USAID, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is a $40 billion agency that funds more than 160 humanitarian and development projects around the world. It's run by the Department of State, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, and the Environmental Protection Agency, but it doesn't get much bigger than that.
00:03:03.740War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
00:03:07.180It's Monday, 3 February, year of our Lord, 2025. We've got so much to go through as the deconstruction
00:03:18.220of the administrative state and the destruction of the deep state continues unabated in days of
00:03:25.980thunder. Michael Benz joins us. Michael, we're going to start with USAID because, and remember,
00:03:32.220Eli Crane just sent me the video from a year ago. Murray did those all-night appropriations
00:03:37.020fights. Eli Crane and Matt Gaetz remind me that they tried to defund USAID and they got less than
00:03:44.38050% of the House votes, less than 50% of the House votes. This is how feckless House Republicans are.
00:03:51.900Michael Benz, Mike Benz, is USAID just, it just funds 160 humanitarian institutions to do humanitarian
00:04:03.260and development projects for the good people of the United States of America? Is that its task and
00:04:07.340purpose, sir? No, it's not even allowed to do that. It's a U.S. foreign policy vehicle. You have to
00:04:13.980understand everything USAID does by charter is dual use. Under the cover of humanitarian work,
00:04:23.180they so-called advance U.S. national interests by accomplishing some goal in the region. Now,
00:04:30.140they don't actually accomplish U.S. national interest in the region. What they do is they accomplish
00:04:35.100the commercial or political goals of a very small secular elite within the United States and their
00:04:41.100international partners. So, for example, I've published about hundreds of different USAID scandals
00:04:47.820from them claiming to run AIDS prevention clinics in Cuba and all over South America. And it turns out
00:04:58.700that the AIDS prevention clinics were actually covers for undercover agents to sow anti-government
00:05:08.540dissent and to try to organize a revolution in the country. You had the case of Zunzuniyo where USAID
00:05:17.500took humanitarian funds earmarked for Pakistan and created a fake knockoff Twitter social media site
00:05:23.980where USAID documents explicitly stated in their own internal documents that the plan was to get 100,000
00:05:31.020people in the country to join up to the social media service, luring them in with news feeds predominated
00:05:38.300by sports news and hurricane updates. And then at the appropriate moment, once enough people were
00:05:43.420onboarded to hit them with messages to overthrow their government and take to the streets in smart mobs.
00:05:49.660You see this time and time again. You will see all over the news and all over these USAID HQ protests
00:05:58.620today and all over X from the intelligence community and military and statecraft blob folks, you will see
00:06:05.260them say, but USAID is funding irrigation canals. And if they are doing irrigation canal work, it is because
00:06:14.380they are trying to control the river systems in the country in Ethiopia, or for example, when they were
00:06:19.740irrigating the, the, uh, uh, the fields in Afghanistan. Well, guess what they were doing there. They were
00:06:25.980growing the heroin supply as the, as their companion, the U S Institute for peace, uh, was, was lobbying the
00:06:34.380Taliban that, uh, to keep the, the heroin supplies flowing because it would, it would be bad for Afghanistan
00:06:42.860and the world. If they shut down the poppy crops, USAID was funding, you know, the irrigation of the, uh,
00:06:50.300of those crops in order to keep the supply of heroin flowing. You see this time and time again,
00:06:56.620if they are doing famine relief projects, it is to control the food supply and therefore control the
00:07:02.700population and, and, and supplement that with sanctions work to make people angry against their
00:07:07.820government or dependent on the U S to dole out that food. Then, you know, and take, for example, the job
00:07:14.460fairs. I just posted this just yesterday. And I've, I've talked about this many times in the past three
00:07:19.260years, Mark Milley and Joe Biden in 2021, in their special forces prospectus game planned, how USAID could
00:07:26.220do job fairs in poor countries in order to get people to take to the streets and riot and go on strike from their
00:07:35.660jobs. And, and so that it would help us military operations by having USA, give free, no show jobs
00:07:42.940to Africans striking in race riots in Africa in order to, uh, to basically, you know, so it's a
00:07:51.020humanitarian job fair, but no, it's actually not. It's actually serving the dual purpose of rent to
00:07:56.460riots being organized by USAID. So USAID is just, is just a mutant baby of the CIA and the state department.
00:08:05.180With, with a little top up support to the U S military. And I could go on and on about this,
00:08:10.460but there's, there's a lot, there's a lot of moving pieces to this story, but I want to, I want to,
00:08:15.260I want to make sure it's a cutout for the CIA, whatever the CIA wants to do with cover from the
00:08:21.100state department. This is what they're doing. It's, it's these types of projects, right?
00:08:26.100Yes. That's why you see this money laundering operation out of there. They have a bigger budget
00:08:30.940than the CIA. The entire intelligence community combined is a 70, $72 billion budget. And as you
00:08:36.700know, so the thing is, is you park operations out. I'll give you a great, a great quote. For example,
00:08:43.900when USAID got busted, uh, running regime change work in South America by arguing that, uh, by using,
00:08:52.060uh, AIDS prevention, HIV prevention clinics, the USAID internal documents said that those HIV
00:08:58.300prevention clinics would be quote, the perfect cover because counterintelligence, those countries
00:09:03.260would never look at an, at an AIDS prevention clinic, uh, HIV prevention clinic, uh, as, as a,
00:09:09.020as a warehousing shop for, uh, for intelligence organizing activity. That's so what happened is,
00:09:16.060is when the CIA got in trouble in the 1960s and seventies, they needed an, uh, an ever deeper layer
00:09:22.700of plausible deniability for the dirty work. The CIA was only created because the state department
00:09:26.860wanted to do the dirty work, but couldn't afford to get caught with, with us government fingerprints
00:09:31.420on it. So they created a spy agency that, that did work claiming not to represent the us government
00:09:37.340to do it. And then CIA started getting in trouble. And so USAID started taking over their business.
00:09:43.260And, uh, and they do that in tandem with this group, the national endowment for democracy. They are,
00:09:47.900you know, kissing cousins. They always move together and all things. Uh, but, but the, but we,
00:09:52.380this is a, this is a huge, huge, huge, massive fundamental restructuring of the American empire
00:09:59.020that we're watching play out before our eyes. But there are many ways that just like with Brexit,
00:10:03.900where there was this big, you know, big referendum, a huge victory that Nigel Farage scored in June,
00:10:10.1402016, but they ultimately ended up stymieing the, the, the purpose of Brexit in many respects through the
00:10:16.780long marathon of layers of fights and implementing it afterwards. And, and assuming that we are able
00:10:23.500actually to shut down USAID, which is powerful symbolically on its own and, and sends a very
00:10:29.260powerful message. But in terms of how it will change things on the ground, that remains to be seen
00:10:34.060because this, because the plan right now is to merge it into the state department. Well, guess what?
00:10:38.940That just gives the state department a USAID herpes infection, unless the actual underlying
00:10:45.420operations are cut. Why is it bad? Why, why is it bad to have the, your central intelligence that
00:10:53.260you're a hegemon, you're trying to keep the post-war international rules-based order going.
00:10:59.820You're trying to limit battlefield, uh, battlefield casualties. So the best way to do it is make sure
00:11:04.620that everybody's on the take throughout the war. Everybody's got a little piece of the action,
00:11:08.300brother Benz. Why is it a bad thing to have something like the USA? The sounds on the surface
00:11:13.340of, you just saw the big crocodile tears are crying on MSNBC. It's for humanitarian projects.
00:11:19.180It's for development projects is to help bring water to the village. And that's a pretty good cover.
00:11:25.180Why is USA, why did we, why did we rip the mask off and say it's a CIA? And what, what is the advantage
00:11:31.260to the American people? You mentioned that he gave the money to a same sort of folks throughout the world.
00:11:36.860Who are those folks? And why is it advantage to the populist nationalist movement in the,
00:11:41.820in the American working man and woman to basically rip the mask off, face what it is, and then shut it
00:11:47.820down, sir? Well, this is a very, very complicated question. And I really hope that Trump world foreign
00:11:53.820policy folks understand the open heart surgery they're conducting on the way our foreign policy
00:12:00.700operates around the world. And in terms of why it's a bad thing that USA does what it does.
00:12:06.780This is one of these questions that, you know, I've, I've known and followed this, this stuff for
00:12:11.820many years, but I never made a crusade about taking it on until USA got in the business of censoring the
00:12:17.820internet. And at that point in censoring Americans on, on the American internet and censoring American
00:12:23.260social media companies as a foreign facing humanitarian, uh, NGO sponsor, uh, you know,
00:12:30.060that everyone knows is just, it's just the CIA is plausible, the liability layer and funding conduit.
00:12:35.420But when, when it started to be used against Americans on American soil,
00:12:39.820that to me was the final straw that no matter how useful it may be to spend $40 billion a year bribing
00:12:48.380warlords in Africa, bribing oligarchs in Ukraine, bribing and recruiting terrorists in Afghanistan
00:12:55.340and Pakistan and Syria, um, you know, disguising medical supply bands, uh, you know, in Venezuela
00:13:02.780with boxes of, of AK 47s and military supplies. The fact is, is it is no longer a foreign policy
00:13:10.380instrument is a domestic control instrument. And that is the final straw. You can't do that to
00:13:16.620Americans. Have, have you, do you have any evidence in your, all your research? Cause you're like the
00:13:23.420ax in the space that it's actually been used domestically against Americans, not just for
00:13:28.300doing warlords, stuff like that, but actually against Americans. Oh my God. Yes. The USA in,
00:13:34.460in 2021, they made a formal policy pivot to stopping disinformation on the internet and they targeted
00:13:40.860us technology companies. They targeted the, they targeted Facebook. They targeted Twitter 1.0. They
00:13:47.980targeted YouTube. They targeted all of the online information space. They were working with news guard
00:13:54.300and global disinformation index. And they were partnered with the state department's democracy
00:13:58.940rights and labor. Uh, they have, uh, which, which is, which works with, uh, USAID's group called the
00:14:06.220democracy rights and democracy, human rights and rule of law. I'm sorry, democracy governance and rights,
00:14:12.860um, uh, bureau. And, and what they, what they did is under the banner of democracy promotion.
00:14:18.380See, this is the thing. There's supposed to be a democracy promotion organizations. One of the reasons
00:14:22.300that they are accountable to, uh, the house foreign affairs committee and Senate foreign
00:14:26.780relations committee. They said that, that misinformation, I know you got to bounce,
00:14:31.020but I just, I just want to hold you through a short break and for a minute or two afterwards,
00:14:34.140I just want to make sure when we leave this today, people understand that, uh, you've made the case
00:14:40.620of why this place is dangerous and not some humanitarian thing, giving out money to like the nuns,
00:14:45.980uh, to, to do, to save the orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, short commercial break back with
00:14:50.940Mike Benz in a moment. Big victory on five November. Now the work can finally start on
00:15:04.220the big issues facing the country. One of the biggest is the national debt and the deficits
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00:16:26.800Okay, welcome back. Today, a gold at one time, $2,848 backed off a little bit.
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00:17:09.120make sure you're free men and women. Make that decision yourself. Another all-time high earlier
00:17:14.080in the day and it backed off a little bit, but man, oh man. Talk about turbulence in the markets.
00:17:18.720Markets back up at the close for the first time all day. Ideas have consequences. Mike Benz has been on
00:17:25.440this idea about a government, an administrative state and deep state that has been out of control.
00:17:29.840Benz has been on this for years. So Benz, when they actually started to allocate money to domestic
00:17:36.000programs and to all the misinformation, shutting down free speech on the internet, like against
00:17:42.720War Room, you, everybody, that money's allocated. We had this audience sat through the appropriations,
00:17:49.120the individual bills, appropriations, and Eli Crane and Matt Gaetz making this case,
00:17:53.360I think back in the summer of 2024, 23 and 24 for two different authorizations bills.
00:18:01.840That time, less than 50% of the Republicans backed them. These things didn't pass in these subcommittees.
00:18:08.560Was anybody overseeing this? Did people in Capitol Hill know that they had started to use this to
00:18:13.040target American citizens, sir? Well, let me clarify that because there's a distinction here,
00:18:19.440which is that USAID does work that has dramatic impact on our domestic politics and domestic
00:18:26.960American to American affairs, but they funnel it through international organizations that operate
00:18:31.440on U.S. soil rather than, for the most part, directly with U.S. organizations, although they do.
00:18:36.720For example, the USAID partnered with the American Bar Association and these types of things. But for
00:18:41.280example, USAID gave $27 million to the fiscal sponsor of the Soros Prosecutor Control Group that,
00:18:50.400you know, everyone here, you talk about Soros prosecutors and Soros, you know, Soros funds these
00:18:55.520prosecutors and then Soros funded NGOs, in particular, this main one called Fair and Just Prosecutions,
00:19:03.680this group that tells Soros prosecutors what to do. Well, that group got more from USAID than it did
00:19:09.920from George Soros. They got 20 or fiscal sponsor, David, $27 million to the Tide Center, which also
00:19:16.400played a major role in fomenting Black Lives Matter as, you know, one of the main parent groups of the
00:19:23.040Black Lives Matter groups. You have to understand USAID is at the dead center. It occupies the center
00:19:29.440space between the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA. It's a switch player that serves as a
00:19:36.880as a plausibly deniable assistance agency to the rogue activities of those three federal agencies. And it
00:19:43.200represents essentially the some consensus of the foreign policy establishment, the legacy foreign policy
00:19:48.960establishment that hated Trump with a passion, wanted to take him down because of his foreign policy views and
00:19:55.200because of his is economic nationalism here at home. And what USAID declared doctrinally is that populism is an attack on
00:20:03.360democracy. They say this openly in USAID meetings. They say this openly in USAID documents. I published
00:20:10.240this a year and a half ago. The USAID disinformation primer published the first month of Biden's term in
00:20:17.200office saying that the purpose of their disinformation programs was to eliminate populist subject matter
00:20:24.080expertise on the Internet because populist news sites undermine USAID programming by undermining public
00:20:33.520faith and confidence in democratic institutions. Because don't you know, USAID spends billions of
00:20:39.360dollars to control the media every year. The you know, all the major media outlets in Ukraine are funded
00:20:45.360by USAID by USAID, like the Kyiv Independent, all the major news outlets in in Western Hemisphere or in many
00:20:53.200parts of Africa and Central Asia. It does what the CIA used to do. Everyone remembers Operation Mockingbird.
00:20:59.760Well, guess what? That's just called USAID media sustainability and media assistance. OK, that's all that is.
00:21:06.320And when populist waves swept the world within the U.S. in 2016 with Trump and with what happened all over
00:21:14.400Europe with Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini and Nigel Farage, USAID declared censorship holy war against
00:21:22.800every single populist group, including Bolsonaro. Steve, I'm telling you right now, if USAID did not exist,
00:21:30.160Bolsonaro would still be the president of Brazil and and Brazil would still have a free and open
00:21:34.880Internet. It was USAID that spent tens of millions of dollars of American taxpayer money funding the push to get
00:21:41.780anti-misinformation bills passed in the parliament. They're funding the the legal advocates who pushed the
00:21:48.920the censorship court there, the TSE, to to to crack down on Bolsonaro tweets and WhatsApp and Telegram messages.
00:21:57.360They built a censorship octopus in Brazil, and it was built entirely on USAID because USAID
00:22:04.480declared Bolsonaro a populist, Trump of the tropics and then set up this operation to control the information
00:22:10.880ecosystem there. One of the USAID grantees even said on a public call that the purpose was to
00:22:16.080eliminate the the international exchange of ideas between the Trump movement and the Bolsonaro movement.
00:22:22.380That's what USAID does. They kill domestic populism because it gets in the way of their foreign policy goals.
00:22:28.720This is nothing short of breathtaking. Before I leave in that is going to the White House.
00:22:37.680This movement, they're they're they're up in arms on Capitol Hill. All the leftists, everybody saying Trump doesn't have the authority to do this.
00:22:44.060He certainly doesn't have the authority to deputize Elon Musk and the Doge guys to do this.
00:22:49.180This is statutory. It has to be taken down. Do you agree that in the appropriations bill,
00:22:54.000we have to zero it or you think what Trump and Elon right now, the guys who are at Doge is fine.
00:22:59.120That's enough work. They're going to take it to zero. Everybody's locked out of the building.
00:23:03.040They're having protests all over. Is that enough?
00:23:07.340It's going to be very, very complicated. You know, I said somewhat tongue in cheek earlier today that
00:23:12.840one of the upshots of this reorganization is that Marco Rubio is now arguably going to be
00:23:18.540the most powerful secretary of state in American history, because if USAID shuts down and it moves
00:23:24.600over to to be directly under the State Department. Now, Marco Rubio will simultaneously be the head
00:23:30.440of the State Department and USAID simply occupied simply, you know, adding beefing up state with
00:23:37.840with USAID, which is why the dogfight, the trench warfare is going to come down to whether or not
00:23:42.480USAID's core mission will continue under the State Department, which is going to be its own fight.
00:23:48.540Um, you know, it may be the case that, that, uh, you know, that the real fight that we have is not
00:23:55.440necessarily the moment of closing of USAID's building, but just like with Brexit, the real
00:24:00.760fight comes with the implementation of the cuts and, and the, and the organizational changes, uh,
00:24:06.660you know, once the USAID building is closed, because it could be, you know, it could even be worse than
00:24:12.600ever if, if this is parked under state and you have, uh, you know, a Hillary Clinton style secretary of
00:24:17.920state who now has a sort of God-like power, uh, over, over both state and USAID simultaneously.
00:24:24.420No, we have to shut this down. There's no doubt about it, but it's going to be a process. I want
00:24:27.740everybody in the audience to understand that we're, this is far from over, but man, what a great start
00:24:31.860seeing those guys locked out as men and women. Benz, you're the best. Where do people go on your
00:24:36.520social media to get you and all this amazing, and you got to get to Benz's social media because it's,
00:24:42.100it's constantly updating its information.
00:24:43.920Yeah. I post about a hundred times a day. It's a follow me at Mike Benz cyber on X and, uh, also,
00:24:51.540uh, my foundation foundation for freedom online.com, uh, has blockbuster reports on all of this. We have
00:24:57.320a huge report on USAID's role in the censorship industry that we published, uh, uh, several months
00:25:02.600ago made possible because of, uh, internal documents obtained by, uh, by Stephen Miller's America first
00:25:09.400legal. And, uh, if you read that document on the foundation website, uh, you will never see USAID