In this episode, we talk about the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as fronts for the U.S. government, and the role they play in shaping foreign policy. We talk about their role as front groups for the government and how they influence our foreign policy decisions.
00:13:17.600Miles Copeland, who was one of the leaders of that from the CIA side, wrote in a biography later in his life that without CIA intervention in that election, we would have lost 60 to 40.
00:13:30.140I believe his son went on to play the drums in the police.
00:13:39.640Well, the grandson actually went on to be, I think, the manager for Sting, R.E.M., a bunch of these major bands, and then teamed up with Donald Rumsfeld in order to help do music diplomacy in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is a whole other, you know, it's a family of secrets.
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00:38:03.180It's people protesting in the streets so that they are not allowed to know foreign funding of their own societies.
00:38:11.600I demand I will I I am not allowed to know put the blindfolders on me.
00:38:17.720I am not allowed to know that whether the newspapers I read, whether the union I'm a part of, whether the lawyers association I'm a part of, whether the the private company that pays my paycheck, whether the public health sector, my hospitals,
00:38:33.540whether that is funded by a foreign government and how much how much is funding.
00:38:36.980And, you know, the Russians are not complaining about that because the money is not coming largely from if if the money was largely coming from the Russians, the EU and the U.S. State Department would be demanding this.
00:38:52.220It's called a FARA registration, the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
00:38:56.220We consider that to be a criminal violation where you can spend five years in jail if you if you don't file a FARA registration.
00:39:05.200But if Hungary or Serbia or Slovakia tries to pass a Foreign Agent Registrations Act law there, we call that an attack on democracy.
00:39:14.400Why? Because it reveals it takes the mask off of the NGO plex and and reflects and shows to the people what it really is.
00:39:24.340It is the long arm of U.S. intelligence is the long arm of U.S. statecraft and is the long arm of that corporate financial donor drafter class with all of their own secular private.
00:39:37.020What if I could just interject and say, you know, what I find so infuriating is that none of this helps the America that I live in or want to live in.
00:39:46.180I mean, a lot of the agendas being pushed are not just like, you know, we want to grow our bananas in your banana favorable climate or we want cheaper coffee or, you know, we want your oil fields.
00:39:57.240It's like pushing stuff that is just terrible, awful, like blowing up families, attacking Christianity.
00:40:04.360It's like, why does it have to be that, too?
00:40:07.560This is where it gets really complicated.
00:40:10.040The idea behind this positive synergy between the corporate sponsored NGOs and the government sponsored NGOs and them all working together as a common blob was that if we secure American business in a country, American contracts, American rights to minerals or American rights to mines.
00:40:40.040We're boxing out the Russians and the Chinese.
00:40:46.040It's it's and that, however, gives a license to some of the dirtiest stuff and and this total profiteering, especially because the multinational corporations have no foot.
00:41:02.100We're still living in Milton Friedman land.
00:41:04.060And this is something Milton Friedman was a huge influence on me as a kid.
00:41:12.700I think he's an incredibly I think he's a high integrity guy and he means what he says.
00:41:19.080But I think he fooled a lot of conservatives with this concept of maximizing total shareholder value, which is now codified effectively, you know, into into our corporate law that you have.
00:41:38.860That does not mean value for Americans.
00:41:40.980When your markets are abroad and your labor is abroad and your factories are abroad, but you are getting billions of dollars from the U.S.
00:41:53.200government to advance your own private interests.
00:41:56.200And you are toppling many solid parts of the world order to do so.
00:42:02.920You're overthrowing governments, you're bribing media, you're controlling organized crime groups and conflict zones and all narco trafficking, all of the dirty work that goes into making the sausage in a lot of these countries.
00:42:19.420It's not trickling down, you know, per Ronald Reagan to the people that live there.
00:42:27.220These companies all got extremely rich while the heartland turned into the Rust Belt.
00:42:33.120And, you know, so to me, it's no surprise when you see that John Bolton on Piers Morgan held up his USAID hand grenade when he was the head of USAID policy and budget under Ronald Reagan.
00:42:45.720He showed this a few months ago on Piers Morgan that his parting gift from USAID after he left running the policy and budget there.
00:42:53.900John Bolton, humanitarian assistance guy, was a USAID hand grenade.
00:43:01.360So that was the parting gift they gave him, a golden hand grenade with his name engraved in it.
00:43:09.540That he was trying to blow up USAID or that he was that they're, in fact, using force?
00:43:14.460I think the idea was that, you know, they are hard charging about it, I think.
00:43:20.720But, you know, what it represents to me is this development defense, you know, they call it the three Ds, the diplomacy, defense, development.
00:43:30.920The idea that USAID is absolutely critical to U.S. military operations.
00:43:35.660It's absolutely critical to U.S. diplomatic operations.
00:43:39.540It's absolutely critical to U.S. intelligence operations, which supports the diplomacy and defense.
00:43:43.100And so, you know, while you're masquerading as this humanitarian NGO sponsor, you're the embodiment of the hand grenade.
00:43:52.340And that, to me, you know, that's a Reaganite philosophy that we're fighting the ghost of.
00:43:59.160This idea that you deserve a slot within this government apparatus, U.S. government apparatus, when you are not representing the interests of the United States, or at least there are no conditions on it.
00:44:15.040There's no bounds on it other than you need to be in the good graces of that government.
00:44:20.800For example, the U.S. embassy in Brasilia did nothing to stop Brazil's attack on X or Brazil's seizure of assets.
00:44:59.160So, when I went into the WikiLeaks archive to look at all the State Department cables that referenced George Soros or the Open Society Foundation or any of its associated groups, the Open Society Institution, the Open Society Forum,
00:45:13.560I was surprised when I saw the communications in the State Department cables start in 1973 because the Open Society Foundation did not start until 1979.
00:45:27.120And when I looked at the State Department cables, they were all related to Soros Associates, which was the firm operated by George Soros's older brother, Paul Soros, who is, you know, according to his New York Times obituary, one of the greatest titans of the shipping and port and infrastructure development world.
00:45:55.720And Paul Soros is all over these State Department cables in tons of countries, Gabon, Iran.
00:46:10.260And so the State Department is working with Soros Associates, Paul Soros, in order to secure contracts for him, in order to secure favorable loan terms to foreign governments, and in order to intervene on the bidding process for port construction, for lucrative port deals.
00:46:36.300I think one in Gabon was, I think, like a, I think it was like a 700 million to a billion dollar port project, you know, huge money for Gabon, a project in Gabon in the early 1970s.
00:46:50.260And one of these cables, State Department cables is really interesting.
00:46:55.380It's the U.S. Embassy there, and they are talking about how three senior executives from Brown and Root are going to be coming to Gabon that week,
00:47:08.480and are looking to have arrangements made to meet with, I think, the president of the country and other influential leaders in government and in civil society,
00:47:20.640and for the embassy to arrange, you know, everything from their travel to their hotel to introducing them to all the senior leaders in the country.
00:47:30.720And Brown and Root was working together with Soros and Associates on this port project, and they were bidding against other foreign, you know, infrastructure development companies from other countries.
00:47:48.640And one of the cables basically suggests that, you know, that the embassy should relay back to Soros and Brown and Root the status of the bid going to them
00:48:03.580and anything favorable that can be done to nudge that contract going to Brown and Root and Soros.
00:48:12.160Now, what's interesting about this is a few things.
00:48:14.240So, this is the example of what you were talking about, which is we're doing this because we want to stop, you know,
00:48:21.320there's a big fight over Africa with the Russians and with the Chinese all throughout the Cold War.
00:48:26.460You know, a lot of Africa had sided with Russia, and the Russian communism was seen as an egalitarian counterweight to a sort of racist United States,
00:48:35.880and there was a big diplomacy push there.
00:48:37.860So, getting Brown and Root and Soros to control the infrastructure in the country and to get those contracts and to get the proceeds and remits
00:48:48.720was advancing U.S. interests under U.S. national security and U.S. national interests,
00:48:54.580which means there's a State Department interest in doing favors for Soros and Brown and Root.
00:48:59.540Now, Brown and Root, which would later become Halliburton, or Brown and Root is, I guess, Halliburton, I guess, acquired Brown and Root.
00:52:01.580And in this, they actually revealed that both Brown Sr. and Brown Jr. had covert security clearances for work with the Central Intelligence Agency.
00:52:13.620So while you have one of the world's premier infrastructure and development firms, which would later go on to work with Soros in Africa
00:52:25.580and then would later spawn Vice President Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, who started off her career in USAID
00:52:33.640and comes from that same, you know, Halliburton, Brown and Root lineage, they direct ties all over the CIA.
00:52:43.140And I guess I bring this up to say that in addition to that, you had this web of adjacent NGOs around statecraft there.
00:52:51.820So for example, in that same files, again, the CIA is doing an internal fact check in this memo where they say Ramparts has accused all of these people of being CIA.
00:53:01.860And it's a memo, I think, to one of the local directors saying, we've reviewed the files.
00:53:09.420Here's what's true and false about the Ramparts article.
00:53:12.080And in one of these, they describe something called the Vernon Fund, which was a private philanthropy.
00:53:19.060Well, it was created by the Central Intelligence Agency to look to the public like a private foundation.
00:53:25.840And it was set up to fund the webs of teachers unions all throughout the world.
00:53:34.860They sponsor something called the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession.
00:53:39.520The CIA was running an initiative at the time to control the education space during the Cold War to stop the spread of communist teachings or communist sympathizing teachings and curricula,
00:53:56.120especially in Cold War conflict zones all over Europe, all over Africa, all over Latin America.
00:54:02.500And so to do that, to control, to make sure that students and young people and every person in society who comes up through the education system is ideologically aligned against communism.
00:54:16.280They had to control the teachers unions and what was being taught, what was being promoted.
00:54:21.480And I bring this up, again, I hate communism, but all of this was repurposed against right-wing populism when Trump won in 2016.
00:54:30.840Because instead of this same blob being threatened from its communist socialist left, it was being threatened from its populist nationalist right.
00:54:38.380But so the CIA, so in this memo, the CIA says, yeah, they're right about the Vernon Fund.
00:54:45.660We set it up to look like a private philanthropy.
00:54:47.900We recruited the daughter of the Texas governor to bundle money to the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession in order to influence the National Education Association and create, I think it was like 140 different trade associations that they all work through.
00:55:06.800Now, the National Education Association is the largest of the teaching union associations.
00:55:14.300And the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession is still around today.
00:55:23.340And by the way, in these CIA files, they explicitly say the president of the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession has a CIA covert clearance to do this work.
00:55:35.360The treasurer, the treasurer, the executive secretary.
00:55:38.520So the thing is funded by the CIA, by a NGO that was actually created by the CIA, the senior leadership of the trade association doing the work, our CIA at every part of the layer.
00:55:53.420But how many people in Education International, how many teachers in that union you think know that story?
00:55:59.600How many fifth grade teachers, how many administrators at the union level, how many people in the schools know that?
00:56:06.680So when you see Education International today come out in Germany, because there are branches in every country, in Germany, Education International has come out and said,
00:56:14.960AFD, no one affiliated with AFD should be allowed to be a teacher in Germany.
00:56:20.420And they petitioned the German government to not allow AFD at any of the –
00:56:25.560You can't have a job if you vote for the party.
00:56:27.060Right. But this is exactly what our CIA has been calling for, because AFD has been trying to revive the Nord Stream pipeline and trying to restore relations with Russia.
00:56:37.300So from the national security side of this, there's a predicate to say, yeah, we're authorized to run this operation.
00:56:54.020They doubled their votes in the recent election.
00:56:59.900But since then, polling shows that they are now the most popular party in Germany.
00:57:05.060They were declared an extremist organization by their own national security state, which is effectively our national security state.
00:57:13.900We gave birth to Germany as a unified country in the 1990s and midwifed its entire intelligence apparatus.
00:57:21.920The center of U.S. intelligence in the Cold War was in Germany.
00:57:25.460And so you have this blob interest in banning AFD.
00:57:33.660The German government declares the most popular party in the country an extremist group.
00:57:40.900If the definition of extreme is that it is a departure from what's popular.
00:57:46.760And so by its very definition, it's a contradiction is what I'm getting at there.
00:57:53.900But that – and thank God for Marco Rubio and Senator Tom Cotton, to his credit, was fantastic on this.
00:58:03.660He directing – he – and Tulsi Gabbard – I think directed Tulsi Gabbard at ODNI to threaten to not – to discontinue intelligence sharing
00:58:13.740with German intelligence for this domestic surveillance because this extremist label allowed the German government to spy on every member of the AFD as if they were Al-Qaeda.
00:58:25.880And so because of U.S. diplomatic pressure from our State Department, our ODNI, our Congress, Germany has temporarily put that – the enforcement of their surveillance dimension on pause.
00:58:40.540But what I'm getting at is – this is a CIA proprietary, Education International, who's doing active work to do exactly what the Bill Burns CIA, the John Brennan CIA wants done in Germany.
00:58:56.060And of course, who was the U.S. ambassador to Germany while this all played out with the Nord Stream pipeline blowing up?
00:59:02.000It was Amy Gutmann, my dean at the University of Pennsylvania.
00:59:06.040You know, Amy Gutmann, when I was there 20 years ago, she was the dean then.
00:59:12.780Then she became the U.S. ambassador to Germany, head of the State Department in Germany during the Biden administration.
00:59:19.240And meanwhile, what's the University of Pennsylvania doing?
00:59:22.620It's housing the Penn-Biden Center, which is this major foreign policy coordinating node at the university layer.
00:59:30.680Again, universities are just super NGOs.
00:59:33.760The universities will organize the international exchanges of ideas with civil society in all these foreign countries.
00:59:41.740They will produce the white papers that get picked up by the media.
00:59:45.480They will liaise with – meet with governing officials to advise on economic policy, don't you know, in the region.
00:59:51.840You know, this is the whole Jeffrey Sachs, Harvard Institute of International Development.
00:59:58.240That's the part that – I mean, because you began this history of the NGO, and thank you for doing it, with reference to the tax code.
01:00:06.720The introduction of the income tax in 1913 and then the tax-exempt statutes of 1917, right in the middle of the First World War, not surprisingly.
01:00:14.840But, like, isn't the whole idea of it, my understanding of a 501c3 – well, I know, because I ran one – the idea is that this helps America.
01:00:27.740But you're describing nonprofits that are arms of the intel community or, you know, working to increase profit to American businesses that may not actually really be American.
01:00:38.960A publicly traded company is not American.
01:00:40.740It's owned by the sovereign wealth funds of nine different countries.
01:00:42.920You know, it's like – the whole thing is fake.
01:00:44.880So, what in 2025 is the justification for continuing to subsidize these?
01:00:51.220Because, I mean, a tax exemption is a subsidy, in effect.
01:01:05.860National security, national interest, and securing export markets.
01:01:10.680And, you know, the idea is, is what does America look like if we don't do this?
01:01:18.600We're in a competition right now with Huawei in the telecom space, in the IT infrastructure space.
01:01:25.700There's major State Department initiatives to try to get neutral third-party governments to do away with Huawei and sign up with AT&T or, if not that, other kind of 5G light providers like LG and Nokia in Finland and South Korea.
01:02:23.020Muhammad al-Jalani, the ISIS commander turned al-Qaeda commander turned Idlib, you know, rebel, moderate rebel leader, you know, who, who became, you know, the de facto head of state.
01:02:43.700Meeting with the U.S. president, meeting with every, every major world leader.
01:02:47.600The U.S. just declared that we're lifting sanctions on, on Syria after Syria pledged to open up its, to basically use U.S. and Western companies and contractors for its services rather than Russian or Chinese ones.
01:03:07.340So, for example, one of the pledges was to use AT&T for its wireless and telecom services rather than Huawei.
01:03:15.180Where are they going to buy their pagers?
01:03:21.260It's, it's, and yeah, it goes without saying that when, you know, the State Department lobbies to allow AT&T to do your, your wireless infrastructure that, you know, that we're monitoring it, of course.
01:03:35.500Right, but you can see how, like, what would America look like if AT&T's, now there's, I think, what, 25 million people or so in, in Syria.
01:03:45.360So, AT&T has just secured 25 million customers, effectively, at the, you know, barrel of a gun, effectively, with the, they've drafted off of the U.S. Defense Department who funded the paramilitaries in Syria.
01:04:04.760They've drafted off of USAID and the billions we funneled into Syria.
01:04:08.560They've drafted off of State Department diplomacy on their behalf.
01:04:13.140And, you know, a great example of this is.
01:04:16.800Let me just say, I mean, I, well, I definitely don't think that the ISIS guy is in any real sense better than Bashar al-Assad, you know, the ophthalmologist.
01:04:45.280And what you're describing is a pretty conventional process where the U.S. State Department, White House, and DOD all kind of combine forces to help American business abroad.
01:05:24.040By the way, if you fly into D.C., into National Airport, Reagan National Airport, which is, like, the closest airport to any city in America, it's right there, right across the river.
01:05:32.400And you come in from the north, you fly directly over the U.S. Institute of Peace, and it's a kind of clamshell.
01:05:50.020Well, International Peace is a funny piece, and International Peace has a funny history with U.S. intelligence work.
01:05:57.740In the JFK files, for example, in the recent declassifications, it showed a group that the CIA infiltrated and directed called the Catholic Association of International Peace.
01:06:09.880And there are all these files that show that, yes, we have our assets in here, and they're doing this for this.
01:06:16.280The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, not the Catholic Association of International Peace, but the second international peace, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was run from 2014 to 2021 by Bill Burns, the guy who would leave the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to run the Central Intelligence Agency.
01:06:37.680What qualifies you as running the Endowment for International Peace as your very next job?
01:06:45.220You hadn't worked in government for seven years.
01:06:48.740He had never worked at the CIA formally.
01:06:51.320He was in the political affairs section, which, according to the JFK files, 47% of every person in the political affairs section in 1961 was not actually working in the State Department political section.
01:07:05.100They were actually called confidential American sources, which is the term for CIA agents operating under diplomatic cover saying they work for the State Department.
01:07:27.740And of course, who was the head of political affairs for the Biden administration, Victoria Newland, you know, you know, and who would then go on to, you know, be on the board of the National Down for Democracy, which is another group that was spun out in 1983 by the Reagan administration when they were trying to get the CIA's old powers back.
01:07:45.580But the Democrats in Congress were blocking that because of the CIA's work against the anti-war faction in the Democrat Party during the 60s and 70s.
01:07:59.3401984, they create the U.S. Institute of Peace.
01:08:01.400The U.S. Institute of Peace has had this crazy showdown with the U.S. federal government recently.
01:08:07.820And it's an unbelievable drama that's been unfolding now for several months.
01:08:12.680So the U.S. Institute of Peace was, you know, was chartered by Congress in 1984 in order to do sort of a think of it like the National Endowment for Democracy.
01:08:25.220But but more is George Orwell in charge of naming these groups.
01:08:29.620I mean, National Endowment for Democracy subverts democracy.
01:08:33.720All these peace groups are like aggressively anti-peace.
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01:09:38.900Well, you know, the quote by the National Endowment for Democracy founder, I believe in 1986 in the New York Times, was that it would be terrible for groups to be seen as subsidized by the Central Intelligence Agency.
01:09:52.380We saw that happen in the 1960s where it was revealed groups were funded by the CIA and it caused embarrassment.
01:10:02.900It's literally a direct quote saying that the endowment was created to fund the groups that it would be embarrassing for them to be publicly revealed that they got CIA funding.
01:10:12.700And, of course, it was conceived in the office of Reagan's CIA, William Casey and Raymond Green.
01:10:20.620There's a whole CIA backstory to the whole Ned thing.
01:10:23.180But in 1984, another layer of gongo, you know, so the U.S. Institute of Peace was set up to be to be a National Endowment for Democracy, but really focused on conflict zones.
01:10:39.680Whereas the National Endowment for Democracy operates everywhere, they'll operate in, you know, very heavily in Hungary or, you know, Brazil, places where there's not real dark, you know, terrorist conflict or hyperactive DOD operations, for example.
01:11:01.120So they, in those places, it's a different track of influence for the NGOs because they're working with these communities in these, they're working with the farmers where the coca leaves for cocaine are being grown.
01:11:17.980They're working, you know, they're working, you mentioned coffee.
01:11:21.140USAID has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the coffee trade sector.
01:11:28.460And USAID does all this joint work with Starbucks, all this joint work with Keurig.
01:11:35.000They operate in conflict zones and the drug zones in Colombia and Peru, the Central African Republic, Sudan.
01:11:45.040And what they're doing here is, sorry, they're, well, I got distracted by the coffee thought, sorry.
01:11:55.140What the U.S. Institute of Peace is doing is they're building giant networks and serving as a back-channel diplomacy.
01:12:04.280So they are, you know, if you're in Foggy Bottom or Langley, Virginia, if you want to know what's happening on the ground in Syria, you need the people in the field to report it to you.
01:12:15.540You need either the U.S. Embassy or you need the NGOs connected to the embassy to provide the field work.
01:12:23.260We want to know what is happening economically in this region, which is the economic, you know, breadbasket that's supporting the U.S. military operations or the mercenary troops so that we can keep them funded.
01:12:37.100We want to keep the industry in Afghanistan going, the industry in Syria in these sections.
01:12:43.040So the U.S. Institute of Peace will do those surveys.
01:12:45.620They'll work with the local populations.
01:13:28.660ISIS and Al Qaeda, with the full backing of the Biden government, just successfully overthrew the Biden administration's top enemy in the region and now have opened up all their markets to Chevron and AT&T.
01:13:46.120And what I'm saying is, is they were openly this same group that is working with these Taliban networks and these Afghan special forces and is deeply, deeply involved in Syria is openly calling.
01:14:00.120And this is not that they got busted paying these Taliban officials when Trump tried to assert control over the U.S. Institute of Peace, because it's chartered by Congress.
01:14:16.220The secretary of state, the secretary of defense and the president of the National Defense University are three reserve spots.
01:14:23.840So think about this is the U.S. Institute of Peace.
01:14:25.480But required on the board is the secretary of war, the head of the the War Institute and the secretary of state.
01:14:34.040And then there are 12 political appointee spots.
01:14:38.160Now, the Trump administration tried to assert control over the U.S. Institute of Peace, as it is statutorily entitled to do.
01:14:44.080And the response from the U.S. Institute of Peace was to barricade the doors to delete, Doge said, a terabyte worth of financial data, which Doge says it recovered and showed payments to those very Taliban networks that they were saying, keep the drugs flowing.
01:15:01.140And so evidently, according to the Doge team, they found weapons caches inside like like a full military, you know, weapons inside the Institute of Peace.
01:15:13.520That was what Doge reported as they said.
01:15:21.880So this has gone through the courts because, you know, the whole blob resistance has been trying to stop all these shutdowns at every layer.
01:15:29.920The outside general counsel for the U.S. Institute of Peace.
01:15:35.520Has he who has been the the outside general counsel for since 1986, just two years.
01:15:41.660So so the guy who's the head lawyer there has been the head lawyer there since just two years after it was founded, since the since the mid 1980s.
01:15:52.100So has been, you know, midwifing the the legal dark, dark arts of this thing since almost the day it was born.
01:16:03.960And he's the one who I believe has spearheaded or been leading this this lawsuit to stop the the federal governments because the because the Trump administration cleared the board.
01:16:17.900The U.S. Institute of Peace would not even allow the Trump appointed board members or its president even go in the building.
01:16:25.220That's why the federal police had to the FBI had to come in.
01:16:28.640And and but what happened was is that same lawyer also happens to represent the Wireless Trade Association in in the U.S.
01:16:42.480So while they are working for regime change in Syria, while the U.S. Institute of Peace is taking U.S.
01:16:47.920taxpayer money, fifty five million a year to build up this network of paramilitary groups and all these economic assistance programs and midwifing the political negotiations of and creating a unified,
01:17:03.480cohesive, cohesive block against the Assad government in Syria with U.S.
01:17:08.880U.S. and Sue Peace funds, the same lawyer who's who's now successfully sued because Judge Barrow, how blocked the Trump administration's attempt.
01:17:18.440Now, now we're back to square one with that.
01:17:20.540He simultaneously is representing the Wireless Trade Association where Syria just, you know, turned over its IT infrastructure to AT&T.
01:17:34.840Institute of Peace organizing this regime change in Syria, including using, you know, these narco traffic drugs while calling for the narco networks to keep going.
01:17:46.520And simultaneously, the, you know, the senior executives effectively.
01:18:03.520national interest to topple Bashar al-Assad because they have a fundamentally unique and singular benefit, whether it's good for us or not, which is that they get rich from it.
01:18:12.580I remember reading about the fascists and one of the one of the criticisms that I thought really resonated was they eliminated the difference between the state and, you know, they were they were socialists, truly.
01:18:37.980Well, it's funny you say that because last week at the Council on Foreign Relations, I think the panel was titled Reflections on a on a Reflections on the Post-Soviet Era and Implications for the Modern Day is Council on Foreign Relations.
01:18:51.980And one of the questions asked the panelists directly directly was there was a deep state in Russia in the 1990s, these oligarchs.
01:19:42.440Well, what they say is that he also co-opted it and got the oligarchy working for him rather than for outside.
01:19:50.940And in the meantime, the Russian economy recovered and life expectancy went up and alcoholism went down and like it became a beautiful country.
01:19:58.720Well, and the punchline to this is at the end of setting this question up, the guy at Council of Foreign Relations asked.
01:20:07.840So with those lessons, given that that's what happened with Putin, how can we preserve the deep state against Trump to save so that the deep state can save us?
01:20:21.760But again, look at like, you know, Chubes and the Russian oligarchs that were working directly with the with USAID and the Harvard Institute for International Development.
01:20:30.060And it's the same thing with with Brown and Root, that story of Brown and Root and Soros in in Gabon in the 1970s.
01:20:38.420It was the same thing in Russia there where we justified because it was in U.S. national security and national interests to make Russia a democracy and to privatize all their state owned assets.
01:20:51.520USAID paid a half a billion dollars to the Harvard Institute for International Development.
01:20:55.740Again, another one of these universities that's delegated by the U.S. government to go deeper into Russian society than the U.S. government was wanted to be seen doing.
01:21:07.680U.S. Agency for International Development pays the Harvard Institute for International Development.
01:21:12.660It's just a Harvard spawn of USAID in order to work with Chubes and all these, you know, Russian oligarchs so that the Russian oligarchs got rich.
01:21:23.320Selling at discount bargain basement prices, all these Russian state held assets.
01:22:08.000And part of that issue is, is as they were driving our own country on a similar path.
01:22:15.920They expressed the exact same contempt that someone would try to do something to stop it.
01:22:21.080And the other thing is, is they fully acknowledged it was a deep state before Putin.
01:22:24.360They were just mad that they lost control of the deep state, which is why they were so why a lot of these actions by the the early Trump administration have terrified them around co-opting parts of the business community.
01:22:40.300They made this whole campaign to drive Elon, you know, away or to go after Tesla.
01:22:44.820They the reaction to Jeff Bezos, for example, and, you know, his posture around reorienting the Washington Post and sort of the Bill Kristol class was apoplectic that these commercial drivers in the sort of business community.
01:23:01.760But really, these are this is the private for profit sector that they would go along with Trump's foreign policy agenda, with Trump's reforms, maybe to be in Trump's good graces.
01:23:12.240But the fact is, is that that state, which was such a powerful asset to them, they do not want that handed off to somebody who might oppose them.
01:23:21.360The same reason that they didn't want Matt Gaetz at the Justice Department.
01:23:25.720They weaponized that Justice Department under Merrick Garland.
01:23:28.940They don't want that baton handed off to someone else.
01:23:31.820It's not that they have a problem with corruption at the Justice Department.
01:23:34.300They want a monopoly on that corruption.
01:23:36.120So you were describing the mobilization of, you know, all the various arms of the U.S. government, but the NGO community against Russia.
01:23:46.240And I thought you made a really, really wise observation that too few make that Putin's original sin wasn't really lusting after Poland.
01:24:19.240And they were, you know, as we discussed, they were authorized, deputized to do that.
01:24:25.920We talked about the Harvard, the Harvard Endowment, the Harvard Institute for International Development by the Open Society Foundation, which was simultaneously doing its civil society work, funding scientists, funding universities, funding the intellectual class, funding the students.
01:24:43.600And then simultaneously Soros is operating a hedge fund that is buying up the assets of the Russian government and, you know, of the failed Soviet state.
01:24:56.680And this relationship is, I mentioned to you just now that there's a funny story about Soros in Mongolia and the State Department in Mongolia that is like almost the perfect encapsulation of this to see how this plays out in every country, whether it's Russia or whether it's Poland or whether it's Hungary or you name it.
01:25:23.960But Mongolia had discovered in Mongolia had discovered in Mongolia, the world's largest copper mine.
01:26:09.580And it describes how this deal could yield billions of billions of dollars and could massively transform the entire Mongolian economy.
01:26:23.340It could like double their entire GDP with a single mine.
01:26:27.340And how there was an interest in making sure that this mine was acquired by Western companies rather than Chinese or Russian ones.
01:26:37.500And in the context of this, the State Department references a pivotal Open Society Foundation Mongolia memo that had caught fire in the Mongolian press and was weighing heavily on public conversation about whether or not the Mongolian government would sign this deal with Ivanhoe, with the company for this.
01:27:05.200And the Soros Foundation writes, and the State Department backs this in this cable.
01:27:11.300They basically say, yes, this is all correct.
01:27:14.940Basically, basically, the Mongolian government wanted deal terms and was about to pass something hastily in parliament to secure a deal that the Open Society Foundation said was too extractive on behalf of the Mongolian government.
01:27:30.600Basically, basically, the Mongolian government had problems with corruption.
01:27:36.800They also mentioned that the deal might have environmental impact in terms of the mine and its environmental impact on the ecosystem of Mongolia.
01:27:47.740And they give seven reasons in this memo that the Mongolian parliament should not – has to be stopped from doing this deal on these terms.
01:28:06.060And the Mongolian parliament is the Mongolian government.
01:28:08.500And so George Soros, who's from Hungary but has British and American citizenship, is telling the Mongolians they shouldn't be able to do what they want with their own mind.
01:28:17.580Maybe I'll start with the punchline first to make it more sense.
01:28:20.580I mean, it's so – the presumption there is a bit much.
01:28:24.240The punchline is in 2009, the George Soros Management Fund purchased an absolutely huge stake in that very company.
01:28:35.640It changed its name to Rio Tinto, but it was called Ivanhoe while it was negotiating this deal.
01:28:40.160Now, the Open Society Foundation, they published a 174-page document which went through everything they did inside of Mongolia to kill the deal in 2007.
01:28:55.840And what they described is that they networked with all these Mongolian members of parliament.
01:28:59.900They used their media NGO, their nonprofit organizations, their advocacy groups, their environmental NGOs to argue that the deal should be killed on environmental grounds.
01:29:14.480And this culminated – and the Soros Foundation takes credit for its spawning street protests that destabilized the Mongolian government and incentivized parliament – the parliament to not ink this deal.
01:29:31.940And again, the Soros Foundation logic was that it was too extractive on the part of the Mongolian government.
01:29:37.620The Mongolian government was getting too good a deal from this.
01:29:44.340And George Soros didn't own enough of it.
01:29:46.160So the U.S. embassy in Mongolia is working with the Soros network.
01:29:52.440Now, they're doing it on national interest, national security grounds.
01:29:54.760They're saying, hey, if a Western company doesn't get this, China's right next door to Mongolia.
01:30:00.180They're big in the minerals, the metal space.
01:30:04.120We don't want to lose this mine, the biggest copper mine in the world, to a Chinese competitor.
01:30:10.640We want to make sure a Western gets this deal.
01:30:13.120But the Open Society Foundation, which is underneath the – now, it's the nonprofit side of the Soros Management Fund.
01:30:21.420The Open Society Foundation is saying, hey, kill this deal because the company is not getting enough money out of this.
01:30:30.060And then as soon as they kill that and get more profit secured for the mining company, the Soros Management Fund buys up the equity way before everybody else.
01:30:45.280You can read about this in – no matter what happened with the mine, he would have, like, doubled his profit.
01:30:51.840I think it went from $0.09 to $0.17 before a deal was even inked or before they even got to one of the development stages of it simply because everybody else hearing the news about this rushed into it.
01:31:02.480But Soros had already bought up the stock because his own NGOs were on the ground midwifing the entire process with the full force and credit of the U.S. government driving.
01:31:13.100This is going to happen in Ukraine, isn't it?
01:31:15.100Oh, I'm sure it's happened all over the country.
01:31:16.380The Ukraine Rebuilding Fund from BlackRock.
01:31:20.260I mean, this is – so if I want a piece of the trillion dollars that's going to be spent to make Ukraine a country again and a piece of its resources, which are substantial, then I'm probably going to use NGOs on my behalf, right?
01:31:37.640Yes, and this is where you get this curious line around gongos, government-organized NGOs, and ongos, I guess, these oligarch-organized NGOs, and where they all sort of meet in the middle.
01:31:54.000And where they meet in the middle is, I guess, what we just call politics, the topography of political factions in the U.S., in the sense that every major company has an interest in sponsoring NGOs that, regardless of whether they believe in the mission of it, they advance something that helps the business side of this.
01:32:21.660So I mentioned Brown and Root had the Brown Foundation, and the Soros Management Fund has the Open Society Foundation, and Microsoft has the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
01:32:37.720But the last one was a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
01:32:41.240But what I'm getting at here is, like, take the example of this Mongolia mine.
01:32:47.080The Soros didn't care about the environmental impact of that Mongolia mine.
01:32:52.860The fact that they could astroturf environmental protesters to take to the streets and to create a human rights predicate as to why the international community should intervene to stop the Mongolian government from signing this deal was simply an NGO.
01:33:10.180Now, if the U.S. government did that, that would have to come straight from the CIA.
01:33:16.040That would be a covert action if you're going to run through front groups.
01:33:19.780But if you have an ostensibly public one, but you're not seeing the classified State Department cables or whatever's CIA underneath that, making an argument from their Asia desk.
01:33:29.520Well, this is going to help U.S. national security because that's less minerals for China.
01:33:34.240But then Soros is using that money and sponsoring.
01:33:45.180That this combination of, you know, government actors, strict government actors from the executive branch agencies and NGOs collude to, like, take down a president.
01:34:08.000And a great example of this, we were talking about the U.S. Institute of Peace.
01:34:11.440The U.S. Institute of Peace, we talked about it in the context of Syria and how they were openly funding the Taliban and lobbying the Taliban to keep 95% of the world's opium flowing after the Taliban took over.
01:34:25.400You know how high heroin prices would go if they shut that down?
01:35:08.200But you have to understand where this came.
01:35:09.440So this came from the same military network.
01:35:13.880We talked about how the origin point for this was 1948.
01:35:17.540The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights forbids military conquest, territorial accession by military force.
01:35:22.940The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Charter, 1948, establishes the NGO framework at the international level intergovernmentally.
01:35:34.9001948 is also when the CIA inaugurates organized political warfare through the use of NGOs.
01:35:41.740But right at this time, you have – sorry, one second.
01:35:46.680I just – I had a second thought that just crapped up on this.
01:35:50.400We were talking about the U.S. Institute of Peace.
01:35:51.400So right at this time, you have this move from direct military force to topple governments through military coups or through military takeovers or through getting military defectors to sort of a top-down attempt to induce regime change.
01:36:17.320This is the famous color revolution blueprint, the people-powered revolution.
01:36:20.960You have lots of names for this, which is the bottom-up method, which instead of getting at the military level with tanks and guns and fighter jets, you do it at the paramilitary street level.
01:36:35.840You shut down the country by getting a critical mass of its civil society organizations to not cooperate with that government.
01:36:45.240So the government can't bring in any revenue.
01:36:48.720They can't pay their own police officers or members of the military to quell the riots because there's no money in the government coffers, because they'll be sanctioned by the international community for cracking down on the protesters and because the country itself is not – the hospital workers have walked out.
01:37:03.920The public health industry workers have walked out.
01:37:07.360So even the schools aren't open, the hospitals aren't open, the roads are being blockaded.
01:37:11.220The only way to get rid of these people is either with hundreds of thousands of police officers in every region to drag them or to kill them, in which case you have the human rights violations.
01:37:21.020And then every person is kicked off the SWIFT system and the international finance system and sanctions and threats of a military intervention at that point.
01:37:31.020So this was pioneered by the U.S. military, this paramilitary street technique that they call nonviolent action.
01:37:39.040And this was done through Gene Sharp and his cohorts.
01:37:44.440It was at the Harvard CIA, incidentally, the Harvard Center for International Affairs.
01:37:50.300It's a very cute, cute, cute nickname.
01:37:53.680But it was – Henry Kissinger was there.
01:37:56.840They got $50 million in Pentagon funding to develop a – the playbook that they now call From Dictatorship to Democracy.
01:38:05.280The idea that you can use mass NGO action to organize the unions, the trade workers, the laborers, the media organizations, every aspect of civil society in order to encircle the government, to cut it off from its own sources of power.
01:38:23.440And then with the sitting government effectively paraplegic, quadriplegic – basically cut off from its arms and legs, it would be ousted by a street protest that effectively surrounds the Capitol and takes over the buildings.
01:38:43.920I mean this is basically – it's a January 6th blueprint if what they said about January 6th was actually true, which of course it's not.
01:38:50.520But, you know, everyone can watch Bringing Down a Dictator, the PBS documentary about the State Department and U.S. Institute of Peace, their work getting the Oatpour movement in Yugoslavia to topple Slobodan Milosevic.
01:39:06.600That was nonviolent action is what they call it.
01:39:09.420Now, the ending scene of that documentary, you hear the whole documentary.
01:39:12.640It's – this is nonviolent action, nonviolent action.
01:39:15.640The climax of the documentary, which has, you know, soaring violins as if this is an amazing, you know, amazing thing, is the parliament building, you know, the Capitol building in Serbia being set on fire.
01:39:32.940It's windows smashed and a throng of hundreds of thousands of angry street protesters flooding into the building and declaring themselves the new government.
01:39:46.480This is cheered on by the State Department, USAID, the U.S. Institute of Peace.
01:39:51.420The U.S. Institute of Peace was actually on the ground training them.
01:39:56.220And, you know, meanwhile, the narrator – Martin Sheen is the narrator in this documentary – and he goes on to say it's all about nonviolent action.
01:40:04.800It's – and he says – and the Oatpour wears all black.
01:40:18.920You know, it's like intentionally sinister, Molotov cocktails in police cars, setting the Capitol building on fire, breaking the glass, forcing the democratically elected president to flee by helivac out of the country.
01:40:32.720This is what they call nonviolent action.
01:40:35.480And just again, nonviolent action just means mob violence action.
01:40:39.820But to them, that is less violent than bombing Sarajevo for – do you understand?
01:40:47.420So really they're saying it's like it's mostly peaceful.
01:43:41.700It's not only was it directly sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency for 30 years during the Cold War, but now they don't even need that because they have the CIA spinoff, National Endowment for Democracy, which has its own union branch called the Solidarity Center.
01:44:00.180The Solidarity Center is a formal part of AFL-CIO.
01:44:04.220It is inseparable from it, and the Solidarity Center kicks them money.
01:44:10.040So what I'm saying is the Chamber of Commerce was threatened by a potential abandonment of cutting the wind for them, of Trump doing liberal interventions, military interventions, humanitarian interventions in every country on God's green earth.
01:44:30.160We would just go in, replace the government, and then what would happen to AT&T if they couldn't get those contracts?
01:44:36.900What would happen to Amex if we didn't have, you know, USAID's DIA app in Ukraine?
01:44:41.920I'm sorry, I think it's Visa, so that Visa gets all the credit card processing for all the transactions there.
01:44:46.980What would happen, you know, to Starbucks if we abandoned the USAID coffee programs in Peru and Colombia and the Central African Republic?
01:44:58.240What would happen, you know, to the petroleum companies if we didn't, you know, militarily step up our presence to – so the Chamber of Commerce and the unions, labor and management had a common enemy the same way Democrats and Republicans did when Trump first came on the scene.
01:45:18.120Because anyone who wants to put America first is going to run straight into everyone who wants to put their own interests first.
01:45:29.840So let's end by – well, I hope you will end by explaining if you were to, I don't know, defang these groups, drain the swamp as we say, who would you go after first and how would you do it to restore democracy to the country?
01:45:47.980The premise that the people rule, that elections matter, that there's the change people want when they get a new leader.
01:45:59.080There's the executive branch layer, the legislative and the judicial.
01:46:03.240On the executive branch layer, an unbelievable amount of positive accomplishments have been done through the executive branch.
01:46:17.320And I think that the Trump admin deserves credit even as we're unsatisfied with how big this is and how many problems there have been with Congress and judges blocking things.
01:46:29.300It took a lot of political capital to do what they did, and they were aggressive at almost every layer of it with some very big asterisks and exceptions.
01:46:40.600The idea of – the firing of 14,000 people at USAID, the closure of the offices, the funding pauses was absolutely massive, both symbolically and in very, very real terms.
01:46:54.080The restructuring that Marco Rubio has led at the State Department is absolutely massive.
01:46:59.560Like 135 sub-agencies are being ripped, totally killed, the reduction in force totally laid off so that you don't even need the congressional approval because there's no job for fire people to go back to because the division doesn't exist anymore.
01:47:17.300Those include the democracy rights and government – the democracy rights and labor bureau at the State Department, which is the number one coordinating web, I guess, in tandem with the International Organization Bureau.
01:47:29.320But democracy rights and labor is like the main place at state for the NGO plex because they're all getting this funding and they're all coordinating with the State Department and getting the protection of the State Department because they are promoting democracy as the State Department wants them to do.
01:47:48.480The rights in it stands for human rights because, you know, human rights violations in foreign countries and then labor is, you know, the unions and this is where you get the rental riots and all this.
01:47:57.220And you can go online and see weeping videos from people from the democracy rights and labor bureau that they've been working there for 15, 20 years and suddenly it's gone and it is going to have a devastating – of course, it never has a devastating impact on these things.
01:48:11.960I mean, a great example is the AP ran a story about – I think the initial title for it was Trump's move to end USAID crushes cocaine programs dedicated to combating the cocaine trade.
01:48:33.560And they – the article is the biggest self-own you'll ever read.
01:48:38.180It's all about how, you know, we have all this money that goes to Colombia and to Peru and to Bolivia to stop the cocaine, to stop drug trafficking in the – you know, Colombia is number one, Peru is number two, biggest coca leave, you know, cultivation in the world.
01:48:55.480And goes on to say, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to – cocaine is going to flourish.
01:49:03.300Then they have a statement that they include because they reached out to the president of Colombia.
01:49:07.400President of Colombia says, we're thrilled that USAID is gone.
01:49:11.220They, you know, they made the problem worse.
01:49:14.200Then they go to Peru and the number two called, you know, coca – sorry, coca leave cultivator.
01:49:23.560And they said the Colombian – the Peruvian government refused to comment.
01:49:27.520But we talked to the former head of the National Commission on, you know, narcotics prevention, you know, the former head of the part of the Peruvian government that handles this.
01:49:37.980And he said, you know, thank God the USAID programs are – on combating cocaine here are gone.
01:49:48.180They were the primary problem in this whole thing.
01:49:51.220Actually, the – and he gives an example.
01:49:54.620He says, actually, not only did none of the money actually ever reach the groups, but they only slowed down action that the Peruvian government tried to do.
01:50:02.460When the Peruvian government tried to do something to stop cocaine, USAID would step in and they would delay things.
01:50:08.920It's almost like they wanted the cocaine.
01:50:10.100And then he gives the example of these – he says, and in Bolivia right next door, Bolivia banned USAID in 2013.
01:50:17.820And they drastically reduced the cocaine trafficking because there was no USAID cocaine program keeping the cocaine flowing.
01:50:27.180And so, anyway, but what I'm saying is this is all done through these, you know, these State Department bureaus, which are now being reorganized.
01:50:35.720And one of the – so at the executive branch level, I would say there's – we have huge wins at the National Science Foundation, which is a major, you know, NGO and university sponsor for this.
01:50:51.060How the National Endowment for Democracy remains fully funded.
01:50:54.560They were talking a big talk, the Trump administration, about defunding the National Endowment for Democracy, which I would say is one of, if not the worst of the worst offender in this entire space, especially with Damon Wilson at the helm, who came straight from the Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Research Lab, which was the censorship super center of the Western world.
01:51:15.100Seven CIA directors on the Atlantic Council's board, funded by the Pentagon State Department and USAID.
01:51:20.420The Atlantic Council, where he came from, at that time, the Atlantic Council was running training seminars to get journalists to flag Trump tweets, including one seminar called I Call Bullshit, where the Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Research Lab, where Damon Wilson was the head.
01:51:38.520They are training schools of journalists holding up Trump tweets on a jumbotron that says, two words, witch hunt.
01:51:47.120This is one month before the Mueller hearing, so Russiagate was at its apex.
01:51:51.780They wanted to censor or call disinformation Trump's attempt to present his own case around Russiagate.
01:51:57.820And they provoked journalists to hold up Atlantic Council-sponsored placards with the word bullshit on it.
01:52:04.760And that means sponsored by you and me, because we pay for them through 11 different government agencies, pay the Atlantic Council.
01:52:10.080So why is NED, National Endowment for Democracy, Atlantic Council, why are they still getting government money?
01:52:17.920I'm not privy to those internal conversations.
01:52:20.620I have actually seen the IR – so there's four cores at NED.
01:52:25.640There's the two political branches, NDI for the Democrats, the National Democratic Institute, IRI for the Republicans, the International Republicans.
01:52:43.320But the – so those are the two political branches.
01:52:45.080The – and then the other two core fours are the exact other two groups who signed that secret agreement around organizing destabilizing street protests in case Trump won.
01:52:59.680The third one is called the Center for International Private Enterprise, CPE.
01:53:04.580That's the U.S. Chamber of Commerce branch of NED.
01:53:07.500And the fourth one is called the Solidarity Center.
01:53:15.380The never-Trump Republicans, the Democrats, the Chamber of Commerce, and the unions, the exact group behind the Transition Integrity Project, which explicitly plotted in the height of the George Floyd riots, ran a war game about how the Biden campaign encased Trump won in a clear win scenario.
01:53:37.400Clear Trump win was the name of their scenario.
01:54:23.940I mean, while the AFL-CIO and SEIU were all on the streets with them, just like they are around the world when we want riots in Georgia, we want riots in Serbia, we want riots in Hungary.
01:54:51.880In full disclosure, they have reached out to me.
01:54:54.700And I think I've mentioned this publicly before, but I haven't really been able to say all that much because it's just doesn't really come up much.
01:55:01.500And I have seen them attempt to make reform.
01:55:06.140And I've heard from folks around its senior leadership that they, that they've recognized how elements of what they were doing before were inappropriate.
01:55:19.300They'd gone rogue, that certain people who were there are not there anymore, that they are trying to align the, their actions with the foreign policy set by their sponsors, the U.S. government.
01:55:33.760And I've seen, and I have seen genuine good faith efforts.
01:55:36.960They're trying to participate in democracy now.
01:55:38.700Look, I'm not weighing into whether or not they're doing it for cynical self-serving reasons or whether, but frankly, you could argue they may have been doing the other, the bad stuff.
01:55:45.760Or because the Biden administration wanted them, you know, to, you know, to do that or because the, you know, Trump was on shaky ground in his own first term and didn't really control his own Congress or, or budget or, or had a very strong coalition.
01:56:01.460But the point is, is NDI has not made those, has not made those reforms at all.
01:56:07.620The, the Solidarity Center has not made those reforms.
01:56:10.060And the issue is, is if you, if you say, okay, IRI has reformed, the Republican branch of it has, but these other three are still rogue.
01:56:22.060Well, then what happens, the whole purpose of NED is that it's bipartisan and, and that it therefore sort of synchronizes U.S. policy, U.S. foreign policy on both sides of the political aisle because everyone's on the take.
01:56:36.300So everyone has a reason to invade Ukraine.
01:56:39.080Everyone has a reason to topple Assad.
01:56:41.000But if only, if, if IRI reforms, but NDI doesn't, what happens to NED?
01:56:49.360What I, this is my last question, but, and you, you will know the answer.
01:56:52.580So when I hear you talk, it's like, it's my childhood.
01:56:55.640You know, I just grew up around this stuff.
01:56:57.140And, you know, pre-91, the assumption was we're locked in a, an existential struggle with the forces of darkness, the Soviets on board with that.
01:57:09.060Post-91, you know, ultimately we came to realize that we run the entire world and that's like a huge management project to keep everything under control and sort of moving in the right direction.
01:57:19.760And, but, you know, we're in charge of the world.
01:57:21.900Post-2023, there's like, there's no way you can tell yourself that.
01:57:31.380And the BRICS is now, represents a bigger economy, bigger population, bigger military than the West.
01:57:37.440So, I guess my question is, do the people running all these different groups understand that their 1980s era assumptions are just like overtaken by events?
01:58:19.020But, um, I think there is recognition of that.
01:58:23.240And I think this is also why you see this, everything is alliance based and why you see, for example, the Biden administration moving so deeply in tandem with the EU on all things.
01:58:36.600Um, and using EU regulatory action to box out, you know, populists like the Biden administration was totally behind the EU Digital Censorship Act that is going to become, that's completely.
01:58:49.480I think their internal documents from their, uh, White House Information Integrity Working Group, um, planning the whole thing as well as the USAID programs to, to beef up the terms of it so that it can be used against domestic enemies in America.
01:59:02.860But the fact is, is, is I think this is, this is part of the global alliance structure.
01:59:11.340And I, I actually don't think that the Biden administration really moved unilaterally, assuming unipolar power, um, almost, almost every major foreign policy decision.
01:59:22.560You know, would, you know, would, would have the buy-in of the UK, France, the in power parties in Germany and Canada and paid very close attention to, um, to, and, and, and in fact, you know, partnering with in many, many ways, China.
01:59:41.040I mean, Trump blocked China from being able to, um, import oil and gas from Iran, block that for four years, two months into Biden's term, China inked the, uh, Iran deal for 400 bill, by $400 billion of oil and gas from Iran.
01:59:58.040Um, it's just, I, so I don't think there is a kind of, uh, as much of the unipolar, there is some of it, definitely.
02:00:05.320Like you hear the John Bolton types, um, you know, talk about, uh, you know, almost presupposing that we can just bully everyone around.
02:00:14.080But I think even that is done with an expectation that it's going to be NATO wide.
02:00:19.360It's going to have, you know, allies, um, around the world.
02:00:22.880Well, but, but I, to your point, uh, I think that the Ukraine Russia war and, uh, you know, is, has been a humbling period, which I think is why there actually is an appetite for peace.
02:00:39.360Um, even within many aspects of the blob, they just want peace on terms that are beyond their leverage to obtain.
02:00:51.120And, um, you know, that, that is a war of attrition that, you know, gets back to the, the efforts to cut USAID and the NGO plex USAID spent $15 billion.
02:01:04.420Uh, I think it was one year alone on, uh, on Ukraine on this USAID NGOs are, are funding the pensions of people in Ukraine, are, are, are funding the, the salaries of municipal workers.
02:01:22.200There's, there's more welfare for people in Ukraine from USAID than, you know, effectively, uh, American citizens who live here legally.
02:01:34.080And, but the fact is, is if that USAID spigot gets cut, things will go south very quickly.
02:01:40.840This is why the EU is creating its own army, you know, built a trillion dollar budget that they've announced that for the EU to, you know, effectively create a parallel NATO in case Trump, um, dips out of that.
02:01:52.200But in the heat of this, you know, I mentioned a few of the failings, one of them, Ned, another one is a trillion dollar Pentagon budget, um, is, is, uh, is hard, hard for me to imagine that that does not go to prolonging the war, but the Trump administration is a tough choice.
02:02:11.180You know, if you, you know, if you totally deprive Ukraine of the lifeline that they've had, everything crumbles immediately, but then, uh, you lose the, the deal terms you, uh, in the sense that there's no hope to, uh, have territory in Eastern Ukraine, uh, you know, flow back to control by the Kiev government.
02:02:34.240Um, there's no hope to recover the, the, the, all the petroleum resources in Ukraine.
02:02:39.480Ukraine is the third largest, uh, shale, uh, uh, reserves, I believe in all of Europe, uh, especially in the Donbass and, uh, off, off sea, off the offshore, uh, at, in Crimea and the Black Sea.
02:02:54.280And so, you know, I, I think Trump is, is between a blob and a hard place.
02:03:00.560You know, he, he has to, if he wants a budget done, he needs Congress to approve.
02:03:05.520We do not have a populist supermajority in Congress.
02:03:09.100We have, there are more populists now in Congress than there were under Trump one.
02:03:13.080So I don't think Trump will, will get as rolled as he was by Paul Ryan, but there will be rolling, uh, undoubtedly.
02:03:21.680It was, we've seen 26 members of Congress, I think have said that they're not going to approve the doge cuts, just the doge cuts.
02:03:29.100Uh, and while you're getting handed even more money from a, from a trillion dollar Pentagon budget, and how much of that trillion is going to be civil military, i.e.
02:03:38.060NGOs, because the military funds these NGOs, as I mentioned, the secretary of war is on the board for the U.S.
02:03:46.640Institute of peace, the, the Pentagon pays the Atlantic council, the Pentagon pays for NATO, which has all the social, societal resilience and social cohesion grants to the NGO space to do all this.
02:04:00.360And so a lot of, you can shut down USAID, but you can just call it civil, civil military and the civil society NGOs will be funded by the Pentagon.
02:04:12.600So, um, Trump has to keep his coalition together.
02:04:16.440And so he, he's, he can't get everything he wants, just as we're not a unipolar power anymore.
02:04:22.120Trump is not a unipolar president, but so, so I'm happy with singles and doubles, um, as long as, as long as the direction line is towards a better country, the question is, is, are we even going to get the singles or doubles?
02:04:43.100Or is, you know, is the blob going to get enough home runs and triples on the other side of it that on net nothing comes to pass?
02:04:50.460When you next come back, I'd, I'd love to hear what a trillion dollars a year buys.
02:04:58.380Considering that we're separated from our enemies by two oceans and face no invasion threat.
02:05:03.860I'm thinking that's a pretty big budget.
02:05:06.760And I know that I'm probably not a good Republican for pointing that out, but, uh, I guess I'm not a good Republican in general, but like, what is that?
02:05:20.420If you want, if you want to fire people at the justice department, if you want to get people approved, you know, by the Senate for their positions, if you want to get rid of the department of education, Hey, you might need to give them a, you might need to give them a Pentagon bone.