More Sinister USAID Programs Emerge; Rumble Returns to Brazil as its Chief Censor is Warned of Arrest; Why CFPB Protects Consumers With Matt Stoller
DOGE continues to discover disturbing USAID projects that have led to the manipulation of countless other countries by the United States. Plus: Rumble returns to Brazil after being banned in a battle over free speech. Finally: Matt Stoller explains why the Trump admin's mission to eliminate the CFPB could enrich Wall Street and hurt American consumers.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube tonight.
The turmoil in Washington over the Trump administration's freezing and closing of U.S. aid continues to intensify.
At the same time, more and more instances of serious abuses of this agency's previously secret activities continue to emerge.
As we have spent ample time documenting U.S. aid, while undoubtedly involved in some projects that help people and even save lives regardless of motives, It essentially acts as an arm in the CIA and the U.S. security state generally, though it is, by design, even more deceitful than those agencies and thus more insidious in light of its pretext of benevolence.
We'll document these latest revelations and analyze how they shed significant light on this now besieged Washington institution and the actual function it performs.
Then, in late 2023, this platform, Rumble, became completely unavailable in Brazil, at least without the use of a VPN to scramble one's location.
The reason, as we have extensively reported, is because of the endless tsunami of censorship orders emanating from a single judge on Brazil's Supreme Court, in which this judge, in secret, Forces social media platforms to ban whomever he decides he wants to silence.
Lawmakers, journalists, activists, and others without so much as a pretense of explanation or evidence, let alone due process.
And all of those secret orders are accompanied by threats of major fines in the event the platforms do not immediately comply.
That was the framework that resulted in this judge last year banning acts from all of Brazil for more than a month.
Rumble, to its great credit, decided back then that it would rather lose access to a major market like Brazil rather than comply with mountains of unjust orders of political censorship and has thus been unavailable in Brazil, the third or fourth largest online country in the world, for more than a year now.
Today, however, all of that has changed with Trump now in office and with the judge facing a formal He was also formally warned by top Brazilian diplomats that he may face the danger of detention or arrest if he tries to enter the United States.
All of that has ushered in a sufficiently changed climate for Rumble to now return to Brazil in what is clearly a victory for free speech, not just for this platform, but for people everywhere.
And we'll tell you all about that.
And finally, for many people, the devastating 2008 financial crisis highlighted the complete lack of limits or controls on the ability of our largest banks and financial institutions to do whatever they wanted.
No matter how much it deceives and harms ordinary consumers and working-class Americans, most of whom are the ones who paid the price for that crisis.
One of the very few reforms that came out of that disaster in 2008 was the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Elon Musk's Doge team and his big tech and finance allies are now attempting to close.
Friend of the show and finance and antitrust expert Matt Stoller will be with us tonight to argue why the CFPB is a vital tool for protecting ordinary Americans, consumers, and why its elimination will help only those big financiers and big banks on Wall Street, which the MAGA movement has long vowed to want to reign in.
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Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, where we'll have our live interactive After show, as we've been saying for a couple weeks now, we are still figuring out and retooling exactly the best way to do this.
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Donald Trump was inaugurated less than three weeks ago, there has been a flurry of activity, to put it mildly, much of which has in our view been positive or at least with the potential to become positive.
Others of which have become, I think, potentially detrimental, most particularly Trump's fixation on serving the interests of the Israeli government, something that he basically signaled during the campaign he intended to do.
We've certainly spent a lot of time on that and we'll spend more time on it this week given recent developments.
But one of the changes, one of the focal points of this new Trump administration that we definitely regard as potentially valuable Is the insistence on trying to not just determine but disclose to the public the actual functions of so many of these sprawling,
massive agencies in Washington that are extremely well-funded, have all sorts of consequences for not just American foreign policy but for the rest of the world and have largely remained completely opaque and operate unto themselves.
Nobody has tried to Nobody has challenged them.
Nobody has tried to investigate them.
Nobody has tried to reform them in any way.
And one of the focal points of Elon Musk and his so-called Doge team, the Department of Government Efficiency, has been trying to take these agencies and essentially put them under the scrutiny that all Democratic States should have for these kinds of agencies that are so consequential.
And it turns out that, in particular, with regard to U.S. aid, which, as we documented, is clearly an arm of the CIA. It's clearly an arm of the U.S. security state.
It was created for that reason.
Back under the Kennedy administration in the 1960s, we had Mike Bentz.
On last week who I think has become one of the foremost experts in USAID who described how the benefit of having USAID is that it can far more easily perform a lot of the functions of the CIA in countries around the world because if you show up and say hi I'm with the CIA or hi I'm with the State Department and I'd like to enter these sectors of society You're going to automatically trigger all sorts of suspicion.
But if you show up and say, hi, I'm here to help, I'm part of the agency that just wants to help, that does the benevolent aid for the rest of the world, you get a lot more access.
But obviously the fact that it's being funded by the US government means that it is serving the same foreign policy ends that the CIA and the State Department are there to advance.
It just has this pretext of benevolence in order to deceive its real function.
And we've gone over so many different revelations about what USAID actually does over the last week or week and a half as this controversy has emerged, but there are still all new ones that are appearing.
WikiLeaks did a remarkable and comprehensive investigation of a program that...
Very few people had actually heard of in which USAID has created a massive coordinated network of media outlets all throughout the world that are designed to falsely appear to be independent, but which in fact are there to disseminate US propaganda,
to bring division and discord to all sorts of countries, to Enable the United States to exploit the rest of the world for its own ends and not only is that sinister unto itself and unknown to the public, it's actually something they're quite poor at accomplishing.
Here is WikiLeaks on February 8th reporting this, quote, U.S. aid has purchased nearly half a billion dollars, $472.6 million, through a secretive U.S. government-financed NGO called Information Network, IN, which has, quote, through a secretive U.S. government-financed NGO called Information Network, IN, which has, quote, worked with 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcast, reaching up to 778 hours of broadcast, reaching up
This network has also supported social media censorship initiatives.
And there you see the graphic called the Inter News Network.
These always have very generic sounding names, not to raise any alarm, to fly under the radar, for people not to really even notice that they exist.
And you can see here in this graphic, it says the recipient is associated with multiple Parents in the Dataset Internews Network and the total awarded amount is $472.6 million from 457 transactions.
The Wikileaks report goes on.
Quote, the operation claims offices in over 30 countries, including main offices in the US, London, Paris, and regional headquarters in Kiev, Bangkok, and Nairobi.
It is headed up by Jean Bergoldt who pays herself $451,000 a year.
Bergoldt worked out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico during the early 1990s where she was in charge of a $250 million budget and in other revolts or conflicts at critical times before formally rotating out of six years at USAID to this network.
Her IN bio and those of other key people and board members have been recently scrubbed from the website but remain accessible at Hhhhtparchive.org.
Reports show the board being co-chaired by Democrat securocrat Richard J. Kessler and Simone Otis Kochs, wife of Nvidia billionaire Trench Kochs, both major Democratic donors.
In 2023, supported by Hillary Clinton, Borgoat launched a $10 million IN fund at the Clinton Global Initiative.
The IN page shows a picture of Borgoat at the CGI. Has also been deleted.
And there you see the image.
Interviews.
Internews launches new $10 million fund supporting independent media at 2023 Clinton Global Initiative.
Now let me just say for a second here.
First of all, the fact that we have this gargantuan network of media collectives all throughout the world with such massive funding that essentially nobody has ever heard of.
In and of itself demonstrates the reason why these kinds of revelations that are happening only because of this Doge investigation are so crucial.
But does anyone believe that the Clinton Foundation is actually interested in promoting genuinely independent media outlets?
Independent media outlets that are funded by the U.S. government?
Obviously it's an oxymoron.
For a media outlet to receive funding directly or indirectly from the US government either straight from the US government or through the Clinton initiative and at the same time declare itself to be independent And yet so much of the reporting has warned in the United States that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are targeting independent journalists and independent media outlets by cutting WikiLeaks
goes on, quote, 95% of IN's budget has been supported by the U.S. government.
USAID and state funneled nearly half a billion dollars through this building, which is at 876 7th Street, Arcata, California.
The IRS and ING government contracts list this address as the current registered address for IN, although it was clearly abandoned by December 2024. Here's a shot taken four months ago and you can see the building actually shuttered.
So just that fact alone that the United States government has been building and constructing and proliferating and financing the internews network that has tentacles all over the world, some of which are administered through the Clinton Foundation, others of which are just directly funded by the U.S. government, for me, in and of itself makes what the Trump administration is doing in digging into these agencies sufficiently valuable to justify.
But there's so much more to it.
Here's from ProPublica in 2024. There you see Internews Network designated as a 501c3 and you see the text of the IRS document.
And here is the report showing that it has $124 million in revenue in 2023. Total assets of $32.8 million.
And expenses of $123 million, so it's spending all the money that it's taking in on this propaganda effort on behalf of the US government and countries all throughout the world.
And you can see there, not just the amount itself, but you can see the trend lines here of How this budget has gone up in the last 10 years, it's kind of a straight-up curve.
It started at around $50 million, then it went to $100 million, now it's at $124 million.
So that's one of the other aspects of these sorts of opaque institutions that nobody pays attention to, nobody really understands what's going on in them.
They operate as their own independent entities, is that they constantly just grow through sheer inertia.
Without really much of any controls taking place.
And this was one of the central themes of the Trump campaign, which I think the people surrounding Donald Trump learned more than anything else after his first term, which is that there's this entire deep state, this entire administrative state that operates unto itself with no democratic accountability.
They believe they run themselves.
They believe they have their own rules.
And that's why there's so much angst and upset and anger that we've seen when elected officials from the executive branch.
We just had a major national election that lasted two years.
Billions and billions of dollars spent on this election.
Donald Trump wins.
He brings in his team into the White House, into the administration and the executive branch.
He deploys the people he's asked to perform these functions that he said he would carry out.
And the reaction of these agencies are, who are you to come and supervise what we're doing to try and control what we're doing?
You don't run us.
And it's true.
The political branches have not run these agencies.
They run themselves.
That's what a deep state is.
That's what an administrative state is.
And it's an incredibly anti-democratic component of our government.
They operate with no transparency, no accountability, no supervision.
And this is the first time, I guess you could go back to the Church Committee, when the Senate finally investigated a lot of what was going on.
When in the 60s and 70s, so many of the abuses came to the fore, and the Senate decided they needed to find out what these agencies are doing.
That's 50 years ago.
45 years ago, so finally there's now an attempt again to get a hold of this administrative state, and it's the Democratic Party that, among all the things Trump is doing, apparently found the most passion to oppose.
They actually went to the USAID building and shook their canes that old people carry, that so many of the Democratic members of Congress carry because of how elderly they are, how long they've been around.
And Chuck Schumer led a chant outside of it.
This is what they are choosing to defend, the right of these agencies to continue operating autonomously and with no democratic accountability, even though they have their tentacles all throughout the world.
Here's to some of the compensation of the officers who There are the top paid officers for this internet news network.
There you see the CEO paid $412,000.
And there's Janine Borgal, who is a major Democratic donor, whose husband is the billionaire founder of NVIDIA, paid almost $400,000 as well.
Now, here is a biography of Janine Borgal.
Oh, there you see her picture.
And her bio reads that her media experience is with Wired and The Guardian.
And she's the president and CEO of East Blue Hill MIE.
And she is there the president of the CEO for Internews as well.
And her bio says, Borgo is an expert on the role of information and media in developing conflict and post-conflict and fragile countries.
She speaks on issues of global news, information technology, media development and democracy assistance worldwide.
Borgo leads the strategic management of the internews and its programs now active in more than 50 countries.
She has overseen internet news growth in areas underserved by local media such as Afghanistan and South Sudan and worked internationally in countries undergoing dramatic shifts in media and political landscapes.
Borgo worked in the former Yugoslavia serving as a strategic advisor.
For media development programs in postwar Kosovo as well as a manager of community development projects in Serbia and Montenegro through the fall of Slobodan Milosevic.
She served for six years with the U.S. Agency for International Development including three years at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
So basically a government spook going to all the places where the U.S. is trying to manipulate.
The outcome of various political conflicts through propaganda, that's exactly who she is, that's what her career is, and that's what this internews, this massively funded internews, is designed to do.
Here you can see from the Twitter account, Data Republican, which is a really reliable Twitter account that does some great work in data if you haven't seen it.
The internet news, the internet news network at the center of all of this and There you see its gross receipts one hundred and twenty three million dollars.
It receives about twenty nine about thirty million dollars in contributions another five and a half million dollars in grants and then ninety three million dollars in Taxpayer funds and obviously Very few people have any idea of what it's doing, but What you know it's doing is spreading propaganda in all sorts of conflict zones and the internal affairs of countries all over the world.
Here's an interview that she gave back at the World Economic Forum, unsurprising that she would be found there, in January of 2024, just to give you a sense for who this person is.
Remember, almost nobody knew about this.
This is all happening inside the U.S. government.
In buildings and agencies that basically operate completely unto themselves, at least until very recently.
Here's part of what she had to say.
Disinformation makes money, and that's one of them.
We need to follow that money, and we need to work with the, and particularly the global advertising industry, that a lot of those dollars go to pretty bad content.
And so you can work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists just to really try to focus ad dollars and challenge the global advertising industry all around the world to focus their ad dollars towards the good news and information, the accurate and relevant news and information.
Needless to say, she's one of these people who talks in terms of disinformation.
Do you actually think that's what the U.S. government's primary objective is when they're operating in Serbia and Kosovo and Russia and all of these other conflict zones where the United States has serious interests?
Oh, we're just trying to make sure that the media there is accurate.
We just want it to be accurate.
We don't have any interest beyond that.
John Hopkins Magazine, all the way back in May of 2006, talked about the early history of Internews.
Quote, in the 1990s, Internews began to attract serious money.
George Soros and his Open Society Institute became supporters, as did eventually the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and dozens of others.
USAID has made the large grant to establish the Russian Independent Television Network.
Evelyn Messenger secured a large sum from the National Endowment for Democracy to study independent media in Eastern Europe.
Internews secured $8 million to set up a media center, a news agency, and a broadcast and print outlet in Ukraine.
Quote, it changed just about everything, recalls Makino.
We became a lot more effective because we could hire staff and cover a lot more ground.
We also had to become much more professional.
Messenger, who eventually would have a falling out with Hoffman, didn't like some of the changes.
Quote, the first phase of internews was really a lot of fun, she said.
We'd come up with little bits of money and do things all pretty ad hoc.
But then the organization began structuring itself around getting money from the government.
David really loved it, and I'm sure he still does.
She felt that accepting so much government support limited Internews's flexibility, quote, there was now an intersection between the political interest of the US and the work we were doing.
Oh, you don't say.
So all the way back in 2006, people who thought they were creating this little fun startup to help independent news outlets started getting major amounts of funding from Open Society and the Soros Foundation and eventually the government.
Obviously, they realized once you start getting massive amounts of money from the government, you're no longer independent.
You're a servant of their foreign policy agenda.
You're no longer interested in disseminating actual news.
You're disseminating propaganda inside countries in order to destabilize them or manipulate them in exactly the way that the United States pretends it never does and only Russia does to it.
Is this really the sort of thing that the United States government ought to be doing, especially if you think it is?
Shouldn't there be a lot of transparency around it, a lot of understanding of what it's actually doing?
doing, the only reason we have any now is because Elon Musk has been sending in his Doge team to demand access to understand what actually it is that they're doing.
Here from May of 2007, so you can see kind of how long this development has been going on, is a map of all the places in which this internews exists.
And all the colored countries there are places where internews has become active.
And again, this is quite a long time ago, back in 2007, and you can see how pervasive, how widespread throughout the world the United States propaganda scheme is.
Now, beyond that internews, which is fairly sinister and extremely significant, another discovery that WikiLeaks had was that the...
And by the way, the internews funding didn't necessarily come from USAID. It came from the US government as a whole.
One of the things that USAID, however, did fund...
Was this project that was led by somebody named David Golombia.
And I remember him quite well from the Snowden reporting.
He was one of the people most vehemently opposed to the reporting that we were doing, claiming that what we were really up to was not a defense of privacy or a defense of...
The Constitution and democracy, we were really somehow covert agents for a right-wing cyber libertarianism where we were trying to free the world and free the internet from any form of government control to create a kind of libertarian anarchist world in which no rules were permitted and everybody could do whatever they wanted.
I had forgotten about him.
He actually, it turns out, passed away, I think, back in 2021, 2022, of cancer.
But one of the things WikiLeaks discovered was that he had written a book through the University of Minnesota Press that was entitled Cyber Libertarianism, The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology.
And this is one of the things that USAID actually did fund, was the development of this book.
And one of the purposes of this book was to attack those of us who have been defending free speech on the internet and opposing government surveillance.
That's what USAID was funding, attacks on American citizens who were expressing views that were contrary to the U.S. security state.
And principally in this book, three of the main villains are Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and myself, where we're all depicted as carrying out this covert right-wing Cyber libertarian agenda.
Here is part of what this book says and it's now taught in courses in several different universities throughout the United States.
Quote, as an all right-wing conspiratorial thought, they deliberately misinterpret kernels of facts to build a false narrative.
Assange directly intervened in a US election through cooperation with Roger Stone, who himself used Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists for just that purpose.
This is not an exaggeration.
Assange is a proto-Nazi political provocateur whose overt anti-Semitism, anti-black racism, climate change denial, misogyny, hatred for democracy, and support for authoritarian political regimes See Chapter 7 from discussion of Assange's career-long leanings toward fascism,
including his efforts to distort public opinion in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, routinely failed to penetrate the minds of observers who see as dispositive his use of digital tools and anti-establishment affect.
Assange is one of the key figures of the syncretic politics of cyber-libertarianism.
In 2014, at the height of Edward Snowden's media fame and exposing secrets of the NSA and the Five Eyes Partnership, historian Sean Willits published a piece in The New Republic that provoked immense outrage across digital pundits across the political spectrum.
Would you feel differently about Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange if you really knew what they thought?
Well, Lentz explained, Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange hardly subscribe to identical beliefs and they differ in their levels of sophistication.
They have held at one time or another a crazy quilt assortment of views, some of them blatantly contradictory.
But from an incoherent swirl of ideas, a common outlook emerges.
The outlook is neither a clear-cut doctrine nor a philosophy, but something closer to a political impulse that might be described, to borrow from the historian Richard Hofstadter, as paranoid libertarianism.
It has major chapters on myself, on Snowden, on Assange, all quite maligning and defamatory.
And this is the first time I discovered that his work was actually funded by USAID to create this book that is now taught in college courses to discredit those of us who are advocates of free speech on the internet, opponents of censorship on the internet, and particularly opponents of mass surveillance on the internet.
WikiLeaks summarizing those findings.
The author, David Golombia, who also wrote, quote, The Politics of Bitcoin Software as Right-Wing Extremism, has previously received at least $80,000 in direct U.S. government grants.
The University of Minnesota made no attempt to fact check the book, which is now on the reading list of two courses at the University of Southern California and Duke.
And I think a lot of this is just...
So sprawling that it could actually end up being anything.
Some government bureaucrat decides that they have an agenda and they use the uncontrolled and unsupervised but gargantuan budget of USA to promote these propagandistic agendas to attack not just critics of the government in the United States but Any opponents of US foreign policy all throughout the world,
just through propaganda that's disguised, heavily disguised, in ways that most people would have no idea is actually connected to the US government.
It's hard to overstate just how extensive these programs are.
Here from Brussels Signal, this is...
An article entitled, from February 10th, when all of this is now coming out, Explosive U.S. Government's Deep Involvement in European Journalism.
Quote, According to USAID records, some of which are no longer publicly accessible, the U.S. has invested over $640 million.
In Moldova since 1992, the actual financial commitment through grants and indirect funding mechanisms has probably hit the several billions in payments for the whole country.
Between 2019 and 2024, the Media Alternative Association, owner of TV8, the fourth most-watched television channel in Moldova, received $1.85 million from Washington.
Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, Western sanctions resulted in the suspension and cancellation of licenses for several Russian-owned TV stations in Moldova, creating a vacuum.
U.S.-funded media outlets quickly moved in.
Filling this space once occupied by Kremlin-aligned broadcasters, Washington's $20 million Moldova Resilience Initiative, initially planned to run from 2022 to 2023, now extended to 2026, was designed to, quote, strengthen popular support for a democratic European Moldova by, quote, uniting Moldovans around a shared European identity.
Oksana Rominiak, director of the Institute of Mass Information in Ukraine, said an estimated 80% of Ukrainian media outlets have collaborated with USAID in some capacity.
Let's emphasize that again.
She's the director of the Institute of Mass Information in Ukraine and said an estimated 80% of Ukrainian media outlets have collaborated with USAID In some capacity, USAID has become the backbone of the country's independent journalism.
There's that word that I don't think she quite understands what it means, though it's being repeated by US corporate media outlets in almost every account designed to attack Elon Musk for scrutinizing USAID. She's saying that 80% of media outlets in Ukraine are funded by or have an association with USAID and that USAID is now the backbone of independent media.
But obviously if 80% of media in Ukraine is being funded by USAID, it means by definition they are anything but independent.
They're propaganda arms of the US government.
And this is the country we're constantly being told is democratic, whose democracy we have to protect.
That the Russian invasion was totally unprovoked.
We had nothing to do with Ukraine.
Here we are.
We're funding 80% of the media in Ukraine.
Imagine if China were funding 80% of the media in Mexico.
And talking openly about putting Mexico in a military alliance led by China right on that side of our border.
You think we would?
Take that well.
Do you think if we entered Mexico in order to confront the threats that was producing, we would regard that as an unprovoked invasion?
The article goes on, quote, a report by the Center for European Policy Analysis, titled U.S. Aid Freezes Numbs Ukraine, revealed that U.S. aid was, quote, reaching deep into areas of the state and civil society in Ukraine.
In the UK, the publicly-owned BBC acknowledged that USAID contributed to 8% of the BBC media action charity funding in 2023 to 2024. A paper from the US Congressional Research Services published in 2022 argued that US foreign assistance was an essential instrument of the country's foreign policy.
The report said that meant U.S. foreign assistance served the United States soft power and sharp power ambitions around the globe.
It likened it to the Marshall Plan after the Second World War that was designed to rebuild European countries so they could restore trade with the U.S., benefiting U.S. industries.
This is something all taking place completely unbeknownst to the public, to the Congress.
It's never talked about or at least it wasn't until Donald Trump was inaugurated and decided that these administrative state agencies and U.S. security state agencies deserve to be exposed for what they actually do so that we have a debate about whether this is something we want to be doing with our resources.
Here is just a small sample of how corporate media is talking about this.
From the Financial Times, February 6th.
Strong men celebrate as Trump aid-freeze hits media.
For years, strong men, including Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, have sought to crack down on their countries.
Independent news outlets, many supported by USAID grants.
All right, I just, I got to stop there again.
It is unbelievable.
How do these people not realize what they're saying?
It is so blatantly ridiculous, so blatantly false and internally contradictory.
You have these strong men, the bad guys, Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin.
And because they're so tyrannical, You know what they've been doing?
They've been seeking to crack down on their country's independent news outlets.
That's really terrible.
What kind of tyrant would want to crack down on independent news media outlets?
And you know what they mean, Financial Times, by independent news media outlets?
What they mean are outlets inside Hungary and Russia that are supported by U.S. aid grants.
We just had a whole political event where we decided we wanted to shut down one of the most significant and popular and widely used social media apps because it was subject to control by the Chinese, TikTok.
And now we turn around and we say that media outlets inside Russia and Hungary that are funded by the U.S. government Are independent media outlets?
And the proof of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban's tyranny is that they want to crack down on the independent media outlets funded by the U.S. government?
It goes on.
Now many of these media organizations are struggling to stay afloat.
After Musk announced plans to put the $40 billion U.S. aid quote into the woodchopper, With most of the organization's 10,000 employees placed on leave and a three-month freeze imposed on spending.
The deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, who served as Prime Minister and President of Russia in rotation with Putin, praised Musk's, quote, smart move to plug U.S. aid's deep throat.
Balaz Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister's political director, described the freeze as, quote, refreshing.
In Latin America, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele welcomed the freeze, claiming that just 10% of the U.S. aid money, quote, reaches real projects that help people in need, while the rest, quote, is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a leftist, former guerrilla group member on Tuesday, said that U.S. aid funding was, quote, poison.
And that the South American country should finance its own government programs.
Isn't it a little bit odd that the advocates of this program of the USA keep portraying it as so benevolent, as so helpful, as so compassionate, as just trying to help the neediest people in these countries, and yet...
These governments on the left and the right throughout the world are saying it's not what these programs do.
That's not what they're designed to do.
The vast majority of them are designed to sow dissent and subvert our countries for the benefit of the US security state.
Which ought to be extremely obvious that that's of course what they're intended to do and they're creating resentment not gratitude all around the world.
Part of the, quote, independent media in Ukraine that USAID has been funding, in fact, multiple outlets, have been attacking American citizens.
So the American government pays these independent media outlets in Ukraine, and they then turn around and attack American journalists and American citizens for exercising our constitutional rights to question our government's policies in Ukraine.
I can't tell you how many List I've been put on by these independent Ukrainian media outlets and Ukrainian intelligence of being a Russian propagandist, part of the network of Kremlin propaganda, because I've questioned the NATO narrative about Ukraine or the U.S. arguments about why we need to be in Ukraine.
It turns out the U.S. government is funding these independent media outlets in Ukraine to do exactly that.
One of them, Vox Ukraine, here in February of 2024, and I could...
I'll show you so many examples.
This is just one randomly chosen one that's illustrative.
The title of the article was The Network of Russian Propaganda.
What connects Western, quote, experts promoting narratives beneficial to Russia?
Quote, most of the, quote, experts we have analyzed have their own YouTube channels or blogs on other platforms.
One of the most well-known is Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has his own show on Twitter.
Among the guests of Fox News, Ex-educator.
It's worth noting journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Like Carlson, he has a loyal audience that believes and trusts his opinions.
At one time, Greenwald wrote articles for The Guardian and has received several awards, particularly for journalistic investigations.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, he states that, quote, at the end, there's going to be a negotiation that says that Russia will end up being able to protect the part of eastern Ukraine, it believes, has people in it who are largely Russian, Russian-speaking, ethnic Russian, who are being oppressed by Kiev, and they will keep Crimea.
I'm so happy that they quoted me in my prediction.
I think it was a year and a half or two years ago whenever Tucker was on Fox because that's exactly what's going to happen.
And yet they had this whole graphic in this article of all the quote-unquote Russian propagandists, including me and Tucker and John Mearsheimer, and just all the people that you would expect there.
And the U.S. government is funding attacks on its own citizens, on its own journalists, for the crime of dissent.
That's what USAID is.
I just gave you a bunch of countries on the left and the right that despise USAID, that understand exactly what the purposes are to subvert their own governments, to spread dissent.
USAID has been expelled from many countries, including Bolivia with a left-wing government and Putin in Russia and Ecuador and many others.
In the wake of The controversy generated by this transparency that is finally being brought to this part of the U.S. security state.
Here on a right-wing Indian news outlet today, Arnab Goswani, the popular host of this program on Republic, spent about seven minutes ranting about the evils and deceitful Subversions of U.S. aid in every country, including India.
We're just going to show you the first two minutes of it or so, just to give you a sense for how often so many people throughout the rest of the world understand what the U.S. government is doing in a way that is kept from American citizens.
Here's what he has to say.
Good evening and welcome, ladies and gentlemen.
Anyone who knows the way Americans operate Or the way that American companies operate, or the way that American government operates, or the way that American society operates overall, would know very well that that old saying that there is no free lunch applies very well to them.
If it comes to dealing with an American, and with the greatest of respect to Americans, there is no free lunch.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is going to America soon and he'll be meeting Donald Trump.
And I'm sure that the government of India and the government of the US sitting together would be absolutely sure that neither side would be expecting a free lunch from the other side.
And that is the way it should be.
There should be no leverage.
There should be no element of dependency.
There should be no attempt at intrusion.
There should be no attempt at interference.
And there should be no way in which any foreign organization...
Can't have any unnecessary influence in our affairs.
And that is why I find it very disconcerting when there have been so many reports of late that USAID, an organization called USAID, with clear links to American deep states,
intelligence agencies, maybe CIA, State Department, their foreign policy interests, That USAID has already penetrated India through some Indian organizations, Indian outfits, some Indian journalists.
Some Indian journalists, mind you, have been very, very welcoming of U.S. aid.
And U.S. aid, which is the same organization that carried out the regime change operation in Bangladesh.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, many months back when I was saying and screaming from the rooftops, put out videos saying, it is the deep state, it is the deep state, it is the deep state that is carried out.
It really does amaze me sometimes how people on the other side of the world have such a better understanding of what the U.S. government is, of how it functions, of the seat that it spreads and upon which it relies than people who live in the United States, primarily because our media is designed to serve the U.S. government and disseminate its propaganda, principally deceive the foreign population.
And that's why there are so many countries where this recognition is so clear and so prevalent, whereas it took Elon Musk and his Doge team with the authorization of Donald Trump to go into these buildings whereas it took Elon Musk and his Doge team with the authorization of Donald Trump to go into these buildings and into these agencies where they were physically resisted to expose all of this while the Democratic Party acted
our country for the American people to learn about what the real function of these institutions are.
And so, as I said, there's a lot going on in the Trump administration, much of which I find concerning.
At the top of that list, I put the obsession that the Trump administration has on serving the interests of Israel and playing with fire in the Middle East in so many different ways, which I'm sure we'll cover tomorrow and we've covered many times before.
I also have concerns about the closing of this Consumer Protection Bureau that we're about to talk to Matt Stoller about in just a little bit, so I want to make very clear that...
My praise of this part of what the Trump administration is doing is by no means an endorsement of everything they're doing.
It would be bizarre if I endorsed everything that an administration is doing, given how many things an administration does, especially this one.
But in this particular case, this is a major public service.
It's a service journalistically.
It's a service democratically.
And it will finally enable a real discussion of how much money we spend to interfere in the Affairs of other countries, particularly given how 2016 we were all drowned with the propaganda that we don't do that.
It's Russia who interferes in our sacred democracy in a way that's unheard of and unprecedented and outrageous and a violation of all norms.
When you have USAID all over Russia, all over Ukraine, all over that entire region doing a lot more than sponsoring some...
Disguise Facebook posts or Twitter bots, the kind of things the Russians were accused of doing in 2016. So we will continue to cover the real function of USAID, its relationship to the rest of the security state because it has major implications, almost all of them negative, for not just the countries in which we're operating, but in the United States as well.
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Speaking of the free speech cause of rumble, as most of you undoubtedly know because we've covered it so frequently, rumble and therefore this program is unavailable rumble and therefore this program is unavailable in several countries, one of which is the country of France, the other of which is the country of Brazil.
where we happen to be based.
The reason rumble is unavailable in France is because France ordered rumble to cease platforming Russian state media such as RT and Sputnik and Rumpel said to the French government, we're not going to follow your orders about which media outlets we are and aren't allowed to platform.
If adults want to listen to Russian state media, we're going to allow them to do so.
In contrast, YouTube immediately obeyed and pulled those down.
And then so France said, if you don't obey our orders, we're going to make you unavailable in France.
And ever since, Rumble has been unavailable in France.
I was amazed.
I was in France, I think last year, maybe the year before, the last year, I believe.
And I had forgotten about this, and I went to go look at something on my show on Rumble, and I got a message saying, Rumble is unavailable in France for that reason.
Other country in which Rumble is unavailable, and there's several, is Brazil.
And the reason for that is because, as we've documented many times, Brazil has adopted one of the most aggressive censorship regimes on the planet, or at least in the democratic world.
And every day, practically, Rumble was receiving orders from the Brazilian Supreme Court, from one judge in particular, Alexandre de Reis, ordering the removal of videos, but particularly the banning of all sorts of...
Users, including many of the most popular elected officials in Brazil, Brazilian journalists, Brazilian activists, and Rumble got to the point where they said, we're not going to collaborate with this any longer.
That was the same conclusion Elon Musk and X reached.
That's what got them banned from Brazil.
Eventually, for a variety of complicated reasons, X capitulated and they were able to get back into Brazil after A year, but Rumble never did.
It stayed out of Brazil.
It's been unavailable in Brazil for about a year and a half now.
And that all changed today.
Here you see from Folio São Paulo, the largest newspaper in Brazil.
Just full disclosure, the newspaper with which I work.
I'm a columnist there.
I do reporting there sometimes.
And there you see the headline that we've translated from Portuguese to English.
The conservative platform, not exactly a...
Accurate description of Rumble, but whatever.
Returns to Brazil and Eduardo Bolsonaro shares Alan DeSantis' program.
Quote, Rumble's CEO had announced at the end of 2023 the deactivation of the service in the country, citing profile suspension orders as a reason.
Now, why did Rumble now get back to Brazil?
Why are they now able to operate in Brazil?
One reason is there's a lot of pressure now on Brazil, and particularly on this judge, because of the election of Donald Trump and the emergence of Elon Musk inside the government, because when X originally announced it would no longer obey these censorship orders, it created a massive war between X on the one hand and this judge on the other.
And it got to the point where Elon Musk even said to this judge, Alexandre de Mares, he posted a...
A graphic of him in prison and said, mark my words, one day you're going to be in prison.
And he called him a dictator and called him for him to resign and accused him of all sorts of crimes.
That judge eventually banned X from all of Brazil.
And as I said, it wasn't until X capitulated and said we will obey these censorship orders did they get back on.
But obviously Elon Musk has not forgotten about this.
And the largest news weekly, kind of the Time Magazine of Brazil, Veja, reported today in the title that Lula's advisors, the president of Brazil, Lula, his advisors, have warned this judge, Alexandre de Mareche, that if he's planning any trips to the United States, he should reevaluate them.
Telling him, quote, any federal judge can have him arrested if he steps there.
They want to take revenge on Moraes, says an advisor to Lula.
Now, nobody in the United States government has said anything like that.
Neither Elon Musk nor Donald Trump nor anyone in the government has even hinted that they intend to arrest Alexander de Moraes if he intends to come to the United States.
It could just be a kind of hysteria that Lula's advisors have based on a caricature of Trump and Elon Musk.
But the fact is that on some level, I believe it's always healthy when people in power have some sort of fear of the consequences of abuse of power.
And this judge up until now has had none.
And if this is in his head, which I'm sure it is, then that can only be a good thing.
But it's not just Trump's re-election.
There is also now a serious investigation by the Organization of American States, which is an organization of Latin American countries, investigating whether Brazil has been assaulting freedom of expression.
It's actually countries in America, Organization of American States, including the United States and others, where they're now in Brazil.
Formally investigating whether the Supreme Court has been violating the free speech rights of Brazilians, which undoubtedly they have.
And there you see on the screen the arrival of the OAS investigators in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.
And there you see the SDF building, which is the Supreme Court building.
And there is a video, I believe, we have of them as well, meeting with the president of the Supreme Court in Brazil, as well as this particular judge, Alexandre de Moraes, of the pressure.
There you see Reis sitting there.
He's the bald one.
And there's the president of the Brazilian Supreme Court meeting with the USA investigators.
So you have this kind of confluence now of pressures on Reis to stop censorship orders.
And within the last two weeks, he has retracted some of the most controversial ones, including an order that required Rumble to ban a very popular podcaster in Brazil.
Whom Rumble had hired and then shortly after the Supreme Court ordered Rumble to ban him and he is now back on the internet.
Other targets of the censorship regime have been back on the internet and so Rumble announced as a result that it was now returning to Brazil.
There you see the headlines from Le Monde.
Announcing this return back to Brazil.
Rumble, an unmoderated video platform, is blocked in France, according to Le Mans, but it is now returning to Brazil.
So it's very unusual to have a kind of reversal of censorship powers because once countries get their hands on censorship powers, it's very inebriating and intoxicating to have the power to decide who can and cannot be heard.
But there's also a lot of pushback possible in the fact that Trump has been elected and has been, obviously, there's an expectation that he will be at least somewhat adversarial to the government of Brazil.
And the fact that Elon Musk is playing a major role in the Trump administration, had a war with his judge.
There's no AS investigation.
The judge just reversed a lot of the censorship orders, has signaled to Rumble that at least for now it can return to Brazil.
The fact that it wasn't available in Brazil.
Is a very powerful indictment of the state of free speech in Brazil.
Hopefully this signals the restoration of some free speech rights in Brazil.
And as I've said before, one of the things that's happening in the democratic world is that each country is going a little bit further and a little bit further.
And each time they do, that signals to other countries that they can go further, too.
It was not a coincidence that Brazil banned acts from Twitter, which had been considered a...
Inconceivably extreme measure, just days after France arrested Pavel Durov in Paris, the founder of Telegram, because he had refused to turn over user data and obey censorship orders from France, which sent a signal to Brazil that they could even go further, and that has been what's happening.
The reversal of these trends is something that, from a free speech perspective, is certainly something to be celebrated.
I'm thrilled that Rumble is now back in Brazil.
I think they deserve immense credit for their, obviously, principled stand, where they've said, we would rather sacrifice our own corporate self-interest, our ability to access markets, if it means we have to violate our principles about what we believe the supreme value of free speech on the internet is,
and hopefully that will Be rewarded in a way that rewards not only Rumble, but all citizens who ought to be able to use the internet freely to express the political opinions that they believe in without being punished for it or censored for it by centralized governments.
All right, Matt Stoller is a friend of the show, a friend of me, a friend of so many different people.
He's also an expert in so many things.
He's the Economic Liberties Institute scholar.
He is the author of one of the books that I think has been the most important on antitrust and big tech, called Goliath, The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly, Power, and Democracy.
He's also spent a lot of time being very critical of the U.S. government's lack of response to the 2008 financial crisis.
And one of those very few responses, which is the Consumer Protection Bureau that was originally Elizabeth Warren's idea and was created by the Congress in 2010, is now under attack by Elon Musk and his Doge team.
We just spent a lot of time talking about the attacks on USAID in a way that I think is very beneficial.
This one, though, is a lot more questionable, to put it mildly, and Matt is here to make the argument about why we should all consider this, especially people who have identified as part of the MAGA movement, as something that is quite lamentable.
Matt, it's great to see you.
Thank you for joining us.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Yeah, so for those who aren't familiar with this Consumer Protection Bureau, talk about the circumstances that led to its creation.
Right.
Well, there was a financial crisis.
I don't know if people remember, but it's a thing that happened in 2007, 8, 9, 10. Lots of foreclosures, lots of terrible things that happened to the global economy really set the stage for the rise of Trump and populism all over the world.
And the response by the Obama administration and the Democrats and then the Bush Republicans as well was massive, but it was to bail out the banks and really screw everyone else.
One piece, right, there was a discussion within the Democratic Party about what to do, and Obama was pushing really, really hard to just bail out the banks and then let them do anything they wanted.
And Elizabeth Warren, who a lot of conservatives don't like, but she's very good on this question, said, you know what, we should at least have a bureau or a regulator that enforces laws against...
Various forms of fraud and deception, which in part led to the financial crisis.
So the big piece was, you know, there was a ton of mortgage fraud.
And that's what the CFPB was set up to do.
And the CFPB has existed since 2010. And, you know, sometimes it's been more aggressive.
Sometimes it's been less aggressive.
It was particularly aggressive under the Biden administration, really, as the cop going after.
Companies that, and big companies mostly, that cheat consumers.
And it's very popular, except in Washington, D.C., among lobbyists, really on both sides of the aisle, who really like being able to cheat consumers.
And yeah, so there's, you know, the Trump administration is a coalition of many different parts.
You have mega populists.
You have new right people.
But you also have traditional George W. Bush conservatives.
And you have really a lot of new influence from Silicon Valley Titans.
And for their own reasons, you know, the George Bush Republicans and the Silicon Valley Titans have aligned to get rid of the CFPB. And it's largely because they are invested in companies that are supervised by the CFPB. And when those companies end up cheating people or scamming people or costing people their life savings, the CFPB has been active.
One of the areas on which I've been focused for quite some time, as I think you know, is this intersection or even kind of merger of what we might call just for shorthand right-wing populism and left-wing populism.
And I think one of the very first times I noticed it was in the wake of the...
Bank bailouts, where you had enormous numbers of Republicans enraged by the idea of bank bailouts.
In fact, huge numbers of them tanked it and voted against it the first time it was voted upon, even though that was still the Bush administration.
Hank Geithner, the Treasury Secretary who had been at Goldman Sachs, who was sponsoring it.
But you also had a lot of Democrats who were populist who were enraged by it as well.
And you couldn't even get a majority in Congress because both Democrats and Republicans in large numbers were opposed to it.
But then you also have these populist movements, Occupy Wall Street, a response clearly to the bailouts on the left.
But also the Tea Party movement, though it began with that Rick Santelli rant about taxation.
Turned more into a libertarian kind of movement where people were primarily motivated by the same exact anger about bank bailouts as you saw on the left.
And I think one of the things that showed is that there was a perception across the spectrum, just from ordinary Americans, that we had gotten to a point in our country where massive financial institutions, massive corporations had centralized so much power because of their control over Washington.
That ordinary Americans just had no chance anymore, no voice any longer.
And this agency, which is quite modest in terms of its budget and even in terms of its power, seems like it's the kind of thing that would appeal to that sentiment, which I think has even grown, this kind of left-right sentiment against unrestrained corporate power at the expense of ordinary Americans.
Why then does there seem to be, in your view, so little noise about the fact that Elon Musk is attacking it on the right?
Well, I think it's because, you know, people really don't—the conservative movement, and I have a lot of conservative friends and we've spent a lot of time talking about corporate power.
You know, the conservatives are rethinking their approach to— I mean, that's why, you know, Trump is not or didn't come out of the Republican establishment.
And that rethinking takes time.
That's sort of the charitable way to put it.
And, you know, you've seen really substantial advances in areas like antitrust, right?
You know, the conservatives have brought cases against Google, against Facebook.
It seems like the Trump administration is going to keep...
Keep engaging on consolidated corporate power around big tech in its early days.
But on banking, that rethinking just hasn't happened sufficiently.
What the CFPB really does is it does things like...
Medical debt that people get that they can't pay back.
There's a lot of evidence that that doesn't impact their ability to pay back other loans.
The CFPB said that most of that medical debt just can't go on your credit record, right?
Because they enforce the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Or things like, you know, a lot of workers are now subject to advance payments.
From their employers that are loans and the terms are not always clearly disguised and the loans can be, you know, at 100%, 200%, something like that.
The CFPB says, no, you have to clearly disclose the terms of the loans to your employees.
Otherwise, it's a kind of company sore type of dynamic.
There's a lot of cheating that's going on in our economy.
There's a lot of fraud.
And the CFPB really steps in to address that around things like debt collection or even times when banks won't do things like show you how much money you have in your account and they'll charge you a fee for it.
Or they'll do tricks to charge people more, particularly low income people, more overdraft fees than is reasonable.
So the CFPB is really a cop on the beat.
But I think the argument that Elon Musk has made It's compelling if you don't, you know, a lot of conservatives have actually had positive experiences with the CFPB, but that's not a majority.
And if you haven't had...
You know, experiences being hassled by your financial institution than having somebody help you.
You are prone to believe that an Elizabeth Warren-created agency that was working aggressively under the Biden administration is lawless and out of control and doing mean things to conservatives.
And that's the kind of thing that Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and the CEO of Coinbase, I think Brian Anderson, something like that.
Armstrong, yeah.
That's what they're all saying.
And, you know, they're particularly making the claim that conservatives are losing their bank accounts because regulators are telling bankers don't don't give bank accounts to conservatives.
Right.
And that's and they're saying that's because of Elizabeth Warren's agency.
And Mark Mark Zuckerberg is saying, you know, these guys are out of control.
I don't I don't even know what they're doing, why they're doing.
He went on Joe Rogan.
He's like, we're not a bank.
You know, why would you ever?
You know, that's crazy for them to look at us.
But, you know, a couple of years ago, under the Trump administration, Facebook tried to start their own currency.
I don't know if people remember that.
It was a big thing.
And they are a payment network.
And these guys, you know, Marc Andreessen and Brian Armstrong— Well, and that's part of what Elon Musk's vision for X is as well, is a centralized, you know, banking and payment system.
Exactly.
And he got his start with PayPal.
These guys understand that the CFPB, you know, they don't want somebody to say, you know, like, you're not allowed to facilitate fraud.
And a lot of the major banks have done that.
Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs and so on and so forth.
And the CFPB has stopped them.
And the CFPB has also said to big tech companies.
If you're going to act like a bank as a payment network, which they're all doing, then we're going to supervise and regulate you like a bank.
And they don't like that.
Now, in terms of the debanking problem, the irony here is that the director of the CFPB, Rohit Chopra, under Biden, put forward a rule.
He's been one of the thought leaders in putting forth a regulation saying that banks are not allowed to discriminate against Customers based on their race or religion or political views or anything else, except if they're doing unlawful behavior.
But you're not allowed to discriminate.
And he put forward a rule and that rule was about to go into effect.
And what the Trump administration has just done when they said we're We're basically going to—we ordered the CFPB to stop all investigations, to stop all rulemaking, to stop everything they're doing.
They shut the headquarters down.
They're basically going to turn the lights out.
They stopped that debanking rule from going into effect.
And, you know, you're not going to hear from Marc Andreessen that the company or that the institution that is busting his companies that are cheating from people is a reasonable institution.
You're going to hear— Mark Andreessen going on Joe Rogan and saying, oh, the CFPB is lawless and out of control and so on and so forth.
But I think it's really important for the MAGA movement to not fall into the trap that a lot of Democrats fell into under Obama and to get...
Fooled by the Wall Street big tech parts of their coalition into supporting things that are bad for Americans and that are, frankly, very popular.
It's bad politics.
And I hope there's some recognition from the MAGA movement that they, for their own political salience and for building a better society and actually retaining power over the long term, that they don't Yeah,
you know, I know you've taken a lot of heat in the past for defending certain parts of what Josh Hawley I don't know.
A few months ago, by accident, I found Josh Hawley's YouTube channel where there's dedicated YouTube channels to Josh Hawley.
And pretty much every day, Josh Hawley spends his time as a senator going to committee hearings where CEOs of major corporations, the companies that American consumers hate because they just get run roughshod over, you know, airlines, industries with their hidden fees, and they're completely irrational and unpredictable.
Yeah, credit card companies.
Yeah, and he just every day is bashing them, you know, as though he's Ralph Nader, you know, like the most anti-corporate rhetoric you could possibly expect to hear from a politician, let alone one in the Republican Party.
He's now working with Bernie Sanders to cap.
Credit card fees of the kind that, you know, was heresy in the Republican Party for so long.
And, you know, that J.D. Vance was part of that same movement, Matt Gaetz was, this certain kind of populist, economic populist strain in the Republican Party that is very real, though not quite dominant.
And I think they realize what you're saying, that if they risk becoming what the Democratic Party has been perceived to be, which is the Party of the corporate establishment, they're going to end up paying a big price for that.
And I think the reason is, you know, this is one area.
I really want to kind of understand this.
It's one area where it's so easy to understand because we all have these experiences.
You know, just like two months ago, out of nowhere, PayPal closed my account that I've been using for five years.
They close your account.
They give you no appeal process.
They tell you whatever.
Money you have in the account, whatever Bitcoin you bought, whatever money you have, they freeze for 180 days, six months.
And there's no due process.
There's no recourse.
Obviously, when you fly, you're subject to just whatever whimsical decisions they decide to make with no recourse at all.
Everybody has these experiences of dealing with these massive corporate conglomerates that Really do create this sensation of repression where they're controlling your lives, they're impeding your lives, and you have no rights whatsoever.
Why would the Republican Party be so willing to sacrifice that kind of sentiment that they've been successfully exploiting?
Is it just because there's some newly arrived, very wealthy...
People from big tech who became MAGA converters over the last six months when they saw Trump would win who are now just dominating the party?
Or is there something else going on there?
Well, I think it's a number of things.
Certainly there are powerful interests on the Republican side that like this kind of activity or that own these companies or that work for these companies.
But I think a lot of it is that Republicans, you know, who come out of the George Bush era, it's not a completely reformed party, there's a lot of confusion about the nature of what a corporation is.
And so a corporation, you know, a lot of people think of a corporation as, you know, a lemonade stand or a store or a manufacturing plant.
And if you don't like what they are selling or doing, you just go to someone else.
But the kind of company that you're talking about, the giant bank that has huge power over you, the payment utility, which is what PayPal is, the dominant airlines, the only one that flies from your city or on the route that you need, these are almost private governments.
They're not just like businesses.
They're not a lemonade stand.
It's a company that is so powerful that it can dictate the terms by which you live your life in that particular...
And that's a real problem.
And I think you've seen Republicans see that when they saw Trump get deplatformed.
They saw debanking.
They've seen a number of things happening where vital services have been denied them.
This happens to lots of people.
It doesn't just happen to conservatives.
But I think they're having trouble transitioning from these are private businesses to we need to rethink the nature of the private public.
And then when you have powerful people like Elon Musk, who seems very appealing, and you have this old traditional Republican orthodoxy, we fear big government, which is legitimate to be skeptical of big government, because in many cases these companies are fused with big government.
But it's very hard to think of a new framework for saying, look, we have rights as citizens, not just against the government, but against these private governments, and we're going to need mechanisms to To make those rights happen.
And I think that the Republican Party, the MAGA movement, is sort of caught in the middle of those.
It's very similar.
It's a different flavor, but it's similar to the way where Democrats were in some ways.
It's just where America is right now, where we're very confused because we have a political order that feels out of touch.
Feels like we're ruled by distant masters and those distant masters aren't just in government.
They're not just in corporate America.
They're not just in universities.
It's a kind of network of all of them together and we don't...
I don't quite have a means to address it, but there are senators like Josh Hawley, who has been super aggressive, and Elizabeth Warren, who has been super aggressive, and Bernie Sanders, who has been super aggressive.
And there are more on both sides of the aisle, more of them on the Democratic side than the Republican side, but there's learning going on in both parties.
This is the last question.
One of the things that really fascinated me, and I think even I would say surprised me about that whole mini civil war that erupted within the MAGA movement prior to inauguration of that H-1B visas where Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and all of these big finance people were saying, you know, we need H-1B visas because they're crucial to our ability to thrive and compete.
And you had all these MAGA people saying, we don't care about your bottom line.
We don't care about your corporate.
Profits.
That's not what the MAGA movement is about.
We care about American workers in a way that had a very kind of left-wing ethos to it from decades ago, which is pitting the interests of America's wealthiest and most You know powerful corporations against the interests of the American worker and Ronald Reagan was able to bridge that by saying oh no if you cheer for American corporate power and American profit you know
the rising tide lifts all boats and the American worker will also benefit and so for a while those kind of differences were papered over through that very clever framework but people have come to realize especially with the 2008 financial crisis but other ways as well that That doesn't happen.
The gap is growing bigger and the MAGA movement, a lot of them have been aware of it and they seemed surprisingly combative about that.
And then at the end of the day, Trump intervened pretty much on the side of Elon Musk and the corporations and said, no, we want H-1B visas.
Do you think that kind of defanged or...
Made it a lot more difficult for that part of MAGA, the more populous part, to have the confidence to take on the large financial interests that have sort of commandeered the MAGA movement for their own interests?
I do.
You know, Steve Bannon talks about this.
So he talked about H-1B, said very pungent things about Elon Musk.
He actually said— That he's a neo-Brandeisian on antitrust and likes Lena Kahn and thinks she should have more power.
He's really straightforward about what's going on.
But what I'll say, as somebody who, populist Democrat, and I watch my party get completely destroyed and lose not only, I think, elections, which is, you know, that comes and goes, but a kind of moral center, right?
There's a lack of confidence.
Among Democrats about our ability to even say anything meaningful, because we don't know what we believe.
And it's really quite catastrophic and demoralizing.
I have to say, I am, you know, I am worried.
And I think the MAGA movement is going that direction, because I know conservatives who know that shutting down the CFPB or taking a position of H-1B visas, which is really not just a problem of immigration, it's just...
Basically indentured servitude.
I've seen other policies on certain trade policies where Trump has moved in one direction and then reversed it in a destructive way.
This is dangerous, right?
I saw what happened with Democrats.
It was impossible to stand up to a very charismatic leader, especially in the first couple of weeks or the first three or four months when Obama came in and he had huge power to reorganize the economy and he moved the money and power towards big banks and big tech firms and big business.
And there were Democrats, even the populist ones, were afraid to say anything.
And look where that got them.
And I think there's something very similar now happening with MAGA people.
They just are afraid to say that Trump is taking them in these particular areas.
I don't mean to characterize it all.
I think there's many things that Trump are doing, and I'm sure people are very happy with a lot of what he's doing.
But in these particular areas, in the fight between sort of Wall Street and big financial interests and ordinary people, In a lot of cases, Trump is really going the wrong way.
And what I'm seeing is, like Democrats did in 2009 by cheering Obama as he took us off a cliff, that is what I see MAGA people doing.
And that is ultimately a disservice to Trump, who needs to be brought back and remember why he got elected.
Yeah, I mean, on the one hand you wonder there's this honeymoon period, there's kind of this high.
Trump has done a lot of things that have excited the MAGA base that is very aligned with what they want in many different ways and you wonder if they're getting carried away with that and eventually they'll kind of sober up and start to focus on some of these things.
But as you say, the problem is that once you just kind of...
Adopt the posture that you're going to just go along with everything because you're overall more or less happy with the way things are going and you're afraid of getting expelled from the halls of power if you become a dissident on anything significant.
The entire project can be easily...
Corrupted and commandeered in exactly the way that you just described, I think, quite accurately what happened with the Democrats and whatever populism existed around the time of Obama, especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that got completely misdirected.
All right, Matt, great conversation.
It was super helpful for me to think through these questions that I wasn't entirely sure.
How I thought about this really was helpful, so I appreciate your taking the time, and you're always welcome.
