The Tucker Carlson Show - Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)

00:00:00.000 you hear that oh paid and done that's the sound of bills being paid on time but with the bemo

00:00:08.880 eclipse rise visa card paying your bills could sound like this yes earn rewards for paying your

00:00:17.020 bill in full and on time each month rise to rewards with the bemo eclipse rise visa card

00:00:22.660 terms and conditions apply so you more than anyone for the past couple of years have been awakening

00:00:28.100 the rest of the country in the world to this nexus between public and private sector NGOs

00:00:33.320 nonprofits u.s government agencies whose acronyms you don't recognize and you've described an entire

00:00:39.120 complex that affects censorship regime change all kinds of sinister unconstitutional outcomes that

00:00:45.200 most americans don't know they're paying for and i'm from dc so as you've explained this to me a

00:00:50.420 couple of times it all has made total sense but sometimes i wonder like do people believe what

00:00:55.540 mike benz is saying and now uh over the last week since the usa id files have dropped mostly on x

00:01:02.820 people are discovering what you have been talking about and learning that it's 100 true

00:01:07.640 and i and i just wanted to ask how's that how that feels for you

00:01:10.920 it's it's a sort of somber moment actually more more than anything and it's i found myself very

00:01:38.800 reflective this week and hit by the weight of history of it if that makes sense uh and there's

00:01:45.620 a lot to this i mean a lot of people have said aren't you so happy you've been fighting for this

00:01:49.360 so long now it's happening and so they expecting you know cartwheels and spiking footballs and that's

00:01:55.080 not how i feel really at all because the task here was to break the halo of of this angel that turned

00:02:05.280 into an angel of death i don't think we've had the success of the 20th century without having a soft

00:02:09.780 power influence arm um i don't i think this is how we add cheap gas and affordable homes and you know

00:02:17.400 middle class prosperity and export markets for our manufactured goods here um the the the task is

00:02:25.180 to be able to make it be righteous and virtuous again uh but you couldn't do that while it had

00:02:34.500 this halo and so the halo had to be broken the mask had to be taken off in order to implement reforms

00:02:39.840 and there have been i i i feel the the global impact of fundamental changes to u.s foreign policy

00:02:53.260 that are happening now because you know as i've been been saying for so long i mean there really

00:02:58.540 is a sort of u.s aid truman show uh that much of the world lives in you know many people found out

00:03:04.120 for the first time this week that 90 percent of media in ukraine is funded by u.s aid many people

00:03:09.300 just now finding out you know the extent of u.s media organizations that are that are funded by uh by

00:03:16.580 u.s aid you know they're finding out the the reach of it and everything from the unions to social

00:03:22.560 media censorship to uh pandemic and gain of function research uh to you know strange ties even to things

00:03:32.120 like terrorism and the drug trade and you know there's that sort of these institutions that everyone

00:03:40.500 thought were private and independent being corrupted by you know u.s aid's 44 billion odd dollar a year

00:03:48.180 budget uh and and when i think a lot of people that was a process that i felt was necessary to tell the

00:03:58.540 story of internet censorship because for me my journey of discovery on this was like everybody else

00:04:05.320 i thought internet censorship was a domestic story at first and so i start following the trail of it and

00:04:11.800 then i see oh well that's weird this at this disinformation conference the next panel is on

00:04:16.060 energy geopolitics what are they doing together huh that's weird and then you go over to the

00:04:21.200 energy geopolitics people and you see okay well their fellow panelists are all military contractors okay

00:04:26.680 all right so the military has something to do with with social media censorship and and the energy

00:04:30.860 pipeline politics and in ukraine have something to do with it okay that's interesting and then you

00:04:35.940 keep going down the line and you see okay there are these chamber of commerce partners and then you see oh

00:04:40.140 there are these suite of humanitarian aid organizations like usaid ned the whole suite of of ngos

00:04:49.780 you know state department grantees national science foundation grantees and you start to see that

00:04:55.280 this is in order to tell the story i felt of of internet censorship and what to do to stop it

00:05:03.940 you had to explain a totally different world than the one people thought that they lived in and for

00:05:11.000 the first several years of this um when i would do my you know little private briefings and bring my

00:05:17.680 powerpoints around the country and it was it was very hard it was impossible frankly to to crack through

00:05:23.800 even when people saw the receipts on screen they saw the source documents and and they they just

00:05:30.580 couldn't conceive that the world actually works this way uh that that our country does these things

00:05:37.300 uh and they have a hard time squaring the morality of it with the the operational side if that makes

00:05:45.280 sense like they don't want to believe certain things and so even if it's six inches in front of

00:05:50.220 their face they won't and so but i guess getting back to this sort of why am i neutral rather than

00:05:58.740 happy right now is because we are conducting open heart surgery on the vital organs of the american

00:06:06.200 empire and i am pro empire to the extent that it helps the homeland i don't think we'd have a

00:06:10.680 prosperous homeland without an empire and the the patient needs open heart surgery it has to be done

00:06:17.940 i am a hundred percent uh agree with with the decisions that have been made on on policy so far

00:06:26.120 on this um but i i want to make sure and i feel a great sense of duty and obligation to try as best i

00:06:35.000 can to help identify the organ you're operating on because in in the zeal to um to carry out radical

00:06:46.720 reforms you can if you don't if if take out the wrong organs yeah or if you don't don't even know

00:06:57.200 you know how the atriums how the how the organ works um it's directionally correct to do the open

00:07:03.520 heart surgery but the patient can die on the table if you if you do it wrong and uh all of that has to

00:07:12.220 be like this is just the beginning of the fight to reform this in my view but we are now in the arena

00:07:20.340 and and a blow has been struck this is in my view this week is really the first time

00:07:25.700 maybe in american history with with few exceptions maybe in the in the 60s and 70s uh that the blob

00:07:34.920 the foreign policy establishment that impacts so much of domestic affairs and sometimes controls it

00:07:40.580 has had to answer to the people that fund it uh this this is a shot across the bow

00:07:49.700 there there have been so many tactics that they've been able to deploy to shift the course of domestic

00:07:55.900 politics in order to ensure that their global vision stays the course and there's been a blitz

00:08:03.220 i don't think they saw this coming i i understand exactly what you're saying i don't think americans

00:08:11.140 even now really understand the degree to which our foreign policy establishment use uses other

00:08:17.080 countries particularly the five eyes the other english-speaking intel services against us here

00:08:22.020 you know i've almost never met a british reporter in the united states who wasn't acting on behalf of

00:08:28.280 some intel service against the united states it's like it's absolutely crazy i dealt with one today

00:08:32.560 actually um do you know what i'm talking about i don't know the individual you're referring to but

00:08:37.240 you're familiar with the trend um so but i guess what i hear you saying is americans when they learn

00:08:44.720 just how corrupt the system is may lose faith in their country

00:08:47.680 milton friedman gives this example about the pencil have you ever seen this video no he um

00:08:56.980 he talks about it in the context of libertarian economic theory he he says look at this pencil

00:09:04.340 and he you know holds up a pencil and it's got a lead tip and graphite and gum and he goes no

00:09:11.280 no single person in the world can make this pencil the gum comes from trees in malaysia and the lead

00:09:18.260 comes from you know some mine in africa and the graphite comes from graphite miners in south america

00:09:23.840 and it's the magic of the market that all makes it possible you know everyone doing it for their

00:09:29.220 own self-interest economic gain but it creates this magical web of cooperation where everyone profits

00:09:34.800 and that's how we get cheap pencils in the u.s and i think what we're what we're about to

00:09:42.920 walk in on is the is is the the flip side of that which is that

00:09:49.220 people have been lied to in this country where they've thought that they've been they've been

00:09:57.340 sold that this was humanitarian aid and uh and co-signed it and and i got let me come back to this

00:10:04.020 point about the pencil because maybe that'll just appear a little bit later in the story um

00:10:08.140 and i'll just sort of hint at it now but

00:10:10.840 right now the people who are trying to defend us aid are stuck between a rock and a hard place

00:10:19.420 they they they want to defend it on humanitarian grounds and then they get totally deluged with

00:10:27.280 all the ways that it has gone wrong and all the horrible things that's funding so then they

00:10:32.400 they then turn to layer two this is sort of like lindsey graham defending our operations in in ukraine

00:10:38.960 when it was you know we need to do this for democracy democracy and then we say okay well

00:10:42.860 you canceled elections uh you know you've you're you know they're all these non-democratic things

00:10:49.660 that are happening and he goes okay okay layer two of my defense is there's 14 trillion dollars worth

00:10:55.000 of natural resources under the soil there so right you know having it be a u.s vassal state is

00:10:59.720 advantage to us because then we can exploit those 14 trillion dollars worth of resources i mean that's

00:11:03.740 what's implied there right why would americans benefit from ukrainians exploiting that 14 trillion now

00:11:08.860 and by the way that's not a knock on on ukraine but you can you simply saw that shift happen

00:11:13.780 when you know as it got harder and harder to defend it on the basis of democracy promotion

00:11:18.760 the the mask had to slip in order to defend it at the deeper level it was to let people in okay here's

00:11:29.040 what we're really here's why we're really doing it in every usa program operates that way it is

00:11:34.820 getting back to this rock in the hard place analogy is that they want to say it's humanitarian aid but

00:11:42.660 it's clearly done so much harm in so many places it's doing such terrible things funding the wuhan lab

00:11:49.800 uh you know not to to mention you know the whole rest of the usa truman show but then they go okay okay

00:11:57.000 well it's u.s soft power it's uh it advances u.s strategic interests and so you say oh okay so

00:12:04.180 it's not aid and and then it becomes very schizophrenic to defend this thing because it's

00:12:11.380 it's a labyrinth of lies usa's access and its reputation completely depends on its perception

00:12:20.080 as being a kind of quasi charity even though you know it's nowhere charity is nowhere to be found

00:12:27.240 it's a u.s foreign policy instrument aid isn't even in the name you know i've said this many times but

00:12:32.660 it's the agency for international development and when you see aid yes there's your mind playing tricks

00:12:36.900 on you and by the way when growing up my dad worked with usaid it was called usaid not usaid right to

00:12:45.960 make it clear to everybody it was not an aid organization right right right now they call it

00:12:50.000 usaid right well i mean you know i mean i'm i'm sure in the ronald reagan building though you know

00:12:55.240 but but how it's colloquially known i mean and how it's described to the voters it's described as

00:13:01.140 humanitarian assistance and you go okay well you know and we can we can get into the the depth of

00:13:09.700 the scandals but i guess the the fundamental feeling that i have right now is this is going to

00:13:17.100 get a lot worse as people go through this self-discovery process of of what's happening

00:13:24.160 and we we were talking a little bit earlier where i mentioned you know eight years ago when i was

00:13:29.220 writing my you know little book attempt to try to explain all everything that was happening in

00:13:36.020 their censorship and i felt like i had to explain all these other you know tectonic plates of american

00:13:42.500 society and and global affairs just to understand who and what and why is why they're censoring the

00:13:49.040 internet but you know i would i would spend my whole day in usa spending.gov you know to the exclusion of

00:13:55.720 everything else friends family a social life and just going through that this can't be true this can't

00:14:05.280 be true oh my god it is oh my god it is and there are there's a sort of five stages of depression

00:14:12.340 that plays out as you discover it yourself going into these grant databases and seeing the receipts

00:14:19.260 with with your eyes like that because that's what i've seen on my news feed this week it's been just

00:14:24.060 hundreds of people all with huge megaphones who are just spending their day like saying hearing about

00:14:31.500 oh wow there's all this corruption at usaid let me plug it into the the search database let me fish

00:14:38.340 around a little bit oh here's what i found and now everyone's contributing to this common knowledge

00:14:42.700 which is which is really amazing but i still feel the already faith has been shaken but there are layers

00:14:52.180 layers to this that i think are going to um truly shock people when they begin to try to put their

00:15:01.820 their minds around it and i i believe fundamentally in u.s soft power i believe in soft power projection i

00:15:10.320 believe there is a role for projects in foreign countries that have a dual function of helping the

00:15:17.680 people there and helping secure import export markets for us helping secure natural resources

00:15:24.920 uh you know helping secure you know uh u.s national security goals in in the region there is a role for

00:15:32.900 that uh and i i just i i feel that many came into this movement around maga and nationalism because they

00:15:47.000 they cared about their schools and and the woke agenda in their schools so they cared about their

00:15:54.060 their streets and their neighborhoods and whether they were safe and they cared about you know

00:15:59.480 corruption from the the u.s president or their local representatives they never had to think about

00:16:06.700 pakistan bangladesh estonia tanzania they they never had to think about how you make a pencil

00:16:17.000 and how the goods and services that they that give them the advantaged life that we have in the

00:16:24.000 united states versus other countries depends on the battering ram of this blob apparatus and so as they

00:16:32.500 learn more and more the depths of depravity of the blob i am i myself am in a hard sort of between a rock

00:16:41.760 and a hard place where more than anyone maybe in in that i know uh have been have been spearheading

00:16:50.760 and trying to lead the charge to to break the blob's halo um now i'm i'm in a sort of curious position

00:16:59.860 where i feel i'd be remiss if i didn't spend this time at least fleshing out that i i don't believe

00:17:07.800 that it should be it should be vanquished entirely it's it's family if that makes sense

00:17:15.540 you know i i was i was thinking about this the other day with we talked about ukraine several

00:17:21.640 times when we've spoken and we've talked about the 2014 maidan toppling of the democratically

00:17:28.320 elected government coincidentally the person on the on the pro-us aid side who's leading the charge

00:17:34.860 to fight uh the white house's reforms is senator chris murphy chris murphy bragged on live national

00:17:41.480 television that uh that the u.s toppled that government it was only because of u.s pressure

00:17:47.220 and u.s support on the ground for for the movements there that that toppled that government um but

00:17:54.140 leaving aside the the morality of whether that was the right or wrong thing to do in the name of

00:17:59.280 of democracy when when victoria newland made her speech in december 2013 two three months before

00:18:05.980 before that you know those those protests you know changed world history you know she bragged about 0.77

00:18:12.820 the five billion dollars that u.s aid and and ned and related you know humanitarian assistance orgs had

00:18:19.660 given to the you know to offend effectively the very same ukrainian civil society organizations that

00:18:24.420 would that would lead that charge and when she did so she was at a sponsored event by standing in front

00:18:30.580 of signs for exxon mobil and chevron and i've reflected on that picture because it's very easy to look at

00:18:38.020 victoria newland as a sort of angel of death figure who knocks on european countries doors and tells them 0.96

00:18:45.500 hey we're about to topple your democratically elected government um and it's very easy to look at the excesses

00:18:52.320 of of big u.s corporations but we do need oil we do we do want cheap oil and gas we do want energy

00:19:01.620 dominance and so you know i'm at this moment when we're seeing the really the first vulnerabilities

00:19:09.460 certainly in my lifetime of this blob monstrosity i'm i feel a strange sort of sympathy for the devil

00:19:17.980 which is that they've done they've done terrible things and we should not do them again and they've

00:19:25.620 gone rogue and there's no oversight and um horrors beyond your wildest imagination at the same time

00:19:33.680 these are still parts of the american family there is some vestige of a function there that

00:19:42.340 i believe our foreign policy planners have to at least know was there and was responsible for much

00:19:53.580 of our prosperity um before it's as they try to reconstruct the patient does that make sense

00:20:02.560 of course it does and i and i and i think maybe that's the whole point of this is that um you know

00:20:08.080 any nation particularly a big one like ours that controls a hemisphere has a foreign policy and has

00:20:13.900 all sorts of ways to affect it including the soft power that you referred to there's nothing wrong

00:20:19.740 with that in fact it's essential the question is why are you doing it are you doing it a to serve your

00:20:26.460 own interest to preserve you know import uh and and export advantage are you doing it to secure energy

00:20:33.660 that you need to have a functioning society those are all are you doing to you know bring peace to

00:20:38.760 your hemisphere so you don't have a lot of like craziness and lawlessness and civil wars and all 0.99

00:20:42.700 that yes those are all good things um or are you doing it to sow chaos for its own sake so i mean i guess

00:20:49.580 the problem that i have with usaid and with the state department and with cia and with all of the ways

00:20:54.220 that we project power abroad is not that they exist it's that they're not serving us and they're not

00:20:59.340 serving sort of like the basic goals you would want for any great power which is like peace security

00:21:05.600 sort of continuity reasonableness freedom democracy like they're not doing any of that they're like

00:21:12.440 sewing bizarro destabilizing sexual politics into other people's cultures like why why would you do 1.00

00:21:18.800 that i don't understand like what what u.s interest is served by having all those agencies that i just

00:21:23.660 named go to some other country and say no you need more traneism or some bizarre you know we need to

00:21:29.840 structure the family differently like why do we do that how do who wins when we do that well i'm really

00:21:35.060 glad you asked because that is the exact example i've been using to try to um to try to give a window

00:21:47.240 of entry into into this larger sort of point about we need a much larger vision about the role of u.s

00:21:54.920 foreign policy if we are going to get rid of the shortcuts that usa provides um and so you know

00:22:02.540 you just mentioned you know why would usa be promoting you know trans take the example of

00:22:07.420 transgender dance festivals that's something i've been talking about a lot this week um take the 0.51

00:22:12.580 example of transgender dance yeah right well love that sentence it used to be only crazy people 1.00

00:22:18.200 thought they were being watched all the time surveilled the guy mumbling next to you on the

00:22:22.140 bus but now anyone who knows what's going on thinks that because it's true your phones are listening to

00:22:27.560 you tech companies tracking all your online activity in order to profit off of what ought to be private

00:22:33.160 information governments are watching too it's a corrupt system it's frightening and the worst part is

00:22:37.900 it's all legal the government certainly will not help stop this of course the intel agencies

00:22:42.340 love it so it's up to you to protect yourself and that's where expressvpn comes in expressvpn which

00:22:48.120 we use here is an app that sends 100 of your online activity through secure encrypted servers

00:22:52.980 that means nobody can see what you do online not internet service providers not data provoke

00:22:58.580 brokers not intel agencies don't believe it listen to this within the last year expressvpn received over

00:23:04.940 400 000 data requests from tech companies and government agencies but did not share a single

00:23:11.760 piece of customer data that's because the company has a strict zero logs policy expressvpn cannot and

00:23:19.920 will not share your data they don't even have your data to share expressvpn is easy to use takes one

00:23:25.520 click it's rated number one by the experts at cnet and the verge and right now you get an extra three

00:23:31.040 months for free when you use a special link go to expressvpn.com slash tucker and get that extra

00:23:38.000 months for free it's expressvpn.com slash tucker get groceries delivered across the gta from real

00:23:45.860 canadian superstore with pc express shop online for super prices and super savings try it today and get up

00:23:52.340 to 75 dollars in pc optimum points visit superstore.ca to get started td direct investing offers

00:24:00.120 live support so whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro you can make your investing steps count and if

00:24:05.960 you're like me and think a tfsa stands for total fun savings adventure maybe reach out to td direct

00:24:12.140 investing what is a transgender dance festival i having never been so that is when usaid or or usaid's

00:24:22.180 companion star national endowment for democracy or other related ngos will you know fund an event

00:24:27.860 in uh in the form of a sort of cultural exchange and that will they will bring together people from

00:24:33.540 that country to come to you know a uh you know a dance festival that's you know comprised of

00:24:41.280 transgender individuals and is intended to both uh create a sense of unity within the transgender

00:24:46.860 population there and to expose and normalize and curry favor with other parts of the demographics

00:24:53.660 there in order to expand the network node of of u.s entities who are working with the activists and

00:25:01.280 leaders there why what american interest is preserved or protected or advanced by pushing transgenderism or

00:25:09.580 any kind of sexual politics or family politics including family planning why is it our business how many

00:25:16.460 kids other countries have i don't i i've always been confused by that like what is that why are we doing

00:25:22.540 that i wish that was rhetorical but and and i do believe in in many instances it is ideological excess

00:25:31.880 you know driven to madness but well give an example from just a few months ago i believe it was this august

00:25:40.400 um this year there was a um a prime minister in bangladesh who was basically ousted in a sort of

00:25:48.260 military coup coupled with a color revolution and uh gray zone news max blumenthal's outlet published this

00:25:55.940 report that i've been talking about a lot for the past week because it's just a really really clean

00:26:00.660 example of all the different facets of the dynamics i'm talking about which is so basically starting

00:26:09.400 in about 20 28 2018 through 2020 um it appeared that that u.s statecraft uh was not particularly pleased

00:26:20.600 with um shake hasina winning this uh you know the prime minister winning the election and um

00:26:30.120 baseline assessments were submitted to the state department about how to prop up the opposition

00:26:35.140 group uh the bangladesh bangladesh national party the bnp um which was considered more favorable to u.s

00:26:42.660 u.s interests um the this the the leaked documents don't get too in the nitty-gritty about what u.s

00:26:50.040 national interest is served uh but there there were many conflicts between that bangladeshi prime minister

00:26:55.240 and um the the u.s foreign policy establishment uh for example it was revealed in wikileaks that

00:27:03.040 hillary clinton while she was secretary of state threatened to have the irs do an audit of her son

00:27:08.580 while while she lived in the u.s and uh and she is that prime minister has come out publicly and said

00:27:14.860 that uh you know she believed that she was overthrown uh because of uh or or basically there was a

00:27:22.120 conflict around uh around the construction of a u.s military base in the region which is a very

00:27:26.560 common conflict that we have oftentimes foreign countries don't like having a big fat u.s military

00:27:32.440 base installed uh you know on they don't want foreign troops on their soil who does right they 1.00

00:27:37.360 don't want 500 acres of their land you know they don't want to provoke uh you know foreign powers this

00:27:42.580 is what's playing out in romania with george's cue and the the you know the cancellation of the

00:27:47.380 elections and he it's just like a giant nato base right now right well they're building the world 0.84

00:27:51.400 the the europe's largest nato base right currently which you know faces straight out of the black sea

00:27:57.280 at crimea but there was this but but she had been refusing to build a u.s military base so so let's

00:28:02.300 just but as i walk through this let me just make some assumptions and make it a harder issue than

00:28:09.380 uh or something a little bit more i guess accessible let's just say it really is vital to u.s national

00:28:16.080 interests to build that military base in bangladesh to counter chinese influence and the bangladeshi

00:28:23.860 prime minister doesn't want to do it and so our foreign policy planners decide we need to do regime

00:28:29.000 change and that and whether or not you agree that's a good or an evil thing to do i'm not even weighing

00:28:35.640 into the morality of it what if it is the declared or discrete policy of the u.s government uh the state

00:28:45.380 department and the white house and the national security council all agree this government uh

00:28:49.980 we should pursue regime change all options to destabilize that country in order to weaken the 0.95

00:28:56.360 existing government and to build up a our network of democratic institutions and activists uh in order to

00:29:03.420 either win the next election or in order to uh you know do a color revolution style you know ousting

00:29:10.280 where the you know the prime minister has to flee in a helicopter and what was done in in this case

00:29:18.200 in in bangladesh and these leaked documents from the gray zone show this in gratuitous detail is that

00:29:24.520 um the national endowment for democracy's republican arm the international republican institute they have

00:29:30.420 four core fours but two of them are political branches there's the ndi the national democratic

00:29:35.280 institute for democrats and there's the iri the international republican institute for republicans

00:29:41.200 and what the the iri submit submitted to the state department in 2019 2020 uh after they got walloped

00:29:50.460 trying to back the the the bangladeshi national party uh in the the recent past election

00:29:56.420 was a plan to destabilize bangladesh uh politics that's a direct quote destabilize bangladesh politics

00:30:05.080 um by working with they they listed 170 um uh pro-democracy activists 304 key informants and then they did

00:30:17.380 a baseline assessment of the different ethnic groups and cultural cleavage points that they could

00:30:24.120 exploit in order to effectively you know either destabilize uh the the country's politics or prop up the

00:30:32.740 the political alternative and in the process of doing that um they they sought the lgbt they sought the lgbt

00:30:41.280 population uh to uh to bangladeshi ethnic minority groups and young students and student groups who were had

00:30:51.760 already been protesting uh earlier that year because of um some a local a local politics issue there uh

00:31:00.380 and and they noted you know that uh rap music was was popular and young people were listening to rap music

00:31:08.700 in bangladesh so what do they do they um they turned around and they took u.s taxpayer funds

00:31:14.280 they get 100 of their money from from the state department and they work closely with us aid they

00:31:18.840 actually administer us aid programs all over bangladesh and all over the world and they funded

00:31:24.320 bangladeshi rap groups to produce uh songs and music videos uh insinuating that people should take to the

00:31:32.240 streets and uh do street protests and you know the the classic uh peaceful protest that's uh has the

00:31:40.300 you know upside of being a a riot um and uh and you know one of in in iris baseline assessment submitted

00:31:50.980 to the state department they talked about how one of the songs they paid for uh was was designed

00:31:57.680 to uh to sow resentment uh at the sitting government and uh you know basically undermine people the

00:32:06.460 the popularity of the government so you have one sponsored song to get people to take the streets

00:32:11.020 another sponsored rap song to to get people to you know to distrust their their government

00:32:16.420 and then you know basically the baseline assessment revealed that that these groups were the ones who

00:32:24.800 would be receptive that those were the contacts in the region they do field work when they do these

00:32:30.280 baseline assessments what if the baseline assessment of the strategic assessment happens to reveal

00:32:35.340 that the highest roi for soft power projection is with very unseemly groups and activities this is for

00:32:44.880 example what how we end up funding terrorist groups and paramilitaries and and and very extreme because

00:32:50.380 oftentimes when you have a popular government it's the coalition of the fringes and the extremes and

00:32:57.460 the weirdos and the criminals and the prostitutes this this was in an ned memo in 2009 for cuba

00:33:03.780 where they were uh where the national down for democracy uh you know under they have something

00:33:09.600 called the journal of democracy and you know they they talked about this exact phenomenon that they

00:33:13.640 might be able to mobilize the afro-cuban community uh to you know leveraging racial animus against the

00:33:20.160 you know mostly you know white cuban government and you know taking note of um you know proclivities for

00:33:28.520 i think it was prostitution crime and drugs and how how usa would be and would might be able to swoop

00:33:34.840 in and you know mobilize these people because a lot of them are really unemployed and also usa should

00:33:40.880 fund the rap groups there because these these populations all listen to rap and they did and

00:33:45.860 this is another great gray zone you're making the hair on my arms go up because you're describing what's

00:33:49.960 happened in our in our country yes you're describing the 2017 charlottesville march the nazi march you're

00:33:57.320 describing what happened on january 6 you're describing the riots after george floyd was murdered

00:34:01.480 you're describing the rise of rap music and drugs in our city and all of it you're describing you know

00:34:09.200 tranny story hour and you know like you're describing all the trends in our country that seem to arise

00:34:16.760 out of nowhere whose net effect is to destabilize america to fray the social fabric to divide people

00:34:22.480 from each other to make them easier to control and in the case of trump's first term to to undermine

00:34:28.240 the white house right i mean i i don't know that any of that's true but like what you're what you're

00:34:34.900 describing that we did in bangladesh is what's happened here and so it raises the question like

00:34:39.260 was that all by design also and of course of course it was right well there's there's a lot there

00:34:46.000 us aid gave um uh am i crazy to ask that no not at all i mean that that is to me the the final the

00:34:57.340 final blow us it's it's bad and there's the moral question about whether to do to do this sort of

00:35:02.940 dirty work abroad and that comes down to different schools of foreign policy thought and to different

00:35:09.200 views on the relative morality of different ways of attacking the issue of of u.s soft power influence

00:35:17.480 abroad but then there is the the breaking of the firewall where our foreign policy

00:35:23.740 hounds are never supposed to bite the you know the owner who uh who who feeds them and that is i mean

00:35:32.340 that that is to me why this is a no-brainer the reforms that are happening and then but do you think

00:35:37.340 it's i mean i spent look just to go through them the 2017 charlottesville march where all of a sudden

00:35:44.360 out of nowhere there are all these nazis like who knew we had so many nazis in our country um

00:35:49.280 right and guys one i'm thinking one particular usa does never funded nazis by the way yeah right so

00:35:57.420 but like out of nowhere trump gets elected and all of a sudden charlottesville virginia home of uva not a

00:36:02.520 right-wing town there are all these people showing up led by a couple of people who are just so

00:36:06.860 obviously feds it's like not even a question in my mind and they're like marching with candles and

00:36:12.080 we're going to restore the fourth reich or whatever and then that the next day is used to delegitimize

00:36:16.820 trump and we're thinking we're supposed to think that's like all organic i mean that sounds like

00:36:21.120 exactly what groups like usaid do in other countries well i don't know about the charlottesville case

00:36:28.140 um you know i can see enough domestic antibodies on that with the fbi and whatnot um and the fact

00:36:36.460 is i'm not saying usaid did it i'm just saying it's the same template oh right oh no well the ability

00:36:44.060 for the the battering ram of our cloak and dagger dark arts only supposed to operate abroad to be

00:36:51.820 laundered at home yes is is is really the the reason that i believe the current open heart

00:36:59.580 surgery is a no-brainer and i fully support the total abolition of usaid as an agency and tucking

00:37:05.620 it under state and putting it through you know having it mended and then if at some point it needs

00:37:10.420 to be rolled out and spun out into into a different independent agency again with with reforms in place

00:37:16.240 and the and the appropriate you know staffing structure we can have that conversation at a later

00:37:21.520 time um there is the the domestic one is is is a huge one there's so many data points there i think

00:37:31.160 it's it's gonna i think it's gonna be terrifying to a lot of people who are just now experiencing this

00:37:36.780 but i do sort of want to close the loop on this on this foreign side because um my concern is when you

00:37:44.400 try to attack these things at the level of there's no u.s interest that served in it at all um it's

00:37:53.360 totally crazy um you you you're going to encounter very strange layers of resistance trying to attack

00:38:03.280 it from that argument so okay so here's an example i've been giving this week and and i'll i'll hit you

00:38:09.560 with the thought experiment what let's just assume and i have no inside knowledge about this i don't i

00:38:14.140 don't talk to to folks in on at that level or anything but venezuela has very can trump has

00:38:20.640 had a very contentious relationship with the government of venezuela during his first term

00:38:24.240 you know we you know declared juan guaydo the the sitting president of you know the the the elected

00:38:30.600 president you know he was standing ovation from you know both sides of the aisle um i could see a

00:38:38.120 situation where this white house where where president trump and secretary of state marco rubio

00:38:44.060 um either in a declared or discreet fashion seek to um deploy u.s soft power institutions to pursue

00:38:53.780 a policy of regime change in venezuela again i have no inside knowledge about that i do have inside

00:38:58.560 knowledge and they've been working on that for years there are americans in venezuela fact because

00:39:03.520 i talked to one of them um as of last year there are americans in venezuela working to overthrow that

00:39:09.640 government right you know so that's true but i'm going to give a narrow example here but but the

00:39:17.740 problem fundamentally that i'm describing is is fractal across all of this waste fraud abuse we're seeing

00:39:23.360 what if the state department and in it together with its new usaid function puts out basically you

00:39:32.080 know a request for proposals to all the different ngos um for how best to capacity build civil society

00:39:39.120 institutions and activists and people who will be willing to you know spread pro-democracy media and

00:39:47.280 and take to the streets and protest against the police and live dual lives effectively

00:39:52.940 as you know um you know working with effectively u.s spy craft while nominally being venezuelan citizens

00:39:59.200 or doing the daring and dangerous deeds of you know transporting supplies despite you know venezuelan

00:40:05.720 counterintelligence monitoring them and what if what if the strategic analysis or the baseline analysis

00:40:11.240 that comes back from from these ngos uh is well the transgender population in venezuela and i know

00:40:21.720 nothing i know nothing about this in in venezuela but i'm using this an example for everywhere what if

00:40:27.260 the cold hard fact is the the demographic in that in that country that is most effective at destabilizing

00:40:37.540 that country's uh uh democratically that country's government or or that will be most um the the highest

00:40:45.820 return on investment for foreign assistance funds given you know what if 2.7 million dollars to

00:40:52.200 a series of 12 different transgender dance festivals if they if the analysis reveals that we need

00:40:59.560 five million votes you know to win this next election that we don't have and every body who

00:41:06.360 converts from being heteronormative to transgender effectively goes from being a maduro person or a

00:41:11.820 to a to a to a you know pro-us one and everyone who norm who normalizes or or is um or believes that

00:41:20.940 you know transgender people being oppressed by the government are more likely to vote against the

00:41:24.820 government you could see a cynical self-serving cold hard calculated decision for a um for a mega

00:41:36.700 state department to fund transgender dance festivals and this is important to keep in mind in bangladesh

00:41:46.380 it was the iri who funded that it was the republicans who funded the transgender dance festivals

00:41:52.300 and rap groups you know republicans are not known for loving rap john mccain i mean mccain ran it for

00:41:57.660 years i mean they're actually all for that but trump is a winner trump likes to win and think of the

00:42:02.460 feather in the cap that it would be for marco rubio to be the person who brought democracy defense

00:42:06.780 what i'm saying is is leave aside the transgender issue again this is going to happen in everywhere and

00:42:12.920 and i think people just don't understand the that aid is a dirty deed with donald trump returning to the

00:42:19.720 white house this country has a unique opportunity maybe our last opportunity to save ourselves from

00:42:25.960 the anti-american and anti-human left but our efforts may be stymied by the deep state that's

00:42:34.120 what happened to the first trump term permanent washington stands in the way of all efforts to

00:42:41.080 approve the lives of ordinary americans and right now they are scheming to do the same thing to the

00:42:46.460 second trump administration they are determined to keep their stranglehold on power regardless of

00:42:52.960 elections anti-democratically that is a fact so what do you do to fight them how do you defeat the

00:43:00.420 deep state well one way you can is by supporting the heritage foundation which is in washington

00:43:04.480 understands exactly how it works in such a way that they're a threat and they're under attack you know

00:43:10.260 who's effective because they're the ones under attack heritage has a comprehensive plan to dismantle 0.61

00:43:15.280 permanent washington and restore the country to its democratic foundations it's important visit

00:43:22.280 heritage.org slash tucker to learn more and to support this critical effort when you make a gift

00:43:28.760 today you get a free pocket constitution to make certain that you are equipped with the founding

00:43:33.820 principles on your person at all times it's amazing to read it again that's heritage.org slash tucker

00:43:40.180 i agree with that i i think my i have a like a macro problem with this which is um you know one it's not

00:43:48.220 at all clear that like overthrowing maduro is in america's interest i think there's like a loud

00:43:53.760 exile community in florida that wants it more foreigners who've come here brought in bringing 0.99

00:43:58.860 their stupid feuds into our country um and using political donations to make the u.s government 1.00

00:44:05.080 settle their scores it's like get out of here is totally not our problem leave us alone um that's how 1.00

00:44:12.300 i feel about the cubans the venezuelans who all of whom i like personally but like these are not 0.99

00:44:16.700 our problems and i feel that way about the gaza thing that's like take it to gaza okay yeah not

00:44:23.220 our problem i think it's a fair as an american i think it's a fair position to have but so there's

00:44:28.180 that you know like is this actually in our interest are we just being paid to care about this yeah

00:44:32.180 two there is a moral quality to it if you're gonna say the united states is better than other

00:44:37.660 countries then you can't just you know assassinate people you don't like you can't just like

00:44:43.400 totally destroy their social fabric you have to make a straightforward honorable case and allow

00:44:49.860 the people of that country to decide using democratic means because you're for democracy

00:44:54.920 and if you're not for democracy then don't say you are and and i do think that like there's something

00:45:00.720 so morally corrupting about the means that our foreign policy establishment uses to achieve its

00:45:06.920 goals that it actually does affect our domestic life like january 6th was an op yeah by you know

00:45:14.360 by the i think primarily by dod is my impression uh and it like kind of wrecked our country and put

00:45:21.600 all these people in prison and like who would even think to do something like that well they've been

00:45:25.140 trained for years doing that sort of thing in faraway nations that's my view right i totally agree

00:45:30.620 yes and and i'm i'm glad that you're saying that because that that is ultimately we need to square

00:45:37.900 the circle which is that you know imagine a situation i think right now the thing that i'm heartened by

00:45:45.740 more than the the technical victories is the national consciousness raising that usa does infect all

00:45:57.360 these institutions and that there is this bleed over between foreign foreign and domestic when people

00:46:02.660 see that media companies that are writing hit pieces on them are being funded by usa when people

00:46:08.180 see that you know the what i've written about the you know social media censorship and in the usaid

00:46:14.540 you know primer documents in the usaid seps program that you know formally plotted to get foreign

00:46:20.820 countries to censor uh to pass censorship laws to target u.s tech companies it's the sort of thing that we

00:46:25.820 would typically you know have it run a sort of usaid covert covert operation to stop another entity from

00:46:34.520 doing and it's our they're doing it and so but you know from all the way down the line from the unions

00:46:40.640 to the universities to the for-profit companies to the media to the social media to the terrorist groups

00:46:46.680 to the you know uh gain of function and you know pandemic uh i mean there's you know how how corrupt

00:46:56.920 does an agency need to be drugs terrorism pandemics uh i mean but it corrupts the country after a while

00:47:04.840 of course of course you don't allow your cops to just like they knew all the drug dealers are but you

00:47:09.600 don't allow your policeman to walk up and execute them right because that i mean that's not our system

00:47:15.040 and we become as bad as the criminals we're fighting if we behave like that but part of the reason

00:47:19.580 there has been such little transparency about usaid and i always say you know when it's too dirty for

00:47:27.940 the cia you give it to usaid for a number of reasons yeah yeah and and i i i think if if there really is a

00:47:37.380 sort of usaid files that you know that that we get from this administration um i think this is why i'm

00:47:44.300 saying i think people are going to want to not necessarily put a new heart in this in this patient

00:47:50.260 when they see how deep it all goes recap some i think you're making a really important point i just

00:47:55.400 want to make sure it doesn't get lost in the details correct me if this is not a fair summation but i think

00:48:01.180 you're saying when we look at we were discovering all these things all the transgender dance contests or 0.96

00:48:07.420 whatever that they're funding it's easy to say well they're just like dipshit liberals who are like 0.97

00:48:12.380 doing dipshit liberal things and what you're saying is no these are hard-edged instruments of policy 0.74

00:48:18.360 yes now of course the personnel night you know 97 of usaid employees did donate to democrats of course

00:48:24.800 right but but you know liz cheney started her her career you know she is at the at usaid at the 1.00

00:48:30.960 eurasia portfolio of russia ukraine poland hungary and a lot of this is destabilizing have you noticed

00:48:38.020 like i thought a great power the reason the u.s is better than the soviet union was we brought

00:48:41.920 stability predictability markets democracy and they brought you know war and instability and i

00:48:49.060 always thought that like good leadership good stewardship good parenting brought stability and

00:48:55.260 it does seem like we are intentionally sowing stability dis you know disunity and instability

00:49:00.220 around the world oh i mean i i i literally just you know quoted you a iri document implementing us

00:49:07.720 aid programs where they literally wrote to the u.s state department that the purpose of of this

00:49:13.940 you know baseline assessment was to gather as many activists and informants and network nodes

00:49:20.180 quote to destabilize you know bangladesh politics but apply that everywhere you know this is you know

00:49:26.420 fundamentally what i believe happened during picture do you do you really want that like isn't that

00:49:30.840 shameful of course it's shameful but but the i think people don't fully understand how products

00:49:38.920 arrive on the shelves around them um i was i was mentioning milton freeman's pencil example well

00:49:46.440 what happens if malaysia decides to nationalize you know to block exports of of gum from the gum trees and

00:49:55.780 the the african miners uh decide that they are going to uh go on strike and not allow you know not

00:50:03.520 allow you know graphite or or lead you know and

00:50:07.520 no blob no pencils if you don't have a mechanism to influence that foreign government to stop the

00:50:17.280 nationalization law to hit it with carrots and sticks uh or if it's if it's a problem within the

00:50:23.400 population sub-government if it's a particular this is what happened in the cold war when when

00:50:27.740 the cia was breaking up union strikes in uh in france and you know the the you know the docks and

00:50:34.240 the longshoremen strikes and the cia infiltrated the unions and they worked with the you know afl cio

00:50:40.640 slash afl cia and uh and you know for the they all have union arms and and so you need a method to be

00:50:47.600 able to go into the unions if you want to be able to have pencils now okay you might say you can live

00:50:53.120 without pencils but how about no petroleum what if what if it's what if it's something that's what

00:51:00.060 if these are really critical resources for us to be able to have microchips for us to be able to have

00:51:05.460 renewable batteries for us to be able to have you know build computers for us to be able to put

00:51:10.460 gas in our car or heating in our home um there is a potential necessity and this is

00:51:17.400 why i feel it's so imperative that what's happening right now is happening and i'm i'm thrilled that it is

00:51:22.880 but there's still much more to internalize about this because you're going to need to

00:51:28.320 reconstruct the history of the entire past century as you disentangle this whole thing

00:51:35.460 if we had not toppled so many foreign governments in service of big oil would we have would we have

00:51:42.240 had cheap oil well does a president want to this is where i come back to this venezuela example

00:51:48.560 trump wants to win and again we don't we don't have to call it venezuela we can call it random

00:51:52.340 random country x um we're going to be hit with a choice as we as we reduce the u.s aid function if

00:52:01.240 we reduce the u.s aid function to my knowledge you know the the staff has been radically cut from 14 000

00:52:06.460 to something like 290 but my my understanding is that most of the grants you know it's 44 billion

00:52:12.560 dollars uh at 14 000 employees it's about a billion dollars of employee overhead you know uh a year

00:52:18.820 so 43 of the 44 billion presumably are still going to all these you know frankensteinian monster projects

00:52:25.720 uh but you're you're going to be hit with that choice of of do you want to win

00:52:33.940 uh fighting dirty or do you want to potentially lose fighting fair and and that's going to play out

00:52:44.100 in every industrial sector in every region and i'm okay and i i what i'm concerned about is that

00:52:53.060 you're saying the u.s economy can't continue um our prosperity can't continue unless we like

00:52:59.440 wreck other people's countries no i'm not saying i'm not saying that i'm saying that that is something

00:53:04.860 there's there's a micro fractal portion of that argument that is going to play out and is going

00:53:10.940 to be a sort of siren song every step of the way at every regional desk at the state department

00:53:16.360 at at every national security council interagency coordination and there are some lines that i believe

00:53:22.980 we cannot ever cross like for example on the social media censorship side the fact is is

00:53:29.240 it was according to biden's foreign policy biden declared populism a threat to democracy his

00:53:35.860 state department did his usa did and so the best populists were popular online in europe so

00:53:42.720 the white house had a whole information integrity working group to have the u.s funded ngos

00:53:48.800 lobby the european union effectively and push uh the different uh sort of influence and spindle

00:53:56.960 groups comprising the the the regulatory body around the eu digital services act to add more

00:54:02.500 and more censorship regulations to target their political opponents and what you're doing is is

00:54:06.660 these people could not do that at home because we have a first amendment but europe doesn't have one so

00:54:11.320 they so if you declare populism to be an attack on democracy then it's easier to win by advocating

00:54:21.380 censorship but that to me is a violation of fundamental american values and not just censorship

00:54:26.340 but putting a lot of people in jail using violence that is a form of violence incarcerating

00:54:31.200 someone putting them in handcuffs and that's what usa does usa's role with the prosecutors

00:54:34.860 is unbelievable the the depth of that rabbit hole but if i if i can just complete this point

00:54:40.340 here because i want to make sure i'm i think there's a lot of nuance to what i'm trying to say

00:54:47.280 here which is which is that people need and and especially at the policymaker and and white house

00:54:55.700 and house senate oversight committee side they need to get a sort of topographical map of the the scope

00:55:07.340 and spectrum of our dirty deeds done in the name of us aid in order to make a triage assessment

00:55:13.660 of what kind of things can be dual purpose because everything usa is dual purpose it has to be

00:55:20.440 it it's it's a u.s it's everything has to advance u.s national interest in some respect whether we're

00:55:26.320 irrigating poppy fields or doing poverty relief programs or public health something about doing

00:55:32.840 that act has to advance some sort of u.s national interest now part of the reason it's been so difficult

00:55:39.180 to oversee us aid or get answers from them is because they can't tell you those dual interests

00:55:43.860 honestly in a public forum take this transgender dance festival in bangladesh thing imagine a hearing

00:55:49.960 on us aid and uh you know high-ranking republican senator holds up you know you're funding bangladesh you

00:55:57.780 know you're funding transgender dance festivals and you're spending 2.7 million dollars on this

00:56:01.420 what possible u.s interest does that serve can that us aid administrator on live television uh say to

00:56:11.700 the world well that was a cynical you know we determined actually we were running a covert operation

00:56:16.680 to uh overthrow that country's democratically elected government and uh it actually wasn't about

00:56:22.640 that you know the that at all this was just uh the whole thing was was a total front for we were

00:56:28.640 building a coalition to challenge the government in power because we didn't like that government

00:56:32.900 right but saying that undermines the efficacy of all other usa programs no i guess it becomes

00:56:37.980 i get it right but my concern is there's some things you can't do assassinations uh you know

00:56:47.340 promoting internet censorship uh you know full-on you know regime change you know that mobilizes the

00:56:54.140 ugliest assets in a society like terrorist groups or uh you know you know extremist groups sort of thing

00:57:01.020 but there's a lot of squishiness in between that and i i'm not sure that the maga foreign policy

00:57:09.220 establishment being very new other than now not marco rubio but marco rubio is newer to maga than you

00:57:16.560 know than than the rest of of the white house um and and he you know when he was approved what 99 to

00:57:22.440 zero or something in the you know he was he was in in the senate he was the you know the easiest one

00:57:27.040 to pass and he's and i think he's done a phenomenal job so far by the way if i can say that but i feel

00:57:32.740 like most of the people who came to the maga movement came to that for domestic for nat for

00:57:38.540 nationalist nationalistic reasons and don't

00:57:42.320 see under understand the interplay between the the national and the global and as they are finding that

00:57:51.020 out they are seeing how horrible the deeds are done of the global and there is going to be this

00:57:56.920 impulse to destroy this thing completely destroy this thing and by the way i don't know that's not

00:58:03.740 even my principal fear because i i actually think you know the other part of this is that i could very

00:58:08.960 easily seeing see most of these grants being preserved simply through the trench state department

00:58:14.600 yeah right simply through the state department i mean this is what happened with brexit everyone

00:58:17.980 celebrate everyone who is pro brexit celebrated brexit the day it happened that to me is like

00:58:23.040 the closure of of the usa building but the fact is is they effectively stopped brexit yeah never

00:58:27.740 brexit because of the there's so many layers of resistance and implementation and that we're going

00:58:32.280 to run into that here which is why i'm i'm i'm using this time to be able to talk with you today on

00:58:40.000 something that is that's on this which is that you're you're going to need to understand the purpose for

00:58:49.440 these things and the scope of it and be able to look at just how bad it is with clear eyes and not

00:58:56.900 necessarily i mean have your rage boiling your anger moment and when when that clears

00:59:05.140 a fundamental reorganization of the way we carry out soft power is going to have to replace

00:59:13.600 what we used to do if we don't do these dirty deeds anymore but it has to be in the service of

00:59:19.120 goals that you know are worth achieving you know like having a strong and free country right

00:59:25.680 the the only problem with that is trump represented something very different than that vision that

00:59:35.760 was expressed by the bush biden blob uniparty that had that had been there and in in countries that are

00:59:44.940 not stable elections completely change everything you know when

00:59:52.340 and and this maybe gets to whether or not you know the problem is not necessarily just the

00:59:59.960 institutions but rather the the sort of legacy of momentum of all these previous political forces

01:00:05.340 because you could see a situation where then okay every time a maga type populist candidate wins an

01:00:12.560 election all of our foreign policy institutions switch radically in one direction calling that american

01:00:18.840 interests and then a sort of internationalist blob a globalist person wins an election then all the

01:00:24.780 institutions switch all that and so you know you can't you can't even build permanent structures in

01:00:30.860 foreign countries or permanent networks because everything's so schizophrenic like your own i mean

01:00:34.880 this is this is the problem with our system is that it doesn't have continuity and the whole purpose

01:00:40.380 of the deep state is to provide content i mean no one ever says this but i grew up around it

01:00:44.540 the purpose of the deep state is provide continuity in a democracy in which leadership changes every

01:00:51.080 four eight years so how does that work exactly so you have the political structure that runs everything

01:00:56.360 at the request of the population that's called democracy but then you have you know longitudinal

01:01:01.100 interests that have to be represented regardless of who's in power right and so you know the deep

01:01:06.720 state arose in response to an actual need you have to have continuity right politics stops at the

01:01:12.440 bar's edge right that's exactly right but then unfortunately but at the same time the deep state

01:01:17.740 has to be in some deep sense responsive to the population or else you have tyranny right so like it's

01:01:24.460 a very you know democracy is not um an easy system to administer it's it's an easy one to talk about

01:01:29.940 and it you know it doesn't work that well in some ways uh obviously i want it to i'm not against

01:01:36.220 democracy of course being an american but it doesn't it you know it's hard yeah so um no i agree 0.98

01:01:41.820 i think the big change is the deep state these institutions were taken over by incredibly dumb 0.96

01:01:47.880 short-sighted selfish people i don't think the problem is you know having an elite the problem 0.98

01:01:54.800 is having an inadequate mediocre selfish elite that doesn't actually like the country they're running

01:02:00.600 so that's just my personal editorial position on that but i i i see what you're saying i mean i've

01:02:06.800 seen it a lot um but here's i want to get back to something you said the very beginning which is

01:02:13.300 the corrupting effect on america the country the place of 350 million people of this kind of behavior

01:02:21.080 and the bleeding over of these tactics into our country yeah so like for example i was the one thing

01:02:30.420 that really shocked me about these disclosures was that a lot of our domestic media is government media 0.93

01:02:34.800 i didn't know that politico which is garbage utterly garbage publication and it's become much worse i 0.93

01:02:42.060 would say uh in the past five or six years takes eight million dollars a year from the government 0.98

01:02:46.940 sort of secretly sort of semi-secretly well what's that well there's there's a distinction i think that's

01:02:54.080 useful to draw here between um public agencies paying for premium services of of u.s news websites

01:03:05.240 that foreign facing so for example you know the state department pays for premium uh subscriptions

01:03:10.720 to various news sites uh in order to be able to access to you know all of the you know new york times

01:03:18.260 or politico uh you know to be able to get behind the paywall for their employees so that while they're

01:03:22.940 doing their job of soft power influence abroad they have the maximum amount of knowledge at their

01:03:26.800 fingertips it's the same thing with but that's all fake i mean of politico pro there's literally it's

01:03:31.720 written by 25 year olds you know there's like nothing in there that's real they're paying off

01:03:37.060 politico well that's right well but there's there's two forms of that and and i'm and i'm just also

01:03:42.260 trying to educate people as they go through this discovery process about the extent of it because

01:03:47.640 you're going to see it's it's everyone but there are two forms of it one is one is you know 100%

01:03:55.800 it's pernicious uh the other one has there's smoke but there's not necessarily fire and so when i say

01:04:04.340 this the smoke not that obviously creates an incentive to um please your the people giving you

01:04:10.260 these government procurements for example if the this is this is what i published for example about

01:04:14.520 reuters you know the biden administration um you know government agencies you know tallied something

01:04:19.940 like 300 million dollars to uh to their various reuters um uh sort of sister sister company groups

01:04:28.200 uh between their between their news agency between their their um westlaw arm in between their uh you

01:04:36.200 know sort of like forensic and like accounting services but uh you know you you see these big like 60

01:04:42.220 million dollars worth of grants from the justice department and now the justice department's paying

01:04:48.340 paying for westlaw you know which is a thompson reuters thing it still makes reuters richer and but

01:04:53.320 reuters is writing hit pieces on the very people that the justice department is going after and so it's

01:04:59.540 softening up you know the enemies and in fact you know reuters won a pulitzer prize for its hit piece

01:05:06.640 for its uh investigative series on malfeasance by elon musk and all his portfolio companies tesla

01:05:12.600 x neurolink spacex and meanwhile the biden administration had 11 different regulatory agents

01:05:19.540 regulatory agencies going after all those and so the the media getting paid by the government was

01:05:25.660 providing the ammunition for prosecutions and regulatory regulatory and disciplinary actions against the

01:05:30.940 very stated targets of the government and so you you don't have a you don't have a stated agreement

01:05:37.540 in that case you have a very very perverse incentive but there are places where you have

01:05:43.420 it where it's even worse because there's again there's there's sort of two forms that can take in the

01:05:47.440 form of you know paying for services but then also there is the affirmative sponsoring of media so

01:05:52.900 um you know for example uh the state i believe it's the state department maybe usa does pay like the

01:05:59.540 reuters news agency uh for for work abroad but it's it's a lot less than the the premium services but

01:06:05.940 but more more to like here's a really clean example that gets to the heart i think of what you're

01:06:11.700 talking about with this domestic and how this all ties together the law the world's largest consortium

01:06:17.240 of investigative journalists is a group called the occrp and you just think of it the corruption

01:06:21.660 reporting project um they have since the very beginning been they were initially i believe fully

01:06:29.200 funded by by the u.s government or they were the the anchor fund and now now i believe half of their

01:06:34.100 funds come from a combination of us aid and and the state department and the and these are supposed to

01:06:39.940 be independent journalists and they're investigative hit piece writers covering the topic of corruption

01:06:45.020 um if if there's something that's published on on occrp's you know website or through their media

01:06:52.000 network it's never about uh the sky was blue today and um you know someone saved a cat from a tree

01:06:57.740 no it's all investigative hit piece work exposing some aspect of corruption in a country and so for

01:07:05.700 and this was something that uh that the u.s began funding really i mean this type of work over a

01:07:13.580 decade ago and really uh around this before occrp around the time of yugoslavia and whatnot because we

01:07:20.020 wanted to create a predicate to arrest the political enemies of the state department in the region by cooking

01:07:25.640 up corruption scandals that prosecutors could then use to arrest them on the basis of corruption and

01:07:31.860 so the problem is prosecutors don't know what to look for uh and also it's it's it it's not necessarily

01:07:40.180 politically feasible to prosecute somebody who's got a halo on them so the halo has to be broken by

01:07:45.940 hit piece news articles by investigative journalists who often get proprietary access for example

01:07:51.980 you know the occrp this corruption reporting project has gotten very strange special access to

01:07:57.940 hack documents while they're being funded by you know what many believe to be a cia front group you

01:08:04.200 know in the form of us aid uh you know when when they get special access to documents hacked from a

01:08:08.960 computer and use that as the basis for the panama papers well you know we they're reporters you can't

01:08:13.380 ask them their source but the interests align these are the targets of of the u.s state department who

01:08:19.460 happens to be funding them they are mercenary media for the state now what now i'm gonna i want to

01:08:23.900 mention two aspects of this scandal because it's this plays out everywhere but this one it's just

01:08:28.720 it it's it's simultaneously clean and dirty enough that i feel like it's just an anecdote everyone

01:08:34.180 should remember forever one directly on u.s politics and targeting of trump as you mentioned

01:08:39.680 occrp got their their eurasia you know that covers like seven or eight countries that they're

01:08:46.660 supposed to dig up dirt of uh you know of corrupt politicians and corrupt you know um oligarchs in 1.00

01:08:53.740 in those in those territories and their eastern europe europe 20 million dollars for their eastern

01:08:59.140 european operation and so that covers ukraine and so what did they do in 2019 they dug up dirt on rudy

01:09:05.640 giuliani and then that dirt ended up being used as part of the impeachment of donald trump

01:09:11.760 in 2019 so they so they this is the state department funding mercenary media

01:09:19.580 to then dig up dirt on high profile u.s citizens metastasizing into that very evidence being entered

01:09:29.460 into the congressional record to to to successfully impeach the president of the united states so

01:09:36.420 in that case if there was no you know if there was no state department u.s aid funding to occrp they

01:09:44.260 wouldn't have you know presumably had the capital to uh to go out and dig up dirt on rudy giuliani and

01:09:49.440 then americans wouldn't have been hearing you know that these also and they also uh you know

01:09:54.980 wrote hit pieces on paul manafort and uh and his i believe his relations with julian assange but

01:10:00.460 basically he had this foreign policy blob apparatus who hated trump and wanted to take him out and just

01:10:06.860 like state and usa were paying occrp to dig up dirt on foreign oligarchs and foreign presidents 0.95

01:10:14.300 the net result and we don't know if there was any sort of and i'm not saying that there wasn't

01:10:20.020 necessarily necessarily uh you know a direct agreement to do that i'm not privy to that but

01:10:24.840 the fact is is that is that is in effect what happened the the faction of the foreign policy

01:10:32.360 establishment that most detested trump and wanted him out he was being impeached because of his

01:10:38.380 foreign policy around russia and ukraine and it and so usa spending to journalists in ukraine comes back

01:10:46.080 to be used to impeach trump well and and and to smear me as a russian agent right that's been reported

01:10:52.360 it's out there it's proven so my tax dollars go to impugning my character and calling me a disloyal

01:10:59.780 american at a certain point you're like we kind of need a revolution i mean that's why should we put

01:11:06.480 up with that for a second well we're we're in a sort of you can you can feel i can you can feel the

01:11:16.040 the passion around this this week and and people sensing how much of their world has been usurped

01:11:24.200 without their consent by these institutions but just to complete this on on the corruption

01:11:31.060 reporting project that gets half of its funding from the state department usa and the u.s government

01:11:35.460 has the formal yes you know yes yay yes no uh about who they can bring on as staff and they have to you

01:11:43.320 know submit basically you know what they're going to do you know uh the the year ahead but on usa spending

01:11:49.880 dot gov i'm sorry on usa.gov the usa website before it went down this weekend but i have all the receipts

01:11:55.880 and i have all the pdfs on my social media feed they they have a section they have a whole document on

01:12:02.460 this corruption reporting probe project and and how how amazing it has been for for us uh you know for

01:12:08.820 for usa's anti-corruption humanitarian work and it it shows the entry says 20 million dollars and

01:12:15.480 here the you know seven or eight countries they operate in the next page has something which

01:12:20.960 is just absolutely devastating to the to the concept of of of the of the firewall between

01:12:29.180 our humanitarian aid organization and prosecutors it's called it's the accomplishment section and

01:12:34.580 there are four bullet points in this accomplishment section again this is on usa.gov publicly boasting

01:12:39.880 about hit pieces for hire mercenary media to call people corrupt call citizens call so the first line

01:12:48.240 item is over a billion dollars worth of assets seized so they're basically saying hey great return on

01:12:53.260 investment we spent 20 million dollars we were able to seize a billion dollars but you did that by

01:13:00.220 paying journalists to dig up dirt on people what if the journalists got it wrong what you know what

01:13:06.200 if uh there's no legal process by the way i mean it's not like people went to court and were found

01:13:09.780 guilty or anything we just took the stuff well act well this is this get that we'll get to that actually

01:13:15.840 that's bullet point four but bullet point two was it was something like a somewhere between 100 and 300

01:13:21.300 policy changes um in different government and civil society institutions in these countries

01:13:27.800 so this usa saying us paying for political black ops hit pieces generated hundreds of policy changes

01:13:39.160 at the government level and and at the institutional level there well we're presupposing all those are

01:13:46.220 good uh i mean they wouldn't be calling them an accomplishment unless the usa thought they were good so

01:13:51.200 they have a catalyzing change they want to do to the policies of foreign countries and they think the

01:13:56.700 way to do that is to pay mercenary media outlets to dig up dirt on people and then use that as the

01:14:04.880 predicate to force through policy changes then they have a section on all the different government

01:14:10.180 officials that they got that that were um that were forced to resign um because of uh their states

01:14:17.580 us aid state sponsored media and i think the list was like six or seven but they said including a

01:14:22.820 president and a prime minister so they they are bragging effectively in this in this document that

01:14:29.140 hey what a bang for the buck for 20 million dollars we were able to topple two governments and then

01:14:33.620 the fourth bullet point is is the one that winds through its whole this whole usa prosecutor story

01:14:40.780 it says 456 arrests and indictments generated on the basis of of occrps reporting so this is the state

01:14:51.040 department bragging about the incredible volume of human beings whose lives and liberties have been

01:15:01.460 taken from them because of sponsored hit pieces by the u.s government we don't know how many of those

01:15:08.340 people were innocent we don't know you know uh what what even they were charged for when you read

01:15:14.580 that usa.gov document on occrp it doesn't even list their crimes we just know it's a good thing that 456

01:15:22.680 people got arrested because we paid for for what their families think you know right and and prosecutors

01:15:28.360 then use that as the basis for for criminal indictment really become hated in the rest of the world by

01:15:33.380 behaving this way well how many foreign leaders have you seen um you know um other than maybe one

01:15:42.380 i can think of but how many foreign leaders have you have you seen who have been making impassioned floor

01:15:46.820 speeches this week about the tens of thousands of people are going to die if usa leaves uh i'm wondering

01:15:51.920 where all the leaders of african countries have been this week or or uh you know low-income central

01:15:57.540 asian or western hemisphere countries are um why do why are they all either silent or like in the

01:16:04.520 case of el salvador relieved that this is happening none of them are getting the money in fact many

01:16:09.920 times usa is forced on them as a condition oh i know i know some of those leaders and they don't want

01:16:15.340 our aid at all right yeah right oftentimes usa institutions are forced into their country or

01:16:21.180 forced into different regions in their country as as part of a compliance measure that the state

01:16:25.880 department is imposing you know you need to have a certain level of uh human rights you know uh

01:16:32.260 you know monitoring or uh you know their your your water levels have to have this you know certain

01:16:39.100 percent uh purity or you need to be able to maintain you know this uh you know your energy uh

01:16:44.840 development has to be this consistent with climate change or else you know we're going to you know

01:16:51.040 destroy you in the in the you know with the with our trade relations or we're going to put sanctions

01:16:56.000 on you unless you put our humanitarian aid organs in there and so boom just like that under the banner

01:17:00.940 of aid we're in control of your energy infrastructure we're in control of your river systems yeah so you

01:17:05.060 know i i think the reason that the only people that we really see who are who are from defending us

01:17:13.280 aid right now are people here in the united states or in nato uh you know that are directly or

01:17:19.240 directly on the take or their or their donors or constituents are so in september we went across

01:17:24.040 the country coast to coast 17 different cities on a nationwide live tour and it was amazing

01:17:29.040 we brought the entire staff with us like we always do because we all work together for so long

01:17:34.000 and enjoy traveling together and one of our producers is a documentary filmmaker and so he decided

01:17:39.500 to make a documentary film about our trip a full month across america with some of the most

01:17:44.520 interesting people around different people join us every single night bun geno and russell brand

01:17:50.080 and bobby kennedy and jd vance and donald trump etc etc we had the best time and the fruit of that

01:17:56.100 is a documentary called on the road the tucker carlson live tour which is available right now

01:18:01.760 on tcn on the road tucker carlson live tour is hilarious you will like it

01:18:06.960 so i i got an email from a friend of mine a text from a friend of mine yesterday is such a wonderful

01:18:15.900 guy actually conservative trump fan but um a recipient of usa money and uh he said it's totally

01:18:23.340 corrupt you're right um but he goes they don't understand you're going to tank the economy of

01:18:27.720 northern virginia if you shut this bigot off right and i thought maybe that's the one perspective

01:18:32.620 people watching in the u.s don't understand is how totally dependent the dc metro area is

01:18:37.280 on foreign policy spending yeah it's not it's not making it to congo it's stopping in arlington

01:18:44.040 it's well that's why i said donors and constituents right because those are like think about the

01:18:48.300 congressman in those representing those districts and uh you know you you see that that's exactly

01:18:55.180 right it's it's it's our own you know it's our own economies and and and then you know the point

01:19:01.860 i was making earlier is that you know you are going to have this sort of um follow-on trickle-down

01:19:08.720 economic impact if uh many of our multinational corporations who form the bedrock of our you know

01:19:17.020 stock exchanges and chamber of commerce uh if the dirty deeds that usa does are cut out are they still

01:19:27.840 going to have uh as will that impact their profitability and so that's why i i want to

01:19:34.340 you know spend the time in the beginning just talking about that that tension because in in

01:19:39.580 the oil and gas case like trump has a plan around that drill baby drill right like you don't we might 1.00

01:19:44.140 not need to fund transgender dance festivals in order to you know like you go to the cia world book uh

01:19:50.780 you know everyone go on cia.gov and just look at every country and the cia has a world book of of

01:19:55.080 all the strategic resources in every country and so you know burma is top strategic resource

01:20:01.040 petroleum okay let's just we don't need to necessarily have the sticky issue about whether

01:20:05.060 or not uh we need to extract those foreign resources from burma if if the sitting government

01:20:10.980 there doesn't if we are drill baby drilling at home right there's creative offsets that can be done

01:20:17.240 to replace dirty tricks you know for example like you know with with isis and uh and the dynamics in

01:20:23.960 syria and afghanistan and pakistan if there are ways to reconceptualize the way we do trade in the

01:20:29.940 region or do creative you know joint partnerships or or try to make inroads into other you know parts

01:20:36.600 of the population that were not you know tested as as robustly um but you're going to need to think

01:20:44.120 a lot more creatively about that when you don't have access to the the dirty deeds done dirt cheap 0.54

01:20:52.800 and that and so that's just i feel like that i just want to impress that point because i think

01:20:58.900 a lot of mega republicans are going to think that it's it's easier than it is to reorganize that and

01:21:08.800 there's just a lot of surgery that needs to be done if you're going to cut that function out which i

01:21:14.660 totally support doing in nine out of ten cases but there's a you know there's going to be a remnant

01:21:21.000 and we need a doctrine that's cohesive and sellable to the american people because the problem was is

01:21:26.520 we'd built such an elaborate labyrinth of lies that you couldn't even honestly talk about it with

01:21:31.660 people this is the whole oversight thing that i mentioned you know you can this happened with

01:21:36.080 the zunzanillo scandal with usaid in um in from 2009 to 2014 ish there was um you know usaid and

01:21:47.840 were at the forefront of the arab spring and toppling democratically elected governments in 0.98

01:21:52.660 tunisia and egypt and all over um you know in these street color revolutions that were powered by

01:21:58.800 digital diplomacy you know we've discussed this before you know where usa was funding people in

01:22:04.880 you know to do do youth engagement for how to use facebook hashtags and you know uh and and how to

01:22:10.980 mobilize street protests so that everyone knows where to go and and what kind of uh you know slogans and

01:22:16.460 slang to use and so you know they wanted to they weren't kind of like the george floyd protests

01:22:20.560 yeah kind of like the george floyd protests yeah kind of yeah wait can i ask you to pause and just

01:22:25.200 remind us why exactly the obama state department would want to topple say the government of egypt

01:22:31.100 um there's there's a a lot i my understanding is is a lot of it has to do with the natural resources

01:22:38.980 and um you know the sort of middle east north africa um you know i mean the fact is is you know like

01:22:46.720 i mean egypt is the you know sort of the lip of of europe that way and um but i think there's

01:22:54.740 probably middle eastern politics that play into it as well and it's a it's a complicated picture um

01:23:01.040 but i think what they we can say 10 years later more than 10 years later was not a clean win for the

01:23:06.700 united states oh right no totally i don't see how we're killing qaddafi the iraq war like i don't

01:23:12.740 know that any of this what's going on now in the middle east syria etc i don't i don't see these are

01:23:19.100 obvious victories for us oh and i don't think they do either actually there's there's been a lot of

01:23:23.360 where did it all go wrong uh in the years post revolution but in those early years they were really

01:23:29.420 jazzed up about this new internet social media superpower that they had deployed to topple those

01:23:35.780 governments and so they sought to do that in cuba by creating what they what usa called a cuban

01:23:40.240 spring and the problem was at that at that time cuba had banned u.s social media companies calling

01:23:46.040 them you know a tool of u.s imperialism and so there was no twitter allowed and so usa pulled off

01:23:53.460 this operation to create a a company called zunzania which is it was a it was a twitter knockoff it

01:24:00.620 had the same user interface it had the same like and retweet uh button and uh that was i believe

01:24:06.220 like the cuban slang word for for hummingbird so it was basically even had like the bird and

01:24:11.200 they they knew that they couldn't it couldn't be an american company so they had to convince

01:24:16.400 i think it was two cuban businessmen to set this up and they ran it as they ran it through usaid they

01:24:22.040 ran it as they what they did is they took humanitarian relief funds earmarked for pakistan and they ran it

01:24:28.320 through a byzantine labyrinth of shell companies and money laundered through cayman banks and panamanian

01:24:34.980 banks and and uh you know bvi banks uh in so that it got to these cuban businessmen to set it up so

01:24:44.340 that cuban counterintelligence would not suspect that it was a u.s thing they this usaid contracted

01:24:50.040 out to a group called creative associates international cai it's not cia it's cai and they're

01:24:56.080 very creative and and what the the internal documents showed when this whole scandal blew up

01:25:01.320 at usaid is that usaid's plan was to recruit about 100 000 cubans onto this onto this platform

01:25:07.620 luring them in with uh with algorithms and vibes favoring sports music and hurricane updates were

01:25:14.480 the were the the main things and then they said once we've and but at the same time we're actually

01:25:19.320 going to be taking all their personal data on the back end and we're going to be using ai for all the

01:25:25.240 metadata and all the websites that they visit and all the cookies we're going to take that to

01:25:29.100 aggregate a political receptivity political receptivity map of the of the categories of

01:25:34.600 users within these 100 000 that'll be most receptive to take to the streets in a violent revolution

01:25:39.500 against against the government and what they what they plotted is that at the at the appropriate

01:25:45.000 moment once the critical nodes once they had a critical mass of users on the platform and they had

01:25:50.080 enough support from other civil society institutions that were that were being funded by usaid and state

01:25:56.160 and any day at the time that they would then activate what they what they called smart mobs they would

01:26:01.540 they would switch the algorithms they would they would switch the algorithms and they would selectively

01:26:06.380 target news distribution of of messages to to users on the basis of their political proclivities

01:26:12.720 in order to get them to take to the streets in in violent street protests and over overthrow their

01:26:19.440 government basically the same you know pull off the same thing that was that happened in the arab

01:26:22.980 spring but do it in cuba and all they needed was enough people on the user base that was their that

01:26:27.520 was what they can i just pause again and just remind people that i think if most americans had been aware

01:26:33.600 that this was going on in 2020 the black lives matter protest would have been instantly recognizable as a

01:26:40.720 government-sponsored revolution called revolution against donald trump because that's what it was

01:26:45.880 well i want to come back to there's actually a lot there that is um i think will be more even more

01:26:54.220 impactful after just kind of finishing this this one point on on usaid here which is that because you

01:26:59.240 know you mentioned if americans had known this is going on well what was really interesting about the

01:27:02.820 scandal is nobody knew that that usaid was doing this this was clearly cia style covert action you know

01:27:12.480 the construction of a private sector for-profit social media company that uh that gets its funds from

01:27:20.040 uh non-profit humanitarian relief funds earmarked for a country 13 000 miles away uh and all with the

01:27:29.200 express stated interest of doing diplomatic you know work with extreme diplomatic implications

01:27:37.040 overthrowing the government of a foreign country and so as this scandal all broke open um the the media

01:27:45.400 and what had happened was is senate oversight had been completely blocked from any information about

01:27:51.760 this operation this is what you heard joni ernst senator joni ernst tell elon musk earlier this week when

01:27:57.040 she was explaining how she was totally blocked by usaid it was a total black box they they uh you know

01:28:03.640 it's all in-house it's all subject to the inspector general there and if the inspector general says no

01:28:07.740 the senate gets nothing and there's nothing they can do and it's less accountable in many respects than

01:28:13.220 the cia because the cia when they do covert action they have to get a presidential finding this is part of

01:28:19.160 the reforms that were done you know in the 1970s when it looked like okay the cia was going rogue and so

01:28:24.380 every cia covert action has to be formally authorized by the president united states but what happens if

01:28:30.920 the president doesn't want to approve something well and you still want the deed done what if for

01:28:37.520 example you know you belong to a certain wing of the foreign policy establishment that's a dot is with

01:28:41.460 the president and you know the president's not going to approve it so how can you get that done like

01:28:47.160 say for you know the funding of isis groups for example trump was wanted to crush isis hillary clinton

01:28:53.160 and jake sullivan said isis is on our side in syria the biden administration kicked billions of

01:28:59.380 dollars in the aggregate to isis and and al-qaeda groups just are now the sitting government of syria

01:29:05.880 and in fact right now the current head of the government in syria uh muhammad al-jalani was there

01:29:11.460 was a 10 million dollar bounty on his head as being a uh al-qaeda terrorist uh that that tweet is still

01:29:17.560 alive on the u.s embassy in syria but he's now our friend right but if trump wouldn't authorize

01:29:23.620 the cia covertly running funds to the uh to isis but that cell within the cia still wanted to do it

01:29:31.620 all they need to do is walk on over to their friends at us aid and us aid can do it without

01:29:37.000 a presidential finding they can call now they can all it takes is creative structuring they can just

01:29:41.920 do it through humanitarian you know relief funds to uh you know to a certain you know part of the

01:29:48.780 you know certain certain region that has a you know disproportionate amount of isis k in it they 1.00

01:29:54.240 can fund you know the the educational institutions or they can water the air there's another thing usa

01:30:01.500 got in trouble for is when they were um they were they were essentially um sustaining that the heroines

01:30:08.040 the world's the world's heroin supply 95 of the world's heroin supply you know came from came

01:30:13.360 from afghanistan why were they doing that well i the so usaids one of their one of their close

01:30:20.260 partners is another usaid adjacent entity called the u.s institute for peace it's its office is right

01:30:28.420 next to the state department in in washington dc it gets it was created by congress it gets 56 million

01:30:34.400 dollars a year from taxpayers and in uh last in in 2023 the u.s institute for peace um wrote a white

01:30:42.680 paper that said uh that told the taliban not to shut down the the heroin not to shut down the poppy

01:30:50.720 fields because it would create a quote economic and humanitarian disaster uh that basically um i mean

01:30:58.960 this is this is the state department they're fully funded by the u.s state department they are they are

01:31:04.320 sort of the policy arm uh of you know many many of the aspects of u.s aid they whereas u.s aid is 44

01:31:11.160 billion they only have 56 million but they they all advance u.s foreign policy in a cohesive

01:31:16.640 vision for a region and they're both operating in afghanistan so while u.s institute for peace is saying

01:31:22.920 we need to keep the heroin flowing it was u.s aid who was doing all the the water irrigation of the

01:31:30.300 poppy fields uh in order that that allowed that propagation of the heroin to continue and that

01:31:36.800 gets into you know a darker story around the role of of narco you know narco activity and narco gangs

01:31:45.380 as instrument of state instruments of statecraft you know this was you know the mujahideen that were

01:31:51.220 pumped up by zbigny brzezinski and rcia and you know in the 1970s and 80s and that you know they were

01:31:57.320 they were being funded by drug money from the golden from the golden crescent and it being

01:32:02.200 laundered into pakistan banks like the cia bank um you know bcci and everyone can read about the bank

01:32:08.840 of credit and commerce international scandal and the and and that but you know it was it was narco

01:32:13.060 terrorism funding uh for u.s backed terrorist paramilitary groups that we were propping up as

01:32:21.720 freedom fighters against the soviets in afghanistan um you know if you remember seeing the old uh you

01:32:28.020 know what osama bin laden puff piece uh you know freedom warrior on the road to peace with you know

01:32:33.080 when he's back in the mujahideen days but what i'm saying is you see this play out everywhere you

01:32:38.860 know this was a business a big part of you know um how uh how right-wing capitalist movements were

01:32:48.780 in western hemisphere were propped up against left-wing socialist and marxist um you know uh

01:32:55.240 opposition in in the 1950s and 60s and and you see this run through everything i mean

01:33:00.680 think about what's happened with el salvador you know why did why did uh buchele say that

01:33:07.980 you know basically was the first one on x to say that yeah us aid is awful it's got to go countries

01:33:15.180 don't want to look at my case because usa was trying to regime change him from there the soros

01:33:19.900 groups i mean the they all said that his attempts to clean up the drug trade were humanity you know

01:33:25.260 were uh you know humanitarian violations of the rights of drug cartels have you seen that that uh

01:33:31.840 you know the the government of mexico appears to actually be quite uh quite happy with the move to

01:33:37.760 abolish usa there's a piece of newsweek about this trump's strange allies in the in the you know in

01:33:43.720 the fight to end usa and it's uh it's the mexican government they don't want it either well there 0.99

01:33:50.620 what i'm saying is is the scope of our dirty deeds done through usa and state department grants and

01:33:59.700 through ci covert activity that is only made possible because they're working with assets

01:34:05.060 whose budget is funded by usa or budget is funded by state or budget is funded by the national

01:34:10.540 now for democracy or others you know a lot of that work is just liaising with assets that are that are

01:34:16.280 there they don't have that big a budget usa just a three times bigger budget than the cia and so they

01:34:21.640 depend on working with state department usa cultivated assets and so we're going to disentangle this whole

01:34:30.120 spider web in order to form a cohesive foreign policy vision that isn't evil and i think that's i think

01:34:38.260 kind of think that's the point that isn't evil because i mean in our system i'd really think in

01:34:43.840 any system even a monarchy the people have to think that in general the government is you know doing

01:34:51.860 things they approve of isn't actively evil isn't you know in business with the drug cartels in mexico

01:34:58.000 which our government is as you know um because there's if the people of a country don't think

01:35:04.940 their own government has legitimacy like it can't last very long it doesn't last right right absolutely

01:35:11.480 so um are you concerned that when people learn like what's going to happen when these stories

01:35:21.000 penetrate that yes your government has been paying to wreck a lot of other places and you know is

01:35:28.380 working against you using your money i mean what it's kind of hard to unknow that right and thank

01:35:37.560 goodness you know because we're going to need that level of national consciousness about these scandals

01:35:44.560 in order to create the moral buffer against the temptation to be evil again exactly right and

01:35:51.260 you know so i do think that this is all because because this is this is a this is a dog fight to

01:36:01.580 the bone we are going to be at every level at the every year in the budget there's going to be this

01:36:07.200 fight i mean now and you know here's the question how much more does the state department get in the

01:36:11.400 budget you know if since you know i had like a 35 billion dollar budget now it's getting us aids 44

01:36:18.000 billion uh but what fraction of that is trump going to i've been saying here for for for a long time

01:36:26.400 because everyone talks about how usa is funneling things to left-wing causes and very easy to see that

01:36:32.580 you know we talked about the 97 of employees at usa do donate to democrats but to me the the main issue

01:36:40.300 here is the remnant of internationalist republicans in congress who can form a critical

01:36:47.120 majority block with in the house or in the senate in order to get their way on this issue

01:36:56.300 like you could you could see a situation where their own vested interests their own constituents

01:37:01.560 are so dependent on either usa's funding or the results of usa's operations uh that they will side

01:37:10.460 with the democrats in order to inflict damage on the trump white house of course budget vision

01:37:17.300 and so that's going to be a constant fight and my what what i'm hoping evolves over the next weeks and

01:37:28.000 months is a moral north star for america first nationalist or populist or maga or or centrist or simply

01:37:40.100 you know reasonable liberal or or center left folks where you have the current level of american

01:37:46.940 prosperity you remove that evil in the labyrinth of lies

01:37:51.840 something needs to fill that gap you know like we talked about the oil and gas spaces drill baby

01:37:58.320 drill for for oil okay but now do that for semiconductors you know like yep and now do that

01:38:03.720 for every critical mineral and and maybe the answer is i mean what i've been trying to sell is that

01:38:11.840 if you're going to do the dirty deeds and you do believe they're necessary for state craft

01:38:16.540 then there has to at least be an obligation to be honest about them you know like i thought it was very

01:38:22.640 honest you know when lindsey graham finally came out and said the strategic vision of the united states is

01:38:27.960 the the you know the 14 trillion dollars worth of natural resources um relying on the humanitarian

01:38:35.200 predicate for it allows voters to be deceived and for them to uh then turn around and be totally

01:38:43.060 feel totally hoodwinked when they find out that hey why are you paying for the unions the media companies

01:38:48.860 the things that are they're acting here on the homeland i we have this tumor that we're removing

01:38:55.240 from the the the body of the american project but there was blood flowing into that and it's connected

01:39:03.460 to all these arteries my the thing that i want to make sure happened that is midwifed appropriately 0.92

01:39:09.400 is what are you changing about our foreign policy structure so that when you remove the tumor

01:39:17.400 um you know you the blood still you know flows in the way that you want it to you know you're not

01:39:24.740 ripping the heart out with open heart surgery i get it i'm just a less confident than than you are

01:39:30.440 that we're reaping some massive reward for this i mean i remember people muttering darkly about

01:39:35.720 you know the purpose of the iraq war in 2003 was to seize the oil in iraq well that didn't happen

01:39:40.660 didn't happen in libya i mean i i don't it's it's hard to i guess i don't have a clear picture of

01:39:46.080 the material benefits that we're receiving well look at look at the benefits to the to the stock price

01:39:50.360 for chevron and exon when the war broke out and and the the u.s state department strong-armed every

01:39:56.360 country in europe to divest from russian gas and they all were forced to buy expensive uh north

01:40:02.220 american lng uh their their stock prices went to the moon they they've had something like you know

01:40:07.960 triple the you know the profits or something for for a certain period of months uh you know following

01:40:14.920 that and reap these windfall benefits um and you know the the this is we're sort of confronting the

01:40:22.800 ghost of ronald reagan here because you know the the the reason you do that for statecraft purposes

01:40:28.360 is trickle down economics what's good for exon mobil is good for the american citizens and so if

01:40:34.660 if so a dirty deed done to advance you know uh big you know big oil big ag you know uh big tech

01:40:44.000 whatever it is anything that's good for them is good for us and so anything that the that the u.s

01:40:51.940 government can do in the form of overt or covert diplomacy or covert influence in the region that

01:40:58.600 tips the scales in favor of those u.s corporate interests or u.s multinational interests will

01:41:04.560 ultimately trickle down to the people itself i mean that's the logic i understand i just i i don't i

01:41:10.220 don't think it's a holistic view of of it first it assumes that the interests of big publicly traded

01:41:15.520 companies are identical to those of the united states which is not true second it assumes that

01:41:20.300 weak neighbors make a strong america also not true destroying the economy of western europe is

01:41:24.940 actually not in our long-term interest at all it just helps china and it changes the balance of power

01:41:31.060 globally east that is not in our interest at all and so i i'm not confident i think the people 0.98

01:41:37.200 running this are dumb fucks actually i don't think they know what they're doing i don't think they even 0.97

01:41:41.380 understand you know the big picture grand game type diplomacy i just don't think they're capable of it i 1.00

01:41:48.060 think they're they're dumb they're like on twitter and so i just don't have confidence in their judgment

01:41:53.180 i guess is what i'm saying right fair no i think it is um because if your measure is like short-term 0.98

01:41:58.020 stock spikes okay those are pretty easy to affect that's like you know but that's not the same as

01:42:04.060 like long-term prosperity but maybe they're smarter than maybe i'm the dumb one take the pepsi coup in

01:42:10.700 1973 okay the you know we overthrew the government of of chile we toppled you know the allende government

01:42:17.360 and uh you know 30 years later 35 years later um files were declassified that showed that the chairman

01:42:25.260 of the pepsi cola company um had lobbied the secretary of state uh to um that that u.s national

01:42:36.520 interests in the form of pepsi cola bottling operations were going to be devastated if allende

01:42:42.220 was allowed you know we have one it was allowed to remain in power and uh i forget if he was nationalizing

01:42:49.160 some element yeah but basically you know pepsi had these bottling operations there it was going to

01:42:53.900 massively you know tank their capacity to produce the the the cans for pepsi bottles and so um

01:43:00.140 a meeting was organized between uh it was like it was it was the it was the cia director at the time

01:43:08.080 and and the chairman of pepsi cola everyone can look up the guardian article on this just type in

01:43:12.700 pepsi coup chile and uh so the the chairman of pepsi and the the head of the central intelligence

01:43:22.160 agency have a planning meeting uh about the best way to overthrow a government in order to preserve

01:43:29.420 pepsi's profits and they even bring in to the meeting the the meeting minutes show they bring in

01:43:33.720 uh basically the state department's media guy for the region who ran a web of of uh print media and

01:43:40.320 radio stations so that the media guy could be brought into the propaganda um you know that was

01:43:47.280 being co-generated effectively by the cia and pepsi well i mean this plays out everywhere as as

01:43:54.700 multinational corporations can benefit from u.s government pressure on foreign companies applied

01:44:00.620 to that's that's clearly true i just i just i i you know i think that american business interests have

01:44:07.460 a very obvious recent history of trading short-term profits for long-term strength you know selling all

01:44:14.780 your industries to china at 40 cents on a dollar you know clearly makes a small number of people

01:44:19.380 rich but it's like it's not a long-term plan for prosperity actually well you know there's not good

01:44:24.180 at this in a way it's a miracle that this is happening because it's forcing us to confront all

01:44:27.860 the related issues as we put together a more cohesive vision for u.s soft power which is that

01:44:32.280 that reaganite style tricking down economics 1980s thing may have made sense when those corporations

01:44:39.440 were american corporations right with american manufacturing facilities employing american labor

01:44:44.640 but now these are nominally you know american companies but they are but there's no there's

01:44:51.360 no trickle down because it's not like that's substantially increasing american jobs when

01:44:56.080 they're going overseas they'll provide american jobs in the first place yeah right or or it's not you

01:45:01.360 know providing you know enhancing the security of our supply chains because it's you know it's giving

01:45:06.780 more more for our factories because we don't have the factories anymore and so trump is doing all this

01:45:11.620 in tandem you know he's trying to onshore things he's trying to bring back domestic manufacturing

01:45:15.660 and some of that may be how we approach statecraft which is that you know the the kinds of entities

01:45:23.300 that we consider to be u.s national interest are the ones that you know have a certain amount of

01:45:29.600 american investment you know you can't be a sort of american in name only right and you know have uh you

01:45:36.360 know you know so much of your workforce in china or have so much of your you know um you know operations

01:45:46.060 uh you know i mean there may be a sort of you we need to sort of have a cohesive vision of what

01:45:54.680 national interest is if we're not going to completely agree i mean you know come companies

01:46:00.520 basically owned by the sovereign wealth funds of our rivals who are only here to benefit from our

01:46:05.240 enforcement of copyright etc etc are no sense really american um what why are we like wrecking the

01:46:12.020 world for their benefit yeah you know so i just want to end on the just to get deeper if you don't

01:46:17.740 mind into this question of the effect of our foreign policy on our domestic life and you just can't

01:46:23.860 escape the suspicion that our politics are really volatile we're way less free than we were

01:46:28.680 in part because of you know methods of control refined overseas like i just look back the last

01:46:37.820 five years and i'm like everything you've said about what usa idea and ned and all these other groups

01:46:43.700 or state department are doing abroad i'm just seeing that here so am i being crazy oh not at all

01:46:49.440 um i mean there's a million direct examples of this there's something that you've brought up

01:46:53.580 several times so far uh around black lives matter and i i i feel like it was so obviously fake like

01:47:00.500 this armed robber porn star drug addict gets dies of a drug od on the street after passing you know

01:47:08.360 a counterfeit bill and like all of a sudden america collapses come on come on dude right right well 0.97

01:47:15.040 and osama bin laden plan 9-11 i'm like the whole thing is just too dumb for me i can't deal with it 0.67

01:47:20.520 right no and there's there's a few a few pieces to that so first um black lives matter is you know

01:47:28.740 one of the main ngos that serves as the black lives matter clearinghouses is the tide center and the

01:47:34.340 tides foundation and um usa gave the tide center a 27 million dollar grant okay now here here we go

01:47:42.760 yeah and um now nominally that grant is for uh the tide tide center institutions to

01:47:49.960 solicit uh uh secure concrete investments from foreign countries on issues related to u.s national

01:47:57.480 interest so basically the usa has deputized this you know group that's you know in the center of the

01:48:05.560 nest around around black lives matter uh to secure commitments from foreign governments 1.00

01:48:12.180 from a formal u.s government agency their deputized act is a sort of long arm of the state department

01:48:19.240 and they're getting 27 million for it and by the way when they get actually before before i go deeper

01:48:24.520 on the the black lives matter stuff because there's a there's a lot there um i've been calling this the

01:48:29.960 you know the smithmont problem for us aid you're right we had a smithmont act from 1948 until 2013

01:48:34.820 with the modernization under obama that effectively got rid of it that prohibited foreign propaganda or

01:48:41.760 fake news stories intended for foreign audiences from being circulated here at home exactly they got

01:48:47.180 rid of that with usa it's even worse because as bad as it is for propaganda usa has the smithmont

01:48:55.160 problem for financing and operations the usa can provide money to international institutions

01:49:04.800 or to ngos for their work abroad but then they turn around and and now they have all this money

01:49:12.840 and they now are wealthy and and powerful and deeply ingrained highly pedigreed institutions because

01:49:20.460 of all their money from state and aid and and ned but there's nothing blocking them from also operating

01:49:28.640 on u.s soil so you know give an example of like there's a you know this this for-profit private

01:49:34.360 sector censorship mercenary firm called newsguard and got a 750 000 pentagon contract to uh you know

01:49:41.400 help the pentagon trace the information for fingerprints of russian mis and disinformation

01:49:46.200 okay maybe there's a strategic interest in the pentagon uh mapping out pro-russia narratives uh in in

01:49:54.200 regions around the world but newsguard targets u.s citizens newsguard has you know um the the the

01:50:01.580 former head of nato on its board the former i've been targeted by newsguard so i know

01:50:06.140 yes yeah of course but they whether or not the grant is for like they don't have there's a lot of

01:50:16.020 domestic censorship grants that the biden administration gave to pump these things up

01:50:18.800 domestically like the national science foundation does a lot but in this case it's what you're doing

01:50:23.200 is you're making the institution more powerful you're buffering its revenues you're padding its

01:50:28.060 profit margins so it's now more powerful to be able to take you on even if the grant isn't for that

01:50:34.580 money exactly and exactly so it bleeds into it and this this happens with every institution usaid

01:50:40.660 works for and when you under again coming back to the fact that usaid is at the heart you know usaid

01:50:45.260 is the swing player between the state department the cia and the pentagon and and it works with all

01:50:50.500 three of those and you know you never know when you see a usaid program which of those three ops

01:50:56.660 is being run but you know for certain it's one of those three you don't know if it's to advance you

01:51:02.440 know a stated uh state department diplomacy uh uh priority in the region you don't know if it's being

01:51:10.420 used in order to advance a u.s national security interest in the region or you don't know if it's being

01:51:15.860 used to advance an unstated state department foreign policy goal being pursued by the cia and

01:51:20.780 it's and it's functioning as an intelligence i'll give you some examples of this in 2021 i've talked

01:51:26.460 about this a few times but under mark milley and and joe president joe biden the the the first special

01:51:33.360 forces um you know vision statement prospectus uh pages 16 17 everyone can look this up it's a it's on

01:51:40.460 it's a public doc you know government document you can find online and it's it presents a a way to

01:51:48.740 synchronize the the psychological uh operations and civil military affairs work that the special

01:51:55.140 forces does um with the different organ with with the different um foreign policy agencies can play

01:52:02.460 supporting roles so they give an example of uh they're trying to block block the chinese from buying 0.96

01:52:07.640 a port in china um and uh the china the african i'm sorry in africa in africa the african government

01:52:14.140 doesn't want to go through with it i'll i'll just try to make this as simple as possible basically

01:52:19.100 what ends up happening is is um the state department can't get the african government to

01:52:23.180 cooperate and agree to cancel this you know this this port construction and so they they need to buy

01:52:30.980 time before the port is completed for the state department to have more carrots and sticks

01:52:37.500 more leverage to be able to force the african government to relent and cancel it that is they

01:52:42.980 need more either more appropriations and allocations to be able to bribe them with or they need more

01:52:49.940 sticks to be able to punish them with you know leverage from from from you know something harm that's

01:52:55.500 being done that they can offer to make the pain stop and so so this is what the special forces

01:52:59.940 document envisions envisages which is that the role of the special forces in that in that scenario

01:53:05.020 in the name of great power competition and special forces role in countering you know peer competitor

01:53:11.580 from from china and and they also argue there's a national security basis because this would give

01:53:16.320 china it was a west african hypothetical country so it would give china access to the atlantic but what

01:53:21.520 what they what they did in this scenario and they war game this all out is how they would effectively

01:53:25.860 induce race riots to get the african workers to um to uh to go all go on strike and boycott and take to

01:53:33.020 the streets and protest against the chinese business interests this would also devastate the the the

01:53:37.420 country economically it would it would effectively bring the uh you know it would also humiliate the

01:53:42.620 the chinese business interests in the area and so it would create this international scandal it would 0.90

01:53:46.960 scandalize the poor construction and the destabilized economic state would allow this the u.s ambassador 0.69

01:53:52.400 to walk back in and say hey uh you know you know all this pain can stop just cancel the

01:53:58.180 poor construction type thing but what's really interesting is in the special forces perspectives can you

01:54:01.940 imagine writing that like let's let's incite race riots and they well they said their quote was

01:54:06.540 inflamed racial tensions or inflamed tensions can you imagine yeah and so what they did is um i think

01:54:13.000 it was inflamed tensions but they explicitly say you know it's africans versus the chinese there

01:54:16.660 and and what they did is the the role of u.s aid in this special operations uh scenario literally printed

01:54:26.200 you know by the u.s government was that u.s aid would would swoop into the scene and provide job

01:54:32.380 fairs u.s taxpayers would they do job fairs in the exact region where the you know rioters and

01:54:39.340 protesters were striking in order because they wouldn't the the special forces concern was that

01:54:44.860 the people they needed in the streets in this you know uh protest uh to destabilize the country would

01:54:50.460 not want to would not were too poor to leave their jobs they would not want to go on strike in

01:54:55.560 these chinese-owned factories and businesses so they needed a replacement source of income and that

01:55:00.840 was where u.s aid came into the operation u.s aid would do job fairs and so the african protesters

01:55:08.920 would be subsidized to do that protest street protest destabilization activity and don't need to

01:55:18.100 worry about whether or not you know um it's going to cost them their jobs because they're now on the

01:55:23.480 payroll of u.s aid and but that was a special forces operation and and you you see this you see

01:55:30.280 this with with everything u.s aid does but um you know to to come back to this you know thing on um

01:55:36.080 you know we're talking about i guess blm and some of this uh domestic uh you know uh foreign thing is

01:55:41.980 um sorry if you want to drill down that and ask me a question but what i'm saying is u.s aid plays this

01:55:48.820 this military role as well with it with with uh support assistance but i mean treating u.s

01:55:55.860 citizens like you would treat foreign enemies or adversaries is something i never imagined would

01:56:03.860 happen but it is happening well because once that when they defined populism as a threat to democracy

01:56:10.740 because it undermines public faith and confidence in democratic institutions they were able to

01:56:15.120 effectively categorize the sitting president of the united states as an attack on democracy and

01:56:18.800 good thing we're democracy promotion programs because that we are the white blood cells uh in

01:56:24.920 of the immune system uh to stop you know the virus of threats to democracy so of course you know

01:56:31.260 populism is democracy right demand for majority rule but yeah okay no of course but they say you know

01:56:36.400 we need democratic institutions to provide the bumper cars to stop demagoguery can i just ask you

01:56:41.160 something like so the nina jankiewicz famously was you know played a censor domestic censorship role

01:56:46.920 so absurd absolutely absurd figure like pulled from tiktok but human um she gets fired because people 0.99

01:56:54.680 are like who is this woman and she winds up at usa i do well so she wants she winds up at the the 0.64

01:56:59.760 center for information resilience which is a which is a london-based um it's basically a british

01:57:05.680 statecraft organ she had to file a far registration she became a registered agent of the united

01:57:10.900 kingdom uh for you know for her work they're recipients of usaid money aren't they yes yes 0.58

01:57:15.840 they were yes recipients of usaid money although i believe um she uh i think she wrote that she left

01:57:21.900 there several months ago sometime in 2024 but the fact is is it's still that same network but a lot

01:57:26.880 of these people i mean i just you know being a kid in dc and you'd meet people who had served in the

01:57:32.140 foreign policy uh apparatus and you know they whatever they were doing killing mosedeck or whatever but

01:57:38.860 they were pretty smart i thought i always thought i mean they were it seems like the current generation 0.94

01:57:44.920 is a lot of nina jankiewicz's like just sort of low iq well you know people like do you know i mean

01:57:52.800 what what's the caliber of the people administering these programs well i actually think there's

01:57:59.420 there's there's layers of sophistication to to nina and oh is that true yeah i i do i do think so and

01:58:06.400 and i don't have any personal extra i mean she's written a lot of

01:58:09.640 not flattering things about me and uh you know and i've pointed out the what i consider to be

01:58:17.920 massive you know conflicts of interest when you know the the the entire field of professional

01:58:25.360 internet censorship that is you you get paid you pay your mortgage with paychecks that come from your

01:58:31.400 job censoring the internet i mean i fund i fundamentally do not believe that that nina's 0.70

01:58:36.100 field that you know this this uh you know disinformation of you know censoring citizens

01:58:42.120 in our own country uh and leave aside you know the sort of you know maybe more nuanced issue about

01:58:48.680 whether there's a role of countering foreign propaganda and how robust that is the fact is is

01:58:53.360 you know what was done here was just straight up saying that domestic misinformation is a threat to

01:58:59.720 democracy and so the u.s government should be you know should be had played the task of of censoring

01:59:04.720 its own its own people through this whole society network but you you have i mean there's so

01:59:11.000 fundamentally i don't believe that that job should exist and it is you know part of what i consider to

01:59:17.320 be my my purpose in life to try to bring freedom to the internet and to the extent that that that field

01:59:22.640 exists as a profession you know that is those those two things are are in conflict and then you know the

01:59:28.900 the other you know part of it is the conflict of interest right when when you can see how these

01:59:35.720 very censorship institutions that are being being funded by usaid and so many of them are it's

01:59:41.380 unbelievable i mean usaid has a formal censorship program i believe we've even talked about it before

01:59:46.220 but now it's uh now i think people are starting to you know appreciate the significance of it and in fact

01:59:51.960 its website just went down a few days ago and um it's it's under i believe an extraordinary amount

01:59:57.820 of scandal but you know which is that these

02:00:00.840 usaid takes taxpayer money and creates lobbyists for more usaid because all the people who it creates

02:00:12.200 a conflict of interest between their own personal piggy banks and what the actual national interest of the

02:00:17.640 country is if if if your whole field is rely is is getting funding you know in in significant part

02:00:27.620 from usaid well then you if you want to really make it in this world you have a moral hazard a perverse

02:00:36.180 incentive to become a a tiny little lobbyist to explain why it is that censoring the internet is

02:00:43.480 is is is essential to u.s uh national interest and and to sell a whole ideology and a whole you know

02:00:53.940 completely different vision of what our country even is and what we're even fighting for because the more

02:01:00.140 that our public grants and contracts the more that our procurements the more that the usa piggy bank

02:01:08.040 funds that the bigger the pie of that field gets and so of course and so you but you see this in

02:01:16.420 everything that usa touches you know from the from the media to the social media to the universities to the

02:01:22.680 to the unions to the anti-corruption you know prosecutor work to the humanitarian work around uh you know

02:01:29.560 in in drug zones and and in in paramilitary zones and and so it's it's you know i think it's what

02:01:36.160 elon would call a self-licking ice cream cone and uh you know the the ice cream's gone bad but with

02:01:42.320 the blm thing it gets it gets very strange you know because because usa is a professional rent-a-riot

02:01:50.560 organizer i mean as i even i mean leave aside the countless documented cases of usa rent-a-riots from

02:01:58.760 you know as as we mentioned the arab spring which we you know we went over the rent-a-riots there 0.97

02:02:04.780 usa pumped 1.2 billion dollars you know into the region uh you know during that during that period

02:02:09.700 we have literal usa documents uh explicitly doing operational planning to create smart mobs and people

02:02:17.160 to take to the streets and riots um you know you see in georgia you saw it in belarus in in in 2020

02:02:24.060 it's anytime there are minneapolis well this is where it gets interesting in the role these foreign

02:02:30.980 policy uh institutions and their domestic you know things so there's one other so i want to

02:02:37.500 mention one quick adjacency before we we go into that uh which is around usa funding to the to the

02:02:45.360 tide center which i mentioned you know has this black lives matter adjacency but the tide center is

02:02:52.060 also the the fiscal sponsor of a group called fair and just prosecutions which is the central group

02:02:57.600 that manages at least according to reports from i believe daily wire and uh uh the write-ups in

02:03:03.480 the and i think it was uh federalist and such but i believe is a daily wire investigation based on media

02:03:08.580 research center report um that fair and just prosecutions is uh is a you know bill themselves

02:03:15.740 a sort of left-wing progressive uh criminal justice advocacy group and they are media research center

02:03:23.620 published a long report you know essentially saying that they were the managing control group of soros

02:03:28.960 prosecutors because the what they do is all these soros now they don't fund the soros they don't fund

02:03:34.080 the election campaigns of the uh at least to my knowledge you know of the soros prosecutors like

02:03:39.180 the open society foundation does but what they uh what they do is they they fund they manage

02:03:47.500 you know they get the prosecutors the soros prosecutors to sign pledges about

02:03:51.220 what they're going to you know what they're not going to you know to not enforce certain laws

02:03:55.920 that are on the books in the region um you know they pressure them to prosecute certain political

02:04:00.640 targets they give them social media uh hashtags and talking points they help write their press releases

02:04:06.080 they meet with them every you know every week and you know they they're it's you know prosecutors

02:04:12.440 you know at least according to this reporting which has some pretty damning uh you know inside

02:04:20.120 documents to you know to to make this case but you basically have prosecutors being managed by this

02:04:26.960 shady ngo who is effectively you know puppeteering these prosecutors who are dependent on continued

02:04:36.960 funding for their election campaigns and continued election funding for their future careers you know

02:04:42.020 you know what's uh you know ag attorney general is you know the joke is uh you know it's it's short for

02:04:48.820 aspiring governor because you know this is you know the so it's a path you want to cultivate these

02:04:52.860 donor networks forever but the tide center which gets 27 million dollars from usa just on basically you

02:05:00.560 know two grants alone for the foreign work is the fiscal sponsor of fjb the this group that is

02:05:07.640 you know liaising with uh you know all these uh prosecutors and securing these pledges why can i just ask

02:05:13.400 one let me ask a final question um just to kind of okay so from everything you've said um and

02:05:20.520 particularly your point that the grants haven't stopped the staff is gone they've been twitterized

02:05:24.960 but the money's still flowing and it's just going to move to the state department which oversees usad

02:05:31.280 anyway um you need some way to stop the poison that they're inspiring overseas from coming in here

02:05:39.140 why why couldn't you just get a variety of the smith act again that said there's like no destabilization

02:05:45.640 effort there's no society changing effort there's really no effort that we project abroad that can be

02:05:50.760 brought here that's what needs to happen for example you can't share the same corporate entity

02:05:55.600 you can't you shouldn't be able to you know if you're i mean imagine if raytheon who is paid by the

02:06:01.360 u.s military to drop deadly lethal you know munitions clusters on foreign countries and and

02:06:08.600 your professional job is killing people and they were getting billions of dollars from the u.s

02:06:12.800 pentagon and they uh they opened up uh a you know a raytheon you know and raytheon started creating a

02:06:18.680 new line of business for uh domestic countering misinformation projects where they where they

02:06:23.460 monitor the internet for covid skepticism or or uh you know climate change you know denial uh you would

02:06:30.140 look at that and you would say raytheon is getting paid by the military to kill people overseas and

02:06:36.680 i know their grants you know their their contracts with the pentagon are not for that work but they

02:06:42.560 have more muscle and money to play with they're being pumped up by steroids administered overseas

02:06:47.300 exactly i mean you saw that with the bangladesh case too by the way uh you know the when the the

02:06:52.740 person who is now the minister of foreign affairs in bangladesh after the coup by the way the the new the

02:06:57.960 new head of state there is a clinton global initiative fellow but the the the foreign the the foreign

02:07:02.000 minister was brought in by us aid for for formal training on countering misinformation and you know

02:07:08.480 who uh who led that it was a another you know state department usa contractor a group called politifact

02:07:15.600 it was the executive director of politifact who does you know who writes hit pieces on you and me

02:07:21.040 that were conspiracy theorists for talking about january 6 or whatever and they are acting as an

02:07:26.520 instrument of statecraft to uh you know to get money from our paychecks to do international work

02:07:33.980 to to train foreign journalists and foreign ministers uh how to censor or or stop you know

02:07:42.520 the spread of information the state department doesn't like but now they're now their margins are

02:07:47.040 padded by that well and that's the point is that the things that we do abroad affects us here we're paying

02:07:53.960 the ukrainian government and they're assassinating people like literally assassinating people trying to

02:07:58.140 assassinate american citizens fact selling weapons to the drug cartels in mexico fact and you end up like

02:08:05.220 wrecking your own country with the things that you do abroad right well i'll tell you what we did in the

02:08:10.740 financing space and i remember being a corporate lawyer and watching that evolve and play out yeah we had

02:08:16.660 things like you know these anti we had anti-terrorist financing you know ofac style laws that prevented

02:08:25.060 laundering you know uh and even if you could technically do it you didn't want to risk it because there were

02:08:31.520 criminal penalties for doing it right and there were financial penalties right and so in something like this

02:08:37.540 imagine if the grantees had to pay treble damages uh in in the amount of their grant if if they tripped one of those

02:08:45.400 foreign domestic firewalls if if they had to if their grant was for 30 million dollars and they have

02:08:50.640 to pay they're they're liable for up to 90 million dollars if if a if a a u.s court finds that they

02:08:57.240 violated the us aid smith-munt act i mean this is something that congress could put in you know put in

02:09:05.100 today i mean you could you could add criminal penalties but you need right now there's no penalty

02:09:09.340 whatsoever the only penalty is that it is that people might find out and it might cause a political

02:09:15.200 scandal and it might make the usa grant coordinator um less likely to give you the next grant in the

02:09:22.160 future where's the clawback where's the where's the the the restitution damages uh you know people

02:09:28.900 shouldn't maybe even be able to sue the the u.s government body administering the grant for for

02:09:33.700 failing to do oversight of the ngo receiving that money you might create a cause a private cause of

02:09:38.940 action against the state department or whatever new form usa costs that can be done legislatively

02:09:44.260 and the message that i mean first of all that would that would go a huge distance to being able to

02:09:51.580 deal with this problem because you're going to have this problem whether usa exists as an outside as an

02:09:56.900 independent agency or whether the state department just inherits a usa herpes infection and just lives

02:10:01.880 with it inside the agency

02:10:03.960 mike bence can go on forever it was your reporting your dogged single-minded almost monomaniacal i will say

02:10:13.320 effort to to bring you know to to public view this web um that i think started all of this so

02:10:20.740 well and and you it is a vindication by the way i know you have mixed feelings about it and you're worried

02:10:27.960 about the whole edifice collapsing which is a fair concern but i do think you know anyone who called

02:10:33.820 you a nutcase has to apologize at this point thank you for saying that and it wouldn't have been

02:10:38.580 possible without you as well i do just want to clarify i i i it's i don't believe that i have mixed 0.86

02:10:44.860 feelings i actually i 100 endorse directionally and technically everything that i've seen so far

02:10:50.400 but i i appreciate the weight of the moment and that you are dealing with something much more

02:10:56.640 delicate yes than simply you know stopping the training dance contests hud turns up a couple

02:11:03.960 billion dollars worth of waste fraud and abuse in the city of chicago and it's a it's a local issue

02:11:08.860 and it's a it's a big scandal we're i feel an obligation to to help midwife this and and but i i

02:11:18.680 totally support it and i just to me the the it's it's reflection rather than rather than hesitation

02:11:25.900 well it sounds like you're on the side of u.s interests abroad which exists we do have interests

02:11:30.420 and we should protect them jealously i would say but america first amen yeah mike bentz thank you very

02:11:37.080 much thank you tucker

The Tucker Carlson Show - February 08, 2025

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

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript