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Feb. 6, 2025 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
01:12:54
The USAID Truman Show, Interview with Mike Benz | Triggered Ep.214
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Thank you.
Every day there is more and more happening.
We are on offense and delivering a death blow to the swamp's corruption, delivering on the America First agenda, and so much more.
And today is going to be a fun one.
We have former Trump State Department official Mike Benz, who is the expert on all things...
USAID. USAID. We've been talking about it a lot.
It's so much worse, so much more nefarious than we could have ever imagined.
We keep getting more and more information each and every day, but this guy understands, and we're going to link how all of these things come together so we stop living in the matrix, so that we understand where your taxpayer dollars are being spent, so we can stop the corruption and so much more.
So for the whole show, For the whole show, we're going to do a deep dive into the inner workings of the administrative state and how the Trump administration and Doge is ending the gravy train once and for all.
It turns out, guys, that USAID was funding every bizarre woke pet project you could ever imagine.
They were even funding media outlets.
Like Politico and the BBC. Why would USAID be funding an American political organization or the British Broadcasting Network?
Or people like former conservative Bill Kristol, who magically turned into a radical leftist?
I wonder if that had to do with funding coming from your taxpayer dollars.
And all of these guys were even operating as an arm of the CIA. USAID as an arm of the CIA. To carry out its dirty work abroad, unchecked, unaccountable, with absolutely no oversight.
It's one of the biggest scandals in American history.
It's basically one giant money laundering operation for Democrats, for wokeism, for the globalists, and their other left-wing allies.
allies.
And it's why their meltdown is only getting worse each and every day.
And it's why we're clearing house across the board at USAID, at the CIA, at the FBI, and even the Gaza Strip may soon be getting a big makeover.
So we have a lot to cover with Mike Benz, and we're going to get to it, all of it, right It's going to be fun, so buckle up.
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So, okay, guys, joining me now, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, former Trump State Department official Mike Benz.
Mike, great to have you back on the show.
Thanks, Don.
Great to talk.
There's so much to get into.
You recently said that, and I quote, when a rogue cell at the CIA wants to do something dirty, but they don't think the president will approve, they just walk right over to USAID. I mean, that sounds like a shadow government if I've ever heard of one.
You know, can you get into that?
I mean, this USAID thing's exploding, and it's not just woke funding.
It seems to be much more nefarious than that.
Yeah, no, it sure is.
And this is one of the ways that USAID was able to outmaneuver the first Trump administration, which is now much wiser and more cunning about the ways that the deep state can deceive you.
But USAID has been functioning as a covert action operations arm with much more flexibility and less administrative oversight or executive branch oversight than the CIA because of a few cute tricks it has at its disposal.
So when the CIA undertakes covert action, it has to have what's called a presidential finding, a presidential.
This this started basically after the 1970s when the church committee hearings and there is this idea that the CIA was acting rogue on its own.
And the upshot of that, because of oversight that was imposed on the CIA, was that any time they engaged in covert action dirty tricks, it had to have a formal sign-off from the United States president.
And USAID is not bound by that.
Because USAID is not technically an intelligence agency.
And so they can do what they've sometimes called discrete action rather than covert action.
So, for example, when USAID went and created a fake Twitter knockoff called Zinzineo in Cuba between 2011 and 2014, there were even oversight hearings about how the heck did this happen.
No one approved this.
No one knew you were doing this.
Congress didn't know you were doing this.
The president didn't know you were doing this.
And this was a very nasty operation.
What USAID did is they took funds that were earmarked for humanitarian relief in Pakistan and then used them to pay two Cuban businessmen to create a social media Twitter knockoff in order to overthrow The Cuban government.
Now, listen, I'm no fan of the Cuban government, believe me.
This is, I think, an interesting template to understand the structure of USAID operations.
But at that point, the Obama administration had just overthrown the governments of Tunisia and Egypt in an Arab Spring that was powered by, essentially, intelligence.
Back-channeling of social media operations, Facebook revolutions, Twitter revolutions.
They wanted to do that in Cuba, but Cuba at that time had banned U.S. social media.
So they came up with the genius idea to create a social media site that would look like it was run by Cubans, but was actually being run by USAID, who contracted it out to a company called Creative Associates International.
Very creative.
CAI instead of CIA. What they did is they lured people in, advertising the site as a place to share sports, music, and hurricane updates.
But the own leaked internal USA documents said that once they got a critical mass, they would change the algorithm in order to get people to take to the streets in violent riots and form so-called smart mobs and confront police officers and try to violently overthrow.
The government.
That was an explicit USAID blueprint, which they even said internally in writing.
They even collected all the personal data of everyone who signed up for the site to measure their political receptivity in terms of who's best targeted with intelligence messaging to overthrow their government.
And again, they were able to do that without President Obama even knowing about it because...
It didn't require a presidential finding.
What they said is this is discrete action in furtherance of democracy promotion instead of covert action in furtherance of spycraft.
But it's tomatoes, tomatoes.
That's why USAID is dirtier than CIA. If you want to fund terrorists, if you have a rogue cell at CIA who wants to support ISIS in Syria and Trump says, I don't want to support ISIS, ISIS is bad.
What they can do is they can move over to USAID and have USAID creatively structure the logistics so that it goes to ISIS and Trump wouldn't know.
So, I mean, USAID isn't just a front for the CIA. It actually seems like it's significantly worse.
It seems like it's just been completely unaccountable.
I guess the question is, right, if they did that and basically, I don't want to say subverted Obama, but certainly got around Obama, I think of a lot of these organizations sort of functioning more as arms of the Democrat Party.
They obviously also do it to Trump, but I'm seeing the Democrats now freaking out about this.
So even if they did it to subvert Obama...
Is this just the gravy train that kept that machine running as well?
How do you juxtapose some of that, which is obviously unsanctioned regime change, or at least attempts, with, I don't know, $100,000 for trans programs in Pakistan, $1 million for DEI training in Burma, all of this insanity that we see.
Well, make no mistake, what they did to Trump was a thousand times worse than what they did with Obama.
At least, for example, in operations like the Cuba one we just talked about with Obama, USAID wasn't attacking Obama.
USAID actually, Donald Trump would not approve a CIA covert action against himself.
But if they walk over to USAID and run it through there, he would never know.
And this is exactly what happened.
USAID systematically set about trying to regime change.
Every single one of Trump's international allies from his right-wing populist allies in the form of Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini in France and Italy to Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Trump would never have signed off on a CIA covert action to overthrow Bolsonaro's government in Brazil.
But USAID went and ran those operations on the quiet.
And I've published all about those, the internet censorship operations, the work that was done trying to pump up the opposition party.
They declared internally that populism is a threat to democracy.
So as a democracy promotion program, they can run all of these covert slash discrete programs in order to take down populist governments or eliminate populist movements.
In the name of promoting democracy because populism is a threat to democracy.
So, and not only that, they targeted him directly.
USAID paid $20 million to a group called OCCRP. You just think of it as the Corruption Reporting Project.
This is the largest consortium of hit piece investigative journalists in the world.
And they paid them, USAID paid them $20 million.
And they turned around and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani's work in Ukraine and then helped use that as the basis to impeach the sitting president, Donald Trump, in 2019. So USAID paid mercenary media to dig up dirt on Trump World and use that as the basis to impeach the sitting president.
They did the same thing to Paul Manafort, by the way.
Publishing stories about Paul Manafort and Julian Assange.
That was USAID mercenary media to target the sitting president of the United States.
Mike, listen, I imagine we're going to figure out more in the coming weeks.
It feels like every day there's a new can opening.
You know, J.D. put out a tweet like, hey, we figured we'd find $250 billion in waste.
We're finding a lot more.
I mean, this is a level of corruption like we've never seen before.
If you mentioned Manafort, you mentioned Rudy Giuliani.
Johnny, I imagine USAID probably had a lot to do with Russia, Russia, Russia, just tying all of these things together.
And then, you know, you mentioned whether it's Bolsonaro in Brazil or some of the other populists, you know, Le Pen in France.
I imagine some of the attacks that we've seen on Viktor Orban in Hungary, one of the last sort of, you know, the last bastions of, let's call it sane Eastern European mentality and thinking.
I imagine there's just so much more to uncover here.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, the Hungary story is unbelievable.
Not only did USAID... Financially sponsor the opposition group in Hungary, but they pay for all the opposition media.
In fact, one of the first order of business that Samantha Power did when she became the head of USAID under Biden was to travel personally to Hungary like an angel of death, knocking door to door.
She descended on Hungary and bragged about all the money that U.S. taxpayers would be paying Hungarian political I mean, it's astounding.
I mean, it's hard to believe.
I mean, this is a Tom Clancy movie when you think about it.
And the American taxpayer don't know.
And strangely enough, I mean, it feels like anyone that's at least even centrist or conservative leading is like, hey, we'd like to at least know where our money is being spent.
And the Democrats are losing their minds about I guess they understand this is exactly the deep state cover-up and the deep state operation that they've been running for so long, totally unchecked, totally unregulated, no checks and balances.
And I guess if they see that gravy train going away, that must be pretty scary to them.
It also sort of amazing.
I mean, I guess it shows you how bad their ideas actually are that even bolstered with umpteen billions of dollars And all of that subversive behavior, they're still not doing that well geopolitically across the world.
Right.
Well, it's the same story with the media, right?
I mean, how overpowered was alternative media compared to mainstream media, especially when all this started?
But, you know, the light of truth shines, you know, is very piercing, and it shines true.
And, you know, one small voice is able to overcome a giant...
Government, you know, media megaphone when it hits the hearts and minds the right way because people know it's true.
So I think that's what's happening in this story with USAID essentially putting the blob on steroids.
But, you know, even on steroids, they couldn't win this fair fight.
And that's what we're seeing.
A lot of that is made possible only because of folks like Elon Musk, who acquired X and allowed free speech there because of...
The good folks at Rumble who've allowed alternative video platforms that have played a big role in the ability to mobilize politically against this.
But again, I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention the Republican side of this because I've been banging the drum on this all week, which is that if this was just a Democrat thing, and you're totally right, 97% of all employee contributions at USAID go to Democrats.
And and left leaning NGOs are the lion's share of grantees.
But you cannot discount the albeit smaller, still very formidable, potent Republican side of this.
And that is, to my mind, actually the main stumbling block at this point, because if this was just a partisan issue, USAID is Democrat.
So, you know, it's in Republicans' interest to shut down a taxpayer money spigot to the other side of the aisle.
If that was the case, it would be very easy to close down USAID and move through with the structuring that the White House has in mind without any legal challenges whatsoever.
And you can bet that these legal challenges are forthcoming.
Everyone in the lawfare world is talking about it, that, you know, that USAID can't be shut down by executive order.
Well, if...
If you can't shut out my executive order, if you want to avoid that fight entirely and just make it super clean, Congress could just pass a law in order to dissolve U.S. aid.
And there is a Republican majority in the House and a Republican majority in the Senate.
So if this was just a, you know, straight down the party line issue, this would be a no-brainer, easy slam dunk, 100% total victory.
Let me guess, the neocons aren't exactly thrilled about it because they're happy with regime change around the world.
Yes, and they're in on it.
Bill Kristol's a part of an organization.
Yeah, but that was the shocking thing.
What on earth is the USAID funding Bill Kristol?
Why are they funding Politico?
What does that have to do with USAID? I mean, it sounds so wonderful.
The Democrats do a great job of this in the deep state of marketing.
Whatever they call something, it usually does the opposite.
But what does funding regime propaganda media in the United States have to do with?
Aid abroad, which is at least on the masthead of what these guys are supposed to be doing.
Yeah, I'll give you their reason, and then I'll cut through the BS. So their reason is that free and independent media is under attack around the world, don't you know?
Authoritarian countries crack down on the press and prevent them from having sustainable business models on their own.
So they need...
To be sponsored by freedom-loving countries like the United States of America in order to allow that country and its citizens to have the flow of free and unfettered information in their countries.
That's basically the mask.
And when you take the mask off is sponsoring the media buys hearts and minds.
Hearts and minds determine elections.
Election determines governments.
And so this is how USAID gets control over governments.
And it's the same thing that the CIA got in trouble for from the 1950s to the 1970s with Operation Mockingbird.
Today, we just call it USAID media sustainability funding.
Yeah, I mean, like I said, Bill Kristol's sort of the perfect example of that.
I imagine his funding started around the time he became a Never Trumper slash Democrat shill, right?
right?
This is someone that was lauded for you.
I mean, I don't know why.
I mean, I guess it was his father that was really sort of the talent, but I, you know, he inherited that and, you know, I guess that happens and whatever it was, but, you know, staunch conservative turns, never Trump turns, you know, he's voting for the Democrats in the last two election cycles.
Do you imagine that that funding has something to do with that sort of political outlook turnaround that it happened so quickly?
Yeah.
You know, there is a deeper issue though, which is I'm...
I sincerely hope everything that's happening right now is totally historic.
It's the first time the foreign policy establishment has ever had to be responsive to the concerns of the people who fund it, i.e.
American citizens.
And it's directionally correct.
I do have concerns that we are conducting open-heart surgery on the entire architecture of the American empire.
And what's built in its place has to be done well.
You know, just because...
A patient is sick and requires open-heart surgery doesn't mean you, I don't know, stick a tuna fish sandwich and random objects in the thing's chest and just say you're happy because you did the open-heart surgery.
You have to know what you're doing.
And the fact is, the justification for all this with USAID is never that it's a charity.
The justification...
Is a cold, calculated, cynical one that something about their programs is helping U.S. national interests by doing it.
And I'll give you a great example, right?
So a few months ago, the U.S. government overthrew the democratically elected government of Bangladesh.
There was a prime minister named Sheikh Hasina who was at war with the Clintons and the Bidens.
Hillary Clinton threatened her son with an IRS audit when he was living here in the U.S. When her government was toppled, she was replaced by a Clinton Global Initiative fellow.
She resoundingly won her election in Bangladesh in 2018. And when that happened, the International Republican Institute, which is the Republican branch of the National Endowment for Democracy.
The National Endowment for Democracy is the operations arm of USAID. You can think of it that way.
USAID is the money spigot, NED. Is the operations arm, effectively.
NED was created after USAID's published a committee letter in 1982 calling for it, essentially, as the USAID support arm.
And so this is the Republican wing of USAID, the Republican wing of NED. And in 2018, and what they, after the Bangladeshi prime minister they wanted to topple, won overwhelmingly in the election.
IRI, the International Republican Institute, Did what they call a baseline assessment, that's the technical term for this, to the State Department, analyzing what could be done in order to win the next election against the Bangladeshi Prime Minister, and what they calculated on the basis of conducting a baseline assessment of all of the religious institutions in Bangladesh, the racial institutions, the gender composition, the demographics, is that the people who hated the government the most in Bangladesh...
That would be most important to pump up were LGBT groups, two ethnic minority groups, and young people and student groups who primarily listen to rap music.
So what did IRI turn around and do?
They funded transgender dance festivals.
They funded Bangladeshi rap groups.
They even helped produce their rap music videos.
And they funded basically ethnic identity woke events for the racial minority groups so that they all were swimming in millions of dollars to play with and were on the financial pay of USAID to take to the streets and riot.
And that was successful.
They did overthrow that government.
Those street protests were covered very favorably by USAID Mockingbird Media.
But the point I'm getting at is that was not the Republican Party being woke when they were funding transgender dance festivals in Bangladesh.
That was a cold, calculated statecraft decision to capacity build their assets in the gay and transgender community there.
And you see the same thing around the world.
So all these sort of bizarre woke projects that we've seen, you know, like you said, millions for gender affirming care in third world countries, you know, they aren't all real projects.
It's just a front for covert, like, I guess, intelligence activity.
Is there some of it that is real?
Because it does seem like...
You know, that mentality is definitely still pervasive.
Certainly in the Democrat Party, we see these people are, you know, 97% funded by Democrats, etc., etc.
The problem is it is real.
The problem is what you have is you have a tension between governments and their populations all around the world.
We have that here in the United States.
You have what they call cleavages.
Cleavages between different groups and cleavages between groups and the representative government.
And what USAID does, same way that the CIA and State Department planners do, is they analyze the topographical network map of a country through a baseline assessment of what the different cleavages are, and they look at those cleavages that are on our side in terms of U.S. foreign policy and those that are not.
And what they then do is they deliberately do operations planning to capacity build the good cleavages and capacity cripple The bad cleavages, meaning pump money and resources and technical support to the cleavages on our side and seek to do the inverse, to cripple the money and resources of those on the other side.
This is the reason, for example, that USAID was backing Pussy Riot.
In Russia, 2010, 2011, 2012. This was not because USAID just loves music videos throwing feces at sculptures.
It was because the patriarchal heteronormative society, which had a strong anti radical transgender bias, meant that the transgender population was the most likely among anyone to take to the streets and riot and foment meant that the transgender population was the most likely among anyone to take to the streets and riot You see the same thing in Eastern Europe.
You see the same thing in Sub-Saharan Africa.
You see the same thing in parts of Western Hemisphere.
You see the same thing in Central Asia.
And I just want to make sure that Republicans in foreign policy leadership understand what's motivating this.
this, you have something actually much more sinister than simply ideological.
You have the fundamental nature of American statecraft.
So, I mean, all of this has tethers in basically every corner of the globe, I guess, at this It funds coups in other countries.
It fuels censorship.
It's basically a handout to Democrat NGO allies.
Is it fair to say that this is the biggest scandal in modern American history?
I mean, you know, this sort of seems to make, like, Iran-Contra and some of these other things, you know, pale in comparison because it's that times 100 all over the place.
Yeah.
No, I think that's fair to say.
USAID, you know, the story here is the, in my view, is the blob, and USAID's role is the spearhead of the blob in so many respects, because USAID is the cleanest way to creatively structure an operation to get around the president, especially President Trump.
Like I said, all these USAID projects, you know, How would Trump know, for example, that when he said he wanted to wipe out ISIS and USAID does water irrigation and rogue cells who want to use ISIS as terrorist groups or keep the supply of heroin flowing,
they can simply structure USAID operations to irrigate the fields under the banner of doing Poverty relief programs.
And this is another thing, is it doesn't even require, you mentioned this earlier in the conversation, which is that one of the reasons USAID is so much worse than the CIA is that it doesn't even require the rogue CIA to walk next door to USAID. It could be anybody with an in there.
You could have political operatives who aren't even formal intelligence agents, but if they want a CIA-style covert action done, they don't need to...
Become a part of the CIA and infiltrate it for 20 years and then get approval from the president to it.
If they have an in with the personnel at USAID and they're in cahoots, they can run a, you know, exactly, you're totally right to call it Iran-Contra because what was the phrase that, you know, that was used by Ali North in the hearings?
It was that the whole purpose of the enterprise was to have a private, standalone, self-sustaining...
Off the shelf capacity to run covert operations.
And I can't think of a single better description, private, standalone, self-sustaining, off the shelf capacity for covert ops than USAID. So, you know, I've talked for months sort of about how, you know, the government has been funding NGOs.
You know, these non-governmental organizations, and it's basically the way to be like, here's money, it's U.S. taxpayer dollars, but now that it's with you, there's no more accountability.
How does all of that tie into this?
Because it seems to be the same mentality, this is just jacked up on steroids, or perhaps it's not, because there are so many of these NGOs, whether they're assisting illegal migrants, whether they're doing whatever they're doing around the world.
How does all of this sort of tie together?
Because...
They all seem to very clearly be designed to be able to get U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund things that the U.S. taxpayer will never know about and probably wouldn't be in favor of.
Right.
Well, what Congress found, for example, in the anecdote that we talked about with the USAID's fake social media site to overthrow governments, The Zinzineo case, what Congress found is that USAID used a Byzantine labyrinth of shell companies and subcontractors in order to hide this from Congress and from the president in terms of what they were doing.
And again, so nominally, what was done in Cuba was creating a...
A fake social media site to lure people in and mind-virus them into overthrowing their government.
Again, strongly dislike the Cuban government, but just want to make sure that's totally clear.
You can say, trust me, I understand, and anyone watching this show understands.
If you say that, hey, maybe we should stop the war, you're not a Putin apologist, you just don't want people dying, because it's not Putin's friends or billionaire oligarch Russians who are sending their kids to die on the front lines.
It's some peasant's kid from...
Siberia that's being sent to die for no reason.
And Americans have to know what USAID is capable of doing, especially when they say USAID operating on their own soil and in their own institutions.
For example, when you know that USAID's internal documents talk about the importance of control over the social media algorithm for the site they created in order to get people to take to the streets and riot against their government, and then you see USAID... Funding censorship work to control the algorithms of Facebook, Twitter 1.0, YouTube, Reddit, you name it, then you know what they're capable of.
When you see USAID trying to get control over that and you know that they've got a dedicated crusade against the sitting president to topple him, well, you have to know what they've done to foreign governments in order to know when you see them operating against your own.
But the point that I was trying to draw there fundamentally about the oversight and the issues that, for example, Senator Joni Ernst described, that she was threatened by USAID when she tried, as a senator, to actually do oversight of them, is that what you find is,
in the same way that the CIA was famous, even in the 1960s, for these Byzantine, labyrinthian, Cayman Islands, offshore, Panama, Cyprus accounts, you know, the whole web of offshore banking and or do things.
This is what USAID does.
USAID structures these humanitarian operations, you know, the way someone would, you know, try to structure a multi-billion dollar, you know, financial scandal.
It's an M&A transaction on a global scale.
Right, because again, with that Cuba operation, those funds were not earmarked for Cuba.
They were earmarked for Pakistan.
And through this Byzantine labyrinth of hundreds of shell companies and subcontractors and bank wire transfers from bank to bank to bank, they shield it so none of the oversight people...
Can figure out what's happening.
It takes years to disentangle it.
And by that point, the operation's already over with.
So, yeah, I mean, we talk about the Pentagon a lot.
You know, they failed seven audits in a row.
$250 billion just went missing.
It just vanished out of thin air, Mike.
It just, you know, just can't account for it.
Like, no big deal.
I mean, how much of that money do you think went to fund similar programs like this?
Or, you know, will we ever actually even know?
I mean, have they covered the paper trail so well that no matter How much transparency we try to put out there, there's still billions of dollars floating out there that have been out for these exact purposes without any kind of oversight whatsoever.
Oh, it's huge.
More and more, the Pentagon has preferred to work with USAID rather than directly with state.
In fact, I published this a few months ago.
There was something like a 2022 Biden administration, sort of DOD. A strategic guidance memo, and it was all about DOD and USAID. And one of the generals who contributed to that memo said that the Pentagon prefers to work with USAID over state because USAID actually does stuff.
They're the ones who can sort of make it happen on the ground.
I published this as well a year and a half ago, and then I re-upped it this week, and folks can check this out.
But under Mark Milley and Joe Biden, the 2021...
First Special Forces Airborne Strategic Mission Playbook has a whole section on how DOD and USAID operations work in tandem.
And in that case scenario that was laid out by the Special Forces, they talked about how to generate race riots in Africa in order to stop the construction of a hypothetical port.
That might endanger U.S. interests if it belonged to another country.
And so the special forces, through its PSYOPs division, ran a whole campaign in this own special forces scenario.
They bragged about this like it was a good thing.
Ran a whole psychological operations campaign on the African population to inflame ethnic animus against the port developers and to go on strike and take to the streets in protest.
And in this special forces planning document, They specifically called to bring in USAID to come to the area where the riots were happening and do job fairs to give no-show jobs,
basically replacement salaries to the strikers and rioters on U.S. taxpayer dimes so that they could quit their jobs and boycott the companies and destabilize the country and be financially incentivized to do it because USAID would simply pay them rather than their previous employers.
And that's a formal.gov sock mill.
You can read that right now.
This is Mark Milley and Joe Biden's plan for how USAID can work as this dark arm support unit for the military.
So how many untold billions?
That the Pentagon has lost have simply gone through that same Byzantine structuring of payments in order to make that happen.
So, Mike, I've noticed that some of the biggest promoters of the Russia hoax, the perpetual war in Ukraine and perhaps the endless wars in general are also the biggest supporters of USAID.
They're the ones that are the most upset about Elon and his team finding the fraud.
They're frankly more upset about Elon finding the fraud than the fraud itself.
What more does that tell us that we haven't already sort of discussed?
It's, you know, corporate wants you to tell the difference between these two pictures, That meme.
It's the same picture.
USAID is just the way to get that done.
You want a media scandal about Trump and the Russians?
USAID media will make it happen.
You want university thought leadership produced?
By academics about the threat of Russian interference on social media, USAID money makes it happen.
Hey, you want prosecutors to arrest people on a BS counterintelligence predicate that their twin sister's dog's nephew's babysitter once talked to a Russian?
USAID prosecutors make that happen.
Every institution can be weaponized through USAID in order to capacity build and make it happen.
So they need USAID because just like I just described with how the military sees it, USAID actually does stuff.
You can scrawl on a napkin about, Donald Trump's a bad man, and I think he's too close to Russia.
Well, that doesn't get you anywhere.
But you know what does?
Media hit pieces.
University thought leadership.
Back-channeling with the tech companies to censor alternatives, funneling money to prosecutor groups to go after it.
It's the money, honey.
That's what greases the skids and makes something like Russiagate possible, is you pay every aspect of society to create that surround sound and each pull their own levers in order to make something like Russiagate happen.
And again, they literally did that with Rudy Giuliani and Paul Manafort USAID. Yeah, so I'd love you to perhaps take us further down the rabbit hole of how they work together with other groups like the National Endowment for Democracy.
I mean, again, probably has nothing to do with democracy, probably actually does the exact opposite.
They're essentially acting as...
An arm of the deep state and provide cover, you know, for the so-called experts, right?
You see that the media, you know, they have their chosen guy.
The narrative is decided.
There's some interesting threads in Twitter about how, you know, the media today can't keep up because so much stuff is going on.
They don't have time to formulate a narrative to then bring in their sort of puppet expert to justify, you know, whatever action is to upplay something, to downplay something else that the experts, again, just go along with.
Can you connect those pieces of the puzzle?
Oh, absolutely.
In fact, I did a three-part, nine-hour private livestream for my ex-subscribers on a May 2017 global security conference in Bratislava, Slovakia in May 2017, where basically the technical head for the National Endowment for Democracy, together with Michael Chertoff, who was the first head of the...
Full-term head of the Department of Homeland Security under George Bush, and then chairman of the board of BAE Systems, one of the largest military contractors in the world, and also former chairman of Freedom House, cornered the head of content moderation policy for Facebook and Google for Central and Eastern Europe.
Again, this is mid-2017.
The fifth person on that panel was someone from BBC, interestingly enough.
What the guy from the National Endowment for Democracy said, his name is Chris Walker, what he basically pitched is that unfiltered alternative news is the reason that Donald Trump got elected and the reason that right-wing populism has swept Europe, the reason that NATO skepticism, Euro skepticism has swept Europe at that time in 2017 was only because of Unfiltered alternative news.
This is literally in the description of the video.
And that unless the internet is censored, populists are going to keep winning elections all around the world.
And what Ned's representative insinuated is that Google and Facebook have to change their algorithms and have to change their monetization policies in order to demonetize populist websites.
And to fundamentally re-engineer the economics of the news industry.
This is again a Ned representative insinuating and pressuring to change the entire economics of the news industry in order to stop Donald Trump from being re-elected, in order to stop Donald Trump's political allies in Europe.
In the opening montage to this discussion, by the way, they played a scary four-minute video that was a straight line from Adolf Hitler, from the invention of the printing press, to Adolf Hitler, to JFK conspiracy theories, people blaming the CIA for the assassination of JFK, to Donald Trump's election.
Basically saying the printing press was good, but it gave us Hitler conspiracies about who killed JFK and Donald Trump.
So we need to stop that.
Yeah.
Everything ends up being Hitler, I guess.
You know, that's...
But this is USAID NED. Yeah.
Plotting to fundamentally re-engineer the entire economics of the news industry.
And out in the open, I mean, you know, again, it doesn't seem like people dug far enough into it, but it doesn't also seem like they were hiding, you know, sort of their overall intentions either.
Well, you know, forgive me for...
I don't mean to make this an uncouth analogy, but, you know, it's...
It's like a skirt, right?
I mean, you see some of the leg.
And this is because these operations involve huge numbers of people and institutions.
You see some of it.
And that's because everybody has to be on board the general idea of what's going on.
The media institutions are part of these whole society consensus building talks.
The academic institutions, the lawfare groups.
The military folks, the intelligence folks, the statecraft folks, the NGOs.
And so there has to be a general public conveyance of what's going on.
This is the whole reason that we moved from so-called covert action to quasi-overt action with the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983, which the Washington Post even wrote about in 1991, saying we don't even need to confirm Robert Gates, the CIA director, this year.
Because the CIA has been functionally replaced by NED and its quasi-overaction.
And that is substantially true when it comes to operations.
But the reason is because it's actually much easier to pull off an operation when you can hint and wink about what's going on to 10,000 people rather than having 10,000 people all have, you know...
TS, SCI, top secret, special compartmentalized information, national security clearances, and have to have all these conversations and skiffs and have to do everything through classified cables.
When you can make it quasi-public, you can create a whole-of-society whirlwind.
And you can argue that's what successfully won us the Cold War because of Ned's operations to topple all of the autocratic governments in Europe under the Iron Curtain in the 1980s.
That's one of the reasons Ned has been the bell of the ball for so long.
They're very good at this.
They overthrew Egypt and Tunisia and the Airspace.
Sorry, I'm sorry.
No, that's all right.
I mean, earlier in the show, you sort of talked about, hey, what ends up sort of filling the I mean, that could be dangerous as well.
Some of these things may need to happen.
Some of these organizations may not need to exist the way that they do, but...
You still need some of that.
How do you backfill that void to make sure that it's done correctly, that if we do need to do some of these things, it's not being abused, that there is actual oversight?
How do you solve for that void that I think you correctly pointed out?
Some of these things may need to actually happen.
They may not all be bad, but they also can't run around rogue agencies without any accountability, without any oversight.
Yeah, and that's the fundamental question, and that I hope that the new crop of Trump world foreign policy crafters and planners are taking fastidiously into account.
We need new layers around the grant coordinators and a much stronger hands-on approach.
To ensuring State Department grantees, assuming USA gets folded into state, are hitting their milestones and are providing much more detailed reporting about what's actually going on and that there are clawback mechanisms so that when grantees don't do that, the money gets taken away or they have to pay affirmative penalties.
So this money should be conditioned.
If they end up duping you or lying to you, they should have to pay the U.S. government.
Rather than, oops, okay, well, we're still contractually bound.
We still get the rest of the money.
Because what happens is, right now, it's set it and forget it.
You give a $25 million grant to some NGO doing poverty relief programs in Afghanistan.
It turns out they're actually giving it straight to ISIS-K. Well, there's no clawback mechanism for that money right now.
There's no way to be able to effectively recoup that.
You know, it's basically, you know, set it and forget it, and, you know, it can stain the reputation, but the fact is the money keeps flowing, and that all needs, we need new layers of accountability there, and we also need a new crop of, you know, proud American nationalist conservative.
Folks who are tuned into this to be able to do the oversight, if they are the grant coordinators.
Part of the reason that it's hard for a lot of people to catch this is because they simply don't know the terrain as well.
And one of the things I'm so delighted about that's happening right now is the MAGA movement is getting educated about foreign policy in a way they never had to think about before.
Most people signed up for MAGA because they saw crime on their streets.
You know, they saw that, you know, the culture war at home was crazy.
They felt like taxes were out of control.
They weren't concerned about what was happening in Bangladesh or Afghanistan.
You know, a lot of them were.
But for the most part, it was a nationalist movement that didn't really have an internationalist focus.
But, you know, what has to be done is you have to synchronize that, you know, America first nationalism.
And so that education, I think, will also naturally present the correct structure for how Marco Rubio's State Department can cure this.
Mike, how related is all of this to John Radcliffe cleaning house at the CIA and what Kash Patel can do at the FBI? For example, we learned basically that half of the agents in the entire FBI were working on going after people that were near the Capitol on January 6th.
I mean, like 6,000 agents of a 13,000-agent agency.
I mean, that doesn't seem like great use of their time.
We all know now, clearly, that was a created narrative, whether you talk about the bomb hoaxes at the...
You know, DNC and the RNC, all of these things, but 6,000 agents dedicated to working over there, not doing their stated task.
You know, is this all part of that same mosaic?
Yes.
Yes.
It's the total weaponization of the blob of the national security state against domestic political allies.
You know, I always call this the, you know, the thumbie war between, you know, there's a normal thumbie war between both sides of the political aisle.
But you have this heavy weapon artillery, which is a cheap trick.
It's a dirty shot, which is a national security predicate for doing something.
And whoever uses that pinky finger trick against their opponent has a massive advantage.
And that's what's done here.
It's the same reason that DHS created a domestic intelligence arm that, thank God, was only shut down, but only because of legal action by Stephen Miller and Gene Hamilton's group, America First Legal.
But DHS created a formal unit dedicated to hunting down Trump supporters.
It was under the banner of stopping domestic extremism and domestic terrorism.
This was run by John Brennan and James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence and the former head of the CIA. So the biggest bosses of the CIA were put in charge of a domestic...
There's spy craft and domestic secret police squad whose primary mission that they even said in their own DHS documents for this were, quote, supporters of Donald Trump.
So DHS was weaponized that way.
FBI was weaponized that way.
You know, I was, you know, joking in a sort of dark humor to a friend yesterday when that news broke that, you know...
In a way, it may have worked out for the best that the FBI put 5,000 of its 13,000 agents on going after, you know, on January 6th cases, because that's 5,000 less agents who could be cooking up terrorist plots.
I mean, the fact is, is so much of what the FBI does is creating fake terror to be used for political purposes.
This is what happened in Syria.
The famous Garland, Texas case in 2015, when Obama was trying to Curry public hearts and minds to justify a military intervention in Syria and support for things like the CIA's Operation Timber Sycamore.
Well, the FBI ran a whole operation to have a mass shooting play out in Garland, Texas.
It was FBI informants paid over $100,000 who were paid to become the best friend of that shooter over a year before it happened.
And, you know, text him to, quote, tear up Texas.
The FBI was even following the shooter in a car, taking pictures of him the whole time on the way to the shooting, even took pictures of the shooting as it happened.
Not only didn't stop it, but didn't say anything about it for years afterwards, while the whole story played out like it was an ISIS attack.
And that's what justified military intervention.
But it was an FBI plot.
I mean, so this plays out all over.
Frankly, this is what played out with January 6th itself.
And thank God that all this is happening in tandem with USAID and John Ratcliffe at CIA and Kash Patel at FBI, because we might really, once again, have a truly free nation.
Yeah, the Garland, Texas thing, I mean, it sort of seems like it strikes a huge resemblance to what happened in Michigan with Gretchen Whitmer.
You know, like a bunch of meth heads, you know, after like three years of being coaxed to do something.
You know, finally, we're like, one guy is like, I don't know, maybe we can do something.
And, you know, oh, now we got you.
There was a terror threat against a prominent Democrat.
I mean, he was entirely manufactured.
The whole thing's insane.
And I wrote about this in my book, Liberal Privilege, years ago.
Like, this is not like a new thing.
This is not a, you know, a...
A byproduct of, like, the war against Trump.
This has been going on for a very long time to try to manipulate the populace into doing things they wouldn't otherwise do.
It's sort of like a lie by omission.
You know, if you think there's an unrealistic fear, you're going to act a different way, and they're doing whatever they can to promote that sort of faux fear.
That's exactly right.
You know, in fact, in that Whitmer Fednapping case, yeah, it wasn't just that they pushed them to, you know, to do it.
The FBI trained them to do it.
The FBI actually sent agents to train these people how to make pipe bombs.
It was every step of the way.
It was the same way, you can look at the 1993 World Trade Center event where the FBI had informants actually...
You know, planting the devices under the building and then the informants, this is all published in the New York Times, you know, made angry calls to their handlers afterwards saying, I thought you were going to switch out the powder.
Why did you make me do this?
You know, the fact is, is this sort of, you know, this sort of dirty quasi intelligence work is is is at the heart of mobilizing society to do actions that they wouldn't or otherwise ordinarily do.
But this also gets back to the importance of USAID media, which is that is that every time this happens, who is the first to jump in line to amplify, you know, the FBI's official story on it, the first to amplify the CIA's official story on it.
It's it's USAID media.
They need a surround sound of of media institutions who then take, you know, what happened with the with the Whitmer case and make it look to people like it was a Trump terrorist attack.
They need that USAID surround sound of media with Garland, Texas, to make it look like it was an ISIS attack.
They need that USAID surround sound of media to make it look like January 6th was an attempt to overthrow the government.
Yeah, because otherwise you would think a pipe bomb at the DNC and the RNC, where the then-sitting vice president-elect was within yards, You'd think that would actually become a real story unless, of course, it was just a backup plan and they were able to create the narrative with the existing fact set, right?
So the insurrection became the talking point and all of a sudden that other stuff was swept under the rug.
If they didn't have enough to run with the fake insurrection narrative, well, look, now we got a pipe bomb at the RNC and they endangered the life of the sitting vice president and elect.
Right.
And what you find, you know, when you read enough of these USAID internal documents and, you know, you see their sort of USAID's eye view of the world, they understand that the media plays a critical role in the legitimacy and the perceived legitimacy of prosecutions.
And that if you want to have prosecutors take out your political enemies, whether here in the U.S. with Trump or whether in Ukraine.
Or anywhere in Eastern Europe or in Brazil or you name it, or Pakistan.
If you have a popular political figure who's beloved by the people and unscandalized, it puts a huge strain on the criminal justice system in order to do that.
And also, it's hard to get prosecutions because the jury pool already fondly loves the person you're prosecuting.
The judge may...
So you need to scandalize them in the media before you hit them with prosecutors.
And at the same time, prosecutors use media hit pieces as the basis for their initial criminal filings.
This is why USAID pays investigative journalists all over the world to dig up dirt on USAID's, on the blob's political opponents, in order to feed that to prosecutors to arrest.
The Blob's opponents.
In fact, USA documents brag about this.
They have a whole accomplishments section, for example, for one of their projects about how their $20 million led to 456 arrests, as well as seven different government officials being fired, including inducing full-on regime change, including a president and a prime minister.
And so USAID bragged about this.
They also bragged that that $20 million netted them over a billion dollars in assets seized.
So this is mercenary media for hire, which then infects the criminal justice system and then infects the entire democratic participation of the whole populace, both here and abroad.
So thank God we are now staring into the sun at the structure of some of the darkest parts of the rogue national security state here in the U.S. And we're doing it with both eyes open, really for the first time.
And the sun couldn't be brighter.
Yeah, I always joke that I'm living in the Truman Show.
I'm just waiting for a TV camera to fall out of my ceiling.
I'm the only guy that doesn't realize that I'm the star of the show.
You recently had a post basically saying that that's actually closer to being true than anyone could ever have believed.
What did you mean by that?
Yeah, well, this is a phrase I've been saying for the past.
I do these private livestream lectures for my ex-subscribers, and I've done about 50 hours of lectures about USAID, and I always start it with that line, which is that you're living in this USAID Truman Show, where all the institutions you think you know, from the media, to social media, to universities, to unions...
To public health institutions, to terrorist groups, to lawfare groups, to judiciary ones that are a carefully constructed creation of a USAID Truman show.
And what I mean by that is that movie had a main character protagonist that thinks his wife really has the backstory.
You know, that he believed.
You know, thinks that his best friends are his best friends.
Thinks that the mailman is really the mailman.
You know, thinks that his job and boss is really the job that he signed up for in Boss.
And, you know, what's actually happening in the background is you have a 24-7 live feed movie being screened to the rest of the world.
And a movie producer has hand-selected every person that, you know, Truman meets.
For decades, basically since the day he was born.
And they changed the script in order to have Truman do things or not do things or go through drama or fulfill certain plot lines that the movie director wants done.
And that is effectively what USAID does.
And also, let's be clear about this.
This is what they're supposed to do by charter.
They are not a humanitarian There's no aid in USAID. It's not the USAID. It's the U.S. Agency for International Development, the international development of assets, the international development of institutions that serve U.S. national interests.
And so every single USAID project is a Truman Show event.
If USAID is doing a job fair in a country, as I mentioned with the Special Forces...
Formal military scenario, currently on a.gov website.
The people who are running around that West African country at that job fair think that it's a USAID job fair.
But what's actually happening in the background is the U.S. Special Forces wants them to take to the streets and riot and quit their jobs and go on strike.
And USAID is a character that has popped up into their movie in order to give them a way to quit their jobs and stay on the streets and protest.
If you have...
You know, these public health facilities, right, that USAID runs, like HIV prevention clinics.
Well, you know, in 2014, USAID was busted running fake HIV prevention clinics that were being used as hubs for regime change work to get people to overthrow their government.
This happened in Western Hemisphere, in Cuba.
This is a major international scandal.
The USAID internal documents said that the HIV prevention clinics would be, quote, the perfect excuse because counterintelligence in these countries would never look for it, would never think that HIV prevention clinics would be where they are, what they're using as the coordinating hub for the regime change work.
So if you're on the ground there in South America, you think it's an HIV clinic.
Yeah.
But in the Truman Show background, it's the movie director.
This is being used to get you to overthrow your government.
And you see this with every single USAID institution, which is why the whole thing's corrupt top to bottom.
Well, I mean, amazing stuff, Mike.
I really appreciate you taking us down the rabbit hole on that one.
I imagine we're going to learn a lot more in the coming weeks as more and more of this gets exposed.
So I'm sure we'll talk again, but incredible stuff.
Thank you so much.
Really appreciate your time.
And guys, this is why we have to pay attention.
So make sure you're liking, sharing, and subscribing so that everyone actually sees what's really going on and we can perhaps stop all living in The Truman Show.
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