#170 Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons and Samantha Powers

Summary

Shawn Ryan Show Episode #170: Mike Benz - USAID Funding CIA-Backed Mercenaries, Media Superweapons, and Samantha Powers

Release Date: February 12, 2025

In Episode #170 of the Shawn Ryan Show, host Shawn Ryan engages in a profound and critical conversation with Mike Benz, an expert delving deep into the intricate and often concealed operations of USAID, its connections with CIA-backed mercenaries, media manipulation tactics, and the controversial role of Samantha Powers. This comprehensive discussion sheds light on the complex web of foreign policy, covert operations, and media influence that shapes both international and domestic landscapes.

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1. The Rapid Unfolding of USAID Scandals

Timestamp: 00:42 - 02:35

The episode kicks off with Shawn Ryan and Mike Benz catching up, quickly transitioning into the heart of the discussion: the swift exposure of corruption within USAID. Mike Benz expresses surprise at the "lightning speed" at which these revelations have emerged, highlighting the intensified scrutiny and audits initiated by figures like Elon Musk's DOGE. He remarks:

"I didn't expect the speed of this. I think once they fixated on USAID... it's now challenging the entire foreign policy establishment."
[01:15] Mike Benz

Mike Benz emphasizes how USAID's financial outlays are now under the microscope, posing a fundamental threat to the operations of the State Department, intelligence services, and the defense establishment. He contends that this scrutiny validates long-held suspicions about the weaponization of domestic and international agencies against American interests.

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2. USAID's Role in Domestic and International Policy Manipulation

Timestamp: 02:35 - 07:43

Delving deeper, Benz discusses USAID's extensive influence, asserting that the organization's actions are a continuation of decades-old tactics aimed at manipulating both foreign and domestic policies. He states:

"USAID is about humanitarian assistance and building to the American people as a kind of international charity. Why are they working with the U.S. Defense Department? Why are they working with Special Forces?"
[04:55] Mike Benz

Benz argues that USAID's collaboration with military and intelligence agencies indicates a blurred line between humanitarian aid and covert operations. He highlights past scandals, such as the Zanzanillo operation in Cuba (2014), where USAID's internal documents revealed unauthorized activities that bypassed traditional oversight mechanisms.

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3. The Intersection of USAID with Political Movements and Media Manipulation

Timestamp: 07:43 - 33:12

Shawn Ryan introduces a question from a Patreon supporter, Jimmy W., about the potential for Republicans and Democrats to create new slush funds in the wake of USAID's troubles. Benz responds by outlining the vast budget disparities between USAID and the Pentagon, emphasizing that USAID's $44 billion budget pales in comparison to the Pentagon's $900 billion.

Benz further critiques the intertwining of USAID with organizations like DOGE and the media, suggesting that the establishment is attempting to suppress USAID's internal records to maintain control over their covert operations. He cites the example of Senator Joni Ernst's failed attempts to audit USAID, only to be met with threats highlighting the severity of the agency's actions.

"We're opening up a Pandora's box and that's the threshold question is how much access to this is Doge ultimately going to get?"
[04:55] Mike Benz

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4. USAID's Global Influence and the Suppression of Populist Movements

Timestamp: 33:12 - 74:56

The conversation shifts to USAID's global footprint, with Benz asserting that the agency's influence spans over 100 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. He discusses how USAID funds various NGOs and media organizations to manipulate political outcomes, often targeting populist leaders who threaten established foreign policy objectives.

Benz recounts the case of Colleen Georgescu in Romania, whose presidential campaign against Russian interference was allegedly funded by USAID to undermine her neutrality and favor NATO interests. He draws parallels to historical interventions, such as the CIA's involvement in Pakistan's political landscape and the attempted ousting of Imran Khan.

"USAID funds mercenary media for the state, paid-for deputies. These are effectively hitmen hired to seize the assets of, to get fired from their jobs and to arrest criminally take use the criminal justice system, create a pipeline between their sponsored journalists and the local prosecutors in order to arrest the political enemies of the U.S. government in these target countries."
[25:58] Mike Benz

Benz also highlights USAID's role in shaping election management bodies (EMBs) globally, aiming to criminalize populist speech and influence election outcomes to favor pro-Western candidates. He underscores the agency's capacity to bypass traditional oversight, enabling covert actions under the guise of humanitarian aid and judicial reform.

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5. The USAID Truman Show: Manipulating Media and Public Perception

Timestamp: 74:56 - 155:42

Mike Benz introduces the concept of the "USAID Truman Show," a metaphor for the agency's pervasive influence over global media and information ecosystems. He argues that USAID funds and controls media outlets and fact-checking organizations to shape narratives that align with U.S. foreign policy objectives.

Benz critiques entities like the Atlantic Council and OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project), asserting that their partnerships with USAID result in biased reporting and investigative journalism aimed at destabilizing political figures unfavorable to U.S. interests. He points out that mainstream media's credibility is undermined by these covert funding streams, leading to a manipulated public perception both domestically and internationally.

"It's the USA Truman show in terms of what us as civilians think are organic institutions but are in fact USAID proxies."
[34:59] Mike Benz

Furthermore, Benz discusses how USAID's funding mechanisms target educational institutions and NGOs, using them as fronts for political warfare and information control. He provides examples of how universities like Harvard have been involved in USAID's covert operations, blurring the lines between academic freedom and state-directed agendas.

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6. Samantha Powers and the Financial Implications of USAID Leadership

Timestamp: 155:27 - 160:34

Towards the episode's conclusion, Benz addresses the financial controversies surrounding Samantha Powers, former chief of USAID. He highlights reports indicating a significant increase in her net worth during her tenure, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest and the misuse of USAID funds. While acknowledging the need for further verification, Benz suggests that such wealth accumulation may be linked to insider knowledge and favorable investment opportunities arising from covert operations.

"Samantha Power made $180,000 a year as Joe Biden's appointee. In those three years, her wealth jumped from 6.7 million to a whopping $30 million."
[120:35] Sean Ryan

Benz underscores the lack of transparency and accountability within USAID, emphasizing the necessity for stringent oversight and reforms to prevent further corruption and misuse of funds.

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7. Recommendations and the Path Forward

Timestamp: 160:27 - End

In the closing segment, Mike Benz advocates for the complete abolition of USAID as a symbolic and practical measure to halt its covert operations. He argues that dismantling USAID would send a strong message against the misuse of humanitarian aid for political manipulation and covert actions.

Benz calls for comprehensive reforms, including:

• Implementation of Smith-Mundt Protections: To safeguard against foreign propaganda infiltration.
• Establishment of Clear Oversight Mechanisms: Allowing citizens to hold grantees and USAID accountable through legal means.
• Separation of Humanitarian Aid and Political Influence: Ensuring that aid is solely used for its intended purposes without ulterior political motives.

He emphasizes the critical need for public awareness and legislative action to address the deep-rooted issues within USAID, aiming to restore transparency and integrity in U.S. foreign policy operations.

"I support the White House's current reforms. I do believe fundamentally, and if nothing else, symbolically, the complete and total abolition of USAID alone sends a chilling message to not do this kind of dirty work in the future."
[155:42] Mike Benz

Shawn Ryan wraps up the episode by thanking Mike Benz for his insightful analysis and urging listeners to stay informed and engaged in the pursuit of accountability and transparency in government agencies.

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Conclusion

Episode #170 of the Shawn Ryan Show offers a compelling and meticulously detailed examination of USAID's covert operations, its entanglements with intelligence agencies, and the broader implications for U.S. foreign and domestic policies. Mike Benz's revelations underscore the urgent need for reforms to prevent the abuse of humanitarian aid for political and covert agendas, advocating for greater transparency and accountability to safeguard democratic principles and national interests.

Transcript

[Mike Benz]

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[Sean Ryan]

1, 2, 3.

[Mike Benz]

Will that be cash or credit? Credit.

[Sean Ryan]

4 Galaxy S25 Ultra. The AI companion that does the heavy lifting. So you can do you get [e-mail].

[Mike Benz]

Compatible with select apps.

[Sean Ryan]

Requires Google Gemini account.

[Mike Benz]

Results may vary based on input.

[Sean Ryan]

Check responses for accuracy.

[Mike Benz]

Foreign.

[Sean Ryan]

Mike Benz Sean, welcome back.

[Mike Benz]

It's good to be back, man.

[Sean Ryan]

I feel like we just saw each other. It was just a couple months ago, wasn't it?

[Mike Benz]

Yeah, but the before and after picture is quite different.

[Sean Ryan]

I know, man. Wow. I mean the stuff that's being unveiled and all the corruption that that's being exposed, I mean, I, we kind of chatted about this a little bit downstairs, but this stuff is rolling out fast. I mean like lightning speed here. Did you expect that to happen?

[Mike Benz]

I didn't expect the speed of this. I think once they fixated on USAID, frankly, I think it was USAID's intransigence as the Trump admin and White House were just trying to simply audit things. And it was their reluctance combined with, I think the scandals leading up to it that led them to zero in on it. And I think that just because of the pure money outlays and how easy that picture is to understand for Americans, it's now challenging the entire foreign policy establishment, from the operations of the State Department to the intelligence services to the defense establishment. I think it's validated what had been percolating for a long time, which was this weaponization, not just of what the focus was for the past several years of domestic agencies like the Justice Department and FBI against US citizens, but actually our even dirtier operations abroad, our dirtier apparatus, our blob foreign policy apparatus, capacity for covert activity and political dirty tricks weaponized against Americans, which is just a fundamental assault on the premise for even having them in the first place.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, it seems like, it seems like Doge kind of started with usa. How involved are you with Doge?

[Mike Benz]

Not I, I, you know, I mean, I speak, I, I, I think that a lot of the folks there pay attention to the things that I publish.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I think so too.

[Mike Benz]

But you know, there's, you know, so there's, there's interaction simply through, you know, through X and whatnot. But you know, there's, they have an incredible job and one of the things we're confronted by right now, in this moment is. It's becoming increasingly clear, I think, to the rest of the American population that it's this foreign policy establishment that's been weaponized against domestic citizens. But this was a nationalist movement from 2016 onward. Make America great again, America first, these sorts of things. People joined it because they cared about their own country or their own neighborhood, whether their streets were safe, whether their school curriculum reflected their own values, whether there was waste, fraud and abuse at the White House or DC level. They didn't think about in large part international affairs, foreign relations. They may care about a few wars that they hear about in the news, but the MAGA movement did, did not really have and is only now beginning, I think, to incubate a sort of foreign policy intelligentsia that both the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party has had for, you know, over half a century and that the Democratic Party has had. And so that process, I think, is forming right now, and people are trying to form that North Star. And I think many of the things that I've published help go into that thought. Leadership soup.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, what I was going to ask this at the end, but I don't want to just pop to my head, so I don't want to forget it. But I mean, you've really doven into the USA aid stuff. And so once we get through all of the USAID stuff, which is what we're going to interview about today, what are you going to go at next? What are you going to start looking into?

[Mike Benz]

Well, it's all related. You know, this is one of the reasons when I do my lectures and I show the chart of the foreign policy establishment, State Department for U.S. national interests, Defense Department for U.S. national security, CIA as a sort of COVID player to covertly help the State Department or covertly help dod, these things are all connected. So the DOD picture is a perhaps darker one and much bigger one to tackle in terms of cleaning that up. I mean, by the sheer size of it. USAID is about a $44 billion budget, the Pentagon's 900 billion. And depending on how you measure it, the black hole in their budget is somewhere between hundreds of billions to 35 trillion. And so. But the reason that I'm so overjoyed that it's starting with the USAID side is because it connects to all those points. And this is another thing that defenders of the establishment are now uncomfortably trying to find the right way to defend themselves, which is that if USAID is supposed to be humanitarian assistance and build to the American people as a kind of international charity. Why are they working with the U.S. defense Department? Why are they working with Special Forces? Why is there even a civil military, you know, coordinating branch for USAID and dod? They have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes there or how dark many of the operations they thought USAID was involved in. And I think that this is part of what the blockade being set up right now to stop Doge from finding out is about. They don't want them to have USAID's books. They don't want them to have the internal records. They don't want them to have the emails and communications. They don't want them to. They definitely don't want them to have the transfer of money flows. This was the sort of thing that even the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which directly oversees usaid, could not get access to until the present moment. Senator Joni Erst had an ex base with Elon Musk where she said when she tried to do oversight, she was threatened by USAID. When USAID ran the Zanzanillo op in Cuba in 2014 and the scandal popped off, who approved this? And it turned out it was all in house at usaid. What Senate staffers said was when they tried to get oversight of this operation, along the way, they were told that if Senate staffers found out what USAID was doing, people could die. So they had to shield it from there. So we're opening up a Pandora's box and that's the threshold question is how much access to this is Doge ultimately going to get?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. Well, Mike, before we get too in the weeds here, you know, I have a Patreon account. We've got a bunch of behind the scenes stuff on there. We got behind the scenes interviews like what we just did with you. But one of the other things that I offer them is each and every guest that comes on, they get to ask a question. And so this is from Jimmy W. What warning signs should we look out for now that USAID has been shut down? What are the chances the Republicans will work against Donald Trump with Democrats to just start a new slush fund under a different name?

[Mike Benz]

So a few things on that one is it's true that almost 14,000 employees were laid off at USAID. It's true that the name has been covered up at the building. It's true that all the foreign operations folks have been recalled. I don't know still, you know, as of the time that we're speaking right now, that it's appropriate to say that USAID as a function has been shut down. Given that, I believe that the grants are still ongoing. There's been a funding pause, but USAID is funded through Q1 and there's going to be a dogfight in the budget about what to preserve. And the plan is to fold it understate. But to my knowledge, an executive order has not been passed formally abolishing it. And even if it did, there'd be the legal challenge. And the bills to abolish USAID are still just born babies in the House and the Senate. And even assuming the closure and abolition of usaid, it is going to be inherited by the State Department. So that function will continue, but under the direct oversight of State. But the warning signs to look for. I think there's no better description of what those warning signs are than what was said by US Ambassador turned legal hatchet man Norm Eisen, I believe in an MSNBC appearance this week where he called the Trump administration an autocratic regime. And we have tools to displace autocratic regimes around the world in, you know, people powered revolutions. And this was the man who basically spearheaded nearly every lawfare push against Trump world for the past eight years. Everything from the Trump impeachment to the J6 impeachment, to all of the Ukraine affairs, to running a group called crew, which sued the Trump administration hundreds of times. And he was the former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic for President Obama and even wrote a playbook basically on how to orchestrate color revolutions against populist movements that were rising in Europe while he was at the Brookings Institution just a few years ago. And he's openly calling on live television to, to take that same playbook for overthrowing foreign governments and to find a way to implement it here. And the first two things that he said off the top were that this needs to be a legal fight and it needs to be a media fight. So taking it to the courts and taking it to the media for hearts and minds. But what you've seen, one of the warning signs that I'm very concerned about is that a fundamental part of these people powered revolutions, these so called color revolutions, is on the street action to destabilize countries, which also provides a sort of patina, a predicate to the rest of the world that this is the genuine reflection of the democratic people being underserved by an autocratic government. But it has the benefit of shutting down the country and destabilizing the government because they're, they're between a rock and a hard place. They'll shut down the highways. The union workers will all walk out and shut down industry by going on mass strike. There'll be violent confrontations in dozens of cities attacking police, as we saw with the BLM riots, even burning down police precincts. And then the only way to really respond to that in order to stop that is through an almost kind of quasi military scale deployment to physically remove those people from the highways they're blocking, the infrastructure that they're terrorizing. But when you do that, you get hit by the second round of the color revolution playbook is cries of humanitarian rights violations, authoritarian crackdowns. See, now we prove they're authoritarian because they've done this. And that's where the international community comes into the picture. With joint sanctions, economic pressure. Now they can hold up this crackdown as the reason to do it. And this gets back to the fundamental position we're in at this unique moment in American history where the foreign policy establishment is really for the first time, in a very serious way, having to respond to the will of the people who pay for it, which is that you have this out of power network here in the US that is grasping to try to find allies on the Republican side in Congress. But they are now being counter pressured by folks like Elon and others who are threatening to primary them if they defect. And their strongest allies are a handful of folks on the Republican side in Congress, but most potently the in power governments abroad that have a similar axe to grind against Trump and Trump World and Trump's foreign policy vision that will be happy to assist in this project any way they can. So what I predict you're going to see is a transatlantic flank attack where you have the out of power foreign policy establishment here teaming up with in power foreign governments like in the UK and the UK Labour Party, like across the EU with in power EU governments like in places like Brazil, with Lula, like certain governments in Central Asia. And to use to I believe right now they're in the consensus building process of this, which was very similar to what happened when Trump won the first time. I cover Internet censorship, it's my primary reason that I crusade on all these other elements. But this played out in the first few months of Trump 1.0. Internet censorship didn't really hit the American people in a very serious way until late 2017, early 2018. What were they doing in the interim time? They were having these consensus building meetings. All the major think tanks were having these. How do we build the coalition? What exactly is going to be our civil society strategy? Our legal strategy, who are friends in the Chamber of Commerce who can put economic pressure on this. How do we build a predicate for this, whether it's counterintelligence through Russiagate or whether it's a democracy promotion predicate that Trump is an attack on democracy, and that process is the process of seducing people from different fractal coalitions into one cohesive network that can do this together. And right now they're fractured. I'm sorry if I'm taking a while for saying this, but just to complete this point, because it's going to hang over the rest of this conversation. We can't forget that the Democrats elected Joe Biden as president and he was removed by another faction of the Democrats. There was effectively a West Wing Democrat Party civil war and Joe Biden put on the Trump hat while Kamala was running against Trump with a big smile. He even asked for the hat to put it on. I've never seen Joe Biden happier than the day after the election when he walked out and made the press statement that Donald Trump had won the election.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Mike Benz]

So it's difficult right now for them to form that cohesive network and unified action plan when you have folks from the Joe Biden side of the foreign policy establishment still extremely upset and feeling betrayed by the Kamala Harris side of it. But those wounds will heal. And time, I believe, does heal all wounds in that way as their economic interests are threatened potentially by the drastic reforms the Trump administration is pursuing.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, you know, nothing forms an alliance like a common enemy. And. Yeah. So, Mike, second time you're on the show and we're gonna talk all about USAID here. Coming up, here's just some stats that we kind of pulled up. But budget of over $44 billion employed more than 14,000 people, two thirds of whom worked overseas. Now we're down to 294 to 611 people after the DOGE discoveries operated in over 100 countries, primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle east and Eastern Europe. I mean, list goes on. You know, one of the things that caught my eye, you know, is, I mean, like I said, there's just been so much that's getting unveiled. But I recently did an interview with Colleen Georgescu, who's running for president in Romania. And the Romanian Supreme Court annulled the election and basically froze it due to, due to Russian interference. And, you know, I got a lot of flack for that interview, but I wanted to give that guy voice because I thought this, this really kind of mirrors very similarly to what we saw with Trump not in the last election, but the election before. And you know, Georgescu called the tens of millions that were sent by USAID a bride wrapped as social aid and an attack on their sovereignty. So how does. So it sounds like this was kind of funded, this campaign against him and shutting him down was funded and instigated by usaid. Now, the Russian interference was never proven. It was all just speculation. But the USAID stuff is proven. And so it's interesting we just did that a couple of weeks ago. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on this.

[Mike Benz]

Well, I'm shocked. I'm shocked to find the US Funded BLOB NGO swarm descending on a right wing Populist party in Europe? No, of course. I mean this is the most predictable thing of all time. George's queue has been a thorn in the side of the US and UK and sort of NATO foreign policy establishment for a number of reasons. The central linchpin of world geopolitics right now is the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Romania occupies a critical strategic point in that war not just because of the transport of arms from Pakistan to Romania into Ukraine which has been a long time route to be able to run guns and arms and munitions in, but but also because Romania shares the Black Sea coast with Ukraine. And NATO is presently in the process of building the single largest NATO base in Europe in all of NATO history. 100% bigger than the Ramstein base in Germany. And in fact NATO is as we speak moving arms, supplies, jets and drones to that base because it points straight out at Crimea and will be the place of force projection. And this is the military hard power play on Crimea which is absolutely essential to Russia in their view. This is what kicked off this conflict to begin with really. There was the effective secession of eastern Ukraine, but it was Russia's warm water port access in Crimea and obviously their military base. There was the Crimea referendum to join the Russian Federation that kicked off all of this, including the rattlesnake nest that Trump walked into with Ukraine and Russia and whatnot. And so George Askew has effectively campaigned on being friends with both sides, enemies of neither neutrality does not want to antagonize Russia by building NATO's largest lethal war fighting capability right on Romania's coast. It makes Romania a target. Obviously from NATO's perspective, the moment Russia bombs Romania and extends the fight beyond Ukraine, that would be a major international incident. But the attempt to remove Georgeskiy is the same thing that happened with Imran Khan. The Intercept published league cables.

[Sean Ryan]

Who was that?

[Mike Benz]

Imran Khan was the Prime Minister of Pakistan. And again there's this deep relationship between Pakistan and Romania here because Pakistan was essentially how we trained and funded the Mujahideen in the 1970s and 80s against the Soviets. There's a lot of military capacities that we warehouse there. There's a lot of money laundering through those. There's the famous BCCI bank, the bank of Commerce and Credit International sort of CIA proprietary bank that went down in web of scandals around Pakistan, Great Britain, the UK which has massive interest in Eurasia, just built an air bridge between Pakistan and Romania for this exact purpose. And so but Pakistan also, Imran Khan, the Prime Minister did not want to, he did not Want to. This is Shortly after the 2022 Russia, Ukraine military fiasco kicked off. The US and UK foreign policy folks thought that in their own words, when they were effectively bribing the political class of Pakistan. And this is all in the Intercept. Everyone can look this up. These leaked cables, it showed that carrots and sticks were offered by the Biden foreign policy establishment to parliamentarians in Pakistan in order to oust Imran Khan in a no confidence vote, an impeachment that would take him from power. And then he was arrested shortly thereafter. He's currently in prison even though he was the wildly popular elected head of state. And the reason cited by the State Department for carrying out this coup operation was that Imran Khan had taken an aggressively neutral position because Khan had said that he will continue to have Pakistan do trade with Russia. He does not want to, you know, allow weapons, you know, to go to killing Russians. And given how central that Pakistan is in this Pakistan Romania corridor. Georgesku I see is the same way, aggressively neutral, but that's all it takes. That was all it took for the State Department there. And can I continue just on this point really quickly?

[Sean Ryan]

Absolutely.

[Mike Benz]

Going after the courts in order to nullify elections or influence the activities of the elections is the beating heart of what USAID and to a related extent the State Department, CIA and civil military folks at DOD do. USAID is in their charter to pursue so called judicial reform which allows them to effectively bribe and try to rig the decisions of judges and the judiciary and the rise and fall of laws in foreign countries. And USAID made a special project of targeting what they call EMBs, election management bodies, which are the bodies in countries that adjudicate elections. So for example, it's our Supreme Court that decided the Bush versus Gore hanging Chad's election in the US 20 years ago in Brazil, the EMB, the election management body is what's called the TSC. It's basically a subcomponent of their STF Supreme Court that is the Demirajs Voldemort judge who banned X, seized assets from Starlink and is basically criminalized pro Bolsonaro support on Brazilian social media. And they were sought after by usaid. Usaid. I have their internal documents where they've in just a few meetings alone they'll gather Together Representatives from 12 different EMBs across the world and have USAID basically convince them, train them on what kind of ways to structure the court or what task forces to set up in the disinformation space in order to allow those courts to not just adjudicate the elections, but to be able to effectively criminalize questioning the elections or speech during the election cycle. This is part of how the power in Brazil of that court expanded to such a huge size. USAID was pumping money into that whole network around that court, pumping up the academic thought leadership, pumping up the legal advocates who were making pitches to the prosecutors and to the disinformation task force itself. And if they're going after every EMB election management body in the world effectively to get those courts to criminalize populist speech, you can bet your bottom dollar they're doing that to criminalize populist election results in those same SEPS documents. This is the political process strengthening center at us in that program they define the enemy as populism. They say that part of the purpose is to prevent the evolution of populist thought leadership because they define right wing populism as a threat to democracy because it undermines the efficacy of democratic institutions, US backed NGOs and civil society institutions in the area. Well, guess what, George's Q is he, he's a right wing populist or he's a populist at least however you wanna define it. He is in their view, the virus that the white blood cells of USAID are custom built to take out. And I just have to stress this point. This was attempted against Donald Trump when He won the 2016 election when the Russiagate predicate came out about social media interference. Everyone can trace the timeline of this and look up the contemporaneous news reporting when the CIA came out and said there was Russian interference on US social media and there were Russian bots and trolls and RT and Sputnik were supporting Trump. They tried to get Congress to not certify the election result on the basis of Russian interference in the election. And to my recollection, they got, I believe almost somewhere between a dozen and two dozen or almost a dozen U.S. congressmen to agree not to certify that vote. Now it's not nearly enough. You need, you know, there's over 500 people in the House and you know, 100 in the Senate. But if you can get that ball rolling and poach sitting members of Congress here in the US eight years ago, before they even built up this apparatus to be juiced. And as powerful as it's become, think of how much easier that task is and how far a little bit of money goes a long way in order to juice those networks in Romania.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, that's what caught my attention was it seemed almost identical with the Russian interference. And what actually blew him up was a TikTok smear campaign. And the TikTok smear campaign actually resonated with a large portion of the population in Romania, which boosted him up. I mean, the guy spent next to nothing on his campaign and had a tremendous lead. And, you know, one of the things that I spoke with him about in detail is how he doesn't. He does not want that NATO base there. I did ask him, you know, will you be able to stop that? He, He. He couldn't answer that. Which means, you know, maybe he can't. I don't. I don't know. But. But it seemed like the reason they went after him is because he does not want that base built, the biggest ever NATO base ever to be built in Europe to include World War II. And obviously it'd be a detriment to the Ukrainian side of the war. And he expressed many times he just wants peace. He doesn't want Romania involved in that. That's not their problem. I think that's the way a lot of Americans feel too. So I think you hit it. But so basically what USAID is doing is they're influencing their politicians to sway a certain way. Are they also paying off their media? Because he would not. They wouldn't platform him. He was not heard other than on TikTok the day after I announced the interview that was going out with him. They had 250,000 people start protesting in front of their parliament.

[Mike Benz]

Yeah, no, absolutely. That's what USAID does. They create the surround sound. This is part of the reason I call it the USAID Truman Show. USAID goes after every single category of institution in the country. They're targeting the media, control over social media, speech, the unions, the workers groups, the judiciaries, the parliamentarians, the arts and music and culture, the universities and the academic institutions, everything, even folks in the commercial for profit sector side. What USAID does is it does what it calls capacity building. It does a baseline assessment or strategic assessment of all the assets they have in the region. And then they look at the gap between what they have and what they need in order to accomplish a particular State Department foreign policy goal or a interagency approved foreign policy goal. And then they close that gap by funding everything they need. So, for example, if Georgia's queue is overwhelmingly popular with unions, they will bring in. They will fund the NED Solidarity center or other sort of CIA back channels, or NED is this sort of squishy in between. Between State and CIA. They're a nonprofit NGO that gets its funding from the US Government. It was created by the US Government. It was conceived of by the CIA director in 1983 and Casey for to be born. Its founders even say that their job was to do what the CIA used to do. That's basically delegate them. They have something called the Solidarity center, which is their union arm. And they'll often work with the AFL CIO's international branches. So if they say, okay, he's overwhelmingly popular, there are those, the people who are on board with our operational plan in place, for example, those people have more disproportionate perception of political legitimacy for that. They will pump those up. If they say, okay, well, George's Q is popular in the media here or in these demographics, they'll do a demographic assessment by ethnicity, gender, religious, denomination, and they will close those gaps. They'll do art and activism. You'll see musicians, you'll see performers, you'll see cultural figures. They will all be approached by USAID funded NGOs and interlocutors to do that. And that's effective enough in a country with counterintelligence antibodies because it's a sort of first world economy or a second world economy. In a place like Romania, the task of trying to stop the reach of those octopus arms is impossible. Georgia right now has been in the news all year because they've been trying to pass our equivalent of fara, the Foreign Agent Registration act, which is a rule here that criminalizes any U.S. person or institution who is lobbying the American government or you know, to change policies or lobbying Congress or the executive branch, but is getting funds from a foreign country to do that and is not disclosing it because we consider that to be a totally existential counterintelligence risk. If you don't have a FARA law to know which NGOs or which universities or which for profit entities or whatnot are getting money from. Pick your foreign country X, China, Saudi Arabia, uk, You name it. To do it, then that's an obvious counterintelligence threat. That's an intelligence operation effectively being run. When Georgia tried to pass that law, which is just US fara, what happened? Well, there were the same street riots that were deployed that USAID was flat busted, you know, caught doing in every place from the Arab Spring, you know, to, you know, to virtually every color revolution street protest movement the US has done at least since the 1980s. And so they're trying to stop Eastern European countries from even knowing the extent of the USAID Truman show there and potentially even deploying Their own rent a riot Mosul to stop disclosure of that. So I don't know the extent in Romania, but I have to imagine if the truth is revealed, it would shock the world.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean how, how much of the. How much of the world is influenced by US aid?

[Mike Benz]

Every plot of dirt on God's green earth is influenced by usaid. I believe you said at the beginning of this that it was about 100 countries and you mentioned Africa, Asia, Western Hemisphere, South America and Eastern Europe. It's every country on earth. For example, why is USAID paying tens of millions of dollars to British censorship NGOs and British censorship firms? Why are they funding places like the center for Information Resilience? And why are they funding all these British institutions if it has no impact there? Well, you're juicing the skids of these London civil society institutions when you do that. Institute for Strategic Dialogue and whatnot. What are those groups doing? What is Institute for Strategic Dialogue doing? It is doing advocacy and high pressure campaigns and liaising with the tech companies to censor Americans. Americans are targeted. USAID is attacking Americans. When USAID paid the occrp. This is the corruption reporting project that's under the public limelight right now because of massive scandals that have broken out in the past several months. This is the largest consortium of investigative journalists in the world. This is the group that broke the Panama Papers and other major world stories. Turns out half of their budget comes from USAID and the State Department. I believe in the beginning it was all of it or virtually all of it. They were effectively spawned out of USAID and the State Department. The USAID and the State Department have approval over what staff they can hire. They closely coordinate on the kinds of stories or category of stories or workload that that they can carry out on USAID.gov right now everyone can see this in the wayback machine with USAID.gov currently under maintenance, shall we say. There's an incredible document at USAID bragging about the accomplishments that this investigative reporting group has done. Now these are hit piece journalists that are carried out to capacity built independent media. Not independent from government. It's our government. It's independent from you or what we say independent from other governments. But they use this live phrase independent media for all of their sponsored media assets. And so under the banner of supporting free and independent media in Central Europe because they operate in Ukraine in about nine or 10 or seven or eight Eastern European countries, it's jointly to do independent media sustainability, funding and anti corruption because we want to root out corruption in Eastern Ukraine and root out corruption in Eastern Europe, root out corruption in Romania and anywhere that basically what they do is they effectively function to write hit pieces and dig up dirt on the political enemies of the US and UK legacy foreign policy establishment and then provide a predicate for prosecutors to arrest them or seize their assets or to induce policy changes in the country. And in fact on USAID.gov, and everyone can find this in the Wayback Machine, they have a document that says funding for OCCRP in Eastern Europe, $20 million function, capacity building, independent media, anti corruption accomplishments, over $1 billion worth of assets seized. I believe it's several hundred policy changes induced in government or civil society organizations in the region. I believe they have six or seven government officials fired or sacked because of this group's reporting, including a president and a Prime Minister. So they're claiming regime change. And then the final one is 456 arrests and indictments. So this is mercenary media for the state, paid for deputies. These are effectively hitmen hired to seize the assets of, to get fired from their jobs and to arrest criminally take use the criminal justice system, create a pipeline between their sponsored journalists and the local prosecutors in order to arrest the political enemies of the U.S. government in these target countries. And you know this relationship with prosecutors in USAID runs very deep. For example, it was the, you know, use USAID funding which was implicated in that Joe Biden, you know, speech to you know, threat to Viktor Shokin around the removal of Victor Shokin in Ukraine. That, you know, that famous Council on Foreign Relations, you know, threat. And by golly, you know, he did it. Son of a b. He did it. This was the, you know, the famous clip where basically said if you don't fire the prosecutor, you're not gonna get your billion. Well USAID, USAID paid $27 million in just two grants alone to the Tide center here in the U.S. the Tide center is not just the fiscal sponsor of the Black Lives Matter foundation, but they are also the fiscal sponsor of a group called fjp. It's Fair and Just Prosecutions, which is the group that manages the Soros prosecutors and tells them who to prosecute, who not to prosecute, has them sign pledges like Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, gives them talking points, gives them social media posts, they meet. This is all according to the Media Research Center, I should note, meet on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. So these are US prosecutors that where the fiscal sponsor of that group. 30% of Americans live under these Soros prosecutors Now, and they're working with this group, Fair and Just Prosecutions. And they get their fiscal sponsorship through a mega grantee of usaid. Usaid. They do this everywhere. And they can get away with it because judicial reform and anti corruption is part of our humanitarian aid work. We're trying to strengthen their democracy. But when you read that accomplishment section, you don't know what crimes these people have committed. You don't know if they're guilty or innocent. USA doesn't even brag about that in the document. It's the raw number. 456 of our enemies. 456 of our enemies got arrested because of the incredible return on investment for paying our own mercenary media assets $20 million. And think of the return on investment. We paid them $20 million and we seized a billion dollars. You don't know what the crimes are when you read that document. As a US Citizen, that scale of prosecutions, it's hard to imagine that every single person there was guilty of those crimes or that there wasn't some relationship with the prosecutors in the background that politicized those cases in the same way we have in the D.C. court here with the January 6th cases. So this plays out everywhere. And this is also why USAID funded SPOCs and NGOs were, you know, had their own personnel making speeches to the prosecutors in Brazil when they were. When they ran the operation against Bolsonaro.

[Sean Ryan]

I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us. And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world. And so one thing we've done here at Shawn Ryan show is we are developing our newsletter. And the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targeter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign Superbad. She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan Show. And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind blowing. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. So it's gonna be all things terrorists. How terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to. And here's the best part. The newsletter is actually free. We're not going to spam you. It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two. If we release two shows. The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that. But like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief. Sign up links in the description or in the comments we'll see in the newsletter. One of the most important ways to stay healthy is cooking your own food. The best way to start the new year is with a home cooked meal and hexclad makes that easier than ever. Hexclad are hands down the best pans I've ever used. Hexclad makes cooking so much more convenient. I get the performance of stainless steel and the convenience of nonstick in a single pan. They're easy to clean, dishwasher safe and simple to wipe off after use. They're even oven safe up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. The patented hexagon design is durable and protects against scratches even from metal utensils. Plus, hexclad products come with a lifetime warranty. They can literally last a lifetime for a limited time only. Our listeners get 10% off your order with our exclusive link. Just head to hexclad.com SRS support our show and check them out at H e x c L-A-Com SRS and tell them we sent you. Bon appetit. Let's eat with hexclad's revolutionary cookware. While we may have won this election, the fight to restore a great nation has just begun. Now is the time to take a stand and Patriot Mobile is leading the charge. As America's only Christian conservative wireless provider, Patriot Mobile offers a way to vote with your wallet without compromising on quality or convenience. Patriot Mobile isn't just about providing exceptional cell phone service. It's a call to action to defend our rights and freedoms. With Patriot Mobile, you'll get outstanding nationwide coverage because they operate on all three major networks. If you have cell phone service today, you can get cell phone service with Patriot Mobile with a coverage guarantee. But the difference is every dollar you spend with Patriot Mobile helps support the first and Second Amendments, the sanctity of life in our veterans and first responders. Switching is easy. Keep your number, keep your phone or upgrade. Their 100%. US based customer service Support team will help you find the perfect plan. Right now. Go to patriotmobile.com SRS or call 972 Patriot and get a free month of service with promo code srs. Switch to Patriot Mobile today and defend your freedom with every call and text you make. Visit patriotmobile.com SRS or call 972 Patriot.

[Mike Benz]

There's this USA Truman show and it touches everything you think. USAID is not having a massive impact on the government of France and the government of Germany and the government of the UK. USAID pays the Atlantic Council in 2018 in the Atlantic Council's Democratic Defense Against Disinformation white papers. The Atlantic Council with seven CIA directors on their board, I should mention funded by the Pentagon and the State Department as well and had a formal partnership with Burisma, but they're funded by USAID in 2018. The front cover of their Democrat Disinformation Defense Against Disinformation, one of their series in this, which was an Internet censorship propaganda document and consensus building document so that the Atlantic council's muscle as NATO's think tank could go out to all of their different grantees and partner networks about who to censor, how to sell it, how to do it, what connections to establish with the tech companies and these governments. The front cover of this and everyone can look this up, was the so called Macron Leaks in France and the distribution web of basically news stories that were damaging to Emmanuel Macron in the middle of his presidential run against Marine Le Pen. Who USAID and the U.S. state Department. This is Western Europe. This is where USAID ain't supposed to be, we're told. The front cover funded by USAID has WikiLeaks at the center of this Jack Posobiek as the other main highlighted note, a US citizen. And the whole rest of the network map are all the different distributions of stories about these Macron leaks that helped Marine Le Pen but hurt their preferred winner of that election, Emmanuel Macron. And what they were suggesting with that is that we need to stop Jack Basobiec and WikiLeaks from helping from publishing news stories that might help Marine Le Pen in Western Europe win that election. And that's USAID sponsored, baby. They're touching every plot of dirt on God's green earth.

[Sean Ryan]

Geez, geez. Where does the. So where does the directive come from?

[Mike Benz]

Well, this is why it's useful to think of it as a blob. So it can come from several directions and then it gets consensus built to build the appropriate operations network to carry it out. So for example, US foreign policy is supposed to be set by the White House through the interagency process at the National Security Council. And it's the State Department, who's supposed to be the agency general to steward the execution of those foreign policy and national interest goals. And it's the Department of Defense that is supposed to steward that on the national security and military side. So depending on what you are trying to do, for example, let's take the Georgeski Romania example, this could come from any number of directions in terms of how the idea first gets pitched and also a couple different tracks in terms of how it gets approved. And sometimes it can be done in a way that's totally rogue. And this is one of the unique capacities of USAID in this story and why I believe it's important for the Trump White House to shut it down, to abolish it, Executive Order, Congressional act, however, store it under State and then after passing a series of reforms that we can maybe talk about at the end if necessary, to spin out a new agency again. But the typical way this will happen is the White House wants to do something, or the Secretary of State or some sort of thought leadership node within that, or within the National Security Council pitch the idea. All the different equities that would be involved in it, whether that's the Defense Department, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, supporting functions like FBI counterintelligence or DHS or other Justice Department and other people who would need to know in on that op would all provide their comment and input. It would finally get approved and then it would be greenlit in the appropriate grants to support. That would all would all flow. You know, the Pentagon would get the money, State Department would issue grants about this and then places like USAID would do the relevant humanitarian aid work in the region that would provide the COVID to juice this. Whether that's doing civil society activity that has a sort of civil military, dual use purpose, or doing civil society work in the area that has a sort of CIA, State Department, national interest, political warfare element to it. And then that process would be midwifed by the National Security Council. But USAID is really unique in this process. And one of the reasons that it's gone so rogue is because USAID has always been this switch player. It was created in 1961 by JFK. And a point that I've stressed continually is that a lot of people are talking about this presently as if you, as if jfk, you know, was purely thinking of creating USAID as a, you know, magnanimous charity because of, you know, the, his high moral, you know, moral fiber. And then it got corrupted through these money laundering and, and payoff networks that are being publicized but two weeks before JFK created USAID by executive order, he awarded the Green Beret to the US Special Forces and is singularly responsible for the massive upscaling of US psychological operations, civil military affairs and unconventional warfare. JFK was bogged down in Vietnam, in Laos and all these counterinsurgency debacles where the US had interests in the region. World War II had ended quite recently. The world based international order made it a big no, no to declare conventional war and bring in 1950 North Korea style tanks and planes and napalm. And so we moved into this small wars political war modality. And JFK believed in that very very strongly. This is how you have places like the John F. Kennedy center for Special Warfare that trains our special operations folks and the whole Fort Bragg JFK special relationship during his presidency. But just two weeks after that historic 10-21-1961, you know, Green Beret special forces event, JFK created USAID and just one month later launched Operation Pin Cushion which was the, which sent the Green Beret, sent our special forces to Laos where USAID was. You know, it would later turn out USAID very quickly played this function of supporting these very same CIA backed mercenary groups that Operation Pincush was recruiting. They were sent to Laos by JFK to train and recruit these hillside guerrillas in Laos as part of our Southeast Asia, Vietnam connected sub war unconventional warfare effort. We sent the special forces there to recruit them. The CIA managed that CIA mercenary army. And it was USAID who paid the head of that mercenary army to acquire two US aircraft from two CIA proprietary airlines, Air America and Continental Air Services. Everyone can look this up in order to buy the planes that they use to traffic. It's unseemly but illegal narcotics to fund that war effort as well as humanitarian relief supplies and personnel. So USAID has played this swing role between State, CIA and Dodge and Special Forces work practically from the day it was born. But what's unique here is it's get out of White House approval free card. Can I flush this out for a second? Most of the major CIA scandals of the past two decades have not actually been the CIA directly themselves. In 1993 USAID created this new office to help wage the post Cold War political warfare initially in Eastern Europe after we were trying to create political vassal states out of the former Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe. And this was called the Office of Transition Initiatives, oti, usaid, oti. And it was designed to be a fast, flexible, rapid response capacity for US aid to do regime change work, to do political stabilization to basically do sort of a kind of civilian special forces for civil military and political warfare work that would not have to run the traditional traps of approval, wouldn't be bogged down in bureaucratic red tape, and it would effectively function under cover of humanitarian work as being a CIA, but without having the limitations that the CIA has on needing White House approval through what's called a presidential finding. So all these CIA scandals popped off in the 1960s and 70s. The CIA went through a bunch of reforms. This was the famous Church Committee and Pike committee hearings of 1975 and 1976. First time the US ever created a Senate Intelligence Committee, a House Intelligence Committee to permanently oversee the CIA to stop what it had been doing domestic political targeting at that time of left wing Democrats from ever happening again. Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election because of these scandals and immediately his first year in office carried out the famous Halloween massacre that laid off 30% of the CIA operations division in a single night and crippled their budget. By the way, tell me if that sounds familiar to what's happening right now. You know, the first month of the Trump admin won the office because of political scandals from intelligence agency oversight. You know, hits them right away. But then Carter ran into the Iran hostage situation, the national security state, the media, Ronald Reagan blamed that for, you know, blamed Jimmy Carter neutering the CIA for having, for having caused that. If we had had the CIA that we had before, the Iran hostage situation would have never happened. And so there was still a black eye at CIA to get those old powers back. But the Reagan administration wanted those powers so they couldn't get it through Congress. So what they did is they basically created new structures to do what used to be done by the CIA to be done by places like USAID and their newly created 1983 National Endowment for Democracy, who's effectively the operations arm of much of USAID work. And I say all this to say that usaid, the reason so much of the worst scandals that you find are USAID and why I always say when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID is because the CIA needs to get presidential approval for every covert action they do. They need to submit a President. There needs to be a presidential finding that they need to do it. USAID does not. Which means if a rogue sell at CIA or Special Forces or some wing of the State Department wants to do a dirty deed and they know the President won't approve or in fact targets directly or indirectly the President or his international allies, they know they can't get the presidential finding, but it has to be a covert action to run the world. Can't find out they're doing it or what these grantees are actually doing. All they need to do is walk next door or place a phone call or meet in a secure location and tell their friends at usaid. And USAID can make the whole thing happen? Totally. Basically behind the President's back. And I can go through a bunch of examples of that, but that's how Trump got hoodwinked in term 1.0 by his own USAID.

[Sean Ryan]

So basically, USAID is a proxy arm for CIA, Department of State, the Bureau, DHS, all these type intelligence organizations.

[Mike Benz]

Yeah, yeah. It's the great flexible swing man for any of their needs.

[Sean Ryan]

So how do they keep from having any oversight?

[Mike Benz]

Well, this is the magic of being an independent agency.

[Sean Ryan]

See, Is it an ngo?

[Mike Benz]

No, it's a formal US government agency, but they make grants and sub grants and contracting work out to the NGO class. But it's an independent agency. There's a great US Army War College book extended white paper that I've been publishing receipts from for the past six months, and it's from 2014, and it's called the DoD and USAID Analysis and Recommendations for Development Defense Cooperation Going Forward. And it looks at this relationship between DoD, State and USAID. And it compiles DoD senior leadership thoughts on how best to synchronize what they call defense diplomacy development. The three Ds all working together. The military, the State Department and USAID. Because DOD has national security interest in the region, State has national interest or economic interest in the region, they need assets to play with, assets to liaise with, assets to build up and development creates those assets, paying to create these institutions, paying to co opt these institutions. So these things all go together, these three Ds. Defense, diplomacy, development. This is 2014, this is over a decade ago. And in that US Army War College memo, there's quotes from US generals that say that they prefer working with USAID over State, even though USAID is independent. But it's always supposed to be guided by State because even our humanitarian assistance has to serve US interests and State represents those stated interests. But you have DoD people over a decade ago saying they prefer to work with USAID over State for several reasons. That USAID is not bogged down by bureaucratic red tape of the quote, interagency knife fight that happens at the National Security Council, but that USAID quote actually does stuff. Whereas State is hamstrung by what they can actually do. It's a diplomatic incident. If the formal diplomatic arm of the US State Department does something versus an independent aid agency that is their own humanitarian purpose. And oh, they were using it for this wrong purpose. And so because there's much more oversight on State, State runs the interagency gauntlet every day of its existence. It has to persuade the White House, the White House, National Security Council and all the interagency partners to do something. But really the only oversight there is at USAID is what's happened is at the Office of Inspector General level you have their own in house accountability mechanism. And there's some great examples of how this has go so Haywire. I don't mean to. Can I keep going? Okay. There was a massive scandal for USAID and everyone can look this up. It was the Zunzinillo scandal. And let me make clear out the gate that I do not like and I'm not a fan of the Cuban government. I don't believe in socialism, I don't believe in communism. I'm not saying what I'm about to say because I believe that the Cuban government should remain or whatnot. I'm leave aside the moral question about whether or not this was the right or wrong thing to do. But here is what was done. In 2014, a very massive scandal popped off that I think few people today remember. This was during the Biden White House where USAID took humanitarian funds that were earmarked for Pakistan and used them, we are told, to unilaterally create a social media website in Cuba at a time when Cuba had banned US social media, considering Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and the like to be arms of US statecraft. The Obama administration was riding high at this moment from the Arab Spring and the Facebook revolutions and the Twitter revolutions that USAID and Ned played such a critical role in funding money to these networks, training them, teaching them how to use Twitter hashtags, teaching them how to coordinate Facebook posts to tell people where to protest. $1.2 billion pumped in by the State Department in Egypt during that time, for example. And so what USAID and their own internal documents showed is that they saw the success of the Arab Spring and they wanted to create a Cuban Spring. They wanted street protests where riots, what they called smart mobs in Cuba on the basis of US social media that they could instrumentalize. The problem was they didn't have the asset in the region. They couldn't get their social media in. So what they did is they used a byzantine labyrinth of money laundering flows from these Humanitarian AIDS earmark for Pakistan. Again, back to Pakistan, and used that to go through a subcontractor called Creative Art Associates International, who's a frequent USAID contractor for this dirty work. They were involved in all sorts of other ones, but it's cai, not CIA, Creative Associates International, who then basically contacted two Cuban businessmen to create a identical version of Twitter, except but for Cubans, and it was Zunza. Neo is Cuban for hummingbird. It's basically even simulated the bird. It had the like button, the retweet button. And USA documents showed that their plan was to get about 100,000 recruit people onto this platform in their own words, with algorithms and feeds and promotion, that this was the site to share sports, music and hurricane updates. That's their direct phrase in their own internal documents. But that once they had gotten a critical mass of users on the site between like 60,000, 100,000, they would shift the algorithms. They would use the data that they hoovered up from Cubans signing up, taking note of their political proclivities, the network clusters they'd formed in order to get them to take to the streets in a violent revolution, protest against the Cuban government, to form what they called smart mobs. And basically, at the appropriate moment, once they'd got them in, to get them to overthrow their government. Now, this is a classic CIA covert action. This has massive diplomatic implications for the United States government if this kind of thing is revealed. That's why the CIA is in charge of this stuff, because the CIA is the political warfare arm of the State Department. The State Department maintains our diplomatic relations and posture with the foreign world. The reason USAID is not supposed to be doing covert action, the CIA, is because if there's diplomatic blowback, it should be diplomatic organs who are doing it. But what USAID said, so evidently there was no presidential finding for that. They ran it. So without President Obama's approval, at least that's the official story. And when Senate staffers during the oversight could not get access, so the Senate Intelligence Senate Foreign Relations Committee said they were duped. The interagency of the White House said they were duped. The official story. And they had public hearings on this, by the way, I believe in 2014, the official story is that USAID did this whole thing in House, and they did it because it was so called discrete rather than covert, that it was not a formal covert action. It was simply discreet democracy promotion work to bring democracy to Cuba. But that's a. If they ran that in the Obama administration, imagine what was done, you know, Trump Wanted to knock out isis. Isis. According to the previous White House. You know, we have WikiLeaks emails of Jake Sullivan saying to Hillary Clinton al Qaeda is on our side in Syria. And that effectively, you know, ISIS was a useful friend against Bashar Al Assad. Trump wants to knock out isis. Hey, how do you fund money to ISIS if the President wants to eradicate isis? If you still want to use them as assets in the region? Well, you're not going to get interagency approval if the CIA does it. A covert action. What if USAID does it? And that's how you see all this USAID money flowing to ISIS and Al Qaeda and Taliban groups. I think they just found 122 million from US aid to them just this week. I guarantee that number is a lot higher than that. And in fact Trump's White House OIG who just took over USAID before this recent action just published a memo where he said this is unbeknownst to the entire American public until now that actually there's a big fat loophole at USAID where their contractors evidently don't need to. And there may be a technical. Everyone can read that OIG report. John Solomon, just the news published all this. But effectively USAID can look the other way because there are no restrictions on their contractors in terms of their ofact and counterterrorism money flow throughs or at least there's giant loopholes in them. So USAID can fund terrorist groups and get away with it in a way that no other US government agency can.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow. You know, I mean, I know we're meddling in a lot of elections and media and all that kind of stuff. And I mean I don't necessarily. Audience is probably going to kill me for this, but I mean we do have to do that in certain situations. Would you not agree?

[Mike Benz]

This is where it gets really dicey and this is where I'm in a really difficult position because we have two fundamentally there are two simultaneous tasks that appear to people who are new to this cinematic universe that are in massive conflict with each other. One is given that this thing broke its sworn oath that it would never be used against the American people and given the sheer depth and scale of what was weaponized, the American people need to know about it. And massive action has to be taken in order to not just knock it out, but salt the earth and stop it from ever rising again. So you need to go extremely hard in terms of shelling the extent of it. On the other hand, this has been, you can make a very compelling argument. The reason that Americans have the standard of life that they do and have the advantages and privileges of the world's most powerful nation that it does. You can make a very, very compelling argument that the rise of America to the preeminent world power in the 20th century would not have been remotely possible without this blob apparatus. I come back to this concept of no blob, no pencils. You can't even make a pencil in this country unless you have a mechanism to be able to influence foreign governments if they nationalize their graphite mines or the export of their gum trees in Malaysia or the ability to potentially make inroads or liaise with or change the minds of unions that go on strike that impact US national interest. This is the reason that our corporations are so powerful. They rely on the battering ram of the Blob. In the early 1970s in Chile when there was an attempt to nationalize the bottling industry before we ran that coup, that coup was jointly coordinated not just between the head of the CIA but the chairman of the Pepsi Cola Company. Pepsi met with the head of the CIA. Don Kendall met with Helms and this is all declassified. You can read a great Guardian report, write up on this or any of the major national security think tanks. Basically, Pepsi's bottling operations in South America were being threatened. The chairman of Pepsi, Don Kendall, arranged a meeting with Henry Kissinger and said, hey, we need to stop this from happening. Kissinger then put him in touch with the head of the CIA. Pepsi, the head of the CIA and the State Department's media mogul in Chile all met to jointly coordinate the best way to take down the government and take it down. Indeed we did.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Mike Benz]

You see this happen time and again. How many governments have been overthrown in the interests of ExxonMobil and Chevron and other Western major oil companies? But hey, that's how we have cheap oil. This is how we. You can make an argument that this is how we have energy dominance. So. And you can make the same argument about media, right? Many people just this week are finding out that 90% of media outlets in Ukraine are funded by the US government. And if you're totally new this space, and you are rightly and righteously livid at finding out the extent of your own media and ecosystem and diet has been puppeteered, co opted and financially sponsored by the government that is supposed to stay out of that domestically, you see these statistics and you go burn it down. Salt the earth. We've been told from elementary school to our own media outlets here that we have a free and independent press and that there's no role for the government in the media. The media is independent from government. That's the difference between us and the Soviet Union in China is we have free and independent media. They have state run media. That's what distinguishes a democracy and autocracy. I totally understand the impulse and I believe as much as possible reforms need to be implemented. Criminal penalties need to be attached for violating it, treble damages for civil suits, even be able to sue the agencies if they don't do oversight of the NGOs who operate domestically. But people who have not gone through their five stages of depression about the true extent of the USAID Truman Show. Before you proceed to the final evolution of these reforms, imagine a world where there's zero of that. Imagine a world where zero percent of media outlets or soft outlets or soft power, hearts and minds work is sponsored by the U.S. government in Latin America, South America, sub Saharan African, sub Saharan Africa, Middle East, North Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Far East, Asia, Eurasia. Imagine a world where there is zero influence whatsoever and other countries are not going to stop that, stop doing that work. We won elections doing this and in doing so we won favors for U.S. corporations who in turn had skyrocketing and ever expanding corporate profits, which in turn created the ability to hire Americans for jobs and to buy houses and to have, you know, and to be able to buy health insurance and to be able to have a 401k of savings and to be able to pass down inherited wealth. But another problem is the MAGA movement again has not really had to deal with this dirty work abroad because the primary concern has been what's 6 inches in front of your face. My schools have this WOKE curriculum, my infrastructure's crumbling, my kids can't afford to buy a home until they're 45 years old. But the other part is that this mission statement of the Blob to do this got corrupted as globalization destroyed the predicate for doing this dirty work in the first place. Okay, we overthrow the government of Chile for Pepsi, we overthrow the government of Iran for oil and gas. We overthrow the government of some central African country to get the lithium in the cobalt? Nominally, this is all supposed to help American corporations and American citizens and. But what happens when those corporations outsource all their jobs to foreigners? What happens when they're not hiring American labor? What happens when they're not even building their manufacturing plants here? Who are we doing these favors for when you have globalist corporations and you have globalist corporate boards and They've got no skin in the game. These are not, these are multinational corporations and most of their export markets are to foreign customers at this point. Most of their labor pools are foreign citizens. Most of their infrastructure, the facilities that they're building. This is how we had the heartland turn into the Rust Belt is because when you have these steel companies and you have these manufacturing places, build their facilities somewhere else. It's not just the citizens, it's the entire regional development that goes away. So this whole concept of Reaganite trickle down economics, that's what's good for the private sector, is good for the private citizen, has become completely divorced. And this is how you have this rogue blob that is stealing US taxpayer money, citing a sort of Reaganite economic principle for doing this trickle down to the American citizens. But when you have this globalist conceit, there's no trickle down. All you're doing is helping the Wall street and London private equity firms and financial firms and equity holders and huge salaries for the C suite, the directors and officers and shareholders of this college of corporations that don't even represent the citizens anymore. And there's ways to put firewalls, by the way. And this is what I'm trying to educate the American people about. For example, you shouldn't even be able to. We're gonna make the reforms. Let's assume to the worst of this dirty work, right? Just like we did in the 70s. We used to assassinate people. The CIA did. The CIA had whole assassination guides scandals of the 60s and 70s come out. We said, okay, okay, no more assassinations, okay? We can still do regime change work, but we can't authorize the killing of people, of a political figure, outside terrorism into covert action. Okay, well you can do these for these other rogue activities, but in addition to that, any stakeholder in a State Department operation or a USAID or that's assisted by US Special forces for great power competition has to meet some threshold of how much investment they're doing on the American soil, how many Americans they're employing on US soil, you know, how many contributions they've made to Americans and the American economy. You can't have this helping. You can't have American taxpayers funding this globalist gut. If this is done for nationalist reasons to help Americans, Americans have to be the beneficiaries of that. So this is all part of the.

[Sean Ryan]

So that was my next question is how do we. I mean, it is important that we are involved when we need to be in media, in politics, in these companies. And so what I was going to ask is how do we effectively do that now that USAID's pretty much shut down? And so is that what you're saying? They would have to work deals with the company, with the international companies to employ. There has to be oversight over the companies that are being funded by usaid?

[Mike Benz]

I'm saying that's part of the reforms because people need to keep this in mind as a sort of nascent Trump world foreign policy establishment. There was a Republican foreign policy establishment for the past six years, but they've all been the neocon faction that was represented, the McCain, the Romney, the Liz Cheney, the Nikki Haley types. And I'm not even trying to draw a personal beef when I say that you can make the argument that this is sort of the foreign policy school that Marco Rubio was substantially supported by and that drew that distinction in 2016 between Rubio and Trump at the time. But I think Rubio, like J.D. vance, J.D. vance was not a Trump ally in the beginning either. But I think that Rubio is doing frankly, an incredible job so far. But the whole of Trump world is going to need to synchronize what their North Star is for these foreign policy visions. And I'm trying to say that it's a package deal. The thing about USAID was because of how flexible it was and because of how dirty it could be. Again, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID. And it's been this way for 20, 30 years at least. It was a shortcut. It was a shortcut that could close gaps quickly. And it's also a shortcut. For example, if you're not going to do regime change work and the highest ROI to be able to secure the petroleum, to be able to secure the lithium, the cobalt, the aluminum, the copper, the zinc, the timber, the import, export markets, the military bases, well, you're going to need to find other ways to offset the power you've lost by doing this. So, for example, Trump in the oil and gas space, Trump is, you can see a creative way of trying to offset this. Like, for example, let's just say a country who we depend on for petroleum access goes rogue, shakes off the yoke of US Soft power in the region, say Azerbaijan or something, and you lose the petroleum because you lost your ability to influence those elections. Well, now you need to offset that. Well, in Trump's case, he's saying drill, baby, drill domestically. So there's ways that you can maybe offset that or maybe you can find other levers for carrots and sticks that prevent that. Don't rely on tapping into this dark arts sorcery work. For example, I believe one of those things that just like with banning the CIA's ability to do assassinations after the 70s is banning social media censorship diplomacy. USAID's huge role in social media censorship. That's one of those assassinations level things that has to be completely banned by law in whatever continuing function USAID has. And any USAID administrator or someone who's caught doing that, there should be criminal penalties, there should be civil penalties with treble damages for every U.S. citizen who's impacted by that. Because this is impacting U.S. taxpayers paying to have this cloak and dagger work target them. There has to be recourse for that. But I'm saying you can create those categories, but it also has to touch the corporate side for the stakeholder group because otherwise who are you doing this for? What are American national interests?

[Sean Ryan]

So do you think, you know now that USAID is pretty much, you know, we've cut them off at the knees and we've established that it's pretty much gone rogue. I mean, do you think we're going to see any, I mean, what does it look like without them? Because they did play an important role, you know, in history in a lot of different things. And so, you know what, what are the ramifications going to be now that they're, they've had their legs chopped off? What do you think some implications might be?

[Mike Benz]

I hesitate to concede that they fully had their legs chopped off because of a number of reasons. One is even assuming so they're moving over to the State Department. Now what I've been telling I do all these private live streams for my deck subscribers. And for 14 months I've been telling every, every lecture I've done, I've said X ray through every time you see USAID and look and you have to see the State Department everywhere. They are not usaid, they're State Department. They've always been State Department. There's never been in an inch of daylight. Now they sort of start with that because when you get to the there actually is in the sense that it's a switch player between these other interagencies and they have more flexibility to do this rogue work than State. But they are fundamentally supposed to be a State Department function. They are independent, but they are supposed to be guided by State and they only exist to advance the foreign policy stipulated goals set by State. But what difference does it make? Leave aside the flexible covert action under discrete democracy promotion Stuff. Leave aside the accountability, get out of White House approval free card aspect of it. What difference does it make to shut down USAID if you move everything over to the State Department? It's a State Department role anyway. There was intense debate about whether even to make it an independent agency because it's fundamentally a State Department. It's the same debate that George Kennan had with his peers in 1948 when they created the function for covert action in the first place for the CIA. George Kennan was the guy who authored NSC 10 2, the National Security memo that established the plausible deniability doctrine for the Central Intelligence Agency to do covert action. Political warfare, economic sabotage, propaganda and information, black ops, the whole gamut of everything that the CIA is authorized to lie about so that our government can deny to us and to the world that they're actually doing it. Two months before George Kennan authored NSC 102 and gave us the national security structure that we currently live under, he wrote this memo that I talk about frequently called the inauguration of organized political warfare. This was on April 30, 1948. This was two weeks after the CIA's first mostly unauthorized covert action to rig and influence the course of, and ultimately win the Italian election in Italy, which was the first election in Italy after World War II that pitted a US backed pro Western candidate against a Communist, Soviet backed candidate. And the CIA did all sorts of dirty work in there. They had their assets stuffing ballot boxes, using mafia muscle to shut down opposition meetings. We bought the media in the region. We worked with all the religious groups and the charities. The people involved in that operation publicly wrote in the memoirs that we would have lost that election if not for the CIA. James Woolsey even defended that regime change operation on Fox News in 2017 when he was asked, does the CIA still, you know, Russia's meddling in our elections? We don't meddle in foreign elections. And he said, well, we used to do that sort of thing in Italy and in Greece. And he's referring to this event that I'm talking about. And then she says, well, we don't do that anymore though, right? And he goes, well, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, only in the interests of democracy, you know, basically. But. But at that point, there was no authorized CIA covert action to do it. They were a spy agency. They were on the ground. They took the reins and run and ex post Facto George Kennan 12 days later says, hey, this thing was gangbusters. We just swung the entire course of the Italian election doing this. We need to do this everywhere. And in fact we need to create the capacity to do this everywhere even if we don't intend to use it. Cuz this was a real last minute effort last we need this capacity in place. Our assets in the organized labor, our assets in the judiciary, our assets in the media, our assets in the movies and culture even if we don't intend to, just in case we ever need to. And he called this the inauguration of organized political warfare. And something like 15 to 20 times in this memo he presupposes that it's going to be parked at what he wanted to set up inside the State Department called the Bureau of Political Warfare and that it would be a formal, that what we now call CI covert activity would simply be another office at the Harry S. Truman building in Washington D.C. in Foggy Bottom, not in Langley, Virginia. And it would be called the Bureau of Political Warfare. But he goes over the reason why we might not want to structure it that way. We might want to put it at another agency which would come to be the CIA. And he talks about how the funding, the funding for it may not be able to be disguised on the State Department's books. It may raise too many questions. There may be too much of a for this sort of COVID activity. It may be best because it's political warfare and it's really dirty and it's huge to black blowback. And State Department has to report its finances very publicly. And there's. We created the State Department the very first meeting of Congress of the United States of America in 1789. It was the first, first agency we created. It's ancient, everything runs through it. So he said it might be best actually to have this done but it should still work constantly with the State Department. It's fundamentally a State Department function, but perhaps it should be parked somewhere else. And then two months later, boom. Cinse 102 was tasked to do the thing that was originally anticipated for the State Department Office of Political Warfare. The same thing is happening right now with usaid. That's all this is. They're just going to create. And in fact everyone can read Max Boot the Arch Council on Foreign Relations Never Trump neocon constant voice on the think tank space against all things Trump world. He penned a article, I believe it was during the Trump administration where he called for this exact same structure to be set up that we should not shy away from, from this sort of work or hide the fact that we do them. We should create a formal track at USAID called a career track for political warfare and it should Be called a Bureau of Political Warfare inside of usaid. And people should be trained specifically for this function of USAID early in their careers. And it should not be something that's a big scandal. And so we have a limited personnel pool because nobody wants to say that's what they do. They should be celebrated. We need to turn the culture around so that when USAID can do this, they've got a much bigger and better network to do this. And we're now running into that. So I don't actually see USAID going away. When you move it at State. Okay, you are inheriting, and this is an uncouth phrase, but I think the visceral imagery is intended to make this stick. Closing the Ronald Reagan building and moving all those funds. If it's a billion in overhead, moving just. If you keep all the grants and move that 43 billion into the State Department. The State Department just inherits a USAID herpes infection. It's the same problems. It's this tumor, this growth, this permanent flare up that now it's just a. There's no difference between, other than the structural. That allows you to get away from oversight, which is what I'm saying. But frankly, there'd be no difference if you shut down Langley headquarters and you created a Office of Political Warfare at State for do that. To do that. If you shut down USAID headquarters and created an Office for International Development at State. Now you're making Marco Rubio at that point, the most powerful Secretary of State in American history when you do that. But fundamentally the problem was there was not oversight or repercussions for wrongdoing and rogue activity at usaid. And so it's coming back to the place it was intended to be spawned out of.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I just see the pulse of America right now hates usaid. And while they are rogue, they do play an important role. It is stuff that we need to be involved in. Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, I mean, just to name a couple, we need to be involved in that kind of stuff and to do kind of like what we're talking about to influence. And so it's just in the meantime, you know, they've done a lot of corrupt shit. So you had mentioned an organization, the Atlantic, something with seven former CIA directors.

[Mike Benz]

What is that? Yeah, the Atlantic Council bills itself as NATO's think tank. Effectively the easiest way to think of them is the sort of civil military, semi clandestine, even though it's public facing, coordinating arm for NATO priorities. So when you have NATO is obviously the Western world's military alliance. And so they're concerned with the military activity of us, France, the whole, all the NATO countries. And it's their sort of consensus military activity. And people are finding this out who are mostly concerned with domestic policy. They're finding this out more and more with this USAID story, which is that a huge and sometimes the most important and dispositive element in military work is actually the civil affairs, is actually the political and civil society topography of the target country and its regional partners, allies and adversaries. And then oftentimes it's that the political which which determines the military result much more so than the military activity itself. We're seeing this for example with Georges Queue, right? NATO wants to build the military base right there and just point like a gun out at Crimea. This will obviously put the people of Romania put a big fat kick me sign on their back from Russia. You know, the moment this goes operational. Okay, well NATO doesn't want that to happen. Could NATO roll into Romania right now and run a Yugoslavia run back like 1995 and 1999 and George Askew gets elected, Gets elected head of state decides to cancel the NATO air base, kick everyone out, kind of a diplomatic incident if they roll in and napalm raid from fighter jets and drones the sitting government of Romania just because that party won the election and decided to cancel a military base. So the military can't do that directly. What they need is the civil military. They need the civil side of military operations to make that election result not happen. And you see the same thing. It's not just always about tilting elections. Sometimes it's about the passage of a law, for example Ukraine. There was a lot of tense Debates about the post 2014Maidan Revolution Government's in Ukraine's stance towards the Russian half of the country, the Russian ethnics, the Russian speaking part of the country, the representation of the Russian side of the story on Ukrainian TV or social media or culture or the religious issues around the Russian Orthodox Church. Well, every bit of pro Russia institutional affinity link that's cleaved out of Ukrainian politics or civil society helps further achieve the NATO goal of folding Ukraine into NATO and of helping Ukraine at that point militarily achieve reconquest of the breakaway Donbass in Crimea region. But the problem is if Zelenskyy didn't want to do that, for example in May 2019 when he took office, or April 2019, if he didn't want to do that, it would kind of be a diplomatic incident for NATO if they ran strafing air raids over Kiev until he promised to kick the Russian language off of Ukrainian tv. Effectively ban or place extreme limits on the Russian Orthodox Church influence if he defied the IMF and its privatization plan for Ukrainians energy assets. NATO wants that done. But NATO can't be the one to do it. They can't have their fingerprints on the gun. So what they need is a sprawling civil military whole of society capacity to have that political result achieved, but have it come from the civil institutions in and around that. And that's how you have the scandal of things like the Ukrainian the red lines memoir. 70 U.S. government funded NGOs all signatory to the USAID funded as well as NATO funded and U.S. state Department funded Ukraine Crisis Media Center Crisis Management. This is the US and NATO funded umbrella arm. You know, we talk about this 90% of Ukrainian media, well, a lot of this is running is run out of these centralized US umbrella groups that coordinate the media surround sound of all these different NGOs and media organizations. And one of the major ones is called the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. Well, I've talked about this before. One month Zelenskyy takes office April 2019. In May 2019, the Ukraine crisis Media center issues Zelenskyy a redlines memo saying that Zelensky will suffer political instability if he crosses any of the 25 listed below. Red lines that touched Zelenskyy's ability to negotiate with Russia about energy affairs, negotiate with Russia about security affairs, block the privatization efforts of major Ukrainian industries, deviate in any way from the path to accession into the eu, into the NATO and surrounding EU bodies. It had a section for their education, for their culture, for their language, for their media, for their energy policies, for their security policies. It's not just the USA Truman show in terms of what us as civilians think are organic institutions but are in fact USAID proxies. It's the policies of sitting governments. Zelenskyy only became the head of state for Ukraine because of the political instability this very same USAID network work inflicted on Viktor Yanukovych. However you feel about him. I'm not even opining an opinion, but the fact is is he was run out of office in a rental riot operation where all of the major groups involved were USAID funded. So you know, easy come, easy go. And what they're saying is twice in that memo the top line of it says these are red lines, cross them. Instability. They say it right again and bold in the memo right before the 70 signatories. Message received. But NATO can't say that directly because hey, that's an attack on democracy if NATO says it. We're supposed to have a civilian run government, so you need a civilian front for the military consensus. That's why the US Department of Defense pays over a million dollars a year to the Atlantic Council and why they have seven CIA directors on their board to juice the capacity to create this civilian front front for a military monster.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting, interesting. Let's move into some domestic stuff with usaid. What is the relationship with USAID in our universities like Harvard?

[Mike Benz]

Yeah, well, USAID does grant funding. USAID builds thought leadership. So academics, academic universities function as a kind of super turbocharged NGO. You know, they are 501 C3s. They are nonprofits just like the NGOs are. They are not for profit. You can give them a lot more money without the unseemly blowback of looking like USAID is picking winners and losers in private sector, you know, private sector partnerships. And so USAID funds research grants, USAID fund funds departments and centers and institutions in order to make all these things happen. So for example, with the Wuhan Lab, how did USAID end up paying like $15 million effectively to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create bat born jump from animal to human gain of function SARS COV2 Frankensteinian freak monster viruses. Why are there USAID fingerprints on that work? Well, it's because it's run through universities who then put the pass through funding in order to do that. That money initially went to, for example, I believe it was UC Davis, it was the University of California. Then it went through to EcoHealth alliance, which is this famous. EcoHealth alliance was famous for its, I believe, NIH and HHS grants. This was the famous case of it being barred. After the revelations of the past few years, I believe Eco Health alliance is now barred from being able to get future grants. But they got his pass through money and then they then, you know, pass the money. Then that money flowed to the Wuhan Institute. And so through this nonprofit sphere, you can create ever more layers of plausible liability that the US government was behind this, that the US Government wanted to do this for whatever reason. You can make the argument that gain of function is not actually to be deployed as a biological warfare weapon, or it's not actually to be sort of leaked to destabilize a popular government like the Trump administration. But actually we do this gain of research function in order to build vaccines, in order if somebody else builds something like this, we have a way to counter somebody else's biological warfare. This is the same argument. You can think of the Mockingbird media apparatus, the USAID Truman show in the media space. You can make the same argument that listen, we fund this Truman show, we find 90% of countries media complex while sort of either lying about it or trying to hide people from knowing about it. Like protesting these Foreign Agent Registration act type things. Because if we don't do it somebody else Russia could do it, China could do it. And so we need to be in the game this thing's dual use. We're not necessarily just doing this to blare propaganda but if to counter foreign countries propaganda. Same thing with why we the justification for gain of function and building freak mutant viruses and jumping them from animals to human. We create these viruses that never existed in a lab in order to create vaccines against hypothetical future viruses and to build the knowledge base of academic researchers and medical researchers in the field. So even if we don't aren't able to have the vaccines, we're able to quickly close the gap in the future. To do that we're learning more about the sciences by expanding beyond the current set of virus suites that we've seen. That's a policy debate that I'm not even entering into. But the fact is this is what we do. We do this at every major university and universities in turn often function as arms of the state. For example when the U.S. state Department and the CIA and USAID USAID created the Office of Transition Initiatives OTI in 1993 that was when we were privatizing Russia. Well, who functioned in many respects as the long arm of the State Department during that time. Often representing state departments in diplomatic effectively a diplomatic interlocutor was the Harvard Harvard University Harvard endowment was working hand in glove. In fact everyone can read about this published in mainstream media. The Harvard boys do Russia or read Casino Moscow or any number of write ups. This is all openly acknowledged that Harvard was effectively a shadow diplomacy arm and it was able to it put a massive favor in the favor bank to the US because they led the shock therapy. They led the privatization of trillion dollars in state owned assets of the Soviet empire to be bought up at fire sale prices by Wall street and London stakeholders. They loved what they were doing. Now I should note this is the same relationship that happens at the NGOs. Take for example the Tide Center. Okay, we talked about this before. The Tide center is known by many conservatives as a sort of notorious left wing Soros network. Because I believe Soros gave at least like $14 million or something to the Tide Center. And the Tide center is the dark money network hub that is a 501C3. But you can't see what money flows to any of its projects that are not 501s but that get their 501 through the tide Center. And so Black Lives Matter foundation gets its 501 through the Tide Center. USAID gave them $27 million FJP, fair and just prosecutions, which is the effective puppeteer of, at least according to the Media Research center report and the daily wire reports on this, which broke all these insider internal documents. They give their marching orders to Letitia James and Alvin Bragg and the people prosecuting our presidents while effectively pressuring them to do so while representing the donor network that makes up their reelection campaigns. This is a massive conflict of interest. And where do they get the 501 from the $27 million USAID grantee recipient. But what do those grants look like? Well, the Tide center has, I think one of these is about a $25 million grant from USAID to the Tide Center. For the Tide center, to quote. And everyone can look this up. I believe I'm stating this accurately, to secure concrete commitments from foreign countries for certain foreign policy goals that are hinted at in the grant. Of course, this is another issue because of the secrecy around usaid. These grant descriptions are very, very nominal instead of the 10 paragraphs. Or instead it's just oftentimes it's 50 word descriptions for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grants. And in this case, the Tide center is being formally deputized to negotiate with secure foreign commitments from secure commitments for the United States government from foreign governments. They're being deputized. And I forget this may be the Tides foundation rather than the Tide center, which is its sister entity, but this is the Tides Network. But that's what Harvard did. And that's what all these universities who get USAID funding do when they are involved in that gooey line between domestic university researchers or domestic centers. But they have cultural exchange events with the people in Pakistan and the energy engineers there, like Arizona State University, for example, or Harvard or Stanford or mit. These have international touch points. And every one of those touch points can double as an instrument of statecraft. And what's a big fat juicy incentive to go out and do that statecraft to achieve US State Department ends? Big fat grant funding from the US State Department, USAID and frequently DARPA in the US Defense Department.

[Sean Ryan]

How are they manipulating immigration?

[Mike Benz]

USAID together with the U.S. state Department's Bureau for Refugee Population and Migration. Refugee Population and Migration. Last year alone, according to I believe the, I believe it was the center for immigration studies, gave 1.6, it was 1.4 or $1.6 billion to the migrant groups who form the illegal migrant trail from South America and Latin America up into the southern border, paying for their food, their transport, their shelter, giving them often cash debit cards. So this is a billion and a half dollars that USAID in conjunction because again, USAID always X ray through USAID is the mask. State Department is mask off. So it's no wonder that they jointly coordinate this. But it's the specific immigration wing of the State Department for Refugee Population Migration together with usaid, a billion and a half dollars just I believe it was a single year alone, maybe the whole Biden administration to a web of over 200 NGOs who every step of the way, capacity build illegal immigrants to make the voyage safely and comfortably and can pay their whole way through in order to violate US Immigration law and to illegally enter and make their new lives here in this country. And some of this gets really, really ugly. And I'll give you an example of this. USAID is doing that. And it was administered for the whole of the Biden administration by Samantha Power, Samantha Power's husband. And I don't normally feel it's appropriate to mention family members, but they are both political and in the Biden administration's government doing a one, two punch on this issue. So you know, it's, this is not about the personal. This is just because these two things are connected. At this hour, I'm Christina IO in Dallas and here are your top stories.

[Sean Ryan]

The ex chief of the usaid, Samantha.

[Mike Benz]

Power, reportedly experienced a spike in her net worth during the time she served.

[Sean Ryan]

As the chief of usaid, the organization.

[Mike Benz]

That oversees hundreds of billions of dollars in global funding and is now under intense scrutiny from Doge audits being conducted by Elon Musk and his team. According to Inside Biden's basement and financial records, Power made $180,000 a year as Joe Biden's appointee. In those three years, her wealth jumped from 6.7 million to a whopping $30 million, leaving many on social media questioning how her net worth made such a significant jump in such a short amount of time. Cass Sunstein was a very infamous figure in conservative world for a long time because he was the, the author, I believe, in 2008, 2007, 2008, of a famous white paper called Conspiracy Theories, which made the argument that the US Federal government needs to infiltrate the online space and infiltrate the cognitive intelligentsia of alternative movements. At the time, he was concerned about things like 9, 11 conspiracy theories on YouTube, undermining the diplomatic posture and standing of the United States and our military posture. If these popularities, if these theories gained steam, it would massively degrade the ability to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq and build an international coalition. And so he made the argument, and I'm not weighing in on this, by the way, substantively, but this is simply what he said, and everyone can look this up. This is Samantha Power's husband, who's current, who then joined. Samantha Power on the other end of this. Actually, maybe I'll start with that side of the story. He moved over while Samantha Power was head of usaid, running this program, spending a billion and a half dollars to fund illegal immigrants to make their way from foreign countries into our country illegally. DHS is responsible for managing that and stopping that and catching them. Cass Sunstein moved over to DHS in order to help run the immigration policy, where he was basically a senior advisor on immigration policy around the open border. That left the whole thing open. So you have the one, two punch. Samantha Power is funding the machine so that they all get here, and her husband is at dhs, creating and popularizing and implementing the policies that make sure there's catch and release and the whole thing's open and we can't do anything to stop them once they get here. So interagency approval, you might say. But it's all in house right there. But the other part of this is this gets back to the role of USAID in psychological operations and why USAID needs to lie about what it does abroad and why it needs to lie about what it does to our own oversight organs and the people, the US citizens, who vote for it. So Sunstein writes this conspiracy theories thing, and he argues, whether you agree with it or not, a lot of people never even think about that when they're considering the merits of such a thing, that these things, if they gain steam, have massive diplomatic implications. You're going to convince France to contribute to the war effort. You're going to convince Germany and the UK or while they see things on YouTube that make their own parliamentarians or prime minister question the predicate for it. You can understand the national security impulse to want to do this work. I'm not saying that's the thing to do, by the way, believe me. So it was called conspiracy theories, this initial paper, and it made the argument that the US Federal government needs to develop a new capacity to infiltrate these movements and develop methods to either neutralize them or reroute their cognitive thought leadership in order to avoid the outcome that results in free and unfettered alternative media popularizing ideas that could undermine the workings of the State Department or the US military. Then quickly thereafter, he writes a book called Nudge. Nudge is basically the holy bible for the censorship industry and it's basically required reading for anyone who wants to have a career in countering disinformation or disinformation studies, if you will, or information integrity or digital resilience or media literacy. This is the sort of it lays out the gospel. It's called Nudge because it's a book about how to get people to do things without top down coercion. The appearance of autocratic coercive control, but getting them to do it anyway. How do you step shove people to do it? Because that's what Russia and China do. Nudge them, find a way to get them to do it without your fingerprints being on it, without it drawing the same critiques that would have if the Russian or Chinese government decided to do this. And what it's about, it's about creating this kind of whole of society surround sound. The State Department wants to do it, DoD wants to do it, CIA wants to it, USAID wants to do it. Okay, we don't need to make it formal government policy. We don't need to throw people in jail for they do it. If they do it, we need to create. Nudge itself is primarily about the behavioral role of this, but also the behavioral psychology behind this, but also about the role of institutions in making this happen. But what you do is you instead of doing top down, you astroturf a bottom up and you create a middle out and a whole society. You want people to feel like their lives will be over if they challenge it, but you can't criminalize it. We have a first amendment. Well, what if there are you raise the costs of that behavior. It's incentives, it's carrots and sticks. How do we heighten the cost of doing that? What assets do we need in civil society in order to achieve this? Well, if they lose their, if they're deplatformed, they can't access their wedding photos and baby photos because they're kicked off Facebook or they see a friend of theirs was and can no longer DM with grandma because they posted about hey, these vaccines may have come from the Wuhan lab or these vaccines may have been funded by the US government or they Might not work, or we shouldn't go through with a mandate. We don't want to throw people in jail for that yet. Maybe because a lot of these same folks have now started to talk about, well, maybe the fundamental problem is the First Amendment itself and that's why they are all working with the EU and the UK and foreign governments like Brazil to make this happen. But, okay, so get the social media companies to demonetize them, deplatform them, do algorithmic suspension. Okay, that's one thing we can do. What's another thing we can do? Well, we can do defamations in lawsuit, we can use lawfare and we can make high profile cases of this. And there were, you know, examples of this in documents of the affirmative planning of finding a sympathetic plaintiff to make an example out of these media companies to do this. And these were published before things like Dominion and some of these other lawsuits around these cases. How can you create vocational penalties for doing this? So, for example, you don't need to arrest them, but have Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, implement policies that he goes on live television and proudly says, no jab, no job. It's going to. You can't earn a living if you believe these things or spread information around that Tony Fauci himself, and the eternal shame of it is it took four years after Covid, three years after Covid for these emails to come out, said that one of the best ways to actually get people to go through, to get citizen buy in for the vaccine rollout and stop these vaccine conspiracy theories is to raise the cost of people saying them and that you need to make it hurt. And that will. He said that in so many words. And everyone can look up this receipt. I have a. I've reposted this 20 times on my ex account. It's been played on Fox News. I believe there's an audio file with it as well. But that was not the criminal justice system. This was not the Attorney General of the United States, but it was the key administrator of the entire public health system during the COVID response, saying the fundamental guiding tenet of it is make it hurt. Make it hurt. Change the incentive so that if people question what we're doing, it cost them their livelihoods, it costs them their social media accounts, it costs them their standing, it costs them their medical licenses. Make it worse than prison, because at least you spend a year in prison. You come out, you still got your Facebook, your Twitter, your Instagram, you still got your business license. You can serve your time and come Back to society. When you lose all these things, you often lose them forever. At least until Elon acquired X and, and set that free.

[Sean Ryan]

And Samantha Powers. Samantha Powers net worth increased from 21 to 24, from an estimated 6.7 million to 16.5 million to around 30 million. How did that happen?

[Mike Benz]

Well, I haven't seen the source documents. I've seen this be reported. I haven't double triple checked. I've seen that as headlines. And, and so I'm not affirmatively weighing into that until I see the source of those numbers myself. So I don't know her particular case, but what frequently happens in other high level scenarios like this is you have stakeholders who. Now first of all, so there's a few things, right? There's always the potential. So let me remove it from the Samantha Power thing because I just want to be respectful and note that I just don't know that for a fact. But let's just call this Cynthia P. Word. Cynthia P. Words. We'll call it Cynthia in sip. Samantha Random example, not her. There are many ways that this kind of radical jump in wealth can be acquired. Now first of all, I also don't know if that's a cumulative household income that includes the net worth of her husband. This is also a frequent thing. I know in reporting disclosures. Oftentimes you don't need to just report your own income. You need to report the combined income of family members because that's often how money is laundered. You saw this with the Biden family, for example. And when you apply for a security clearance, they need to know if you're holding your assets, you declare this much income, but actually the house is owned in the name of your wife. And so it looks like you have a $5 million home, but it's your home, you live in it. Any moment you could change the deed back to your thing. So oftentimes there are equity interests or large asset interests that are combined. So again, I don't know in this case, but there are a few things. First of all, you have insider knowledge in these cases. So talking generally about this because this is the famous Nancy Pelosi tracker about how she does this and I talk about this frequently. This is why there is a pipeline from blob to banker. The people who administer U.S. foreign policy and are insiders and have national security clearances and know everyone in the business and know everyone in the network and know everything they're up to next and every their whole inside thought process and they have access to the classified documents and they know, you know like, you know sure is a, you know, staring into a Magic 8 ball or maybe you know, like a fortune teller. They know they can see the swirling purple clouds inside the glass of what the CIA is going to do, what the DoD is going to do, what the State Department's going to do, what the USAID is going to do in Ukraine next, in Congo next, in Venezuela next. They know or have a really good insider traders advantage knowledge of whether there's going to be a coup for example in that country that opens up that country's natural resources to privatization. Is the oil and gas going to be privatized in Turkmenistan and you are a part of a Goldman Sachs fund. This is how you get these things. Like Jared Cohen from the State Department's policy planning staff then creating Google Jigsaw which played the tip of the spearhead role in Internet censorship, AI super weapons and works closely with the US State Department and DHS CISA for censorship work as well as foreign academic institutions like the Cambridge University Social Decision Making Lab which is partnered with all these groups that does psychological inoculation work funded by the US taxpayer in part or partnered in part. Well, what did Jared Cohen do right after going to Jigsaw? Went to Goldman Sachs and he's doing macroeconomic and global policy there. Well what does he bring to the table? Let's see the State Department's policy planning staff and that whole network where it was basically the CIA branch of Google that he was inter liaising with that whole time. He brings the whole network. How is he able to help Goldman Sachs make investment predictions so that they're one step ahead of the market? Well, it's not technically insider trading in the sense that it's directly at the portfolio company with advanced knowledge of their business line and some 10B5 securities violation. It is the great unstated insider trading reason that there is this blob to banker pipeline. Mark Milley for example I believe. Is it JP Morgan or another one of those banks? Another great example of this is the Joe Biden White House blobber to banker pipeline. So Joe Biden's closest political adviser in the White House and has been since was since the 1980s was a guy named Mike Donellan. Mike Donellan was this sort of shadow advisor figure who you know, according to media reports basically, you know, sits over Biden's shoulder with everything he does and and helps advise on, you know, political and other strategy. Well, Mike, so Mike Donelon's brother is a guy named Tom Donellon. Tom Donelon was basically hit the hat trick of everything you can possibly do as an apex predator of the US national security state, national security advisor, State Department, coordinated the military, the intelligence and the statecraft world for years and years. Decades apex predator of the national security state at the highest level of military intelligence and statecraft. What was he doing during the entirety of the Biden, State Department, Biden White House? He was the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute. So this is basically overseeing administrating the investment arm of BlackRock, which has $10 trillion of assets under management. I know a lot of those are donor advised funds and pass throughs, but this is at the end of the day a $10 trillion juggernaut of portfolio investments. And his brother is the closest advisor to the President of the United States who commands the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department. So all that would need to be done. I mean, you can imagine why blackrock might want to pick up someone like Tom Donelan, who even if he had zero experience whatsoever as a banker or as a finance mogul, maybe, who knows if Mark Milley can even read a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or can even have a conversation with any of the quants who crunch the numbers, they don't care about that. They want to know whether or not. They want to know whether or not they can be the first mover and capture the entire market, for example, of the potential for lithium to open up in the Golden Triangle. Because what's the Biden administration going to do? Are they going to send in the Marines, are going to send in the boys? Are they going to do that in Iran? What's going to happen with Russia and the $75 trillion worth of natural resources that Russia sits on? What parts of that, what regions? How about Africa? How about all the cobalt and lithium in the Congo? Or the copper companies that are their portfolio companies? Or the zinc or the timber or the copper, the aluminum, the gold, the silver, everything. And so in theory, all that would need to happen was a conversation from Mike to his brother Tom. And then suddenly blackrock has a first mover advantage of knowing exactly where. You know the Wayne Gretzky quote, right? How are you so how are you so good? You're not even that fast. How are you so good at hockey? And he says, I don't skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going. That's how I look so fast. That's how it looks like I'm so fast. Well, speed of investment is everything.

[Sean Ryan]

Let's move into. I Want to move into legacy media. How's USAID influencing U.S. legacy media?

[Mike Benz]

It does it in several ways. So there's the direct. Now all of this has moral hazard involved. All of this corrupts the domestic process and in some respect jeopardizes that sort of Smith Munt style protecting domestic people from foreign facing operations type stuff whenever those media outlets pick winners and losers in domestic politics. But there are two variations of this that one of them, you know, is, well, let me explain them. So the first is a lot of people are just now seeing a lot of these very damning looking USAID outflows to mainstream media outlets like Politico or to Reuters. For example. You know, I mentioned that there's $300 million in grants that were given by the Biden administration from various government agencies to Reuters while Reuters want a Pulitzer. For Reuters was the tip of the spear for all anti Trump reporting. And they won a Pulitzer in the year 2024 for their series on Elon Musk and malfeasance by Elon Musk and his companies at all of his different portfolio companies, Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX. At the same time that Biden from the White House had asked, the US Government had replied to reporters that regulators should look into Elon Musk and that 11 different US government regulatory agencies, regulatory bodies and agencies were pursuing adverse action against all four of those very agencies that Reuters won its Pulitzer for writing hit pieces about. This is, by the way, a little bit of a. There's the same sort of moral hazard here that you have with USAID sponsoring the OCCRP hit piece. Journalists that only have the capacity to do that because their revenues and their profits are being buffered by the American taxpayer. And those. Even though the grants are not explicitly to the US to do that. Right? Like there's no grant from the Biden, you know, a Biden government agency of that 300 million that says write hit pieces on Donald Trump, you know, or Trump allies. Just like, you know, the money to occrp, the corruption reporting probe is supposed to be for corruption for politicians and oligarchs and significant cultural figures in Eastern Europe. But in the process of doing that, OCCRP turned around and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani in his work in Ukraine. And that formed part of the basis to impeach Donald Trump as president in the Ukraine. Impeachment in 2019. So American citizens who voted for Donald Trump effectively funded through Donald Trump's USAID the impeachment of Donald Trump. They also dug up dirt on Paul Manafort and other US citizens. But in that case it was, you can argue, dirtier than the Reuters case because the grants were to dig up dirt in the Reuters case. It's complicated. You see this with much just a huge quantity of US Media because so let me start from the bottom here. Premium subscriptions are part of news agencies business models, paywalls. Almost every major media outlet has paywalls for their news content. And part of the justification for the US government paying US media companies sounds benign on its face. We want our government officials, our hired employees who are representing you to be as best equipped and to be as knowledgeable as possible about their line of business representing you as possible. And so they need to have as much information as possible. And so we pay premium subscriptions for foreign facing activity to US media companies who are the best in business or sometimes the only or some of the only people who provide that needed proprietary service. So a great example of this is with the Reuters case because when I talked about the Reuters case, a lot of people, there's still a scandal there and a moral hazard in the system that needs to be reformed. But a lot of people ran away with it and sort of presupposed when they read this that that meant that it was like a direct pay to play. Now we don't know if there was or wasn't, if there was back channel conversations, if there was an informal phone call. I'm not suggesting there was. Or if it's simply the incentives align, you know, you know these are the people giving you the money. You know they're targeting Trump, you know, because this was the other thing is the all 11 agencies targeting Trump, targeting Elon Musk were paying to the non news agency side of Reuters who was digging up the dirt that the regulatory agencies could use to go after Elon Musk. The same thing for occrp, USAID funds the hit piece journalists. The hit piece journalists dig up dirt. The prosecutors then use that dirt as the basis to arrest them. And then you have a USAID big fat bow on top of it with an accomplishment section saying ta da 456 arrests that we sponsored. But in this case for example, the Justice Department under the Biden administration paid tens of millions of dollars, it was something like $60 million to Reuters for Westlaw because Thomson Reuters has properties, they have their news agency side, they have a tool for legal folks for legal research. LexisNexis and Westlaw dominate that space. So Justice Barr is paying for Westlaw and they're tens of millions of dollars Padding the profits of a portfolio company of Thomson Reuters. But that's every one of those million is less that they need to make in their newsline because their profits are still being pumped up for the network and they are still picking heavy winners and losers in domestic politics. For example, what if they were paying Raytheon? What if the Defense Department was paying Raytheon continually as it does billions of dollars in defense contracts? And Raytheon opens up a new line of business called Raytheon Media llc. And Raytheon Media LLC has a basically explicit media purpose to target Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Republicans like Bill Kristol. I mean, just straight up, just like the Washington Post, just like Reuters, just like. No objectivity. In fact, they even just like the Washington Post and all the different journalistic things said, we're gonna end whataboutism. Objectivity is no longer an underpinning credo of our reporting because we believe both sides makes misinformation spread. So we do need to pick winners and losers in this. And Trump doubled Raytheon's. Trump doubled Raytheon's Pentagon contracts to Raytheon. So the contracts aren't going directly to Raytheon Media. They're going to Raytheon Military llc. But now Raytheon Media doesn't have to make a dime because their margins, their revenues are padded up the wazoo by a huge cash infusion to a sister line of business. You see this everywhere. News Guard, for example, one of the most notorious private sector for profit censorship, mercenary firms with former head of NATO on its board, the former head of DHS on its board, the former head of the State Department's Global Engagement center on its board. You know, you name it. Mark Milley, the former head of the CIA, NSA. I'm sorry, not Mark Milley, Michael. General Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the CIA, NSA four star general on its board. They got a $750,000 Pentagon contract nominally for the purpose of helping the Pentagon scan the Internet to help scan and ban Chinese and Russian propaganda online. Now, as this new MAGA foreign policy coalition and base has to navigate the tension between foreign ops and domestic interests, we have to navigate what the role is of countering foreign influence and countering foreign propaganda, squaring that with the fact that that was the exact predicate used to take out hundreds of thousands and arguably millions of Trump supporters at home when Trump was called a Russian asset and, and Trump was just like Putin. Trump equals Putin. The FBI is saying it, the CIA is saying it. And you had tens of thousands of American citizens who are rolled up in these very groups who were supposed to be focused on Russia making the argument that, well, these Americans are being an unwitting or unwitting vassal of talking points from Russia. So now we get to put them in these blacklist database. Now we get to. So that's a tension that has to be navigated. But the point is, however you navigate it, that 750,000 Pentagon grant to News Guard was not explicitly for News Guard to create advertiser blacklists to target Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro and Prager University and Fox News hosts and virtually every populist right wing media conduit for the man who is now the sitting democratically elected president United States. But it's the same Raytheon military, Raytheon media thing. So we need to create firewalls so there's no domestic bleed if you volunteer to accept a US Government contract for foreign facing work from any foreign facing agency, whether that's State, whether that's aid, whether that's dod, whether that's a confidential CIA service, because it's another thing, right? Reuters does CIA services. They have a whole intelligence assistance wing. So they're getting paid by the CIA and the dod. Again, this is the, it's not the Reuters media line, but it's the sort of strategic intelligence and whatnot. But this problem pops up everywhere with all these news. But then you do have another problem. So you have that USAID Truman show that comes up from that. But then you also have the other one, which is that we actually do fund these, a lot of these US media outlets to operate in foreign countries. And then they also operate at home. So they sort of are being a direct arm of the State Department for what the grant is doing. And then they're coming back and using that. So for example, a great example is like our fact checkers, independent fact checkers, my asthma, okay, there's no such thing as an independent fact checker. This entire field was created by the US State Department. And I would say with a set spike relationship, sort of Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal relationship with the UK Foreign Office because this was a transatlantic thing. So the UK Foreign Office funds a ton of these as well, but it's one foreign policy blob there. But why do places like the Poynter Institute and almost every one of the credentialed fact checkers for Facebook and Reddit and Twitter 1.0 and TikTok and Twitch and YouTube, why are almost every single one of these Groups are either directly or partnered with a U.S. state Department. It's because we use this international fact checking network which is housed under the Poynter Institute as the way to get foreign countries to censor their Internet to stop the rise of politicians, whether they be right wing populist or left wing socialists sometimes to stop them to censor their Internets. We pump up these American fact checker groups and then they get sent to Myanmar and they get sent to the Philippines and they get sent to Brazil and they get sent to Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia and you know, like for example, you know in this story about Bangladesh that I've been talking about a lot lately where you have a lot of this USAID and International Republican Institute ned funds to places like transgender dance festivals and rap groups there and supporting picking sides in the political thing there. The guy who is now the top foreign advisor was the former Bangladesh Foreign Secretary. And during this period before he retook power Here recently in 2024, he was brought in by USAID. USAID ran a countering misinformation workshop hosted at the US embassy in Bangladesh. And who did they have as the featured speakers to teach Bangladeshi journalists about how to counter misinformation? It was the guy who would, would get catapulted into the top foreign advisor position with the new government. And the guy who became the head of it is a Clinton Global Bell initiative I should note. I mean it's basically a pro US government now. And who was the other person that was the co leader of this? It was the executive director of PolitiFact, the US based PolitiFact. The, you know, flagging you here for misinformation and disinformation. You know, pressuring the social media companies and always having that latent threat of advertiser boycotts and potential legal non compliance I should note with the EU code of practice on disinformation because it is in July effectively going to be illegal to spread disinformation in Europe under this EU Digital Services Act. And if I can stress this to any people presently in charge of White House or State Department policy on this, the EU Digital Censorship act, technically called the Digital Services act, has to be stopped through whatever diplomatic means necessary to stop it because it will absolutely destroy freedom of speech in this country as we know it as Americans will not be allowed to talk to Americans about topics that a foreign regulatory body calls in its sole discretion, disinformation, unless you stop it. Every US Ambassador in Europe has to apply carrots and sticks, pressure the US Ambassador to the EU has to apply this pressure. The US Ambassador to NATO has to apply adjacent pressure. The White House has to. This thing is one of the craziest assaults on free speech in America our country will ever experience. And I should note USAID and our foreign policy blob made this happen. In fact, my foundation's publishing this report. 19 US government funded entities are signatories and nine of them are helping implement this very EU code of practice doing this. That's a full 20% of the signatories are from the US government and most of the major ones that have a lot more clout. But the critical node is coming from inside the House because the Biden White House actually had a formal policy goal. It's Information Integrity Working Group, which is something that I've now published, it's on our foundation's website. To get Europe and help Europe pass this thing and tighten the disinformation regs. USAID had a formal program through SEPSIS to get to help the EU and other countries pass disinformation laws because the first Amendment wouldn't allow it. So they're working with the international partners.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow, that makes a hell of a lot of sense.

[Mike Benz]

Wow, wow.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, Mike, I was gonna cover terrorism, but we kind of did that earlier. And so kind of to wrap this thing up, I just want to ask, you know, what would you like to see happen with usaid?

[Mike Benz]

I support the White House's current reforms. I do believe fundamentally, and if nothing else, symbolically, the complete and total abolition of USAID alone sends a chilling message to not do this kind of dirty work in the future. If you ever begin to look like the former disgraced, folded up usaid, you can imagine whatever form USAID takes in the future, whether they call it US OOD or whether it's the Bureau of International Development at State, people are gonna be tempted to do this. This is like God and the devil. This is like there's an eternal struggle here. And sometimes the moral area can look great, sometimes different elected governments are going to have different defined national interests about what governments to deploy US soft power in. And it's gonna look to one side like it's freedom fighting. One side of the American electorate like freedom fighting or liberation, that's going to look to another side like regime change, coup mongering and black ops dirty tricks that will always be there as well as the potential for profiteering or for doing that index finger trick in the domestic thumby war of a fair fight of Republicans, Democrats, conservative, liberals, whatever it is, whoever can weaponize the Blob, can take out their domestic political opponent. So what I would like to see happen is during this education process, while everyone is learning about the sheer extent of it, and we have just begun to peel the onion on this is that in whatever stage the aid function continues to the critical thing is putting in a Smith Mundt style protection for funding and operations. Smith Mundt was supposed to protect us from foreign propaganda distributed inward. And even that was destroyed by Barack Obama's presidency with the NDAA modernization that removed that protection. So we are now completely Smith Mutton less than we have been for 12 years. But there's something even worse going on with USAID, which is the Smith Munt problem of foreign propaganda rigging the domestic information ecosystem. But this is for funding and operations. U.S. aIDS function can fund U.S. organizations for their international work. And now they are pumped up on steroids with their capitalization for their domestic work. And also their foreign operations can target US citizens. Like we mentioned with the OCCRP example, how are there no criminal penalties passed by Congress? How is there no civilian right of action with treble damages in civil court against either the recipient of the aid when Rudy Giuliani is paying his tax dollars for the State Department to hand it over to the group that writes hit pieces on him to get him, you know, to get him not only humiliated, but to help, you know, all the adjacent reputational destruction that makes it easier to indictment dictate him on related charges. So we need a sort of Smithmont for financing and operations for US aid also for the adjacent ones. DoD should be subject to this law, state, CIA. But aid is the most obvious one because these are public grants and this is supposed to be humanitarian work. It's the last place you'd see coming to get socked in your own eyeball by the government you voted for. So that civil penalty can take the form of suing the grantee. But maybe you should also be able to sue the agency itself. You can sue the FBI for wrongful death if something they do is through gross negligence or otherwise results in the death of your family member or something. This is something that the famous Jesse Trinedieu case of the Oklahoma City bombing. That can be done. What if USAID had to worry for its own budget if it failed in oversight to catch one of its grantees? And you could sue USAID if One of the USAID's grantees broke that firewall? Well, USAID has to fight for its life in the budget every year just like everybody else does. And if they had their own budgets mortally threatened and they needed to decide whether or not to plan the overthrow of a government in Central Asia because they wouldn't have enough capital to pull it off, because they're targeting a US citizen in Tanzania, the whole thing gets chilled. But you need these reforms at every layer. You understand?

[Sean Ryan]

I do. That makes a hell of a lot of sense. That makes a hell of a lot of sense. I actually. I hope that happens.

[Mike Benz]

Me, too.

[Sean Ryan]

But, Mike, thank you for being here. Overwhelming amount of information, and I hope to get you back again.

[Mike Benz]

Good to be back. All right. No one knows music like Rolling Stone.

[Sean Ryan]

Senior writer Brian Hyatt talks the biggest.

[Mike Benz]

Music news from the biggest stars.

[Sean Ryan]

Almost. Almost everyone is teaming up on Drake. It's like Drake versus the world. Yeah. You first met Prince, you were driving for him before you were drumming for him.

[Mike Benz]

That's correct.

[Sean Ryan]

Stevie Wonder.

[Mike Benz]

You kind of have to understand how Stevie began White radio. That's where the money was. That's what still is. You know what I'm saying? Rolling Stone music. Now, follow and listen on your favorite platform.