Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - Exclusive Interview with Darren Beattie, First Interview Since Joining State Dept! | TRIGGERED Ep.269

00:06:23.000 Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode.

00:06:25.000 of Trigger.

00:06:25.000 Today we're going to sit down with great friend of the show, Darren Beatty, who now has taken on a major role at the State Department as the Acting Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy.

00:06:37.000 He's taking on global censorship, enacting much-needed reform, and carrying the torch for the America First mission abroad.

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00:09:00.000 Well, guys, joining me now, Acting Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy at the State Department and the Acting President of the Institute of Peace, Darren Beatty.

00:09:10.000 How's it going, man?

00:09:11.000 Good to have you back on.

00:09:13.000 So great to be back with you.

00:09:15.000 So I think it's the first time you've been on since you were in the private sector.

00:09:22.000 You're back now in government again, second time in the Trump administration, and maybe this is the first interview in the new role.

00:09:29.000 That's correct.

00:09:30.000 I'm really happy to do it with you.

00:09:32.000 And yes, as you can see, I'm a bit better dressed than I normally am. 0.65

00:09:37.000 I kind of like the Darren Beatty in a t-shirt talking crap from Revolver News. 0.82

00:09:41.000 I mean, listen, it's a whole new me. 0.97

00:09:46.000 Better lighting.

00:09:47.000 We'll see if the people like it or not.

00:09:48.000 I mean, it was always a crowd favorite before.

00:09:51.000 So let's see if you still have it, Darren, you know?

00:09:54.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:09:56.000 So, Liz, obviously you've been a regular on the show, but now you're in a much different role.

00:10:02.000 Can you give the audience an update on what you've been up to at the State Department and where this journey is taking you?

00:10:09.000 Absolutely.

00:10:10.000 And there are so many exciting things we're doing at the Department of State and in the administration.

00:10:16.000 And so I'll kind of focus on the highlights of what I've been most focused on.

00:10:21.000 And as you know, a lot of our earlier discussions have focused on weaponization of government, on the color revolution issue, on the censorship issue, and now, thanks to the very forward leaning posture of your father's administration, we've been able to do a lot of very substantive things on those issues.

00:10:44.000 I think at the highest level, what we've been able to promote is something I would refer to as free speech diplomacy.

00:10:54.000 Now under the Biden regime, what you had was a situation in which, unfortunately, the US government was pressuring US tech companies to censor American citizens.

00:11:06.000 Now under President Trump's administration, he has successfully rolled back a lot of the domestic censorship regime.

00:11:14.000 But what has happened is there's been censorship architecture that's intensified overseas.

00:11:21.000 And so just as we're rolling back the censorship regime here in the United States, rolling back what Biden was doing, we're seeing a redoubling of efforts in certain regions, in particular in Europe and Brazil.

00:11:36.000 And so really this kind of foreign component of things, which has always been around but now it's intensified, not only invites but demands a real kind of diplomatic approach to free speech, which under President Trump's leadership and under Secretary Rubio's leadership, we've been able to conduct very successfully so far.

00:11:59.000 And I'm very honored to have been a part of that process.

00:12:03.000 Yeah, I mean, it really seems like the team, this time around, is all aligned.

00:12:10.000 I think Secretary Rubio has done an incredible job.

00:12:16.000 It's like they're actually in sync with my father.

00:12:20.000 They're actually taking what he wants and effectuating it.

00:12:23.000 Whereas in the first term, it was like, okay, we heard him, but we're never going to do any of those things that doesn't jive with the rest of us at state.

00:12:29.000 I mean, have you seen that sort of cohesiveness?

00:12:33.000 And does it translate to some of the stuff that we used to talk about again, which is sort of the guys that are the careers down below not necessarily buying in and holding people back?

00:12:43.000 Or has just the leadership sort of overwhelmed some of that stuff that would have stymied any kind of America first First policies?

00:12:50.000 I would say it's night and day.

00:12:52.000 I would say it's more in the direction of overwhelmed.

00:12:55.000 We're in a situation now where we've gone through a very substantive reorganization.

00:13:02.000 We have a configuration in place that really enables the department and really the bureaucracies writ large to be responsive to the president's vision, which is, again, that's a precondition for the democratic process to work.

00:13:19.000 And that's something that has always been a complicated thing whenever you have a transformational presidency.

00:13:26.000 Sometimes, you know, entrenched bureaucratic elements trying to thwart it.

00:13:30.000 And this time around, I think we're really in a position where the systems are in place in order for the department and the bureaucracies to be maximally responsive to the president's vision.

00:13:44.000 And I think that's why you've seen so many successes in so little time, including, again, some of the stuff we're doing.

00:13:52.000 It's just a wild ride from discussing with you as a private citizen the weaponization of government under Biden.

00:13:59.000 And one of the first things we did here at the Department of State, and major credit to Secretary Rubio for really leaning into this was.

00:14:09.000 eliminating the Global Engagement Center, which was the kind of censorship operation within the State Department, really kind of inaugurated under Obama.

00:14:20.000 It was run by a guy who kind of gained notoriety for advocating for the reimagining of the First Amendment and basically set up a censorship infrastructure within the State Department.

00:14:33.000 That one of the first things we did was eliminate the entire office.

00:14:36.000 And I'm currently undergoing a widespread transparency effort.

00:14:41.000 And this is going to come out in the next couple of weeks.

00:14:44.000 We've gone through hundreds of thousands of emails and very much look forward to revealing to the public exactly what was going on in this censorship office.

00:14:53.000 I think the public will be shocked and a lot of the things they were doing even against current cabinet members in President Trump's administration.

00:15:01.000 So there's a lot of that story that still needs to be told, but we've taken just a very proactive, aggressive posture towards these things.

00:15:10.000 And it's just such an honor to be in a position to help realize this transformation from things that we've been talking about and the American people have been concerned about to things we're actually taking action on now within this new administration.

00:15:26.000 So as the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, what exactly are your goals and responsibilities?

00:15:33.000 And I know you're also now the acting president of the Institute for Peace.

00:15:37.000 So that's quite a portfolio.

00:15:39.000 I mean, I know they've given Marco like seven or eight jobs.

00:15:43.000 It's like, of course they have to give it to the Hispanic guy. 0.98

00:15:46.000 He's going to be the one working all these things.

00:15:48.000 But it looks like you have a pretty full plate too.

00:15:50.000 You know, what exactly does all of that entail?

00:15:53.000 Well, you know, it's a very interesting history, this public diplomacy office.

00:15:59.000 It's really, I won't get want to go into too much detail the history, but it does come from basically what used to be called the US Information Agency, which is an organization that is largely credited for having helped win the Cold War, that did a lot of effective messaging and programs.

00:16:18.000 And in the 90s, that became enveloped into the State Department, where it assumed its new form as the Office of Public Diplomacy.

00:16:28.000 And this is an enormous office that encompasses a wide range of things that some of which would be familiar to most Americans.

00:16:35.000 For instance, the Fulbright Scholarship Program, Music Diplomacy, Sports Diplomacy, and the Office of Public Diplomacy., which I know this administration has really taken a keen interest in.

00:16:47.000 And so all of those items.

00:16:50.000 But really, it's about kind of speech is very much in that kind of purview as well.

00:16:56.000 And so that's the component that I've leaned into, I think, most enthusiastically.

00:17:01.000 And we've done a lot of work in relation to encroachments on free speech from Europe.

00:17:07.000 And in particular, and probably most most known at this point are some of the things we're doing in relation to Brazil and in particular the censorship and persecution complex erected by Justice Moraes in Brazil against Bolsonaro and his supporters?

00:17:27.000 Well, I mean, I think that one, you know, specifically on Brazil, you sanctioned Judge Alexander Moraes.

00:17:34.000 It's a powerful and needed move against a sitting judge, you know, who is pushing, you know, the same kind of lawfare that we experience here, perhaps even more.

00:17:42.000 Can you explain the specific actions that led up to this?

00:17:46.000 you know, why it really matters, perhaps now more than ever.

00:17:49.000 And there's those who also say that they actually want us to do this because that's their sort of way.

00:17:55.000 If you don't bang Can you kind of explain the details of how you see this all playing out?

00:18:07.000 Absolutely.

00:18:08.000 Well, the first observation is all of these things are connected.

00:18:12.000 And indeed, the parallels between the situation with Bolsonaro and the situation with President Trump, it's not a one-to-one correspondence, but there's definitely an analogy to be made.

00:18:25.000 It definitely rhymes.

00:18:26.000 You had Bolsonaro as a populist figure that won a pretty decisive victory in 2018.

00:18:38.000 And there's correctly perceived to have some affinities to the energies underlying the tremendous victory of President Trump in 2016.

00:18:46.000 And as you know, these things are not isolated.

00:18:49.000 They're not compartmentalized.

00:18:50.000 The successful populist movements across the world have been targeted in the same ways, for the same reasons, and in many instances by the same people and the same networks.

00:19:02.000 And that's very much part of the dynamic in Brazil.

00:19:05.000 And so right away, you had the cultivation of this persecution and censorship architecture in Brazil, unfortunately, with the assistance of our government, particularly under Biden.

00:19:19.000 And what this has resulted in is, again, a very similar and unfortunate story in Brazil where law fair and politicized prosecutions and persecutions have really suppressed the democratic process in Brazil and the architecture is so monstrous and so profound that it's had spillover effects where it's affecting US citizens, US residents and US companies.

00:19:46.000 In fact, we're talking now on Rumble.

00:19:49.000 Rumble has been directly affected by Justice Moraes' censorship regime.

00:19:55.000 He banned Rumble and by extension, Truth Social even from Brazil.

00:20:02.000 He's issued indictments and various orders against Rumble and other social media companies, so taking an extremely aggressive posture on that.

00:20:14.000 So it's not just the censorship and persecution complex internally, which prevents Brazil from being able to express itself through the democratic process, but it's also directly affected, again, our citizens, our residents and our companies, including Rumble.

00:20:33.000 So I'm very, very pleased and very happy that the president has taken decisive action on this and made it very clear that this political persecution complex is a central impediment to the ultimate flourishing of what could and should be an extremely productive bilateral relationship with Brazil.

00:20:55.000 Yeah, I mean, it seems like you also have some, you know, problems in Colombia and other parts of Latin America, but we do cover Latin America a lot on this show, but this week we actually saw Bolivia reject socialism for the first time in twenty years in their presidential race.

00:21:12.000 Are the people rising up and walking across Latin and South America?

00:21:17.000 And how does that impact your diplomacy and effort to combat censorship and illegitimate regimes?

00:21:25.000 Yes, I mean, I think that's a great story of this second term of this administration is there is a focus on the Western Hemisphere.

00:21:35.000 There is a focus on Latin America.

00:21:37.000 It's very important.

00:21:38.000 I know you had the Deputy Secretary on not too long ago, who is very much an expert in this and expressed the importance of getting the Western Hemisphere right because the potentialities are tremendous.

00:21:52.000 And again, we're Europe is very important, the Middle East is very important, but our backyard is very important too.

00:22:01.000 And all of these countries that you mentioned have tremendous potential, and Brazil being an enormous country, enormous population, enormous economy, so many amazing things that we could do if the democratic process were in a position to actually flourish in the way that it should without this persecution and censorship architecture.

00:22:26.000 So I think that's really something we're working towards, is realizing the full potentialities of what our relationships in the western hemisphere can be, including in Brazil.

00:22:39.000 So how can we advance free speech as a diplomatic tool?

00:22:43.000 How does that really manifest itself in practice, especially in a world where many countries, including some of our alleged allies, have far different views on the limits of free speech?

00:22:56.000 Well, that's a great question.

00:22:57.000 And it's certainly not easy.

00:22:59.000 And I think the general answer is we approach it the way that we've approached a lot of other objectives in the US government.

00:23:07.000 The important thing is this is now an objective..

00:23:09.000 We have a standard roster of carrots and sticks that have been pretty effective in advancing our interests in the past, you know, not in every case, but we do have carrots that people want to eat and sticks that people want to avoid, and so optimally and wisely marshalling those tools to advance our free speech interests is, I think, very much something that's sensible and advisable to do.

00:23:37.000 And, you know, it's different in different areas and different regions.

00:23:42.000 The case in Brazil, I think, is particularly severe and egregious in how.

00:23:46.000 and how the censorship architecture was kind of globalized in a way that directly and severely impacts US interest.

00:23:56.000 In Europe, there's another version of this that we're also looking at with concern that expresses itself in sweeping internet legislation like the Digital Services Act, where they might say, oh, we're doing these things.

00:24:12.000 This is just an internal European thing.

00:24:15.000 And it's a question of how much do we want to get involved in the internal process?

00:24:20.000 But certainly we want to get involved if they're doing things that spill over and affect the speech environment in the United States.

00:24:28.000 And so at the very least, what we want to avoid is something called the Brussels effect, which basically captures the regulatory comparative advantage of Europe where they have a market share and they leverage that by saying, okay, you don't have access to our market unless you conform to these standards.

00:24:47.000 And just as a matter of efficiency, usually industries end up conforming to the standards of Europe because they're the most aggressive from a regulatory standpoint.

00:24:57.000 So we want to prevent something from happening whereby our companies are either forced to incur a tremendous financial cost or conform to these censorship standards promoted by Europe.

00:25:12.000 That's one of those things that I think is very much in the interest of the United States to do and something that we're working on very, very closely.

00:25:20.000 And again, the Brazil case is especially severe, I would say, perhaps uniquely severe, and it's something that, again, has been dealt with with tools that kind of correspond to that severity.

00:25:34.000 The Magnitsky sanction is known to be a kind of financial death sentence for a good reason. 0.99

00:25:40.000 It's a very serious tool that reflects the nature there on the ground and what justice Marias has been doing to Brazil, but also by extension to the United States.

00:25:51.000 What are some of those other kinds effective, let's call them soft power tools that are at our disposal?

00:25:57.000 Is it traditional cultural exchanges and academic programs or are there other new types of strategies that are more important for building those people to people kind of ties that you need, that actually those real relationships that actually affect real diplomacy?

00:26:13.000 Yeah, that's a great question.

00:26:14.000 And again, there are a lot of tools with different levels of severity.

00:26:18.000 Another tool that we've implemented and established at the State Department was this tool of visas.

00:26:26.000 So one thing that the State Department did a couple of months ago was announcing a global 3C visa policy.

00:26:33.000 Basically, we're defining a target class of violations whereby any foreign official who is deemed to have been involved or complicit in censorship activity that affects Americans on American soil is subject to visa restrictions.

00:26:53.000 So they and their immediate family members are not able to come into the United States.

00:26:57.000 That's a tool that is very effective.

00:27:00.000 It's not at the level of severity of a Magnitsky sanction, but it definitely sends a very acute message to those who are potentially involved in that activity.

00:27:12.000 And so there's a wide range of things.

00:27:14.000 As you mentioned, exchange programs.

00:27:18.000 So we run the gamut from the softer tools to the more severe tools, and we kind of leverage those as appropriate.

00:27:26.000 So how do you these days measure the success of a public diplomacy effort?

00:27:31.000 Is it a change in public opinion, a policy shift in another country, or is it something else?

00:27:36.000 Because I mean, you guys did a great job obviously getting rid of USAID and we saw the insanity uh you know that that was pushing but i guess by their standards they would have given themselves an a plus for you know making sure that there's gender awareness for trans people in third world countries who wouldn't know what transgender even is.

00:27:54.000 And yet they spent billions of dollars and, you know, probably touted those successes.

00:27:59.000 You know, how do you have an objective measure of what is success?

00:28:02.000 Are we just seeing that with these peace deals, with the ending of the wars?

00:28:05.000 You know, how do you grade those these days so that, you know, a regular person could be like, okay, we're actually spending money on these things and we're actually effectuating real change.

00:28:15.000 That's a great question.

00:28:16.000 And again, sometimes a lot of the success is not spending money on some things.

00:28:20.000 Oftentimes the success is not spending money on bad things.

00:28:24.000 So that's a bit of a personal.

00:28:26.000 Like everything USAID was doing prior.

00:28:28.000 Yes, I agree with you, one hundred percent.

00:28:30.000 I mean, and that's so critical, and hopefully we can get into that a little bit in this conversation of the NGO component of things.

00:28:40.000 But yes, so first we just want not to spend money on bad things, not to spend money on misaligned things.

00:28:46.000 So I've canceled a lot of stuff that was highly suspect and misaligned, and it takes a long time to get go through the entire catalog of what was set up.

00:28:57.000 So that is one component of it.

00:29:00.000 I think another component is defining, you know, defining precise goals, not sort of in an overarching sense, but for instance in relation to Brazil, we want the democratic process to be able to flourish there.

00:29:15.000 And one can imagine like very precise sort of victory conditions associated with the situation in Brazil or maybe the Digital Services Act.

00:29:24.000 There are certain components of, say, the fact checkers.

00:29:28.000 We don't want them to use these fact checkers or maybe the idea.

00:29:33.000 of say, Europe holding a fine over the heads of our companies, maybe that fine shouldn't be associated with the global revenue, but maybe just the European revenue.

00:29:44.000 So these are things just, you know, there are ways to define precise victory conditions, but the overarching kind of concept of public diplomacy is something that I think is it's something that hasn't really been kind of freshly evaluated since the Cold War.

00:30:03.000 The term public diplomacy itself is a Cold War coinage.

00:30:07.000 It, to a large degree, a lot of the programs.

00:30:11.000 are kind of, I don't want to say vestigial, but rooted in this Cold War context that is a particular configuration of the US, the Soviet Union, both animated by sort of ideologies of universal appeal, very much set up for this kind of global war of ideas framework that still applies to some degree today, but maybe with some differences.

00:30:38.000 And so I think part of the exciting exercise we have is to really kind of fundamentally reassess what is public diplomacy means in the current configuration, how do we kind of rework these pipelines that have been on autopilot for decades and to kind of repurpose a lot of our assets in a more targeted and efficient fashion to achieve, as you were saying, kind of more precisely defined goals.

00:31:06.000 I think that's part of the broader challenge and imperative we have.

00:31:10.000 And I think so far we've been quite successful in doing that.

00:31:13.000 So let's talk about that NGO component that you mentioned.

00:31:16.000 I know, as long as I've known you, we've been talking about, you certainly had a real fundamental grasp of what was really going on.

00:31:24.000 That was not the message that was conveyed to the public.

00:31:26.000 public, what do we need to know now?

00:31:30.000 Obviously, there's been a lot of dismantling of those, still a very powerful force.

00:31:35.000 I don't know what you can and can't say now as someone who's working at the State Department, but I imagine in your past role, you and I talking on this show would have A done a victory lap about these things going on and then probably tied that to the staggering lack of funding for Act Blue and the Democrat fundraising machine.

00:31:55.000 So what do you think is the NGO component now?

00:31:59.000 Beyond perhaps what we've discovered with the exposure of USAID and all of these other insane programs.

00:32:06.000 Absolutely.

00:32:07.000 This is such a critical item item.

00:32:09.000 And I think this has been talked about, but I almost think this is an underappreciated and major success of the administration so far.

00:32:21.000 There have been a lot of successes to go around, so there's kind of an abundance of riches in that regard, but I think one of the special successes has been how this administration has gone after the deep state, the swamp, whatever you want to call it, at the NGO layer.

00:32:39.000 The NGO layer of the deep state has been profoundly undermined.

00:32:46.000 Just to appreciate the significance of that, I think it's important to call, well, what function does this NGO layer serve?

00:32:53.000 In a nutshell, basically, after the church committee hearings that expose a lot of the stuff that the CIA was doing, the government restructured in a way that kind of distributed responsibility in a kind of a plausibly deniable way to an archipelago of NGOs that have operated in this kind of interstitial zone of kind of public,

00:33:19.000 kind of private, and they express themselves in different ways according to the needs of the people.

00:33:27.000 And this layer of things is the layer on which color revolutions were conducted.

00:33:32.000 It was the layer on which the Biden administration helped to facilitate a lot of the things that we don't love in Brazil and all over the world.

00:33:42.000 And it's certainly the layer that's been most responsible for the censorship architecture, both domestically and abroad.

00:33:49.000 And this has been dealt a decisive blow.

00:33:52.000 A lot of the things that we've terminated at the State Department, including the Global Engagement Center, part of their infamy came from how they were funding a lot of these NGOs.

00:34:02.000 And the US Institute of Peace in particular is a fascinating story.

00:34:07.000 I think, from what I can tell, this is almost a perfection of that sort of chameleon like ambiguity of is this a government institution, is it a private institution?

00:34:23.000 It's almost a perfection of that form.

00:34:25.000 And well, I'm still kind of getting a handle on things.

00:34:30.000 And so a lot will have to stay tuned, but I think the public will be very interested in what we have to come.

00:34:36.000 But from what is already public, it's a very bizarre situation.

00:34:41.000 For instance, this is called the US Institute of Peace.

00:34:44.000 Why is one of their major things talking about how it's not a great thing that the opium business in Afghanistan is diminishing?

00:34:55.000 Why is the US Institute of Peace because like all the acronyms and fancy names they come up in DC, like whatever they come up with, it's probably doing the opposite.

00:35:03.000 So if you would have told me, and again, with you at the helm now, it's perhaps it's different.

00:35:07.000 I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt, but if you would have told me the Institute of Peace under Biden, I'm like, so they're sowing the seeds of war all over the world.

00:35:14.000 And, you know.

00:35:16.000 But how bizarre is that of all places?, the US Institute of Peace making it one of their main agenda items to, like, implicitly try to restore the opium trade in Afghanistan or at least lament the diminishment of the opium trade in Afghanistan.

00:35:36.000 So it's very bizarre and really it just underlines how, how, how, how, how, how complicated and how dirty this NGO layer can really be.

00:35:47.000 And I think, you know, again, for full transparency of government, there needs to be a public understanding and reckoning with this NGO layer and like all the other layers needs to be brought under political control.

00:36:02.000 And by political control, I mean control of the people.

00:36:06.000 Because, you know, again, what's the point of winning an election if there's these bureaucratic and NGO layers that exist precisely to undermine the mandate and the will of the people as it's expressed through electoral outcomes.

00:36:23.000 And so that's just a critical component of the swamp.

00:36:27.000 And again, I think that of all of the incredible successes that the Trump administration has achieved so far, I would put the bringing the NGO layer to heal as preeminent among them.

00:36:43.000 And I don't know if the American people yet even fully appreciate the significance of that.

00:36:48.000 So what surprised you most about this new role?

00:36:52.000 Well, I'm still getting into it and we're kind of trying to develop it in a deliberate and responsible fashion.

00:37:00.000 But frankly, what surprised me was how perfectly it was set up.

00:37:06.000 It really is sort of, if you look at the post church kind of government structure as the development of this sort of NGO world that exists at an arm's length plausible deniable layer to do the stuff that previously other maybe agencies in the government have done.

00:37:24.000 What impressed me about USIP was how it's just really the culmination of that.

00:37:29.000 It really is the perfect chameleon.

00:37:31.000 I would even call it Schrödinger's bureaucracy in the sense that it can be public or private depending on how you look at it.

00:37:40.000 And again, the bizarre stuff that it seems like they were invested in, including the opium trade in Afghanistan.

00:37:48.000 And so there's a lot more, I think, where that came from.

00:37:52.000 We're just getting started.

00:37:54.000 I'm just still in the process of onboarding, really.

00:37:58.000 But the whole saga of USIP is something, it's a story that really needs to be told.

00:38:04.000 It's very intense.

00:38:05.000 And I think most Americans, including myself, is US Institute of Peace is not really on people's radar as much as something like USAID, but I think it really encapsulates a lot of the problems and challenges with this NGO layer, perhaps better than any other institution.

00:38:25.000 You know, how much deeper does it go?

00:38:27.000 Obviously, I thought of everything as USAID.

00:38:29.000 I never even really heard of USIP, and I kind of do a lot of this.

00:38:34.000 How many more of these things are there?

00:38:37.000 I imagine USADE is one of the big ones, but if there's 30 other that are 10% of the size, it's still, you're talking about billions of dollars, plus the negative impact of what those things ultimately do to the America, their sort of global hegemony on power, where it seemed to really undermine so much of those things, as well as the countries.

00:38:57.000 that they were supposed to be helping probably didn't get any benefit out of that unless they wanted to become trans-communists.

00:39:04.000 Right.

00:39:04.000 That's the funny thing about USAID is that, you know, it's frame.

00:39:08.000 It's Agency of International Development.

00:39:13.000 That's where aid comes from.

00:39:14.000 You know, people think of aid as, oh, we're giving charity.

00:39:17.000 Well, usually, you know, usually people like, you know, charity if you're just giving them stuff.

00:39:22.000 In many cases, the countries didn't even like the US, the people who are complaining the most about the closure of USAID were actually just these, you know, NGO types, not even the recipients of taxpayer funding.

00:39:38.000 Exactly.

00:39:38.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:39:40.000 Not even the alleged recipients and beneficiaries of this.

00:39:44.000 So it's just another example of how the grand scheme is grift of the Democrats is really at the level of, you know, kind of using the tax base as their own political slush fund.

00:39:59.000 And that's sort of another component of this NGO layer, which is sort of, it's a reconfiguration of how the government does some of its maybe dirty work, color revolution type stuff, post church committee.

00:40:14.000 But also it's intimately twined with sort of the grand scale grift of the Democratic Party, which is very much to use the tax base to make money.

00:40:26.000 space as its slush fund.

00:40:29.000 Yeah, I mean, So, you know, the USAID stuff blows up two months ago, three months ago, whenever that was.

00:40:35.000 And then all of a sudden you see, you know, the top, you know, five to seven executives at ACTBLUE, the Democrat fundraising apparatus design.

00:40:42.000 Then you see their quarterly numbers and they're, you know, 10% of what they used to be.

00:40:47.000 I mean, it doesn't take a lot.

00:40:49.000 It doesn't seem like a stretch to say that these things have been tied and that's been a back channel way to fund, you know, the Democrat Party apparatus.

00:40:57.000 for years, in my opinion.

00:41:00.000 Do you see that link?

00:41:01.000 Are you even allowed to talk about that now?

00:41:02.000 And because I just don't believe in coincidence and I don't believe you do either.

00:41:07.000 No, absolutely.

00:41:08.000 And again, that could be directly and it could also be indirectly.

00:41:12.000 Like if people are basically using these funds and operationalizing these institutions in a manner that's directly supportive of a kind of left wing democrat agenda, they don't even need to be formally associated with the party in order to be effectively an extension of that broader network.

00:41:30.000 Just in the same way that National Endowment of Democracy or these other NGOs which were explicitly designed to function as cutout layers to other agencies within government, they don't need to have a formal relationship in order to function as a kind of bureaucratic extension of that.

00:41:51.000 So it really is like these distinctions that I think traditionally have meant a lot to the conversation of the distinction between public and private and these kinds of things really don't capture the underlying reality of what this sort of broader nexus really is.

00:42:09.000 And I think we need to think more of it in terms of this kind of, you know, one thing slash the other.

00:42:15.000 They're extensions of each other, kind of in a similar way of sort of Eisenhower's coinage of the military industrial complex.

00:42:23.000 I think the FOIA captures this very well.

00:42:26.000 There's an equivalent, there's an analogous thing going on with these sort of NGO institutions is that they are extensions of this kind of broader apparatus and need to be thought of as part of this collective.

00:42:42.000 Yeah, I mean, it feels like that's the entire purpose.

00:42:44.000 Once it goes, once the money goes to the NGO, all of a sudden, there's no accountability.

00:42:49.000 No one gets to know where it is.

00:42:50.000 No one has to know who's a part of it.

00:42:52.000 It's not subject to FOIA requests.

00:42:54.000 And so it was just a way of, to me, it was like money laundering.

00:42:57.000 It's like it goes to a government gives it to these guys.

00:42:59.000 They're doing at least one party's, you know, money laundering.

00:43:02.000 Uh, you know, governmental work, but there's no way to actually track what's going on to see if there is waste, fraud, or abuse.

00:43:08.000 And therefore, it was just going to keep going forever because there were enough beneficiaries of it to make sure that it made sense and stayed quiet.

00:43:14.000 But other than that, it didn't really seem to have any real purpose.

00:43:18.000 Absolutely.

00:43:19.000 Absolutely.

00:43:20.000 I just wanted to make sure I want to break a little bit of news with you.

00:43:23.000 I just want to make sure I get it in.

00:43:27.000 I mentioned that sports diplomacy is part of our portfolio.

00:43:32.000 And that's very kind of a, uh, something that I know the president and also the secretary has taken very keen interest in with the Olympics going on, with FIFA going on, and a lot of other important programs.

00:43:47.000 I just wanted to say on your show, one exciting thing that we're doing is we're adding the sport of mixed martial arts to the official roster of sports that can be included as part of exchange programs.

00:44:01.000 And so that's one of those things, again, that we can do to sort of tailor our programs to sort of the vision of the administration, to how things have kind of developed.

00:44:13.000 There's a lot of demand for this sport.

00:44:15.000 For some reason it hasn't been officially included.

00:44:18.000 But these are the kinds of things that we can leverage to strengthen our relationships overseas, because now this is a sport that is very much a global sport and obviously also a very important sport in Brazil.

00:44:32.000 So I think there's a lot of potential there and I just wanted to, because I know you're a fan as well, so I wanted to break that news with you.

00:44:41.000 That's big one.

00:44:42.000 I like that.

00:44:42.000 I mean, it sort of pales in comparison to, I know, a couple of years ago when the Olympics were talking about getting rid of wrestling.

00:44:48.000 I was like, I don't know, like, other than maybe track, like, what is more of an Olympic sport than wrestling?

00:44:54.000 And then you see the stuff they want to admit and I'm like like, it's sort of wild.

00:44:58.000 So I think that sets pretty good precedent for, you know, real sports to stay included and especially those kinds of sports that are, you know, played throughout the world.

00:45:07.000 And I, you know, obviously MMA's got such a big, big following across every country now.

00:45:12.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:45:13.000 And you're right.

00:45:14.000 These are, you know, these combat sports do conform to like the original understanding of what sport is, it's basically those or questions.

00:45:22.000 Who's the fastest?

00:45:24.000 Who would win in a fight?

00:45:25.000 Like this goes all the way back to the Greeks.

00:45:26.000 And so these are.

00:45:27.000 Yeah, I respect my badminton players.

00:45:29.000 I'm sure they'd kick the crap out of me on a badminton court.

00:45:31.000 But I'm like, I don't know.

00:45:32.000 It doesn't seem like it's all that relevant to the Olympics relative to wrestling.

00:45:35.000 But, you know, again, like, you know, I guess I'm not nuts.

00:45:41.000 So Darren, you have a unique background from doing political commentary, journalism.

00:45:47.000 Obviously, you ran Revolver News, and you even started out as an academic.

00:45:51.000 I think back in 1516, you may have been the lone academics for Trump voice.

00:45:58.000 It was a distinguished list, but a very short one with basically only you in it.

00:46:03.000 How does that perspective and experience apply to what you're doing at state now?

00:46:07.000 Well, you know, to be honest, I think it all every, every bit helps the academic background.

00:46:13.000 I am an academic by nature.

00:46:15.000 I'm an, I've fully confess to being an academic nerd by nature.

00:46:22.000 My background is in mathematics and philosophy.

00:46:25.000 And again, we have, part of the Fulbright program, we have a lot of interesting academic exchange programs that perhaps haven't been used optimally in the past, but I think do have a lot of potential.

00:46:36.000 We have very sophisticated things that I think really contribute to the narrative of America being the custodian of civilization.

00:46:46.000 Most people don't know this.

00:46:47.000 We have a special office in our department called the Cultural Heritage Center, which really conducts all diplomatic affairs related to the preservation of cultural antiquities.

00:47:01.000 So stuff from ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Near East, all the diplomacy associated with that, sort of Indiana Jones type stuff is very important and I think it's important for the United States to be known as the custodian of civilization in that respect.

00:47:19.000 So the academic background has been very helpful and obviously the media background is, you know, we do a lot of media and just knowing how that works has been tremendously important.

00:47:32.000 I feel like all of those previous chapters of my professional life have kind of come together into a skill set that is, you know, specially tailored to allow me to have the honor of contributing in this capacity at the State Department and to President Trump's administration.

00:47:48.000 Yeah, no, I think one hundred percent, I guess that's the, you know, one thing I wanted to say about you, Deputy Secretary Landau, Secretary Robio, you're all kind of sophisticated intellectuals and policy experts.

00:48:01.000 And that really seems to be paying dividends for the American people.

00:48:06.000 And, you know, what is that environment like at, you know, foggy bottom?

00:48:10.000 Because there's there are so many good things happening.

00:48:13.000 You compare and contrast that to the last administration.

00:48:16.000 I'm like, I don't know if any of these guys knew anything.

00:48:18.000 They were just sort of like you were we're just going to put you in this spot.

00:48:21.000 You'll figure it out along the way.

00:48:23.000 And we saw the disasters that unfolded because of it.

00:48:25.000 No, absolutely.

00:48:26.000 And, you know, I think even the comparison to the previous administration is is is not.

00:48:34.000 I mean, that's a very low bar.

00:48:36.000 But I would say that.

00:48:37.000 Don't get me wrong.

00:48:39.000 That was not a compliment to me.

00:48:41.000 to them at all it was like but it was like you can't really get much worse that's what rock bottom looks like and this is a little different and you see the changes in such a short amount of time already.

00:48:50.000 Absolutely.

00:48:51.000 So, yeah, previous administration, very low bar, but I would say this administration now has really been an exceptionally high bar.

00:49:00.000 And I can, you know, I speak for the administration most broadly, but in particular because this is what I see, what I know, what I interact with every day.

00:49:08.000 I am, you know, I'm a tough grader, but I am really impressed by the quality of my colleagues here at the State Department.

00:49:20.000 I think, you know, the American people should be proud.

00:49:24.000 There's genuinely a critical mat mass of not only 100% politically aligned people, but exceptionally smart, creative and courageous people.

00:49:38.000 And you need all of those components.

00:49:40.000 You know, you can have people who aren't politically aligned, but they might be smart and creative.

00:49:46.000 That's not going to work.

00:49:47.000 But you can also have people very politically aligned and, you know, bless their hearts, they don't know what to do about it.

00:49:52.000 Well, we had plenty of those in the first term.

00:49:53.000 I get it.

00:49:54.000 That's almost more dangerous than the Mossack.

00:49:56.000 Yeah, sure.

00:49:57.000 Have the combination of totally solid political people who are also very smart, very entrepreneurial, very resourceful, very creative and who have good guts, which is a big thing.

00:50:11.000 That's really a recipe for the kind of success that we've seen so far.

00:50:14.000 Yeah, no, I've always had the sort of the concentric circles of loyal and smart and wise.

00:50:18.000 I mean, it's like, it's a really little, tiny little sliver of that.

00:50:22.000 But it seems like, you know, they've done a great job of putting those people all in one place.

00:50:26.000 So I want to thank you for taking on that role, Darren.

00:50:28.000 It's just really, it's awesome to see.

00:50:30.000 And, you know, as you get more subtle and you start taking on more of these things, I look forward to having you back and hearing all about it.

00:50:37.000 Hundred percent.

00:50:38.000 Thank you so much.

00:50:38.000 It's been so great to talk with you.

00:50:40.000 Likewise, buddy.

00:50:41.000 Good to see you.

00:50:42.000 Thanks so much for tuning in, guys.

00:50:44.000 Remember to like, to share, to subscribe.

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Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - August 21, 2025

Exclusive Interview with Darren Beattie, First Interview Since Joining State Dept! | TRIGGERED Ep.269

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