aid they whereas us aid is 44 billion they only have 56 million but they all advance U.S. foreign policy in a cohesive vision for a region.
And they're both operating in Afghanistan. So while U.S.
Institute for Peace is saying we need to keep the heroin flowing, it was USAID who was doing all the water irrigation of the poppy fields that allowed that propagation of the heroin to continue. And that gets into a darker story around the role of narco activity and narco gangs as instruments of statecraft.
This was the Mujahideen that were pumped up by Zbigniew Brzezinski and our CIA in the 1970s and 80s, they were being funded by drug money from the Golden Crescent and it being laundered into Pakistan banks like the CIA bank, BCCI, and everyone can read about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal and that. But, you know, it was it funding for US-backed terrorist paramilitary groups that we were propping up as freedom fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
If you remember seeing the old Osama bin Laden puff piece, freedom warrior on the road to peace when he's back in in the mujahideen days but what i'm saying is you see this play out everywhere you know this was a business a big part of you know um how uh how right-wing capitalist movements were in western hemisphere were propped up against left-wing socialist and marxist um you know, opposition in the 1950s and 60s. And you see this run through everything.
I mean, think about what's happened with El Salvador. You know, why did, why did Buchanan say that, you know, basically was the first one on X to say that, yeah, USAID is awful.
It's got to go. Countries don't want it.
Look at my case because USAID was trying to regime change them from there. The Soros groups, I mean, they all said that his attempts to clean up the drug trade were humanitarian violations of the rights of drug cartels.
Have you seen that the government of Mexico appears to actually be quite happy with the move to abolish USAID? There's a piece in Newsweek about Trump's strange allies in the fight to end USAID, and it's the Mexican government. They don't want it either.
Well, what I'm saying is the scope of our dirty deeds done through USAID and State Department grants and through CIA covert activity that is only made possible because they're working with assets whose budget is funded by USAID or budget is funded by state or budget is funded by the National Network for Democracy or others. A lot of that work is just liaising with assets that are there.
They don't have that big a budget. USAID has a three times bigger budget than the CIA.
And so they depend on working with State Department USAID cultivated assets. And so we're going to have to disentangle this whole spider web in order to form a cohesive foreign policy vision that isn't evil and i think that's i think kind of think that's the point that isn't evil because i mean in our system i'd really think in any system even a monarchy the people have to think that in general the government is you know doing things they approve of isn't, isn't in business with the drug cartels in Mexico, which our government is, as you know.
Because if the people of a country don't think their own government has legitimacy, it can't last very long. It doesn't last, right? Right.
Absolutely. So are you concerned that when people learn, like what's going to happen when these stories penetrate? That, yes, your government has been paying to wreck a lot of other places and is working against you using your money.
I mean, it's kind of hard to unknow that.

Right.

And thank goodness, because we're going to need that level of national consciousness about these scandals in order to create the moral buffer against the temptation to be evil again. That's exactly right.
And, you know, so I do think that this is all because this is a dog fight to the bone. We are going to be at every level at the every year in the budget, there's going to be this fight.
I mean, now, and here's the question, how much more does the State Department get in the budget? You know, it's since you had like a $35 billion budget. Now it's getting USAID's $44 billion.
But what fraction of that is Trump going to? I've been saying here for a long time because everyone talks about how USAID is funneling things to left-wing causes. And very easy to see that.
We talked about the 97% of employees at USAID who donate to Democrats. But to me, the main issue here is the remnant

of internationalist Republicans in Congress who can form a critical majority block in the House

or in the Senate in order to get their way on this issue. You could see a situation where their own vested interests, their own constituents are so dependent on either USAID's funding or the results of USAID operations that they will side with the Democrats in order to inflict damage on the Trump White House budget vision.

And so that's going to be a constant fight.

And what I'm hoping evolves over the next weeks and months is a moral North Star for America First nationalist or populist or MAGA or centrist or simply reasonable liberal or center left folks where you have the current level of American prosperity, you remove that evil in the labyrinth of lies, something needs to fill that gap. You know, like we talked about the oil and gas spaces, drill, baby, drill for oil.
Okay. But now do that for semiconductors, you know, like, and now do that for every critical mineral.
And, and maybe the answer is, I mean, what I've been trying to sell is that if you're going to do the dirty deeds and you do believe they're necessary for statecraft, then there has to at least be an obligation to be honest about them. You know, like I thought it was very honest when Lindsey Graham finally came out and said the strategic vision of the United States is the $14 trillion worth of natural resources.
relying on the humanitarian predicate for it allows voters to be deceived and for them to then turn around and be totally, feel totally hoodwinked when they find out that, hey, why are you paying for the unions, the media companies, the things that are, they're acting here on the homeland. We, we have this tumor that we're removing from the, the, the body of the American project, but there was blood flowing into that.
And it's connected to all these arteries. My, the thing that I want to make sure happened that is midwifed appropriately is what are you changing about our foreign policy structure so that when you remove the tumor, you know, you, the blood still flows in the way that you want it to, you know, you're not ripping the heart out with open heart surgery.
I get it. I'm just less confident than you are that we're reaping some massive reward for this.
I mean, I remember people muttering darkly about, you know, the purpose of the Iraq war in 2003 was to seize

the oil in Iraq. Well, that didn't happen.
Didn't happen in Libya. I mean, I don't, it's hard to,

I guess I don't have a clear picture of the material benefits that we're receiving.

Well, look at the benefits to the stock price for Chevron and Exxon when the war broke out and

the U.S. State Department strong-armed every country in Europe to divest from Russian gas, and they all were forced to buy expensive North American LNG.
Their stock prices went to the moon. They had something like triple the profits or something for a certain period of months following that and reap these windfall benefits.
And, you know, this is, we're sort of confronting the ghost of Ronald Reagan here because, you know, the reason you do that for statecraft purposes is trickle down economics. What's good for ExxonMobil is good for the American citizens.
And so if it's a dirty deed done to advance, you know, big oil, big ag, you know, big tech, whatever it is, anything that's good for them is good for us. And so anything that the U.S.
government can do in the form of overt or covert diplomacy or covert influence in the region that tips the scales in favor of those U.S. corporate interests or U.S.
multinational interests will ultimately trickle down to the people itself. I mean, that's the logic.
I understand. I just, I don't think it's a holistic view of it.
First, it assumes that the interests of big publicly traded companies are identical to those of the United States, which is not true.

Second, it assumes that weak neighbors make a strong America.

Also not true.

Destroying the economy of Western Europe is actually not in our long-term interest at all.

It just helps China.

And it changes the balance of power globally east.

That is not in our interest at all. And so I'm not confident.
I think the people running this are dumb fucks, actually. I don't think they know what they're doing.
I don't think they even understand, you know, the big picture grand game type diplomacy. I just don't think they're capable of it.
I think they're dumb. They're like on Twitter.
And so I just don't have confidence in their judgment, I guess is what I'm saying. Is that fair? No, I think it is.
Because if your measure is like short-term stock spikes, okay. Those are pretty easy to affect.
That's like, you know, but that's not the same as like long-term prosperity. But maybe they're smarter than maybe I'm the dumb one.
Take the Pepsi coup in 1973 coup in 1973. Okay.
We overthrew the government of Chile.

We toppled the Allende government.

And 30 years later, 35 years later, files were declassified that showed that the chairman of the Pepsi Cola company had lobbied the secretary of state to that U.S. national interests in the form of Pepsi-Cola bottling operations

were going to be devastated if Allende was allowed to remain in power.

And I forget if he was nationalizing some element.

But basically, Pepsi had these bottling operations there.

It was going to massively tank their capacity to produce the the the cans for pepsi bottles and so um a meeting was organized between uh it was like it was it was the it was the cia director at the time and and the chairman of pepsi cola everyone can look up the guardian article on this just type in Pepsi Coup Chile. And so the chairman of Pepsi Cola, everyone can look up the Guardian article on this, just type in Pepsi Coup Chile.

And so the chairman of Pepsi and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency have a planning meeting about the best way to overthrow a government in order to preserve Pepsi's profits. And they even bring in to the meeting, the meeting minute show, they bring in basically the State Department's media guy for the region who ran a web of print media and radio stations so that the media guy could be brought into the propaganda that was being co-generated effectively by the CIA and Pepsi.
Well, I mean, this plays out everywhere as multinational corporations can benefit from U.S. government pressure on foreign companies applied to that.
That's clearly true. I just, you know, I think that American business interests have a very obvious recent history of trading short-term profits for long-term strength, you know, selling all your industries to China at 40 cents on a dollar, you know, clearly makes a small number of people rich, but it's like, it's not a long-term plan for prosperity, actually.
Well, you know, there's not good at this. In a way, it's a miracle that this is happening because it's forcing us to confront all the related issues as we put together a more cohesive vision for U.S.
soft power, which is that Reaganite-style trickle-down economics 1980s thing may have made sense when those corporations were American corporations with American manufacturing facilities employing American labor. But now these are nominally American companies, but there's no trickle-down because it's not like that's substantially increasing American jobs when they're going overseas to East Asia.
They don't provide American jobs in the first place. Right.
Or it's not, you know, providing, you know, enhancing the security of our supply chains because, you know, it's giving more for our factories because we don't have the factories anymore. And so Trump is doing all this in tandem.
You know, he's trying to onshore things. He's trying to bring back domestic manufacturing.
And some of that may be how we approach statecraft, which is that the kinds of entities that we consider to be US national interest are the ones that have a certain amount of American investment. You can't be a sort of American in name only and have so much of your workforce in China or have so much of your operations.
There may be a sort of we need to sort of have a cohesive vision of what national interest is if we're not going to completely agree I mean companies basically owned by the sovereign wealth funds of our rivals who are only here to benefit from our enforcement of copyright etc etc no sense really American why are we like wrecking the world for their benefit you know so I just to end on just to get deeper, if you don't mind, into this question of the effect of our foreign policy on our domestic life. And you just can't escape the suspicion that our politics are really volatile.
We're way less free than we were in part because of, you know, methods of control refined overseas. I, I just look back the last five years and I'm like, everything you've said about what USAID and NED and all these other groups or State Department are doing abroad, I'm just seeing that here.
So am I being crazy? Oh, not at all. I mean, there's a million direct examples of this.
There's something that you've brought up several times so far around Black Lives Matter. And I feel like.
That was so obviously fake. Like this armed robber porn star drug addict gets dies of a drug OD on the street after passing, you know, a counterfeit bill.
And like all of a sudden America collapses. Come on, dude.
Right. Right.
Well. And plan 9-11 I'm like the whole thing is just too dumb for me I can't deal with it right no and there's there's a few a few pieces to that so first um Black Lives Matter is you know one of the main NGOs that serves as the Black Lives Matter clearinghouse is the Tide Center and the Tides Foundation.
And USAID gave the Tide Center a $27 million grant. Okay, now here we go.
Yeah. And now nominally that grant is for the Tide Center institutions to solicit secure concrete investments from foreign countries on issues related to U.S.
national interest. So basically, the USAID has deputized this, you know, group that's, you know, in the center of the nest around Black Lives Matter to secure commitments from foreign governments from a formal U.S.
government agency. They deputized act is a sort of long arm of the State Department, and they're getting $27 million for it.
And by the way, when they get – actually, before I go deeper on the Black Lives Matter stuff, because there's a lot there, I've been calling this the Smithmont problem for USAID. We had a Smithunt Act from 1948 until 2013 with the modernization under Obama that effectively got rid of it that prohibited foreign propaganda or fake news stories intended for foreign audiences from being circulated here at home.
They got rid of that. With USAID, it's even worse because as bad as it is for propaganda, USAID has the Smithmont problem for financing and operations.

USAID can provide money to international institutions or to NGOs for their work abroad. but then they turn around and now they have all this money and they now are wealthy and powerful

and deeply ingrained, highly pedigreed institutions because of all their money from state and aid and NED, but there's nothing blocking them from also operating on U.S. soil.
So, you know, give an example of like, there's this for-profit private sector censorship mercenary firm called NewsGuard and got a $750,000 Pentagon contract to, you know, help the Pentagon trace the information for fingerprints of Russian mis and disinformation. Okay, maybe there's a strategic interest in the Pentagon mapping out pro-Russia narratives in regions around the world.

But NewsGuard targets U.S. citizens.

NewsGuard targets U.S. citizens.
NewsGuard has, you know, the former head of NATO on its board. I've been targeted by NewsGuard, so I know.
Yes, yeah, of course. But they, whether or not the grant is for, like, they don't have, there's a lot of domestic censorship grants that the Biden administration gave to pump these things up domestically.
Like the National Science Foundation did this a lot. But in this case, it's what you're doing is you're making the institution more powerful.
You're buffering its revenues. You're padding its profit margins.
So it's now more powerful to be able to take you on, even if the grant isn for that money. Exactly.
And so it bleeds into it. And this happens with every institution USAID works for.
And again, coming back to the fact that USAID is at the heart, USAID is the swing player between the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon. And it works with all three of those.
And you never know when you see aID program, which of those three ops is being run. But you know for certain it's one of those three.
You don't know if it's to advance, you know, a stated State Department diplomacy priority in the region. You don't know if it's being used in order to advance a U.S.
national security interest in the region, or you don't know if it's being used to advance an unstated State Department foreign policy goal being pursued by the CIA and its functioning as an intelligence.

And I'll give you some examples of this. In 2021, I've talked about this a few times, but under Mark Milley and President Joe Biden, the first special forces vision statement prospectus, pages 16, 17, everyone can look this up.
It's a public document, government document you can find online. And it presents a way to synchronize the psychological operations and civil military affairs work that the Special Forces does with the different foreign policy agencies who can play supporting roles.
So they give an example of – they're trying to block the Chinese from buying a port in China and the African – I'm sorry. In Africa.
In Africa. The African government doesn't want to go through with it.
I'll just try to make this as simple as possible. Basically what ends up happening is the State Department can't get the African government to cooperate and agree to cancel this port construction.
And so they need to buy time before the port is completed for the State Department to have more carrots and sticks, more leverage to be able to force the African government to relent and cancel it. That is, they need more either more appropriations and allocations to be able to bribe them with or they need more sticks to be able to punish them with, you know, leverage know, something harm that's being done that they can offer to make the pain stop.
And so this is what the special forces document envisages, which is that the role of the special forces in that scenario, in the name of great power competition, the special forces role in countering, you know, peer competitor from China. And they also argue there's a national security basis because this would give China, it was a West African hypothetical country, so it would give China access to the Atlantic.
But what they did in this scenario, and they wargamed this all out, is how they would effectively induce race riots to get the African workers to all go on strike and boycott and take to the streets and protest against the Chinese business interests. This would also devastate the country economically.
It would effectively bring the, you know, it would also humiliate the Chinese business interests in the area. And so it would create this international scandal.
It would scandalize the port construction and the destabilized economic state would allow this U.S. ambassador to walk back in and say hey uh you know you know all this pain can stop just cancel the board construction type thing but what's really interesting is in the special forces perspectives can you imagine writing that like let's let's incite race riots and they well they their quote was inflamed racial tensions or inflamed tensions can you imagine yeah and so what they did is um i think it was inflamed tensions but they explicitly At least it's Africans versus the Chinese there.
And what they did is, I think it was in flame tensions, but they explicitly say it's Africans versus the Chinese there. And what they did is the role of USAID in this special operations scenario literally printed by the U.S.
government was that USAID would swoop into the scene and provide job fairs. U.S.
taxpayers would, they would do job fairs in the exact region where the rioters and protesters were striking in order, because they wouldn't, the special forces concern was that the people they needed in the streets in this protest to destabilize the country would not want to, were too poor to leave their jobs. They would not want to go on strike in these Chinese-owned factories and businesses.
So they needed a replacement source of income. And that was where USAID came into the operation.
USAID would do job fairs. And so the African protesters would be subsidized to do that protest, street protest dest destabilization activity, and don't need to worry about whether or not, you know, it's going to cost them their jobs because they're now on the payroll of USAID.
And, but that was a special forces operation. And, and you, you see this, you see this with, with everything USAID does, but, you know, to, to, to come back to this, you know, thing on, you on – we were talking about, I guess, BLM and some of this domestic foreign thing is – sorry, if you want to drill down on that and ask me a question.
But what I'm saying is USAID plays this military role as well with support assistance. But I mean, treating U.S.
citizens like you would treat foreign enemies or adversaries is something I never imagined would happen, but it is happening. Well, because when they defined populism as a threat to democracy because it undermines public faith and confidence in democratic institutions, they were able to effectively categorize the sitting president of the united states as an attack on democracy and good thing were democracy promotion programs because that we are the white blood cells uh in of the immune system uh to stop you know the virus of threats to democracy so of course you know populism is democracy right demand for majority rule but yeah Okay.
No, of course. But they say we need democratic institutions to provide the bumper cars to stop demagoguery.
Can I just ask you something? So Nina Jankiewicz famously played a domestic censorship role. She's an absolutely absurd figure, like pulled from TikTok, but human.
She gets fired because people are like, is this woman and she winds up at USAID well she wants she winds up at the the center for information resilience which is a which is a london-based um it's basically a british statecraft organ she had to file a far registration she became a registered agent of the united kingdom uh for you know for her work they're recipients of USAID money aren't they yes yes they were yes recipients of usaid money although i believe um she uh i think she wrote that she left there several months ago sometime in 2024 but the fact is is it's still that same network but a lot of these people i mean i just you know being a kid in dc and you'd meet people who had served in the foreign policy apparatus and, you know, whatever they were doing, killing Mossadegh or whatever, but they were pretty smart, I thought. I always thought.
I mean, they were. It seems like the current generation is a lot of Nina Jankiewicz's, like, just sort of low IQ people.
Like, do you know? I mean, what's the caliber of the people administering these programs? Well, I actually think there's layers of sophistication to Nina. Oh, is that true? Yeah, I do think so.
And I don't have any personal extra. I mean, she's written a lot of not flattering things about me.
And I've pointed out what I consider to be massive conflicts of interest when the entire field of professional internet censorship, that is you get paid, you pay your mortgage with paychecks that come from your job censoring the internet. I mean, I fundamentally do not believe that Nina's field, that this disinformation of censoring citizens in our own country, leave aside the sort of maybe more nuanced issue about whether there's a role of countering foreign propaganda and how robust that is.
The fact is, is, you know, what was done here was just straight up saying that domestic misinformation is a threat to democracy. And so the U S government should be, you know, should be had played the task of, of censoring its own, its own people through this whole society network.
But you have, I mean, there's so fundamentally, I don't believe that that job should exist.

And it is, you know, part of what I consider to be my purpose in life to try to bring freedom to the internet. And to the extent that that field exists as a profession, you know, that is, those two things are in conflict.
And then, you know, the other part of it is the conflict of interest, right? When you can see how these very censorship institutions that are being funded by USAID, and so many of them are, it's unbelievable. I mean, USAID has a formal censorship program.
I believe we've even talked about it before, but now I think people are starting to appreciate the significance of it. And in fact, its website just went down a few days ago and it's under, I believe, an extraordinary amount of scandal, which is that these...
USAID takes taxpayer money and creates lobbyists for more USAID because all the people who... It creates a conflict of interest between their own personal piggy banks and what the actual national interest of the country is.

If your whole field is getting funding in significant part from USAID, well, then if you want to really make it in this world, you have a moral hazard, a perverse incentive to become a tiny little lobbyist to explain why it is that censoring the internet is essential to U.S. national interest.
and to sell a whole ideology and a whole completely different vision

of what our country even is and what we're even

fighting for.

Because the more that our public grants and contracts,

the more that our procurements,

the more that the USAID piggy bank funds that the bigger,

the pie of that field gets.

And so, and so, but you see this in everything that USAID touches,

you know, from the,

from the media to the social media, to the universities, to the unions, to the anti-corruption, you know, prosecutor work, to the humanitarian work around, you know, in drug zones and in paramilitary zones. And so it's, you know, I think it's what Elon would call a self-licking ice cream cone.
And, you know, the ice cream's gone bad, but with the BLM thing, it gets very strange because USAID is a professional rent-a-riot organizer. I mean, as I even, I mean, leave aside the countless documented cases of USAID rent-a-riots from, you know,

as we mentioned, the Arab Spring,

which we, you know, we went over the rent-a-riots there.

USAID pumped $1.2 billion into the region,

you know, during that period.

We have literal USAID documents

explicitly doing operational planning to create smart mobs and people to take to the streets and riots. You know, you see it in Georgia.
You saw it in Belarus in 2020. It's anytime there are...
What about Minneapolis? Well, this is where it gets interesting in the role of these foreign policy institutions and their domestic things.

So I want to mention one quick adjacency before we go into that, which is around USAID funding to the Tide Center, which I mentioned has this Black Lives Matter adjacency. But the Tide Center is also the fiscal sponsor of a group called Fair and Just Prosecutions, which is the central group that manages, at least according to reports from, I believe, Daily Wire and the write-ups in the, I think it was Federalist and such, but I believe it was a Daily Wire investigation based on Media Research Center report.
that fair and just prosecutions is, is a, you know,

build themselves as sort of left-wing progressive criminal justice advocacy group. And they, Media Research Center published a long report, you know, essentially saying that they were the managing control group of Soros prosecutors, because what they do is all these Soros, now they don't fund the Soros, they don't fund the election campaigns of the, at least to my knowledge, of the Soros prosecutors like the Open Society Foundation does.
But what they do is they fund, they manage, they get the prosecutors, the Soros prosecutors to sign pledges about what they're going to, what they're not going to, you know, to not enforce certain laws that are on the books in the region.

You know, they pressure them to prosecute certain political targets. They give them social media hashtags and talking points.
They help write their press releases. They meet with them every, you know, every week.
And, you know, they they're it's, you know, prosecutors, you know, at least according to this reporting, which has some pretty damning, you know, inside documents to, you know, to to make this case.

You basically have prosecutors being managed by this shady NGO who is effectively puppeteering these prosecutors who are dependent on continued funding for their election campaigns and continued election funding for their future careers. What's AG, Attorney General, the joke is it's short for aspiring governor.
Always. So it's a path.
You want to cultivate these donor networks forever. But the Tide Center, which gets $27 million from USAID just on basically, you know, two grants alone for the foreign work is the fiscal sponsor of FJP, this group that is liaising with, you know, all these prosecutors and securing these pledges.
Can I just ask one? Let me just ask a final question. Just to kind of, so from everything you've said, and particularly your point that the grants haven't stopped, the staff is gone, they've been Twitterized, but the money's still flowing and it's just going to move to the State Department, which oversees USAID anyway.
You need some way to stop the poison that they're inspiring overseas from coming in here. Why couldn't you just get a variety of the Smith Act again that said there's like no destabilization effort, there's no society changing effort, there's really no effort that we project abroad that can be brought here? That's what needs to happen.
For example, you can't share the same corporate entity. You shouldn't be able to, you know, if you're, I mean, imagine if Raytheon, who is paid by the U.S.
military to drop deadly, lethal, you know, munitions clusters on foreign countries and their professional job is killing people. And they were getting billions of dollars from the U.S.
Pentagon. And they opened up a Raytheon.
And Raytheon started creating a new line of business for domestic countering misinformation projects. Where they monitor the internet for COVID skepticism or climate change denial.
You would look at that and you would say, Raytheon is getting paid by the military to kill people overseas.

And I know their grants, their contracts with the Pentagon are not for that work. But they have more muscle and money to play with.
They're being pumped up by steroids administered overseas. I mean, you saw that with the Bangladesh case too, by the way.
You know, the person who is now the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Bangladesh after the coup, by the way, the new head of state there is a Clinton Global Initiative fellow, but the foreign minister was brought in by USAID for formal training on countering misinformation. And you know who led that? It was another State Department USAID contractor, a group called PolitiFact.
It was the executive director of PolitiFact who writes hit pieces on you and me that were conspiracy theorists for talking about January 6th. And they are acting as an instrument of statecraft to get money from our paychecks to do international work to to train foreign journalists and foreign ministers uh how to censor or or stop you know the spread of information the state department doesn't like but now they're now their margins are padded by that well and that's the point is that the things that we do abroad affects us here we're paying the ukrainian government they're assassinating people like literally assassinating people trying to assassinate american citizens fact selling weapons to the drug cartels in mexico fact and you end up like wrecking your own country with the things that you do abroad right well i'll tell you what we did in the financing space and i remember being a corporate lawyer and watching that evolve evolve and play out.
We had anti-terrorist financing, OFAC-style laws that prevented laundering. And even if you could technically do it, you didn't want to risk it because there were criminal penalties for doing it and there were financial penalties.
And so in something like this, imagine if the grantees had to pay treble damages in the amount of their grant if they tripped one of those foreign domestic firewalls. If their grant was for $30 million and they have to pay, they're liable for up to $90 million if a U.S.
court finds that they violated the USAID-Smith-Munt Act. I mean, this is something that Congress could put in today.
I mean, you could add criminal penalties, but you need, right now, there's no penalty whatsoever. The only penalty is that people might find out and it might cause a political scandal and it might make the USAID grant coordinator less likely to give you the next grant in the future.
Where's the clawback? Where's the restitution damages? People shouldn't maybe even be able to sue the US government body administering the grant for failing to do oversight of the NGO receiving that money. You might create a cause, a private cause of action against the State Department or whatever new form USAID costs.
That can be done legislatively in the message that, I mean, first of all, that would go a huge distance to being able to deal with this problem because you're going to have this problem whether USAID exists as an outside as an independent agency or whether the State Department just inherits a USAID herpes infection and just lives with it inside the agency Mike Benson you go on forever it was your reporting your dogged single-minded almost monomaniacal, I will say, effort to bring to public view this web that I think started all of this. Well, and you...
It is a vindication, by the way. I know you have mixed feelings about it and you're worried about the whole edifice collapsing, which is a fair concern.
But I do think anyone who called you a nutcase has to apologize at this point. Thank you for saying that.
And it wouldn't have been possible without you as well. I do just want to clarify, I don't believe that I have mixed feelings.
I 100% endorse directionally and technically everything that I've seen so far. But I appreciate the weight of the moment and that you are dealing with something much more delicate than simply, you know.
Stopping the trainee dance contests. HUD turns up a couple billion dollars worth of waste, fraud, and abuse in the city of Chicago, and it's a local issue, and it's a big scandal.
were, I feel an obligation to help midwife this.

And, but I totally- And it's a big scandal. I feel an obligation to help midwife this.

But I totally support it.

And I just, to me, it's reflection rather than hesitation.

Well, it sounds like you're on the side of U.S. interests abroad, which exists.

We do have interests.

And we should protect them jealously, I would say.

But America first. Amen.
Mike Benz thank you very much thank you