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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 government agencies whose acronyms you don't recognize.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I'm from DC, so as you've explained this to me a couple of times, it all has made total sense.

Speaker 1 But sometimes I wonder, like, like, do people believe what Mike Benz is saying?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 And I just wanted to ask how that feels for you.

Speaker 2 It's a sort of somber moment, actually, more than anything. And

Speaker 2 I found myself very reflective this week and hit by the weight of history of it, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 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 now it's happening.
And so they expecting cartwheels and spiking footballs.

Speaker 2 And that's not how I feel really at all because

Speaker 2 the task here was to break the halo of

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I think this is how we had cheap gas and affordable homes and

Speaker 2 middle-class prosperity and export markets for our manufactured goods here.

Speaker 2 The task is

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 2 be able to make it be righteous and virtuous again,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 I feel

Speaker 2 the global impact of fundamental changes to U.S. foreign policy that are happening now.
Because,

Speaker 2 you know, as I've been saying for so long, I mean, there really is a sort of U.S. aid Truman show that much of the world lives in.

Speaker 2 You know, many people found out for the first time this week that 90% of media in Ukraine is funded by U.S. aid.
Many people are just now finding out the extent of U.S. media organizations

Speaker 2 that are funded by USAID. They're finding out the reach of it in everything from the unions to social media censorship to pandemic and gain of function research

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 strange ties, even to things like terrorism and the drug trade. And

Speaker 2 there's that sort of

Speaker 2 these institutions that everyone thought were private and independent being corrupted by

Speaker 2 USAID's $44 billion

Speaker 2 year budget.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 2 I think a lot of people, that was a process that I felt was necessary to tell the story of internet censorship.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then I see, oh, well, that's weird. At this disinformation conference, the next panel is on energy geopolitics.
What are they doing together? Huh, that's weird.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 USAID, NED, the whole suite of NGOs,

Speaker 2 State Department grantees, National Science Foundation grantees. And you start to see that this is

Speaker 2 in order to tell the story, I felt, of internet censorship and what to do to stop it,

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 when I would do my

Speaker 2 little private briefings and bring my PowerPoints around the country,

Speaker 2 it was impossible, frankly, to crack through, even when people saw the receipts on screen, they saw the source documents, and

Speaker 2 they just couldn't conceive that the world actually works this way,

Speaker 2 that our country does these things.

Speaker 2 And they have a hard time squaring the morality of it with the

Speaker 2 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. And so, but

Speaker 2 I guess getting back to this sort of why am I

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I don't think we'd have a prosperous homeland without an empire. And the patient needs open heart surgery.

Speaker 2 It has to be done. I am 100%

Speaker 2 agree with the decisions that have been made on on policy so far on this um

Speaker 2 but i i 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

Speaker 2 in the in the zeal to um

Speaker 2 to carry out radical reforms

Speaker 2 you can

Speaker 1 if you don't if if take out the wrong organs.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or if you don't, don't even know

Speaker 2 how the atriums,

Speaker 2 how the organ works,

Speaker 2 it's directionally correct to do the open heart surgery, but the patient can die on the table if you do it wrong. And

Speaker 2 all of that has to be like, this is just the beginning of

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 maybe in American history, with few exceptions, maybe in the 60s and 70s,

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 the blob, the foreign policy establishment that impacts so much of domestic affairs and sometimes controls it, has had to answer to the people

Speaker 2 that fund it.

Speaker 2 This is a shot across the bow.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I don't think they saw this coming.

Speaker 1 I understand exactly what you're saying. I don't think Americans even now really understand the degree to which our foreign policy establishment

Speaker 1 uses other countries, particularly the Five Eyes, the other English-speaking intel services, against us here.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I dealt with one today, actually.

Speaker 1 Do you know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 2 I don't know the individual you're referring to, but you're familiar with the trend.

Speaker 1 So, but

Speaker 1 I guess what I hear you saying is Americans, when they learn just how corrupt the system is, may lose faith in their country.

Speaker 2 Milton Friedman gives this example about the pencil. Have you ever seen this video?

Speaker 2 He talks about it in the context of libertarian economic theory.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And it's the magic of the market that all makes it possible.

Speaker 2 You know, 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.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 2 what we're about to walk in on is

Speaker 2 the flip side of that, which is that

Speaker 2 people have been lied to in this country where they've thought that

Speaker 2 they've been sold that this was humanitarian aid and

Speaker 2 co-signed it. And

Speaker 2 let me come back to this point about the pencil because maybe that'll just appear a little bit later in the story.

Speaker 2 And I'll just sort of hint at it now.

Speaker 2 Right now, the people who are trying to defend U.S. aid are stuck between Iraq and a hard place.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then we say, okay, well, you canceled elections. You know, you've, you're,

Speaker 2 you know, there are all of 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

Speaker 2 having it be a U.S. vassal state is an advantage to us because then we can exploit those $14 trillion worth of resources.
I mean, that's what's implied there, right?

Speaker 2 Why would Americans benefit from Ukrainians exploiting that $14 trillion?

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 the mask had to slip in order to defend it at the deeper level. It was

Speaker 2 to let people in, okay,

Speaker 2 here's why we're really doing it. And every USAI program operates that way.

Speaker 1 It is

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's doing such terrible things, funding the Wuhan lab,

Speaker 2 not to mention the whole rest of the USAI USAID Truman show. But then they go, okay, okay, well, it's U.S.
soft power.

Speaker 2 It advances U.S. strategic interests.
And so you say, oh, okay, so it's not aid.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 it becomes very schizophrenic to defend this thing because it's a labyrinth of lies.

Speaker 2 U.S.AID's access. and its reputation completely depends on its perception as being a kind of quasi-charity, even though,

Speaker 2 charity is nowhere to be found. It's a U.S.
foreign policy instrument. AID isn't even in the name.
I've said this many times, but it's the Agency for International Development.

Speaker 2 And when you see aid, it's your mind playing tricks on you.

Speaker 1 And by the way, growing up,

Speaker 1 my dad worked with USAID. It was called USAID, not USAID.

Speaker 1 To make it clear to everybody, it was not an aid organization. Right.
But now they call it USAID. Right.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, you know, I mean,

Speaker 2 I'm sure in the Ronald Reagan building,

Speaker 2 but how it's colloquially known, I mean, and how it's described to the voters, it's described as humanitarian assistance.

Speaker 2 And you go, okay, well, you know,

Speaker 2 and we can

Speaker 2 get into the depth of the scandals. But I guess the fundamental feeling that I have right now is

Speaker 2 this is going to get a lot worse as people go through this self-discovery process of what's happening.

Speaker 2 And We were talking a little bit earlier where I mentioned, you know, eight years ago when I was writing my

Speaker 2 little

Speaker 2 book attempt to try to explain everything that was happening in Air Censorship, and I felt like I had to explain all these other

Speaker 2 tectonic plates of American society and global affairs just to understand

Speaker 2 who and what and

Speaker 2 why they're censoring the internet.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I would spend my whole day in usaspending.gov, you you know, to the exclusion of everything else, friends, family, a social life, and just

Speaker 2 going through that

Speaker 2 this can't be true. This can't be true.
Oh, my God, it is. Oh, my God, it is.
And

Speaker 2 there's a sort of five stages of depression that plays out as you

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's been just hundreds of people, all with huge megaphones, who are just spending their day

Speaker 2 hearing about, oh, wow, there's all this corruption at USAID. Let me plug it into

Speaker 2 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 the

Speaker 2 already faith has been shaken, but there are layers to this that I think are going to

Speaker 2 truly shock

Speaker 2 people when they begin to try to put

Speaker 2 their minds around it. And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 and helping secure import-export markets for us, helping secure natural resources, you know, helping secure, you know, U.S. national security goals in the region.
There is a role for that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I just

Speaker 2 feel that many came into this movement around MAGA and nationalism because they cared about

Speaker 2 their schools and

Speaker 2 the woke agenda in their schools. They cared about their streets and their neighborhoods and whether they were safe, and they cared about

Speaker 2 corruption from the U.S. President or their local representatives.
They never had to think about

Speaker 2 Pakistan, Bangladesh, Estonia, Tanzania.

Speaker 2 They never had to think about how you make a pencil and how the goods and services that

Speaker 2 give them the advantaged life that we have in the United States versus other countries depends on the battering ram of this blob apparatus.

Speaker 2 And so as they learn more and more the depths of depravity of the blob,

Speaker 2 I myself am in a hard, sort of between a rock and a hard place, where more than anyone maybe

Speaker 2 that I know

Speaker 2 have been have been spearheading and trying to lead the charge to break the blob's halo.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 it should be vanquished entirely. It's family, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 I was thinking about this the other day with

Speaker 2 we talked about Ukraine several times when we've spoken, and we've talked about the 2014 Maidan

Speaker 2 toppling of the democratically elected government. Coincidentally, the person on the pro-U.S.AID side who's leading the charge to fight the White House's reforms is Senator Chris Murphy.

Speaker 2 Chris Murphy bragged on live national television that

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 those protests

Speaker 2 changed world history, she bragged about the $5 billion that USAID and NED and related

Speaker 2 humanitarian assistance orgs had given to

Speaker 2 effectively the very same Ukrainian civil society organizations that would lead that charge. And when she did so,

Speaker 2 she was at a sponsored event by standing in front of signs for ExxonMobil and Chevron.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I've reflected on that picture because it's very easy to look at Victoria Newland 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.

Speaker 2 And it's very easy to look at the excesses of big U.S. corporations.
But we do need oil.

Speaker 2 We do want cheap oil and gas. We do want energy dominance.
And so, you know,

Speaker 2 at this moment, when we're seeing really the first vulnerabilities, certainly in my lifetime, of this blob monstrosity,

Speaker 2 I feel a strange sort of sympathy for the devil, which is that

Speaker 2 they've done terrible things and we should not do them again. And they've gone rogue, and there's no oversight, and

Speaker 2 horrors beyond your wildest imagination. At the same time,

Speaker 2 these are still parts of the American family. There is some vestige of a function there that

Speaker 2 I believe our foreign policy planners

Speaker 2 have to at least know

Speaker 2 was there and was

Speaker 2 responsible for much of our prosperity

Speaker 1 before

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 2 as they try to reconstruct the patient. Does that make sense? Of course it does.

Speaker 1 And I think maybe that's the whole point of this, is that

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 interests, to preserve

Speaker 2 import

Speaker 1 and export advantage? Are you doing it to secure energy that you need to have a functioning society? Those are all, are you doing it to

Speaker 1 bring peace to your hemispheres? You don't have a lot of craziness and lawlessness and civil wars and all that? Yes, those are all good things.

Speaker 1 Or are you doing it to sow chaos for its own sake?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, why would, why would you do that? I don't understand. Like, what, what U.S.

Speaker 1 interest is served by having all of those agencies that I just named go go to some other country and say, no, you need more traineism or some bizarre, you know, we need to structure the family differently.

Speaker 1 Like, why do we do that?

Speaker 1 Who wins when we do that?

Speaker 2 Well, I'm really glad you asked because that is

Speaker 2 the exact

Speaker 2 example I've been using to try to

Speaker 2 give a window of entry 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.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, you just mentioned, you know, why would USAID be promoting, you know, trans, take the example of transgender dance festivals. It's something I've been talking about a lot this week.

Speaker 1 Take the example of transgender dance festivals. Yeah, right.
Well, love that sentence.

Speaker 1 It used to be only crazy people thought they were being watched all the time, surveilled, the guy mumbling next to you on the bus.

Speaker 1 But now anyone who knows what's going on thinks that that because it's true your phones are listening to you tech companies tracking all your online activity in order to profit off of what ought to be private information governments are watching too it's a corrupt system it's frightening and the worst part is it's all legal the government certainly will not help stop this of course the intel agencies love it so it's up to you to protect yourself and that's where express vpn comes in the express vpn which we use here is an app that sends 100 of your online activity through secure encrypted servers that means nobody can see what you do online, not internet service providers, not data brokers, not Intel agencies.

Speaker 1 Don't believe it? Listen to this. Within last year, ExpressVPN received over 400,000 data requests from tech companies and government agencies, but did not share a single piece of cuffs from or data.

Speaker 1 That's because the company has a strict zero logs policy. Express VPN cannot and will not share your data.

Speaker 2 They don't even have your data to share.

Speaker 1 ExpressVPN is is easy to use, takes one click. It's rated number one by the experts at CNET and The Verge.
And right now, you get an extra three months for free when you use a special link.

Speaker 1 Go to expressvpn.com/slash tucker and get that extra months for free. It's expressvpn.com/slash tucker.

Speaker 3 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift. One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks for.
I know, I'm putting them back. Hey, Dave, here's a tip: put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 2 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 3 It's an easy shopping trip. We're glad we could assist.
Thanks, random singing people. So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.
Scratchers from the California lottery.

Speaker 3 A little play can make your name.

Speaker 1 Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.
You may have noticed this is a great country with bad food. Our food supply is rotten.
It didn't used to be this way.

Speaker 1 Take chips, for example. You may recall a time when crushing a bag of chips didn't make you feel hungover, like you couldn't get out of bed the next day.
And the change, of course, is chemicals.

Speaker 1 There's all kinds of crap they're putting in this food that should not be in your body, seed oils, for example.

Speaker 1 Now even one serving of your standard American chip brand can make you feel bloated, fat,

Speaker 1 totally passive and out of it. But there is a better way.
It's called masa chips. They're delicious.
I've got a whole garage full of them.

Speaker 1 They're healthy they taste great and they have three simple ingredients corn salt and a hundred percent grass-fed beef tallow no garbage no seed oils what a relief and you feel the difference when you eat them as we often do snacking on masa chips is not like eating the garbage that you buy convenience stores you feel satisfied light energetic not sluggish Tens of thousands of happy people eat masa chips.

Speaker 1 It's endorsed by people who understand health. It's well worth a try.
Go to masa, m-asachips.com/slash tucker. Use the code tucker for 25% off your first order.
That's masachips.com

Speaker 1 tucker. Code Tucker for 25% off your first order.
Highly recommended.

Speaker 1 What is a transgender dance festival? I having never been.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 they will bring together people from that country to come to

Speaker 2 a dance festival that's

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 U.S. entities who are working with the activists and labels.

Speaker 1 Well, 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?

Speaker 1 Why is it our business how many kids other countries have?

Speaker 1 I've always been confused by that. Like, what is that? Why are we doing that?

Speaker 2 I wish that was rhetorical, but

Speaker 2 and I do believe in many instances it is ideological excess driven to madness. But

Speaker 2 give an example from just a few months ago. I believe it was

Speaker 2 this August of this year. There was

Speaker 2 a prime minister in Bangladesh who was basically ousted in a sort of military coup coupled with a color revolution.

Speaker 2 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 of the different facets of the dynamics I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 basically, starting in about

Speaker 2 2018 through 2020,

Speaker 2 it appeared that U.S. statecraft was not particularly pleased with

Speaker 2 Sheikh Hasina winning this,

Speaker 2 you know, the prime minister winning the election. And

Speaker 2 baseline assessments were submitted to the State Department about how to prop up the opposition group, the Bangladeshi National Party, the BNP,

Speaker 2 which was considered more favorable to U.S. interests.

Speaker 2 The leaked documents don't get too in the nitty-gritty about what U.S. national interests have served, but there were many conflicts between that Bangladeshi prime minister and

Speaker 2 the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that prime minister has come out publicly and said that

Speaker 2 she believed that she was overthrown

Speaker 2 because of,

Speaker 2 or basically there was a conflict around

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 on they don't want foreign troops on their soil.

Speaker 1 Who does? Right, right.

Speaker 2 They don't want 500 acres of their land. You know, they don't want to provoke foreign powers.

Speaker 2 This is what's playing out in Romania with Georgeskew and the, you know, the cancellation of the elections.

Speaker 1 It's just like a giant NATO base right now.

Speaker 2 Right. Well, they're building

Speaker 2 Europe's largest NATO base

Speaker 2 currently, which faces straight out of the Black Sea and Crimea.

Speaker 2 But she had been refusing to build a U.S. military base.
So let's just,

Speaker 2 as I walk through this, let me just make some assumptions and make it a harder issue than,

Speaker 2 or something a little bit more, I guess, accessible. Let's just say it really is vital to U.S.

Speaker 2 national interests to build that military base in Bangladesh to counter Chinese influence, and the Bangladeshi prime minister doesn't want to do it.

Speaker 2 And so our foreign policy planners decide we need to do regime change.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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 democratic institutions and activists in order to either win the next election or in order to

Speaker 2 do a color evolution style ousting where

Speaker 2 the prime minister has to flee in a helicopter. And

Speaker 2 what was done in this case in Bangladesh, and these leaked documents from the gray zone show this in gratuitous detail, is that

Speaker 2 the National Endowment for Democracy's Republican Arm, the International Republican Institute, they have four core force, but two of them are political branches.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 submitted to the State Department in 2019, 2020,

Speaker 2 after they got walloped trying to back the Bangladeshi National Party in the recent past election, was a plan to destabilize Bangladesh politics.

Speaker 2 That's a direct quote, destabilize Bangladesh politics.

Speaker 2 By working with, they listed 170

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 either destabilize the country's politics or prop up the political alternative. And in the process of doing that,

Speaker 2 they sought the LGBT population,

Speaker 2 two Bangladeshi ethnic minority groups, and young students and student groups who had already been protesting earlier that year because of

Speaker 2 a local politics issue there.

Speaker 2 And they noted that

Speaker 2 rap music was popular, and young people were listening to rap music in Bangladesh. So, what do they do?

Speaker 2 They turned around and they took U.S. taxpayer funds.
They get 100% of their money from the State Department, and they work closely with U.S. AIDS.
They actually administer U.S.

Speaker 2 aid programs all over Bangladesh and all over the world.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 the classic peaceful protest that has the upside of being a riot.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 in IRI's baseline assessment submitted to the State Department, they talked about how one of the songs that they paid for

Speaker 2 was

Speaker 2 designed

Speaker 2 to sow resentment at the sitting government and

Speaker 2 basically undermine people, 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

Speaker 2 distrust their government. And then

Speaker 2 basically the baseline assessment revealed that these groups were the ones who would be receptive.

Speaker 2 Those were the contacts in the region. They do field work when they do these baseline assessments.

Speaker 2 What if the baseline assessment or the strategic assessment happens to reveal that the highest ROI for

Speaker 2 soft power projection is with very unseemly groups and activities? This is, for example, how we end up funding terrorist groups and paramilitaries and

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This was in an NED memo in 2009 for Cuba where

Speaker 2 the National Down for Democracy

Speaker 2 have something called the Journal of Democracy. And

Speaker 2 they talked about this exact phenomenon, that they might be able to mobilize the Afro-Cuban community to

Speaker 2 leveraging racial animus against the

Speaker 2 mostly

Speaker 2 white Cuban government and taking note of

Speaker 2 proclivities for, I think it was prostitution, crime, and drugs, and how USAID

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 these populations all listen to rap, and they did. This is another great gray zone.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 you're describing, you know, tranny story hour.

Speaker 1 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, to fray the social fabric, to divide people from each other, to make them easier to control.

Speaker 1 And in the case of Trump's first term, to undermine the White House, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't know that any of that's true, but like what you're what you're describing that we did in Bangladesh is what's happened here.

Speaker 1 And so it raises the question, like, was that all by design also? And of course, of course it was, right?

Speaker 2 Well, there's, there's a lot there. USAID gave

Speaker 1 am I crazy to ask that?

Speaker 2 No, not at all. I mean, that, that is, to me, the, the final, the final blow.
U.S. it's, it's bad.
And there's There's the moral question about whether to do this sort of dirty work abroad.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 U.S. soft power influence abroad.

Speaker 2 But then there is

Speaker 2 the breaking of the firewall where our foreign policy

Speaker 2 hounds are never supposed to bite

Speaker 2 the owner

Speaker 2 who feeds them. And that is, I mean, that is, to me, why this is a no-brainer, the reforms that are happening.

Speaker 1 But do you think it's possible?

Speaker 1 Look, just to go through them, the 2017 Charlottesville march, where all of a sudden out of nowhere, there are all these Nazis. Like, who knew we had so many Nazis in our country?

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 2 And guys,

Speaker 1 one, I'm thinking one pretty much.

Speaker 2 The USAID has never funded Nazis, by the way.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 So, but like, out of nowhere, Trump gets elected, and all of a sudden, sudden in 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Well, I don't know about the Charlottesville case.

Speaker 2 You know, I can see enough domestic antibodies on that with the FBI and whatnot.

Speaker 2 And the fact is...

Speaker 1 Well, I'm not saying USAID did it. I'm just saying it's the same template.
Oh, right. Oh, no.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 the ability for the

Speaker 2 battering ram of our cloak and dagger, dark arts, only supposed to operate abroad to be laundered at home.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Is really

Speaker 2 the reason that I believe the current open heart surgery is a no-brainer.

Speaker 2 And I fully support the total abolition of USAID as an agency and tucking it understate and putting it through, you know, having it mend.

Speaker 2 And then if at some point it needs to be rolled out, spun out into a different independent agency again with reforms in place and the appropriate staffing structure, we can have that conversation at a later time.

Speaker 2 There is the

Speaker 2 domestic one is a huge one. There's so many data points there.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 my concern is when you try to attack these things at the level of

Speaker 2 there's no U.S. interest that's served in it at all.

Speaker 2 It's totally crazy.

Speaker 2 You're going to encounter very strange layers of resistance trying to attack it from that argument.

Speaker 2 So here's an example I've been giving this week, and I'll hit you with the thought experiment.

Speaker 2 Let's just assume, and I have no inside knowledge about this. I don't talk to folks

Speaker 2 at that level or anything, but

Speaker 2 Venezuela has a very, Trump has had a very contentious relationship with the government of Venezuela during his first term.

Speaker 2 We

Speaker 2 declared Juan Guaido the sitting president of, you know, the the elected president. He was

Speaker 2 standing ovation from both sides of the aisle.

Speaker 2 I could see a situation where this White House, where President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio,

Speaker 2 either in a declared or discreet fashion seek to

Speaker 2 deploy U.S. soft power institutions to pursue a policy of regime change in Venezuela.
Again, I have no inside knowledge about that.

Speaker 1 I do have inside knowledge. And they've been working on that for for years.
There are Americans in Venezuela, fact, because I've talked to one of them.

Speaker 1 As of last year, there are Americans in Venezuela working to overthrow that government. Right.
You know, so that's true.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 I'm going to give a narrow example here, but the problem fundamentally that I'm describing is fractal across all of this waste, fraud, and abuse we're seeing. What if the State Department and

Speaker 2 together with

Speaker 2 its new U.S.

Speaker 2 aid function, puts out basically, you know, 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,

Speaker 2 working with effectively U.S.

Speaker 2 spy craft while nominally being Venezuelan citizens or doing doing the daring and dangerous deeds of transporting supplies despite Venezuelan counterintelligence monitoring them. And

Speaker 2 what if the strategic analysis or the baseline analysis that comes back from

Speaker 2 these NGOs

Speaker 1 is,

Speaker 2 well, the transgender population in Venezuela. And

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 in that country that is

Speaker 2 most

Speaker 2 effective at destabilizing

Speaker 2 that country's government, or that will be most

Speaker 2 the highest return on investment for foreign assistance funds given?

Speaker 2 What if $2.7 million

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 2 a series of 12 different transgender dance festivals,

Speaker 2 if the analysis reveals that we need

Speaker 2 5 million votes 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

Speaker 2 to a pro-U.S. one,

Speaker 2 and everyone

Speaker 2 who normalizes or is

Speaker 2 or believes that transgender people being oppressed by the government are more likely to vote against the government, you could see a cynical, self-serving,

Speaker 2 cold-hard, calculated decision

Speaker 2 for a MAGA

Speaker 2 State Department to fund transgender dance festivals. And this is important to keep in mind.
In Bangladesh, it was the IRI who funded that.

Speaker 2 It was the Republicans who funded the transgender dance festivals and rap groups. Republicans are not known for loving rap.

Speaker 1 But it's John McCain. I mean, McCain ran it for years.
I mean, they're actually all for that.

Speaker 2 But Trump is a 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

Speaker 2 leave aside the transgender issue.

Speaker 2 This is going to happen everywhere. And I think people just don't understand

Speaker 2 that aid is a dirty deed.

Speaker 1 With Donald Trump returning to the White House, this country has a unique opportunity, maybe our last opportunity, to save ourselves from the anti-American and anti-human left.

Speaker 1 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 improve the lives of ordinary Americans.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That is a fact.

Speaker 1 So what do you do to fight them? How do you defeat the deep state?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know who's effective because they're the ones under attack. Heritage has a comprehensive plan to dismantle permanent Washington and restore the country to its democratic foundations.

Speaker 1 It's important. Visit heritage.org slash Tucker to learn more and to support this critical effort.

Speaker 1 And when you make a gift today, you get a free pocket constitution to make certain that you are equipped with the founding principles on your person at all times. It's amazing to read it.

Speaker 1 Again, that's heritage.org/slash Tucker. Where do you keep your most valuable possessions? Not your necktie or a pair of socks, but things you wouldn't want to replace or maybe couldn't.

Speaker 1 Heirlooms from your parents, your birth certificate, your firearms, your grandfather's shotgun. Where do you store those? Under the bed? In the back of a closet?

Speaker 1 That's unwise and maybe unsafe. Liberty Safe is the place to store them.
I would know I have a colonial safe from Liberty Safe. It's in my garage.
It's the best. I keep everything in there.

Speaker 1 It's a proflex system. Allows you to design the inside of your safe in a way that works for you.

Speaker 2 It's not a fixed setup.

Speaker 1 Someone else puts the shelves in and you have to deal with it. You make it the way you want it.
Have a stock of rifles. You can make room.

Speaker 1 Need more shelves for handguns, for documents, for valuables, for gold. You can do whatever you want.

Speaker 1 you can refigure your safe in minutes maximum flexibility maximum convenience liberty safe is america's number one safe company made in the united states great people i know them visit libertysafe.com use the code tucker10 at checkout for 10 off franklin and colonial safes featuring the pro flex interior that you customize you're going to dig it we definitely plus are good looking i will say So you probably got Verizon, AT ⁇ T, T-Mobile.

Speaker 1 That means you are definitely way overpaying for wireless service. And we're not just saying that.
It happens for a reason.

Speaker 1 When you join a massive cell phone company, you get charters to support everything that their operation is doing. And that's a lot.

Speaker 1 Big corporate programs, huge HR departments, thousands of retail stores you're never going to visit. You think your money is going toward getting better cell service, 5G service, but it's not.

Speaker 1 So the wireless company we use, PureTalk, is very different. They use the exact same cell network as the companies we just mentioned, but they don't do any of the other garbage.

Speaker 1 And for you, that means $25 a month for your phone's data plans. Actually, $25 a month.
You'll be amazed. Switch to Pure Talk.
It's super easy.

Speaker 1 Visit puretalk.com slash Tucker and you save an additional 50% off your first month. PureTalk.com slash Tucker.
It literally takes minutes. It's America's wireless company.
I agree with that.

Speaker 1 I think I have a macro problem with this, which is,

Speaker 1 you know, one, it's not at all clear that like overthrowing Maduro is in America's interest. I think there's like a loud exile community in Florida that wants it.

Speaker 1 More foreigners who've come here bringing their stupid feuds into our country

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's how I feel. about the Cubans, the Venezuelans, all of whom I like personally, but like, these are not our problems.
And I feel that way about the Gaza thing. It's like, take it to Gaza, okay?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Not our problem.
I think it's a fair, as an American, I think it's a fair position to have. But so there's that, you know, like, is this actually in our interest?

Speaker 1 Are we just being paid to care about this? Yeah.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 you know, assassinate people you don't like. You can't just like totally destroy their social fabric.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And if you're not for democracy, then don't say you are.

Speaker 1 And I do think that like 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.

Speaker 1 Like January 6th was an op

Speaker 1 by

Speaker 1 you know, by the, I think primarily by DOD is my impression.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Well, they've been trained for years doing that sort of thing in faraway nations. That's my view.
Right. I totally agree.
Does that make sense? Yes.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I'm glad that you're saying that because that is ultimately, we need to square the circle, which is that,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 imagine a situation. I think right now, the thing that I'm heartened by,

Speaker 2 more than the technical victories, is the national consciousness raising that USAID

Speaker 2 does infect all of these institutions and that there is this bleed over between foreign and domestic.

Speaker 2 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...

Speaker 2 What I've written about the social media censorship and the USAID

Speaker 2 primer documents and the USAID SEPS program that formally plotted to get foreign countries to censor, to pass censorship laws to target U.S. tech companies.

Speaker 2 It's the sort of thing that we would typically

Speaker 2 have run a sort of USAID

Speaker 2 covert operation to stop another entity from doing. And it's our,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 gain of function and you know pandemic uh i mean there's

Speaker 2 you know how

Speaker 2 how corrupt does an agency need to be drugs terrorism pandemics uh i mean

Speaker 1 but it corrupts the country after all

Speaker 1 of course of course like you don't allow your cops to just like they knew who all the drug dealers are but you don't allow your policemen to walk up and execute them right because that i mean 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 the reason there has been such little transparency about us aid and and i always say you know

Speaker 2 when it's too dirty for the cia you give it to us aid

Speaker 2 you for for for a number of reasons

Speaker 2 yeah yeah and and i i i think

Speaker 2 if if there really is a sort of usaid files that you know that that we get from this administration um i think This is why I'm saying, I think people are going to want to

Speaker 2 not necessarily put a new heart in this, in this patient when they see how it's going to be.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Correct me if this is not a fair summation, but I think you're saying when we look at, we're 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...

Speaker 1 doing dipshit liberal things. And what you're saying is, no, these are hard-edged instruments of policy.

Speaker 2 Yes. Now, of course, the personnel,

Speaker 2 97% of USAID employees donate to Democrats. Of course, right.

Speaker 2 But Liz Cheney started her career

Speaker 2 at USAID, at the Eurasia portfolio of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary.

Speaker 1 A lot of this is destabilizing. Have you noticed that? I thought a great power, the reason the U.S.

Speaker 1 is better than the Soviet Union was we brought stability, predictability, markets, democracy, and they brought war and instability.

Speaker 1 And I always thought that good leadership, good stewardship, good parenting brought stability. And it does seem like we are intentionally sowing

Speaker 1 disunity and instability around the world.

Speaker 2 Oh, I mean, I literally just quoted you a IRI document implementing U.S. aid programs where they literally wrote to the U.S.
State Department that the purpose of

Speaker 2 this baseline assessment was to gather as many activists and informants and and network nodes, quote, to destabilize

Speaker 2 Bangladeshi politics, but apply that everywhere. You know, this is fundamentally what I believe has happened during the time.

Speaker 1 Do you really want that? Isn't that shameful?

Speaker 2 Of course, it's shameful.

Speaker 1 But, but

Speaker 2 I think people don't fully understand how products arrive on the shelves around them.

Speaker 2 I was mentioning Milton Freeman's pencil example.

Speaker 2 Well, what happens if Malaysia decides to nationalize, you know, 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

Speaker 2 graphite or lead to, you know, and

Speaker 2 no blob, no pencils.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 the docks and the longshoreman strikes. And the CIA infiltrated the unions and they worked with the

Speaker 2 AFL-CIO slash AFL-CIA. And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Now, okay, you might say you can live without pencils, but how about no petroleum?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 There is a potential necessity. And this is why I feel it's so imperative that what's happening right now is happening.

Speaker 2 And I'm thrilled that it is, but there's still much more to internalize about this because you're going to need to

Speaker 2 reconstruct the history of the entire past century as you disentangle this whole thing.

Speaker 2 If we had not toppled so many foreign governments in service of big oil,

Speaker 2 would we have had cheap oil? Well, does a president want to

Speaker 2 this is where I come back to this Venezuela example. Trump wants to to win and again we don't we don't have to call it Venezuela we can call it random random country X

Speaker 2 we're going to be hit with a choice as we as we reduce the USAID function if we reduce the USAID function to my knowledge you know the the staff has been radically cut from 14,000 to something like 290

Speaker 2 but my my understanding is that most of the grants you know it's $44 billion

Speaker 2 At 14,000 employees, it's about a billion dollars of employee overhead

Speaker 2 a year. So 43 of the 44 billion presumably are still going to all these you know frankensteinian monster projects uh

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 2 you're you're going to be hit with that choice of of do you want to

Speaker 2 win

Speaker 2 uh fighting dirty

Speaker 2 or do you want to potentially lose fighting fair and

Speaker 2 and that's going to play out in every industrial sector in every region and

Speaker 1 i'm okay and i i what i'm concerned about is that you're saying the u.s economy can't continue um our prosperity can't continue unless we like

Speaker 2 wreck other people's countries no i'm not saying i'm not saying that i'm saying that that is something

Speaker 2 there's a 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 at every national security Council interagency coordination.

Speaker 2 And there are some lines that I believe we cannot ever cross.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 His State Department did, his U.S.AID did. And so the best populists were popular online in Europe.
So

Speaker 2 the White House had a whole information integrity working group to have the U.S.-funded NGOs lobby the European Union effectively and push

Speaker 2 the different 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.

Speaker 2 And what you're doing is, is these people could not do that at home because we have a First Amendment, but Europe doesn't have one.

Speaker 2 So if you declare populism to be an attack on democracy, then

Speaker 2 it's easier to win by advocating censorship. But that, to me, is a violation of fundamental American values.

Speaker 1 And not just censorship, but putting a lot of people in jail, using violence. That is a form of violence,

Speaker 1 incarcerating someone, putting them in handcuffs.

Speaker 2 And that's what USAID does. USAID's role with the prosecutors is unbelievable, the depth of that rabbit hole.
But if I can just complete this point here, because I want to make sure I'm,

Speaker 2 there's a lot of nuance to what I'm trying to say here, which is that

Speaker 1 people need,

Speaker 2 and especially at the policymaker and White House and House, Senate Oversight Committee side,

Speaker 2 they need to get a sort of topographical map of

Speaker 2 the scope and spectrum of our dirty deeds done in the name of U.S. aid in order to make a triaged assessment of what kind of things can be dual purpose.
Because everything U.S. aid is dual purpose.

Speaker 2 It has to be.

Speaker 2 It's a U.S.,

Speaker 2 everything has to advance U.S.

Speaker 2 national interests 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.

Speaker 2 national interest.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Take this transgender dance festival in Bangladesh thing. Imagine a hearing on U.S.
aid and a

Speaker 2 high-ranking Republican senator holds up, you know, you're funding Bangladesh, you know, you're funding transgender dance festivals and you're spending $2.7 million on this.

Speaker 2 What possible U.S. interest does that serve? Can that U.S.
aid administrator on live television

Speaker 2 say to the world, well, that was a cynical, you know, we determined actually, we were running a covert operation to 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 you know 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 usage programs no i get it so it becomes i get it right but

Speaker 2 my concern is

Speaker 2 There's some things you can't do, assassinations,

Speaker 2 you know, promoting internet censorship,

Speaker 2 full-on regime change

Speaker 2 that mobilizes the ugliest assets in a society like terrorist groups or

Speaker 2 extremist groups sort of thing. But there's a lot of squishiness in between that.
And

Speaker 2 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 the rest of the White House.

Speaker 2 When he was approved, what, 99 to 0 or something?

Speaker 2 In the Senate, he was the easiest one to pass.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 came to the MAGA movement came to that

Speaker 2 for

Speaker 2 nationalistic reasons and don't

Speaker 2 see,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 see most of these grants being preserved simply through the trench.

Speaker 1 State Department.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right. Simply through the State Department.
I mean, this is what happened with Brexit.

Speaker 2 Everyone who was pro-Brexit celebrated Brexit the day it happened. That to me is like the closure of the U.S.
AID building.

Speaker 2 But the fact is, is they effectively stopped Brexit post-Brexit because of the, there's so many layers of resistance at implementation. And that we're going to run into that here, which is why

Speaker 2 I'm using

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 time to be able to talk with you today on something that is

Speaker 2 on this, which is that you're going to need to

Speaker 2 understand

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 when that clears,

Speaker 2 a fundamental

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 But it has to be in the service of

Speaker 1 goals that are worth achieving,

Speaker 1 like having a strong and free country.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 The only problem with that is

Speaker 2 Trump represented something very different than that vision that was expressed by the Bush-Biden blob uniparty that had been there. And

Speaker 2 in countries that are not stable,

Speaker 2 elections completely change everything.

Speaker 2 And this maybe gets to whether or not

Speaker 2 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 interests.

Speaker 2 And then a sort of internationalist blob, globalist person wins an election, and then all the institutions switch all of that.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, you can't, you can't even build permanent structures in foreign countries or permanent networks because everything's so schizophrenic.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is the problem with our system is that it doesn't have continuity.

Speaker 1 And the whole purpose of the deep state is to provide continu. I mean, no one ever says this, but I grew up around it.

Speaker 1 The purpose of the deep state is to provide continuity in a democracy in which leadership changes every four or eight years. So, how does that work exactly?

Speaker 1 So, you have the political structure that runs everything at the request of the population. That's called democracy.

Speaker 1 But then you have, you know, longitudinal interests that have to be represented regardless of who's in power.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, the deep state arose in response to an actual need. You have to have continuity.
Right.

Speaker 2 Politics stops at the water's edge, right? That's exactly right.

Speaker 1 But then, unfortunately, but at the same time, the deep state has to be in some deep sense sense responsive to the population or else you have tyranny.

Speaker 1 So, like, it's a very, you know, democracy is not an easy system to administer. It's, 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.

Speaker 1 I'm not against democracy, of course, being an American, but it doesn't, you know, it's hard.

Speaker 1 So, no, I agree. I think the big change is that the deep state, these institutions were taken over by incredibly dumb, short-sighted, selfish people.

Speaker 1 I don't think the problem is, you know, having an elite. The problem is having an inadequate, mediocre, selfish elite that doesn't actually like the country they're running.

Speaker 1 So that's just my personal editorial position on that. But

Speaker 1 I see what you're saying. I mean, I've seen it a lot.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 into our country. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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, sort of secretly, sort of semi-secretly.

Speaker 1 semi-secretly. Well, what's that?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 there's a distinction I think that's useful to draw here between

Speaker 2 public agencies paying for premium services of

Speaker 2 U.S. news websites that foreign-facing websites.
So, for example, the State Department pays for premium subscriptions to various news sites in order to be able to have access to all of the

Speaker 2 New York Times or Politico,

Speaker 2 to be able to get behind the paywall for their employees so that while they're doing their job of soft power influence abroad, they have the maximum amount of knowledge at their fingertips.

Speaker 2 It's the same thing with

Speaker 1 Politico Pro, there's literally, it's written by 25-year-olds. There's like nothing in there that's real.
They're paying off Politico.

Speaker 2 Well, that's right. But there's two forms of that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 One is,

Speaker 2 you know, 100% it's pernicious.

Speaker 2 The other one has

Speaker 2 there's smoke, but there's not necessarily fire. And so when I say this, the smoke not, it obviously creates an incentive to please your, the people giving you these government procurements.

Speaker 2 For example, if the, this is, this is what I published, for example, about Reuters. You know, the Biden administration,

Speaker 2 you know, government agencies, you know, tallied something like $300 million to various Reuters

Speaker 2 sort of sister company groups

Speaker 2 between their news agency, between

Speaker 2 their

Speaker 2 Westlaw arm, and between their

Speaker 2 forensic and accounting services. But

Speaker 2 you see these big $60 million worth of grants from the Justice Department. And

Speaker 2 now the Justice Department's paying for Westlaw, which is a Thomson Reuters thing. It still makes Reuters richer.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And in fact, Reuters won a Pulitzer Prize for its hit piece for its investigative series on malfeasance by Elon Musk at all of his portfolio companies, Tesla, X, Neuralink, SpaceX.

Speaker 2 And meanwhile, the Biden administration had 11 different

Speaker 2 regulatory agencies going after all those. And so the media getting paid by the government was providing the ammunition for prosecutions and

Speaker 2 regulatory and disciplinary actions against the very stated targets of the government. And so

Speaker 2 you don't have a stated agreement in that case. You have a very, very perverse incentive.

Speaker 2 But there are places where you have where it's even worse because there's, 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.

Speaker 2 So, you know, for example,

Speaker 2 the state, I believe it's the State Department, maybe USA, does pay like the Reuters News Agency

Speaker 2 for work abroad, but it's a lot less than the premium services. But more

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The world's largest consortium of investigative journalists is a group called the OCCRP. You just think of it the Corruption Reporting Project.

Speaker 2 They have, since the very beginning, been

Speaker 2 they were initially, I believe, fully funded by the U.S. government, or they were the anchor funded.
Now, I believe half of their funds come from a combination of U.S. aid and the State Department.

Speaker 2 And these are supposed to be independent journalists, and they're investigative hit piece writers covering the topic of corruption.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 someone saved a cat from a tree. No, it's all investigative hit piece work exposing some aspect of corruption in a country.

Speaker 2 And this was something that

Speaker 2 the U.S. began funding

Speaker 2 really, I mean, this type of work over a decade ago, and really around

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so the problem is prosecutors don't know what to look for.

Speaker 2 And also,

Speaker 2 it's not necessarily politically feasible to prosecute somebody who's got a halo on them.

Speaker 2 So the halo has to be broken by hit piece news articles, by investigative journalists who often get proprietary access.

Speaker 2 For example, you know, the OCCRP, this corruption reporting project, has gotten very strange special access to hacked documents while they're being funded by, you know, what many believe to be a CIA front group, you know, in the form of U.S.AID.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Now, I want to mention two aspects of this scandal because

Speaker 2 this plays out everywhere, but this one, it's just

Speaker 2 simultaneously clean and dirty enough that I feel like it's just an anecdote everyone should remember forever.

Speaker 2 One, directly on U.S. politics and targeting of Trump, as you mentioned.
OCCRP got

Speaker 2 their Eurasia, you know, that 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

Speaker 2 in those territories. And their Eastern Europe, Europe, $20 million for their Eastern European operation.
And so that covers Ukraine. And so what did they do in 2019?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So they had, so they, this is the State Department funding mercenary media

Speaker 2 to then dig up dirt on high-profile U.S. citizens, metastasizing into that very evidence being entered into the congressional record

Speaker 2 to successfully impeach the President of the United States. So

Speaker 2 in that case,

Speaker 2 if there was no State Department U.S. aid funding to OCCRP, they wouldn't have presumably had the capital to go out and dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani, And then Americans wouldn't have been hearing

Speaker 2 these.

Speaker 2 And they also

Speaker 2 wrote hit pieces on Paul Manafort and

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And just like state and USAID were paying OCCRP to dig up dirt on foreign oligarchs and foreign presidents,

Speaker 2 the net result, and we don't know if there was any sort of, and I'm not saying that there wasn't

Speaker 2 necessarily a direct agreement to do that. I'm not privy to that.
But the fact is, is

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 is in effect what happened.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so U.S. aid spending to journalists in Ukraine comes back to be used to impeach Trump.

Speaker 1 Well, and to smear me as a Russian agent.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 At a certain point, you're like, we kind of need a revolution.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's...

Speaker 1 Why should we put up with that for a second?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 we're in a sort of

Speaker 2 you can feel the

Speaker 2 passion around this this week and people sensing how much of their world has been usurped without their consent by these institutions.

Speaker 2 But just to complete this,

Speaker 2 on the corruption reporting project that gets half of its funding from the State Department and USAID, and the U.S. government has the formal

Speaker 2 yes, yay, yes, no about who they can bring on as staff. And they have to submit basically what they're going to do

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They have a whole document on this corruption reporting project and

Speaker 2 how amazing it has been for

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 1 which

Speaker 2 is just absolutely devastating to the concept of

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Again, this is on usaid.gov, publicly boasting about hit pieces for hire, mercenary media to call people corrupt, call citizens, call.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But you did that

Speaker 2 by paying journalists to dig up dirt on people. What if the journalists got it wrong?

Speaker 2 What if.

Speaker 1 There's no legal process, by the way, in selling people into court and weren't found guilty or anything. We just took the stuff.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 this is this get that.

Speaker 2 We'll get to that actually. That's bullet point four.
But bullet point two was it was something like somewhere between 100 and 300 policy changes

Speaker 2 in different government and civil society institutions in these countries.

Speaker 2 So this USAID 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,

Speaker 2 we're presupposing all of those are good.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Then they have a section on all the different government officials that they got

Speaker 2 that were forced to resign

Speaker 2 because of their state's 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 are bragging effectively

Speaker 2 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 the one that

Speaker 2 winds through this whole USAID prosecutor story.

Speaker 2 It says 456 arrests and indictments generated on the basis of OCCRP's reporting. So, this is the State Department bragging about

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We don't know

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 1 what do their families think? Right.

Speaker 2 And prosecutors then use that as the basis for a criminal indictment.

Speaker 1 You really become hated in the rest of the world by behaving this way.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 how many foreign leaders have you seen,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 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 going to die if U.S.

Speaker 2 aid leaves.

Speaker 2 I'm wondering where all the leaders of African countries have been this week or

Speaker 2 low-income Central Asian or Western hemisphere countries are.

Speaker 2 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 U.S.
aid is forced on them as a condition.

Speaker 1 Oh, I know. I know some of those leaders, and they don't want our aid at all.
Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Right.
Oftentimes, U.S.AID 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.

Speaker 2 You know, you need to have a certain level of human rights

Speaker 2 monitoring or

Speaker 2 your water levels have to have this certain percent purity or you need to be able to maintain

Speaker 2 your energy development has to be this consistent with climate change or else

Speaker 2 we're going to, you know,

Speaker 2 destroy you

Speaker 2 with our trade relations, or we're going to put sanctions on you unless you put our humanitarian aid organs in there.

Speaker 2 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 rivers.

Speaker 2 So, you know,

Speaker 2 I think the reason that the only people that we really see who

Speaker 2 are defending U.S. aid right now are people here in the United States or in NATO

Speaker 2 that are directly or indirectly on the take or their donors or constituents are.

Speaker 1 So in September, we went across the country, coast to coast, 17 different cities on a nationwide live tour, and it was amazing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Different people joined us every single night. Von Gino and and Russell Brand and Bobby Kennedy and J.D.
Vance and Donald Trump, et cetera, et cetera. We had the best time.

Speaker 1 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 is hilarious.
You will like it.

Speaker 1 Breaking news, Beam's cyber sale is open for early access to the people who listen to this show, the select few, their best offer for the year. It lasts for 48 hours.

Speaker 1 Listeners of this show get up to 50% off by using the code Tucker. That means you can get Beam's Dream Powder for just $32.50.

Speaker 1 That's only $1.08

Speaker 1 per night for the best sleep you've ever had. Visit shopbeam.com slash Tucker.
Use the code Tucker. This is the lowest price Dream has ever been sold anywhere.
Don't miss out. Probably sell out fast.

Speaker 1 Dream is packed with ingredients your body needs to sleep.

Speaker 1 Natural ingredients, nothing weird, magnesium, melatonin, but dosed intelligently, not like the drugstore garbage that knocks you out and leaves you groggy. It's like a head injury.

Speaker 1 Totally different, better.

Speaker 1 Visit shopbeam.com/slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker, get up to 50% off during Beam Cyber Sale.
You can grab Dream for just $32.50,

Speaker 1 but only until it sells out. Think about it.
How much would you pay to get a great night's sleep? Eight hours uninterrupted with Beam Cyber Price, $1.8 per night. Shopbeam.com slash Tucker.

Speaker 1 Shopbeam.com slash Tucker.

Speaker 1 So I I got an email from a friend of mine, a text from a friend of mine yesterday is such a wonderful guy, actually a conservative Trump fan, but

Speaker 1 a recipient of U.S. AID money.

Speaker 1 And he said it's totally corrupt. You're right.

Speaker 1 But he goes, they don't understand. You're going to tank the economy of Northern Virginia if you shut this bigot off.

Speaker 1 And I thought maybe that's the one perspective people watching in the U.S. don't understand is how totally dependent the D.C.
metro area is on foreign policy spending.

Speaker 1 It's not making it to Congo. It's stopping in Arlington.

Speaker 2 Well, that's why I said donors and constituents, right? Because those are considered, like, think about the congressmen

Speaker 2 representing those districts. And, you know, you

Speaker 2 see that. That's exactly right.

Speaker 2 It's our own economies.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, the point I was making earlier is that you are going to have this sort of

Speaker 2 follow-on, trickle-down economic impact if many of our multinational corporations who form the bedrock of our

Speaker 2 stock exchanges and Chamber of Commerce,

Speaker 2 if the dirty deeds that USA does are cut out, are they still going to have as will that impact their profitability?

Speaker 2 And so that's why I want 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,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the CIA has a world book of all of the strategic resources in every country. And so, you know, Burma is top strategic resource petroleum.
Okay, let's just...

Speaker 2 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 at home.

Speaker 2 There's creative offsets that can be done to replace dirty tricks.

Speaker 2 You know, for example, like you know, with ISIS 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 try to make inroads into other parts of the population that were not

Speaker 2 tested as robustly.

Speaker 2 But you're going to need to think a lot more creatively about that when you don't have access to the

Speaker 2 dirty deeds done dirt cheap.

Speaker 2 And so that's just, I feel like that,

Speaker 2 I just want to impress that point because I think a lot of MAGA Republicans are going to think that it's

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 there's going to be a remnant, and we need a doctrine that's cohesive and sellable to the American people.

Speaker 2 Because the problem was, is we had 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.

Speaker 2 This happened with the Zanzanio scandal with USAID

Speaker 2 from 2009 to 2014-ish, there was

Speaker 2 USAID and NED were at the forefront of the Arab Spring and toppling democratically elected governments in Tunisia and Egypt and all over

Speaker 2 in these street color revolutions that were powered by digital diplomacy.

Speaker 2 We've discussed this before,

Speaker 2 where USAID was funding people.

Speaker 2 in you know to do youth engagement for how to use facebook hashtags and you know uh and and how to mobilize street protests so that everyone knows where to go and what kind of

Speaker 2 slogans and slang to use. And so, you know, they wanted to.

Speaker 1 Kind of like the George Floyd protests.

Speaker 2 Yeah, kind of like the George Floyd protests.

Speaker 1 Yeah, kind of. Yeah.
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?

Speaker 2 There's a lot.

Speaker 2 My understanding is a lot of it has to do with the natural resources and

Speaker 2 the sort of Middle East, North Africa.

Speaker 2 I mean the fact is,

Speaker 2 Egypt is the

Speaker 2 sort of the lip of Europe that way.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I think there's probably Middle Eastern politics that play into it as well. And it's a complicated picture.

Speaker 1 But I think

Speaker 1 we can say 10 years later more than 10 years later was not a clean win for the United States.

Speaker 2 Oh, right. No, totally.

Speaker 1 I don't see how we're killing Gaddafi, the Iraq war. Like, I don't know that any of this, what's going on now in the Middle East, Syria, et cetera.

Speaker 1 I don't see these are obvious victories for us.

Speaker 2 Oh, and 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so they sought to do that in Cuba by creating what USAID called a Cuban spring. And the problem was

Speaker 2 at that time, Cuba had banned U.S. social media companies, calling them a tool of U.S.
imperialism. And so there was no Twitter allowed.
And so USAID pulled off this operation to create a

Speaker 2 company called Zunzanio, which 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.

Speaker 2 So it was basically, it even had like the bird. And

Speaker 2 they they knew that they couldn't, 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.

Speaker 2 They ran it as they, 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

Speaker 2 BVI banks

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 USAID contracted out to a group called Creative Associates International, CAI. It's not CIA, it's CAI, and they're very creative.
And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And we're going to take that to aggregate a political receptive 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.

Speaker 2 And what they plotted is that at the appropriate moment,

Speaker 2 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 NEDA at the time, that they would then activate what they called smart mobs.

Speaker 2 They would switch the algorithms.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 overthrow their government. Basically the same, you know, pull off the same thing that happened in the Airbus Spring, but do it in Cuba.
And all they needed was enough people on the user base.

Speaker 2 That was what they needed.

Speaker 1 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 protest would have been instantly recognizable as a government-sponsored revolution, co-revolution against Donald Trump, because that's what it was.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I want to come back to that because there's actually a lot there that is,

Speaker 2 I think, will be even more impactful after just kind of finishing this one point on USAID here, which is that, because you mentioned if Americans had known this is going on.

Speaker 2 Well, what was really interesting about the scandal is nobody knew that USAID was doing this. This was clearly CIA-style covert action.

Speaker 2 You know, the construction of a private sector for-profit social media company that

Speaker 2 gets its funds from non-profit humanitarian relief funds earmarked for a country 13,000 miles away

Speaker 2 and all with the express

Speaker 2 stated interest of doing diplomatic, you know, work with extreme diplomatic implications, overthrowing the government of a foreign country. And so as this scandal all broke open,

Speaker 2 the media and what had happened was, is Senate oversight had been completely blocked from any information about this operation.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This is part of the reforms that were done in the 1970s when it looked like, okay, the CIA was going rogue.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Well, And you still want the deed done. What if, for example, you know, you belong to a certain wing of the foreign policy establishment, that's at odds with the president.

Speaker 2 And you know, the president's not going to approve it. So how can you get that done? Like, say, for the funding of ISIS groups, for example, Trump wanted to crush ISIS.

Speaker 2 Hillary Clinton and Jake Sullivan said ISIS is on our side in Syria. The Biden administration kicked billions of dollars in the aggregate to ISIS.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 Mohammed al-Jalani, was there was a $10 $10 million bounty on his head as being a al-Qaeda terrorist.

Speaker 2 That tweet is still live on the U.S. Embassy in Syria now.

Speaker 2 Right. But if Trump wouldn't authorize the CIA covertly running funds

Speaker 2 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 U.S.AID, and U.S.
aid can do it without a presidential finding.

Speaker 2 They can call, now they can just, all it takes is creative structuring. They can just do it through humanitarian relief funds to

Speaker 2 a certain

Speaker 2 part of the

Speaker 2 certain region that has a disproportionate amount of ISIS-K in it. They can fund

Speaker 2 the educational institutions or they can water the earth. This is another thing USAID got in trouble for is when

Speaker 2 they were essentially sustaining

Speaker 2 the world's heroin supply. 95% of the world's heroin supply

Speaker 2 came from Afghanistan.

Speaker 1 Why were they doing that?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 U.S.AIDS,

Speaker 2 one of their close partners is another U.S. AIDS-adjacent entity called the U.S.
Institute for Peace.

Speaker 2 Its office is right next to the State Department in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 It was created by Congress. It gets $56 million a year from taxpayers.
And

Speaker 2 in 2023, the U.S. Institute for Peace

Speaker 2 wrote a white paper that

Speaker 2 told the Taliban not to shut down

Speaker 2 the heroin, not to shut down the poppy fields, because it would create a, quote, economic and humanitarian disaster

Speaker 2 that basically,

Speaker 2 I mean, this is

Speaker 2 the State Department. They're fully funded by the U.S.
State Department.

Speaker 2 They are sort of the policy arm of

Speaker 2 many of the aspects of U.S. aid.

Speaker 2 Whereas U.S. 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.

Speaker 2 Institute for Peace is saying we need to keep the heroin flowing,

Speaker 2 it was USAID who was doing all the water irrigation of the poppy fields

Speaker 2 that allowed that propagation of the heroin to continue. And that gets into

Speaker 2 a darker story around the role of

Speaker 2 narco-activity and narco-gangs as

Speaker 2 instruments of statecraft.

Speaker 2 This was the Mujahideen that were pumped up by Zbigniew Brzezinski and RCIA

Speaker 2 in the 1970s and 80s. And

Speaker 2 they were being funded by drug money

Speaker 2 from the Golden Crescent and being laundered into Pakistan banks like the CIA Bank.

Speaker 2 BCCI, and everyone can read about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal

Speaker 2 and that. But But

Speaker 2 it was narco-terrorism funding

Speaker 2 for U.S.-backed terrorist paramilitary groups that we were propping up as freedom fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 If you remember seeing the old

Speaker 2 Osama bin Laden puff piece, freedom warrior on the road to peace

Speaker 2 when he's back in the Mujahideen days. But what I'm saying is you see this play out everywhere.

Speaker 2 This was a big part of

Speaker 2 how right-wing

Speaker 2 capitalist movements

Speaker 2 in the Western Hemisphere were propped up against left-wing socialist and Marxist

Speaker 2 opposition in the 1950s and 60s.

Speaker 2 And you see this run through everything.

Speaker 2 Think about what's happened with El Salvador.

Speaker 2 Why did Bukele say that

Speaker 2 basically was the first one on X to say that, yeah, U.S. aid is awful.
It's got to go. Countries don't want it.
Look at my case because U.S. aid was trying to regime change him from there.

Speaker 2 The Soros groups, I mean, they all said that his attempts to clean up the drug trade were

Speaker 2 humanitarian violations of the rights of drug cartels.

Speaker 2 Have you seen that

Speaker 2 the government of Mexico appears to actually be

Speaker 2 quite happy with the move to abolish U.S. aid? There's a piece in Newsweek about Trump's strange allies

Speaker 2 in the fight to end USAID, and

Speaker 2 it's the Mexican government. They don't want it either.
Well,

Speaker 2 what I'm saying is

Speaker 2 the scope of our dirty deeds done through

Speaker 2 USAID and State Department grants and through CI 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 Down for Democracy or others.

Speaker 2 A lot of that work is just liaising with assets that are there. They don't have that big a budget.
USAID is a three times bigger budget than the CIA.

Speaker 2 And so they depend on working with

Speaker 2 State Department USAID cultivated assets. And so

Speaker 2 we're going to have to disentangle this whole spider web in order to form a cohesive foreign policy vision that isn't evil.

Speaker 1 And I think that's, I kind of think that's the point that isn't evil. Because, I mean, in our system,

Speaker 1 I really think in any system, even

Speaker 1 a monarchy, the people have to think that in general the government is

Speaker 1 doing things they approve of, isn't actively evil, isn't

Speaker 1 in business with the drug cartels in Mexico, which our government is, as you know.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 if the people of a country don't think their own government has legitimacy, like it can't last very long.

Speaker 1 It doesn't last, right? Right.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 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, you know, is working against you using your money?

Speaker 1 I mean, what, it's kind of hard to unknow that. Right.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 thank goodness, you know,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 That's exactly right.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 I do think that this is all because

Speaker 2 this is a dogfight to the bone. We are going to be

Speaker 2 at every level,

Speaker 2 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, if since

Speaker 2 I had like a $35 billion budget, now it's getting USAID's $44 billion.

Speaker 2 But what fraction of that is Trump going to?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We talked about the 97% of employees at USAID who donate to Democrats.

Speaker 2 But to me,

Speaker 2 the main issue here is the remnant of internationalist Republicans in Congress who can form a critical majority bloc

Speaker 2 in the House or in the Senate in order to

Speaker 2 get their way on this issue.

Speaker 2 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 U.S. AIDS operations

Speaker 2 that they will side with the Democrats in order to inflict damage on the Trump White House

Speaker 2 budget vision.

Speaker 2 And so that's going to be a constant fight. And

Speaker 2 what I'm hoping evolves over the next weeks and months is a moral North star for

Speaker 2 America first.

Speaker 2 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 and the labyrinth of lies,

Speaker 2 something needs to fill that gap. Like we talked about in the oil and gas basis, drill, baby, drill for oil.
Okay, but now do that for semiconductors.

Speaker 2 And now do that for every critical mineral.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You know, like I thought it was very honest, you know, when Lindsey Graham finally came out and said the strategic vision of the United States is the, the, you know, the $14 trillion worth of natural resources.

Speaker 2 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 acting here on the homeland?

Speaker 2 We have this tumor that we're removing from

Speaker 2 the body of the American project.

Speaker 2 But there was blood flowing into that and it's connected to all these arteries.

Speaker 2 The thing that I want to make sure happen, that is midwifed appropriately is

Speaker 2 what are you changing about our foreign policy structure so that when you remove the tumor,

Speaker 2 you know, you, the blood still flows in the way that you want it to.

Speaker 2 You're not ripping the heart out with open heart surgery.

Speaker 1 I get it. I'm just less confident than you are that we're reaping some massive reward for this.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 from the market.

Speaker 2 Well, look at the benefits to the stock price for Chevron and Exxon when the war broke out and the U.S.

Speaker 2 State Department strong-armed every country in Europe to divest from Russian gas, and they all were forced to buy expensive North American LNG.

Speaker 2 Their stock prices went to the moon. They had something like triple the

Speaker 2 profits or something for a certain period of months

Speaker 2 following that and reap these windfall benefits.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we're sort of confronting the ghost of Ronald Reagan here because

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 a dirty deed done to advance

Speaker 2 big oil, big ag, you know,

Speaker 2 big tech, whatever it is, anything that's good for them is good for us. And so anything that the, that the U.S.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 multinational interests will ultimately trickle down to the people itself. I mean, that's the logic.

Speaker 1 And you need to. I understand.
I just, I don't, I don't think it's a holistic view of it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That is not in our interest at all. And so I'm not confident.
I think the people running this are dumbfucks, actually. I don't think they know what they're doing.
I don't think they even understand,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 so I just don't have confidence in their judgment, I guess is what I'm saying. Is that fair?

Speaker 2 No, I think it is.

Speaker 2 Because if your measure is like short-term stock spikes, okay, those are pretty easy to affect.

Speaker 1 That's like, you know, but that's not the same as like long-term prosperity.

Speaker 1 But maybe they're smarter than maybe I'm the dumb one.

Speaker 2 Take the PepsiCo in 1973. Okay.

Speaker 2 We overthrew the government of Chile. We toppled the Allende government.
And

Speaker 2 30 years later, 35 years later,

Speaker 2 files were declassified that showed that the chairman of the Pepsi-Cola company had lobbied the Secretary of State

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 U.S. national interests in the form of Pepsi-Cola bottling operations were going to be devastated if Allende was allowed to

Speaker 2 remain in power. And

Speaker 2 I forget if he was nationalizing some elementary.

Speaker 2 But basically,

Speaker 2 Pepsi had these bottling operations there. It was going to massively tank their capacity to produce the cans for Pepsi bottles.
And so

Speaker 2 a meeting was organized between

Speaker 2 it was the CIA director at the time and the chairman of Pepsi-Cola. Everyone can look up the Guardian article on this.
Just type in Pepsi-Coo Chile.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they even bring in to the meeting, the meeting minutes show, they bring in

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 government pressure on foreign companies apply to them.

Speaker 1 That's clearly true.

Speaker 1 I think that American business interests have a very obvious recent history of trading short-term profits for long-term strength.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, they're just not good at this.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 Reaganite-style trick-and-down economics 1980s thing may have made sense when those corporations were American corporations with American manufacturing facilities employing American labor.

Speaker 2 But now these are nominally American companies,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 there's no trickle down because it's not like that's substantially increasing American jobs when they're going overseas to East Asia.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 Or it's not

Speaker 2 providing,

Speaker 2 enhancing the security of our supply chains because it's giving more for our factory spruce because we don't even have the factories anymore. And so Trump is doing all this in tandem.

Speaker 2 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 U.S.

Speaker 2 national interest are the ones that

Speaker 2 have a certain amount of American investment.

Speaker 2 You can't be a sort of American in name only

Speaker 2 and have

Speaker 2 so much of your workforce in China or have so much of your

Speaker 2 operations.

Speaker 2 I mean, there may be a sort of,

Speaker 2 we need to sort of have a cohesive vision of what national interest is if we're not going to. Completely agree.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 companies basically owned by the sovereign wealth funds of our rivals who are only here to benefit from our enforcement of copyright, et cetera, et cetera, are in no sense really American.

Speaker 1 Why are we like wrecking wrecking the world for their benefit?

Speaker 1 So I just want to end on the just to get deeper, if you don't mind, into this question of the effect of our foreign policy on our domestic life.

Speaker 1 And you just can't escape the suspicion that our politics are really volatile. We're way less free than we were in part

Speaker 1 because of

Speaker 1 methods of control refined overseas.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, am I being crazy? Oh, not at all.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Like this armed robber, porn star, drug addict

Speaker 1 dies of a drug OD on the street after passing a counterfeit bill and like all of a sudden America collapses.

Speaker 1 Come on, come on, dude. Right, right.
Well, and Osama bin Laden planned 9-11. I'm like, the whole thing is just too dumb for me.
I can't deal with it. Right.

Speaker 2 No, and

Speaker 2 there's a few pieces to that. So, first,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And USAID gave the Tide Center a $27 million grant.

Speaker 1 Okay, now here we go.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And now, nominally, that grant is for the Tide Center institutions to

Speaker 2 solicit,

Speaker 2 secure concrete investments from foreign countries on issues related to U.S. national interest.
So basically, the U.S.AID has deputized this

Speaker 2 group that's

Speaker 2 in the center of the nest around Black Lives Matter

Speaker 2 to secure commitments from foreign governments from a formal U.S. government agency.
They're deputized to act as a sort of long arm of the State Department, and they're getting $27 million for it.

Speaker 2 And by the way, when they get

Speaker 2 actually, before I go deeper on the Black Lives Matter stuff, because there's a lot there,

Speaker 2 I've been calling this the Smithmont problem for U.S. aid, right?

Speaker 2 We had a Smithmont Act from 1948 until 2013 with the modernization under Obama that effectively got rid of it that prohibited foreign propaganda or or fake news stories intended for foreign audiences from being circulated here at home.

Speaker 2 Exactly. They got rid of that.
With USAID, it's even worse because as bad as it is for propaganda,

Speaker 2 USAID has the Smith-Munt problem for financing and operations.

Speaker 2 USAID can provide money to international institutions or to NGOs.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But there's nothing blocking them from also operating on U.S. soil.
So, you know, I give an example of like

Speaker 2 there's a, you know, this for-profit private sector censorship mercenary firm called NewsGuard and got a $750,000 Pentagon contract to

Speaker 2 help the Pentagon trace the information for fingerprints of Russian mis and disinformation.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 2 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 has

Speaker 2 the former head of NATO on its board, the former head of state.

Speaker 1 I've been targeted by NewsGuard, so I know.

Speaker 2 Yes, yeah, of course. But

Speaker 2 they,

Speaker 2 whether or 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You're padding its profit margins. So it's now more powerful.
to be able to take you on, even if the grant isn't for that money. Exactly.
And

Speaker 1 so it bleeds into it.

Speaker 2 And this happens with every institution USAID works for.

Speaker 2 And when you under, and again, coming back to the fact that USAID is at the heart, you know, USAID is the swing player between the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

Speaker 2 And it works with all three of those. And, you know, you never know when you see a USAID program, which of those three ops is being run.
But you know for certain it's one of those three.

Speaker 2 You don't know if it's to advance, you know, a stated

Speaker 2 State Department diplomacy

Speaker 2 priority in the region. You don't know if it's being used in order to to advance a U.S.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 under Mark Milley and

Speaker 2 President Joe Biden,

Speaker 2 the First Special Forces

Speaker 2 Vision Statement Prospectus, pages 16 and 17, everyone can look this up.

Speaker 2 It's a public

Speaker 2 government document you can find online.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it presents

Speaker 2 a way to synchronize the psychological operations and civil military affairs work that the Special Forces does

Speaker 2 with

Speaker 2 the different

Speaker 2 foreign policy agencies who can play supporting roles. So they give an example of

Speaker 2 they're trying to block the Chinese from buying a port in China.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I'm sorry,

Speaker 2 in Africa, the African government doesn't want to go through with it.

Speaker 2 I'll just try to make this as simple as possible. Basically, what ends up happening is

Speaker 2 the State Department can't get the African government to cooperate and agree to cancel

Speaker 2 this port construction. And so

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 from

Speaker 2 something, harm that's being done that they can offer to make the pain stop.

Speaker 2 And so this is what the special forces document envisions 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

Speaker 2 peer competitor from from China.

Speaker 2 And they also argued there was 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

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It would scandalize the port construction and the destabilized economic state would allow the U.S. ambassador to walk back in and say, hey,

Speaker 2 all this pain can stop. Just cancel the port construction type.
But what's really interesting is in the special forces perspectives,

Speaker 1 just writing that? Like, let's incite race riots.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 their quote was inflame racial tensions or inflame tensions.

Speaker 1 Can you imagine?

Speaker 2 And so what they did is,

Speaker 2 I think it was inflamed tensions, but they explicitly say, you know, it's Africans versus the Chinese there. And what they did is

Speaker 2 the role of U.S. aid in this special operations

Speaker 2 scenario, literally printed, you know, by the U.S. government, was that U.S.AID would

Speaker 2 swoop into the scene and provide job fairs. U.S.
taxpayers would do job fairs in the exact region where the rioters and protesters were striking in order because they wouldn't,

Speaker 2 the special forces concern was that the people they needed in the streets in this

Speaker 2 protest to destabilize the country would not want to, would not, were too poor to leave their jobs. They would not want to go on strike in these Chinese-owned factories and businesses.

Speaker 2 So they needed a replacement source of income. And that was where U.S.AID came into the operation.
U.S.AID would do job fairs.

Speaker 2 And so the African protesters would be subsidized to do that protest, street protest destabilization activity, and don't need to worry about whether or not

Speaker 2 it's going to cost them their jobs because they're now on the payroll of USAID.

Speaker 2 But that was a special forces operation.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you see this with everything USAID does. But

Speaker 2 to come back to this thing on, we were talking about, I guess, BLM and some of this

Speaker 2 domestic

Speaker 2 foreign thing is

Speaker 2 sorry if you want to join down there and ask me a question. But what I'm saying is U.S.
aid plays this military role as well

Speaker 2 with support assistance.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 good thing we're democracy promotion programs because we are the white blood cells of the immune system to stop the virus of threats to democracy.

Speaker 1 Of course,

Speaker 1 populism is democracy, a demand for majority rule. Right.

Speaker 2 No, of course. But they say we need democratic institutions to provide the bumper cars to stop demagoguery.

Speaker 1 Can I just ask you something? So So the Nina Jankowitz famously was, you know, played a domestic censorship role. She's an absurd, absolutely absurd figure, like pulled from TikTok, but human.

Speaker 1 She gets fired because people are like, who is this woman? And she winds up at USAID.

Speaker 2 She winds up at the Center for Information Resilience, which

Speaker 2 is a London-based,

Speaker 2 basically a British statecraft organ. She had to file the FARA registration.
She became a registered agent of the United Kingdom for, you know, for her work.

Speaker 1 They were recipients of USAID money, aren't they?

Speaker 2 Yes, yes. They were recipients of USAID money.
Although I believe

Speaker 1 she,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 But a lot of these people, I mean, I just, you know, being a kid in D.C.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, they were.

Speaker 1 It seems like the current generation is a lot of Nina Jankowitz's, like, just sort of low IQ.

Speaker 2 Well, you know,

Speaker 1 people. Like, do you know? I mean, what's the caliber of the people administering these programs?

Speaker 2 Well, I actually think

Speaker 2 there's layers of sophistication to Nina. And

Speaker 1 is that true?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I do think so. And I don't have any personal astrographs.
I mean, she's written a lot of

Speaker 2 not flattering things about me and uh you know and i've pointed out the what i consider to be massive you know conflicts of interest when you know the the the entire field of professional internet censorship that is you you get paid you pay your mortgage with paychecks that come from your job censoring the internet i mean i find i fundamentally do not believe that that nina's field that you know this this uh you know disinformation of you know censoring citizens in our own country,

Speaker 2 and leave aside the sort of

Speaker 2 maybe more nuanced issue about whether there's a role of countering foreign propaganda and how robust that is. The fact is, is what was done here was just

Speaker 2 straight up saying that domestic misinformation is a threat to democracy. And so the U.S.
government

Speaker 2 should

Speaker 2 play the task of censoring its own people through this whole society network. But

Speaker 2 you have I mean, there's so fundamentally, I don't believe that that job should exist and it is part of what I consider to be my purpose in life to try to bring freedom to the internet.

Speaker 2 And to the extent that that field exists as a profession,

Speaker 2 those two things are in conflict. And then

Speaker 2 the other part of it is the conflict of interest, right? When

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I believe we've even talked about it before, but

Speaker 2 now I think people are starting to

Speaker 2 appreciate the significance of it. In fact, its website just went down a few days ago, and

Speaker 2 it's under, I believe, an extraordinary amount of scandal,

Speaker 2 which is that these

Speaker 2 USAID takes taxpayer money and creates lobbyists for more USAID because all the people who

Speaker 2 it creates a conflict of interest between their own personal piggy banks and what the actual national interest of the country is.

Speaker 2 If your whole field

Speaker 2 is getting funding, you know, in significant part from U.S. aid, well, then you, if you want to really make it in this world, you have a

Speaker 2 moral hazard, a perverse incentive to become a tiny little lobbyist to explain why it is that censoring the internet

Speaker 2 is essential to U.S.

Speaker 2 national interest and to sell a whole ideology and a whole

Speaker 2 completely different vision of what our country even is and what we're even fighting for.

Speaker 2 Because the more that our public grants and contracts, the more that our procurements, the more that the USAID piggy bank funds that,

Speaker 2 the bigger the pie of that that field gets.

Speaker 2 Of course. And so,

Speaker 2 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, to the unions, to the anti-corruption, you know, prosecutor work to the humanitarian work around, uh, you know, in drug zones and, and, in, and in paramilitary zones.

Speaker 2 And, and so it's, it's, you know, I think it's what Elon would call a self-licking ice cream cone. And,

Speaker 2 you know, the ice cream's gone bad, But with the BLM thing,

Speaker 2 it gets very strange

Speaker 2 because USAID

Speaker 2 is a professional rent-a-riot organizer. I mean, as I even, I mean,

Speaker 2 leave aside the countless documented cases of USAID rent-a-riots from, you know, as we mentioned,

Speaker 2 the Arab Spring, which we, you know, we went over, the rental riots there. USAID pumped $1.2 billion

Speaker 2 into the region

Speaker 2 during that period. We have literally USAID documents explicitly doing operational planning to create smart mobs and people to take to the streets and riots.

Speaker 2 You see it in Georgia. You saw it in Belarus in 2020.
It's anytime there are.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 this is where it gets interesting in the role of these foreign policy institutions and their domestic things.

Speaker 2 I want to mention one quick adjacency before we go into that,

Speaker 2 which is

Speaker 2 around U.S. aid funding to the Tide Center, which I mentioned

Speaker 2 has this Black Lives Matter adjacency. But

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 write-ups in the, I think it was Federalists and such, but I believe it was a Daily Wire investigation, based on a media research center report,

Speaker 2 that Fair and Just Prosecutions is

Speaker 2 a, you know, Bill themselves as a sort of left-wing progressive criminal justice advocacy group. And they

Speaker 2 are, 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.

Speaker 2 But what they

Speaker 2 what they do is they

Speaker 2 fund, they manage,

Speaker 2 they get the prosecutors, the Soros prosecutors, to sign pledges about what they're going to, you know, what they're not going to, you know, to not enforce certain laws that are on the books in the region.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They meet with them every, you know, every week. And, you know, they, they're, it's, you know, prosecutors

Speaker 2 you know at least according to this reporting which has some pretty damning uh you know

Speaker 2 inside documents to you know to to make this case but you basically have prosecutors being managed by this shady ngo who is effectively you know puppeteering these

Speaker 2 prosecutors who are dependent on continued funding for their election campaigns and continued election funding for their future careers.

Speaker 2 AG, Attorney General,

Speaker 2 the joke is

Speaker 2 it's short for aspiring governor because

Speaker 2 so it's a path. You want to cultivate these donor networks forever.

Speaker 2 But the Tithe Center, which gets $27 million from USAID just on basically two grants alone for the foreign work, is the fiscal sponsor of FJP, this group that is

Speaker 2 liaising with all these prosecutors and securing securing these pledges.

Speaker 1 Let me just ask a final question.

Speaker 1 So from everything you've said,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You need some way to stop the poison that they're inspiring overseas from coming in here.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's really no effort that we project abroad that can be brought here.

Speaker 2 That's what needs to happen. For example, you can't share the same corporate entity.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 their professional job is killing people. And they were getting billions of dollars from the U.S.
Pentagon.

Speaker 2 And they opened up a Raytheon, and Raytheon started creating a new line of business for domestic countering misinformation projects

Speaker 2 where they monitor the internet for COVID skepticism or

Speaker 2 climate change denial.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 I mean, you saw that with the Bangladesh case, too, by the way. You know,

Speaker 2 when the person who is now the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Bangladesh after the coup, by the way,

Speaker 2 the new head of state there is a Clinton Global Initiative Fellow, but

Speaker 2 the foreign minister was brought in by USAID for formal training on countering misinformation. And you know

Speaker 2 who led that? It was

Speaker 2 another State Department USAID contractor, a group called PolitiFact.

Speaker 2 It was the executive director of PolitiFact who does, you know, who writes hit pieces on you and me that were conspiracy theorists for talking about January 6th.

Speaker 2 And they are acting as an instrument of statecraft to, you know, to get money from our paychecks to do international work to train foreign journalists and foreign ministers

Speaker 2 how to censor or stop the spread of information the State Department doesn't like.

Speaker 2 Now, their margins are padded by that.

Speaker 1 Well, and that's the point: is that the things that we do abroad affect us here.

Speaker 1 We're paying the Ukrainian government and they're assassinating people, like literally assassinating people, trying to assassinate American citizens, fact,

Speaker 1 selling weapons to the drug cartels in Mexico, fact.

Speaker 1 And you end up like wrecking your own country with the things that you do abroad. Right.

Speaker 2 Well, I'll tell you what we did in the financing space. And I remember being a corporate lawyer and watching that evolve and play out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we had things like, you know, these anti, we had anti-terrorist financing, you know, OFAC style laws that prevented laundering, you know,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 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. Right.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 If their grant was for $30 million and they have to pay, they're liable for up to $90 million

Speaker 2 if

Speaker 2 a U.S. court finds that they violated the USAID Smith-Munt Act.
I mean, this is something that Congress could put in, you know, put in today.

Speaker 2 I mean, you could add criminal penalties, but you need, right now there's no penalty whatsoever.

Speaker 2 The only penalty is it is that people might find out and it might cause a political scandal and it might make the USAID grant coordinator

Speaker 2 less likely to give you the next grant in the future. Where's the clawback?

Speaker 2 Where's the restitution damages?

Speaker 2 People should maybe even be able to sue the U.S. government body administering the grant for failing to do oversight of the NGO receiving that money.

Speaker 2 You might create a cause, a private cause of action against the State Department or whatever new form of U.S. aid costs.
That can be done legislatively. And the message that, I mean, first of all,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Mike Bence, it could go on forever. It was your reporting, your dogged, single-minded, almost almost monomaniacal, I will say, effort to

Speaker 1 bring, you know, to public view this web

Speaker 1 that I think started all of this.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 anyone who called you a nutcase has to apologize at this point.

Speaker 2 Thank you for saying that. And it wouldn't have been possible without you as well.
I do just want to clarify.

Speaker 2 I don't believe that I have mixed feelings.

Speaker 2 I 100% endorse directionally and technically everything that I've seen so far.

Speaker 2 But I appreciate the weight of the moment and that you are dealing with something much more delicate than simply, you know,

Speaker 1 stopping the trainee dance contests.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I feel an obligation to help midwife this,

Speaker 2 and and but I totally support it. And I just to me,

Speaker 2 it's reflection rather than rather than hesitation.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 But America first, amen.

Speaker 1 Yep, Mike Bence, thank you very much. Thank you, Tucker.