Mike Benz
Appearances
Bongino Report Early Edition with Evita
Epstein Files Drop Today-But How Much Will They Reveal? (Ep.149)
in order to win the war against Russia right now. NATO believes we need to build the single largest military base in all of NATO on the Black Sea coast of Romania that points straight out in a line at Crimea and move this base that's under construction is 100% bigger. als die größte NATO-Base in Europa. Sie sehen, es gibt eine Wahl in Rumänien.
Bongino Report Early Edition with Evita
Epstein Files Drop Today-But How Much Will They Reveal? (Ep.149)
Sie haben es vielleicht gehört, die kanzlerlose Wahl in Rumänien mit Georgescu, diesem rechten Populisten, der in der Wahl Neutralität gefeiert hat. Er will nicht Amerika antagonisieren, aber er will nicht die Russen töten. Er will NATO auslösen und er will nicht, dass diese Militärbasis gemacht wird.
Bongino Report Early Edition with Evita
Epstein Files Drop Today-But How Much Will They Reveal? (Ep.149)
Das ist eine zivilisierte Entscheidung der gewählten Regierung Rumäniens, die von den Herzen und Geistern der Votierenden der rumänischen Bevölkerung entschieden wurde.
Morning Wire
Suspected Killer’s Infamy & GEC’s Likely Demise | 12.12.24
They were afraid that social media, rising all these right-wing populist parties to power, would effectively collapse the entire rules-based international order unless there was international censorship. Because Brexit would give rise to Frexit if Marine Le Pen won, and she was massively overpowered on social media versus Macron.
Morning Wire
Suspected Killer’s Infamy & GEC’s Likely Demise | 12.12.24
If, you know, as I mentioned, Italy, Germany, there was going to be not just Brexit, there was going to be Frexit, Spexit, Italegxit, Grexit, Grexit.
Morning Wire
Suspected Killer’s Infamy & GEC’s Likely Demise | 12.12.24
So the entire EU would come undone, which would mean all of NATO would come undone, which would mean there's no enforcement arm for the IMF or the World Bank or international creditors, which would mean it would be like the ending scene of Fight Club, where the credit card company buildings all collapse just because you're allowed to post on the Internet.
Morning Wire
Suspected Killer’s Infamy & GEC’s Likely Demise | 12.12.24
And they talked about that quite openly in 2017 as they were creating this whole censorship infrastructure.
PBD Podcast
Jair Bolsonaro’s Prediction Comes True! Ex-President Ordered To Stand Trial In Brazilian Coup Plot
ist, dass Populismus ein Angriff auf Demokratie ist. Sie sagen das offensichtlich in USAID-Meetungen. Sie sagen das offensichtlich in USAID-Dokumenten. Ich habe das ein Jahr und ein halbes lang veröffentlicht.
PBD Podcast
Jair Bolsonaro’s Prediction Comes True! Ex-President Ordered To Stand Trial In Brazilian Coup Plot
Der USAID-Desinformation-Primer hat den ersten Monat des Bidens-Terms im Offizier veröffentlicht, dass der Grund für ihre Desinformation-Programme war, Populismus-Subjektmatter-Expertise auf der Internetseite zu eliminieren, weil Populismus-News-Seiten Undermine USAID-Programming by undermining public faith and confidence in democratic institutions.
PBD Podcast
Jair Bolsonaro’s Prediction Comes True! Ex-President Ordered To Stand Trial In Brazilian Coup Plot
Because, don't you know, USAID spends billions of dollars to control the media every year. All the major media outlets in Ukraine are funded by USAID, like the Kiev Independent. All the major news outlets in Western Hemisphere or in many parts of Africa and Central Asia are It does what the CIA used to do. Everyone remembers Operation Mockingbird. Well, guess what?
PBD Podcast
Jair Bolsonaro’s Prediction Comes True! Ex-President Ordered To Stand Trial In Brazilian Coup Plot
That's just called USAID Media Sustainability and Media Assistance. Okay? That's all that is. And when populist waves swept the world in the US in 2016 with Trump and with what happened all over Europe with Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini and Nigel Farage, USAID declared censorship holy war against every single populist group, including Bolsonaro.
PBD Podcast
Jair Bolsonaro’s Prediction Comes True! Ex-President Ordered To Stand Trial In Brazilian Coup Plot
Steve, I'm telling you right now, if USAID did not exist, Bolsonaro would still be the President of Brazil and Brazil would still have a free and open Internet. It was USAID that spent tens of millions of dollars of American taxpayer money. entirely on USAID, because USAID declared Bolsonaro a populist, Trump of the tropics, and then set up this operation to control the information ecosystem.
PBD Podcast
Jair Bolsonaro’s Prediction Comes True! Ex-President Ordered To Stand Trial In Brazilian Coup Plot
One of the USAID grantees even said on a public call that the purpose was to eliminate the international exchange of ideas between the Trump movement and the Bolsonaro movement. Das ist das, was die USA tun. Sie töten den domänischen Populismus, weil es in die Richtung ihrer Außenpolitik geht.
PBD Podcast
Jair Bolsonaro’s Prediction Comes True! Ex-President Ordered To Stand Trial In Brazilian Coup Plot
You are a one of one?
PBD Podcast
Jair Bolsonaro’s Prediction Comes True! Ex-President Ordered To Stand Trial In Brazilian Coup Plot
Es kamen Leute, die mit Alessandro gearbeitet haben.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
But whenever some something's deemed a threat to democracy, there's always something else behind it. Right. In Trump's case, it was very obvious that Trump's policy about Eurasia. Was the primary reason that they ran all of the coup like actions against him from the multiple impeachment, multiple impeachments to the 91 felonies.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
to the special prosecutor's probe, the Bob Mueller two-and-a-half-year FBI special prosecutors, to the whirlwind of state-funded media and intelligence six ways from Sunday's things against him. There were other things that Trump did that flew in the face of the interests of international corporations and banks and foundations and NGOs. That one was the primary one in my view.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
In the Bolsonaro story, since my primary focus is on Internet censorship, it's very easy for me to tell that story, and I can walk you through that whole thing. But in terms of the why they did it, again, technically, all they need to say is threat to democracy, but there are always interests underneath that, and there are many threads. There is a sort of murder mystery, whodunit.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
There are many... Financial interests in Brazil. There are many U.S. multinational corporations of interest there. There are international interests around China and the relationship between China and the Biden administration. There's the connection with the unions and many of the union groups.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And there's several others, and this is actually why I'm happy to sit in and sort of play second chair to Nicholas because I have my own questions around the specifics of who financially benefit from any of these things. Because, for example – Lula connected his whole government to China, and he was very open about that.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
This is the sort of thing that the State Department and the CIA and USAID typically run operations to stop, and yet you had this very strange situation where we ran these operations to install it, this Chinese influence in Brazil.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And when you look at the Biden family relationship with Chinese stakeholders, you look at the Hunter Biden, you know, $10 million basically windfall from Chinese clients for his consulting company and partnerships with Chinese energy companies. You see this recurring pattern with the Biden administration.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I don't have, though, since everything I do is open source, I don't have any confessions from people in the U.S.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I don't know that. There are things that keep coming up in my research about it that I find highly disturbing and I would not be able to get without the subpoena power of Congress.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And it is my opinion that at the end of this process and once the report that I'm working on is published and all this can be just – the whole timeline, chronology, network map, funding flows, cast of characters, all that –
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
It's my belief that that it would be beneficial for the American people to understand, to have an autopsy of the rogue activity of their own government for any of the oversight bodies that we currently have set up, whether that is the weaponization subcommittee of Jim Jordan, whether that's the House Foreign Affairs or Senate Foreign Affairs committees, whether that is declassifying federal secrets, frankly, from covert actions involved in this.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
power-equipped courts, congressional committees that could probe those questions, most immediately the what comes up most frequently publicly in this and what they talk about is this international exchange of ideas between Trumpism and Bolsonaroism. And that's a very simple one to understand, right?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Which is just the raw political calculus of you get rid of Bolsonaro, you get rid of Trump, you get rid of the, you know, and this is a direct quote, the international exchange of ideas. You can actually go to my foundation's website, it's foundationforfreedomonline.com. If you put Brazil into the search at the top, you'll see, oh yeah, one word, yep.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Yep, and you just put Brazil on the top, and you'll see a report that I published a little over two years ago. Yeah, U.S. tax dollars funding text message censorship in Brazil. Published this in July 2022, so just in time for the CIA director to descend on Brazil. And you'll see we U.S. taxpayers paid to – to get the censorship state installed in Brazil. U.S. taxpayers? Yes, yes.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Yes, if the U.S. is serious about applying diplomatic... diplomatic resources on the issue. There are many ways that that can be done. I'm not sure this is the most appropriate forum for discussing them. And there are actually two open threads that I did want to get to from what Nicholas just said. But the short answer is there are many things that the U S can do.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
If the U S ambassador is serious, if the president is serious, um, if the, if Marco Rubio is serious, um, and, uh, Yes, much can be done. I'll leave it there. I think what you need is policy alignment and then the appropriate organs to mobilize.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Well, you're going to need to synchronize all the different facets of U.S. foreign policy. That can be done.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
It just doesn't feel appropriate. I'm just going to say it. I don't think that this is the forum to – but I'm happy to listen to you guys talk about it. It's just – yeah. Yeah.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Is it the McDonald's job from Trump?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Well, what I was getting into there was about – and one of the reasons I want to circle back to some of the things that we were just talking about and play some of these things for the world to see here is that we – like I mentioned, congressional committees on this who have subpoena power, who can do transcribed interviews of all the officials involved.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
who can use the power of the purse to slash budgets, who can do public hearings and put this all out, and prosecutors in the U.S. who can take appropriate action to the extent that there's criminal wrongdoing. There is right now, agency by agency, the people at the top of the perch have been the people who have been punished by the system. But, you know, RFK is at the head of HHS.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Cash and now, you know, Dan Bongino at the top of FBI. Time and time again, we've seen this, you know, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the top of NIH. I think that there is an American interest in pursuing this and the weaponization of the foreign policy establishment and its covert and overt capabilities and its NGO capabilities.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
to go after bolsonaro as a way of going after donald trump and so i mentioned this phrase stopping the inner in uh the international exchange of ideas between trumpism and bolsonaroism so on that on that piece that i pulled up before the uh the foundation for freedom online brazil report you actually see that's a direct quote i think actually just if you scroll down or just run a control f for uh exchange you'll see this if we'll just yeah there you go
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So this is funded by the U.S. here. If you scroll down, this is a U.S. taxpayer. So what this is, if you click this video, this is a presentation to IFES, which is a U.S. AID partner and implementer. This is an international idea. This is attached to the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. And it's basically election management in foreign countries. And you'll see here our U.S.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
taxpayers paying international – they get all their money from Congress through a State Department contribution. So this was back in 2021, 2022. And if you just play this, you'll see what the thought process was ahead of Brazil's election for how our own NGOs were weaponized to go after Trump by going after Bolsonaro. Do you have an ad there?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Okay. Yeah, if we go through both of them.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
This is an international idea. Sure, I would address.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So here he is presenting – this is hosted by us, U.S. taxpayers. And this is – I published this years ago. I published this two and a half years ago at this point. Similar keywords on the Brazilian and U.S. populist right on Parler. And you'll see it's Trump, election fraud irregularities, the very things that – People in Brazil were prosecuted or banned from being able to talk about.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
They grafted off of the model of something that was done here in the U.S. ahead of the 2020 election when DHS partnered with groups like EIP, the Atlantic Council, Grafica, two of our universities. to censor Americans' ability to talk about election voting machines. And then we systematically trained the Brazilian judges to do the same to stop Bolsonaro.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And I can walk you through that whole process. But this is just from things of our profession. If you let it play, you'll see how basically this is art, taxpayer-funded NGOs and CIA cutouts working with here a Brazilian professor, effectively, on how to co-strategize to stop the international exchange of ideas between Trump and Bolsonaro.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Yeah. We exported our censorship models when they started to work against Trump. We exported them to Brazil. We exported them to Europe. We're exporting them to Australia as part of a State Department USAID push to control the information space in every country on Earth. So the reason, for example, this that I published was about the U.S.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
taxpayers funding the censorship of encrypted chat apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. This was because we had already moved into Brazil to censor social media. This is why Brazilians were one of the first people to come to Gab and some of the other alternative, and Parler and these other platforms. But on this point, you mentioned Bahoso. Am I saying that correctly? So if you go to slide 23...
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Yes. Yes. So this is NDI. NDI is the DNC branch. It's the CIA wing of the DNC. NDI is the Democrat Party wing of the National Endowment for Democracy. The National Endowment for Democracy is the premier CIA cutout of our tens of thousands around the world. It's a big umbrella one. It was created in 1983. It was conceived in the office of the CIA Director William Casey.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
The CIA had gotten in a lot of trouble just a few years earlier when the heart attack gun was held up in front of Congress. The Democrats hated the CIA. Ronald Reagan wanted it back. They couldn't get that approved. They couldn't get the powers back because Democrats controlled the lower house of Congress.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And so they came up with an idea to create the National Endowment for Democracy to have an outside NGO funded by the State Department where all the grants are reviewed by the CIA. Go out and be the operations arm, basically a plausible deniability layer for the CIA the same way the CIA provides that plausible deniability layer for the State Department. They have four core fours.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
IRI, which is the Republican branch of the CIA, of the NED. It's the International Republican Institute. It was founded by John McCain, who ran for president in 2008, the Republican nominee. On its board are people like Mitt Romney, who ran for president in 2012. Basically, until Trump, you had to be IRI if you wanted to run for president in the Republican Party.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
On the Democrat side, it's called the other political core for it is called NDI, the National Democratic Institute, who was... Hunter Biden, for example, is on the Chairman's Advisory Board of the NDI, if you've ever heard me talking about the wonderful CIA world of Hunter Biden. But NDI, again, is fully funded by the U.S. government. They get hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
They are notorious for regime change and organizing street riots, penetrating the unions in countries, penetrating their for-profit companies, penetrating academia, mobilizing student youths to take to the streets. And here you have the NDI senior elections advisor encouraging Brazil's top judge, Bahoso, to – if you just play this clip here in this rumble, you'll see. How long is it?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
You can just play the first – just play like the first 30 seconds to get the idea of it. And you can – if you need to mute that for the answer a second. I just want to show you that all this is – meticulously, forensically detailed.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Can you fast forward to when he speaks? Well, you'll see what you pause for a second. What she goes – she presses him to do more to censor non-inclusive speech. This is our taxpayer-funded CIA cutout pushing the top judge in Brazil to do more to censor. And in fact, you can play that out or if you – I've got a million of these clips. We trained all their judges. I mean I can show you. It's –
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
We trained all of Brazil's judges. Yes, yes. In fact, in the program, the banner program that coordinated this, they said one of the specific reasons they did this is so that these judicial institutions, what they call EMBs, election management bodies, this has been a big push.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
since Trump one to to control the judiciary's because USAID its charters is allowed to do so-called judicial reform to influence the laws in the in the judicial decisions in foreign countries and so you know you can if you want to sit through this whole thing but you can hear her say it so this is all make this up this is in the report with millions of other things but I'll put this on my ex account for for folks you know right after this but if you want to go the next slide
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
You'll see. If you want to just hear straight from the horse's mouth without having to skip around. So this is a presentation of the top judge in Brazil to the Wilson Center, which is the close partner and implementer of the U.S. State Department. It gets, I think, over 30 percent of its annual funds directly from U.S. taxpayers. It is one of our flank of State Department interlocutors.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Now, if you want to play that, I can give you a background. They did a whole war game for teaching them how to censor a Bolsonaro post, the Wilson Center, the State Department-funded Wilson Center with them.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
In fact, if you skip to the end of it, just do the last 45 seconds and you'll get the picture of it. We brought them in for this. Yeah, just, yeah, like, or actually, no, no, no. Start a little bit for that. Yeah, yeah, right there. Yeah, that's fine. You'll see.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Okay, so if you pause there. Now, the Wilson Center is a U.S. State Department organ. We pay for this. The Wilson Center then got together with Brazilian judges and officials and did a whole disinformation war game to train them on the best practices of what we'd used to censor Trump during the 2020 election. You know, who else was at the Wilson Center?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Nina Jankovic, the head of the Disinformation Governance Board. We are literally taking best practices from the U.S. that were used to stop Trump from winning in 2020 and training every organ. We went around to the prosecutors, the judges, the universities. There's a whole story here with the unions. Top to bottom, we spent tens of millions of dollars.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
like is there the ned still yes they're in a full-blown panic over it uh and now there are there's a question of if they can offset that through funding from the eu and other international bodies like the un they want to try to create sort of like replacement funding through the the private donor networks through The Soros networks and the Gates networks are going to have to pay.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
The Craig Newmark networks, the Piero Midiar networks, the Reid Hoffman networks may have to spend their own billions to offset that. But they're also working with these in power. The censors in exile here in the U.S. are trying to get this funding to continue this work by partnering with foreign governments to get it now that USAID is down. But that is going to cost them a lot.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Whatever the best role for me is. My North Star here is about freedom of speech. And it's not about trying to get a particular person elected. It's not about... what happens in foreign countries for the sake of what happens there. Like I said, I think Bolsonaro is a hero. I think he's a martyr figure. I think it's a human rights violation what happened to him.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
My priority is as an American to tell this story about Brazil because this is a story of the American government. And this is something that the Trump administration, if it wants to get done its domestic agenda, is going to run into this international crisis.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
they're going to run into it in the EU, they're going to run into it in Canada, in Australia, they're going to run into it in Ukraine, they're going to run into it in Central Asia, they're going to run into it in Sub-Saharan Africa. But the Brazil case study is a really clean one because the size of the operation and how sloppy they were about covering the tracks.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
You want to go to slide one, by the way? I don't mean to interrupt.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Does that look familiar?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
That's the USAID SEPs program.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
It's hard for me to give advice to the Brazilian people as an American citizen. It feels a little bit outside my place. I think, in general, it's amazing to see the success that you've had. I, too, like Patrick, have never seen an Instagram video with over 300 million views that's...
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Highly impressive, but I think that is ultimately the path to bringing power to the people, is to make your voice heard as loud as humanly possible and to keep turning your voice up and up and up and up and to find partners at every conceivable level, in the U.S., in Europe, to wherever. And I don't mean that in an interference way.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I mean that simply for people around the world to hear your message. This is... A common interplay in these situations is there's the concept of the so-called international community, which are like-mindeds all around the world who believe in a cause or believe in a principle.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And the bigger that tent is, the more that energizes and the more that also impacts the people in the country because they will... They will hear the media sirens around the world who amplify that message. It gets out, and support can come from strange places when you sing your song loud enough. And I think you guys are doing the right thing in terms of that.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And that's really the only thing that feels appropriate for me to say, because I think below that you start to get to issues around political organizing, and it feels out of place for me to opine on that part of it.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I think it's enormous. I think that's why they want it shut down in Brazil unless compliance measures were put in place. I think that the Lula government, as well as the Biden government, was intensely aware that the power of social media would be the determinant of whether or not the election would go one way or the other.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I have quotes from the people involved in this that they believe their work censoring Bolsonaro was... in terms of tilting it in Lula's favor. There was a personal meeting, actually, Lula's... I think it was, what, his first month in office at the first meeting with the Biden administration.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I know you're accusing me of going back to the slideshow, but the fact is I think that a lot of people haven't seen this, and since I know that... I'm not accusing you at all.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I'm being cheeky.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Well, what I'm showing here is this is the... Okay, so this is February 2023. So I guess this was... This is a joint statement following the meeting between President Biden and President Lula. So I think this was their first meeting after the 2022 election. So today, President Biden and President Lula...
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
During the meeting, they discussed the nature of the U.S.-Brazil relationship, strengthening democracy. Go to the next slide. Biden and Lula pledged to work together to strengthen democratic institutions, which means strengthen these control networks, and reaffirmed their intention to build societal resilience to disinformation and to work together on that. So Biden and Lula pledged.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
talked about the need to stop online disinformation and agreed to work together. When I go back to this coordination between the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, the NGOs, this is part of an interagency working group to control the internal politics of Brazil. And that money is still flowing. And it's not just USAID. They're the biggest money spigot.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
But I'll give you some other examples because I'm actually fascinated about what something Nicholas just said about the fires. But maybe I'll start with with if you go to slide. This is, I think, 24, 24, 25. Yeah. Yeah. Next one. Sorry. 25 or 25. Can you blow that up? Okay, so here's just one. Rob, can you zoom in a little bit, even more?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Yeah, so would you say the unions are more pro-Bolsonaro or pro-Lula in Brazil? It's a union candidate.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Yeah, the whole thing's unions. So here's a $12 million U.S. Department of Labor. That's... my wallet, Patrick, your wallet, U.S. citizens, paying $12 million to the unions in Brazil. So I'm going to read some of these details, okay? What?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
$12 million, yes, and this was granted right after the, this was, I think the grant date for this was, start date was December 2022, right after the 2022 elections. It almost feels like a payoff for some reason. But here you go, let me read this, okay? So $22 million, I'm sorry, $12 million given to,
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And you'll see the – and in fact, if you go to the next – if you go to the one right after, you'll see – and yeah, so Brazil – and one more over. We'll come back to that in a sec. You'll see – just so you see the numbers here, right? This is on USAspending.gov. You can look this up publicly. It's still active. Brazilian unions, Lula's unions are still getting paid by you and me.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
They are taking money from us. Why? We are capacity building. I'll read you the technical reason they say why. So if you go back two slides again, let's just read this, okay? So this is, the purpose is to improve respect for labor rights and participatory planning with unions in Brazil. Again, this is the Bureau of International Labor Affairs at the Department of Labor.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Direct financial support for workers organizing. Build cross-movement networks with civil society organization allies. Uh, representing marginalized populations and mobilize increased capacity of worker organizations to organize, mobilize, and, you know, advocate on their own behalves here.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Um, populations and beneficiaries are in Brazil workers and unions with a focus on Afro Brazilian young and women workers. Um, And there's tie-ins to the indigenous sects in Brazil, which the U.S. State Department made a very big play for, which sort of gets me to some of the Amazon fire elements here. But this is stock standard.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
We've been funding the Lula machine from every direction, from the State Department, from USAID, from the Department of Labor, from the National Endowment for Democracy Solidarity Center. Can I go off on this for a second? Okay.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I mentioned there's four core fours for our top CIA cutout, the National Endowment for Democracy, which by the way, and you can even, you know, you can go to my X timeline or you can look it up either way. This is a direct quote from the founder of the National Endowment for Democracy at their founding that the reason
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
that they were created was because the CIA used to get in trouble for running financial assistance to political opposition groups, and it looks terrible when the CIA is seen as subsidizing them. That's why the endowment was created, the National Endowment for Democracy was created, so that the funding could be provided without CIA fingerprints on it.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And so Ned has these four core fours that I've been talking about, right? IRI for the Republican side, NDI for the Democrat side. They have one for the Chamber of Commerce, basically business interests in the region where we do political dirty work. They will basically benefit in some way from the new government. The fourth one is called the Solidarity Center. It's the CIA's work with unions.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
The Solidarity Center's closest partner by far and away, bar none, is the group that used to be known by Democrats in the 1960s and 70s who hated their partnership with the Central Intelligence Agency. They used to call it the AFL-CIA. It's known widely as the AFL-CIO. It's the largest union in the U.S.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
It has international branches that have served for 70 years as the union arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. When we go to topple a government, we always go for the workers. Because a government can only wield the power of its own industrial base It relies on the mine workers. It relies on the transportation workers. It relies on the dock workers.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
It relies on the media and the hospital workers. If we can penetrate the workforce, we can cause the whole country to come to a standstill. And then the police are out of luck. The military are out of luck. They don't have hospitals working anymore. They don't have toilets working anymore. They don't have energy resources anymore.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And so Solidarity Center, this gets its name from the Solidarity Movement, which was – Lech Walesa, this was the Polish union group that liberated Poland from communism during the Cold War. But they were handed bags of cash by the Central Intelligence Agency during that process. And this is a blueprint that we do all around.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Now, it was done against left-wing socialist countries during the Cold War primarily, but now it's being done to right-wing populist movements. This is this boomerang that we're living in now. But the Solidarity Center's Basically, you know, the AFL-CIO is the main arm of the Solidarity Center.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And the AFL-CIO, if you can look this up, before we get back to this grant, look up the AFL-CIO and who they named as man of the year. I believe it was in 2021, 2022. Yeah, put Lula or put... You can, yeah, put Lula there, you'll see. This is the, well, they gave the award here. Lula, I don't think, or scroll down. Yeah, that's the one. Okay, that's the one. But that's 2019. Oh, 2019, yes, okay.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Yeah, 2019, huh, right after.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Right, yes, yes, that's right. Yes, AFL-CIO led that to get Lula out. Yeah, the U.S. Union, who works with the CIA around the world in its international branches. This is one year into Bolsonaro's term. They were grooming him for the task, practically. And they are our biggest union. Now, hold on. Go to the Molly Ball article online.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Look up the Molly Ball article in Time Magazine, and I want to show you something really interesting. Time Magazine, you just put in right-wing fever dream or fortified elections. You may remember, this is one of those famous articles of the past several years.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Oh, yeah. Well, this is yes. He got rolled by the National Endowment for Democracy. He got rolled by USAID. And that is why they are. So, OK, here you go. The secret history of the shadow campaign to save the 2020 election.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Can you hit control? Actually, just scroll down. I believe it's the scroll down, scroll, scroll down right below the fold. OK, let me read this. There was a conspiracy unfold. This is Time magazine. They all admitted to this publicly. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. Also, some right-wing internationalist Republican business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-knownest joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO. They had protests ready to go to shut down the U.S. government if Trump won in a fair and square election.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
You can look all this up. This is a blueprint that was planned out. You can find it on my XFeed where we can go straight to the source documents. If you go to my XFeed and you type in TIP and BLM, you'll see this. They had this whole thing planned out. They had – or just type in clear Trump win, clear Trump win. That'll get you there, too. OK, or scroll down, down to the source documents.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Or you can do BLM. We'll get you there, too. Yeah, there you go. Scroll down. Yeah, right there. OK, so actually before I read this, if you click on the thread, you'll see the context for this. Yeah, right there. Scroll up a little bit. Or yeah, up a little. OK, all right, maybe it's different. Go down.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
You'll see, and I have on my timeline the clear term, but this is the Transition Integrity Project. Rosa Brooks, I think Undersecretary for Policy in Obama's Pentagon. They had got together with military intelligence officials and the former heads of both the DNC and RNC, Michael Steele, Donna Brazile, that whole network. They planned what to do in the event of, quote, a clear Trump win.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
This is scenario three here. Everyone can look up the source document. It's all over. I think I have the source link right there, and we can click on that right after this. But let's start here. A show of numbers in the streets and action in the streets may be the decisive factors in determining how the public perceives it.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So what they talk about is leveraging the BLM protesters, because they did this in the height of the George Floyd riots. They said, hey... we're going to run this war game. If Trump wins, how can we still make sure, if he wins the election, how do we stop his inauguration? And look what they do in this war game.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
The person role-playing Joe Biden, who was John Podesta, who was the one at the meeting who role-played this, says that they... presupposed that the Democrats would be able to use Black Lives Matter street muscle as a destabilizing protest force and the union workers and the whole AFL-CIO network, and that basically the recommendation, because this is going to come down to action in the streets,
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
is that they need to better test the likely receptivity to a Biden call to take to the streets or a Biden campaign's ability to control these actors once mobilized. This is the BLM. Control the campaign's ability to wield them. And so what they propose is to build strong ties and be responsive to BLM's demands. That way BLM will owe them a favor.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
They talk in this same thing, and you can click the hyperlink so you see. This is, I think, Boston Herald who reported this. They have the source document right here. Type control F for clear Trump win. Yeah, here it is. This is the wordplay. And just click again, and you'll get to the second one. You'll see. This is what this all falls under, okay?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
How to stop Trump from taking office if he wins fair and square. And what they called for was enhancing resources to the Black Lives Matter resource, Black Lives Matter, which, by the way, is exactly what the Chamber of Commerce did. Remember those billions of dollars from big corporations?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And then lo and behold, there's this secret agreement which doesn't get published until six months after the election. And who was actually the one who was going to be mobilizing all of these shutdown D.C. protests? Oh, it's the CIA's top union arm, the AFL-CIO, who's behind the same thing in Brazil. And by the way, let me get the kicker here. I mentioned there's four core fours for Ned, right?
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
The IRI, NDI, Solidary Center. You know what the fourth one is? It's called CPE, the Center for International Private Enterprise. You know what that is? That's the CIA's liaison to the Chamber of Commerce.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
The exact two groups, the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce, who teamed up, had an agreement published in Time magazine to oust Trump if he won the election in 2020, teamed up through the National Endowment for Democracy, working in Brazil, that ousted Bolsonaro. And if you remember, they were the ones who were training the judges. They were the ones who ran that whole network.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
NDI, they set up a whole coalition. It was called D4D, Design for Democracy, spun a spider's web around virtually every Brazilian institution around information control.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I think assassinations are a lot rarer nowadays. They've moved towards prosecutors as a much cleaner way to do it. There's been a lot of blowback from assassinations. And they're upset about it. They're very upset about it. The interesting case of JFK, for example. And even today, the censors talk about conspiracy theories about the CIA maybe assassinating.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
It was published in the late 90s during the declassifications that the CIA was opening Lee Harvey Oswald's mail before he received it because they had a counterintelligence probe on him. What I'm getting at is it's very messy when you take out a high-profile figure in an assassination. It's messy because whenever there's a tilt of power, there are attempts to try to get transparency.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
If you read the CIA assassination guide, which I've done on my ex-account, and it's very funny. This came out during the church committee hearings. Actually, it came out in the 1990s during the JFK declassifications. Yeah.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Um, you know, they, they talk about how it's imperative to, to make sure that there's only casual investigation afterwards and that these things don't have long memories in terms of investigation. And, uh, you know, and it was, it was outlawed and these things are never done directly by the agency.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
It's always through contractors, other groups, but what they've moved towards is judicial assassination. That's, that's the clean way to do it. You get, you get them accused of a crime, you throw them away for the rest of their life. What they try, you know, with Trump, with, you know, what they're doing to Bolsonaro and, um,
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
It was my expectation that that was going to happen to me eventually, whether it was going to be under the Biden administration with the – I mean I saw practically everyone else who made impact be arrested by Merrick Garland and his goons. I thank the Lord every day that –
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
That Justice Department has been replaced because I think... The joke I say is they throw me away for 30 years for premeditated jaywalking. They would find a reason, and it's as good as assassination. But that doesn't matter to me. I feel a deep sense of purpose. I'm happy that there's an audience now for the things I talk about, but I was doing it... I do it...
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Throw me in a jail cell and I'll be, you know, I'll finish my book or I'll try to convince the other people in the prison. I can't turn this off even if I wanted to. So it doesn't really feel like it's up to me.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Oh, yeah. I mean, if you remember, they tried to... This is like... I mean, this is like stock standard, right? I mean, this is what's happening in Romania with the Georgia skew election in terms of nullifying it. I mean... Whether you remove the ballots, you can't vote for it, or you nullify the election after he wins. I mean, they're both the same thing that you can't run if you're winning.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I mean, it's basically the rule. And this is why it's terrifying that USAID and these other, you know, intelligence and statecraft affiliated NGO swarms. Go right for the jugular, targeting the EMBs, targeting the electoral and judicial organs around deciding elections and election processes and election results. You know, I have...
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I hate to say it, but I have slides on all this prepared if you want to see straight from the horse's mouth what that looked like. Because USAID was doing the same thing, and even some of these slides that I have here, they're getting 12 countries' EMBs in a room at once. For example, in the U.S., the big EMB is the Supreme Court.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
They decided the result of Bush v. Gore when there was the Florida hanging ballot, hanging Chad situation. You know, Brazil, they have a different structure. They have their, you know, their STF and then they've got their subcourt, the TSE. And so they went for the juggernaut TSE. But as you'll see, but they also train the STF.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
In fact, if you want to pull the slide deck back up and, you know, hop on over to if you started started. Yeah. How about slide? What is this? What number is this? Slide seven.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Okay, all right. All right, next one. Okay, so you'll see here, again, this is IFAS again. This is the State Department. They get fully funded by the U.S. State Department. They implement the USAID's programs, the USAID partner and implementer on all things elections there, working with another judge here. Jose Gilberto Scandiucci.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So now we've got Bojoso, DeMorais, Scandiucci working directly with the CEPs USAID program, which is one of the most terrifying things. But go to the next slide here real quick. Okay, well, actually, let's stay on that for a second. This is another example of how U.S. money continues to corrupt Brazil's democracy here.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
COVID, they went after Bolsonaro for questioning COVID and not streaming the vaccine. So this is Internews. Internews gets half a billion dollars a year from U.S. taxpayers. The founder of Internews talks about how... They had to constantly explain to people in foreign countries that, no, we're not the CIA. We're not CIA media. We're just funded by the U.S. government, and we're directing this.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So Internews has a network of about 6,000 different media organizations. They train 9,000 journalists around the world. They're basically a worldwide Operation Mockingbird apparatus for the U.S. State Department to be able to create a symphony of media in foreign countries.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Well, actually, if you pull up the clip of the CEO of, just type in CEO, go to like X and just type CEO Internews advertiser. And you'll see this was very viral.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Elon was livid at this, as everyone should be, because I've been talking about Internews, their huge role in internet censorship, because they use the State Department's media apparatus to push advertiser boycotts and all sorts of other things. Yeah, if you start from the beginning, it's just 28 seconds, you'll see. This is the CEO of Internews right here.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Well, are you referring, when you say they went to tell Bolsonaro, are you referring to the CIA director Lloyd Austin? I actually can pull that up on screen. If you go to the slide deck, it'll be slides starting on slide 12. I can walk you through that.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So that's the general of, effectively, the CIA State Department USAID media octopus with thousands of tentacles around the world. Now, here's Brazil. Here's Internews in Brazil, okay? Because media promotes censorship in these countries, and that legitimizes the passage of anti-misinformation laws. When judges act corrupt...
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
People don't take to the streets because internews media is saying that's what they should have done. In fact, internews will put pressure on governments if they don't censor what the State Department wants censored there. So here's what they did in COVID. They created a program in Brazil called Rooted in Trust.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
You see, it's a global pandemic information response program countering the unprecedented scale and speed and spread of rumors and misinformation. Project focuses on, you know, see, Lebanon, Mali, Colombia, Sudan, Brazil. They have a whole section on Brazil in this report as well. Look at the highlights so far. Rudy and Trust has tracked more than 19,000 rumors about the virus.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
14 languages, 81 million people. In response to the unique rumors sourced from each country context, the project has produced over 130 rumor bulletins, 500 radio broadcasts, and 480 other media stories. Through a series of training opportunities, events, peer-to-peer networks, and grants, Rooted in Trust has sponsored 550 local media organizations.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
350,000 people, almost 5,000 listening groups for this, all to basically ban the ability to question facts.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So this is the U.S. State Department. Go to the slideshow.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So and we'll go through this line by line here. But the U.S. State Department called in massive favors and leveraged personal connections to build voting machines for Lula aligned Brazil officials. And then the CIA warned Bolsonaro not to warrant not to mess with or cast doubt on all the new U.S. State Department secured voting machines determining his election.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And if you go to the next slide and walk through this. So this is from the Financial Times. This piece is basically about. In fact, you go to the slide after this first. What they say is this was a concerted but unannounced. So this was basically a covert action by the Biden White House. the Biden Pentagon, the Biden CIA and the Biden State Department to fortify Brazil's election.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Oh, nobody.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Sure.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Well, it comes from a lot of places. You have these Pentagon relationships between the U.S. military and the Brazilian Army. You have these state department grants to the region, which are huge. Remember, USAID is getting folded into state. So you have the state department funds. Then you also have the active AID ones that need to be cut, not just paused, but cut.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
You have the Department of Labor ones. You're probably going to have Department of Energy ones. You're going to have weird juicing of the universities through some of these other grant organs as well. There's... All of that is one thing that at least creates a fair fight. I brought up, for example, the $12 million grant to Lula's unions right after the 2022 election.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So if you go back to the other one, the slide before. So the U.S. provided practical help in the election process to obtain components, especially semiconductors needed to manufacture the new voting machines. The former U.S. ambassador to Brazil. So they are using shadow diplomacy here because they don't want their formal U.S. State Department fingerprints on it.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
The Solidarity Center just gave a $7 million grant to the unions. That's tens of millions of dollars. You're capturing... Essentially, you're pumping up this. This is not Bolsonaro who's getting tens of millions of dollars from it. And so that also makes people... Ideology is a funny thing. Sometimes people are true believers. Most of the time, hearts and minds work is about cash.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I always call it hearts and minds and cash because you're only really sort of getting the tail end of people through hearts and minds when they read the news. usually it's downstream of their cultural leaders, their community leaders, their politicians, their significant people of note in the country. And if you capture them with cash, you get the whole hearts and minds behind that.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And so you take the coup cash out of Brazil, I think you will see a much fairer fight. And I think that people will be more responsive to their own people because they will not have a foreign source of funds that are basically telling them, advising what the judges should do.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And again, getting back to that USAID CEPPS program, they literally said in the launch event of the program that one of its purposes was to make the partner networks feel supported. by the US government. So one of the reasons that you've had this, I think this perception that there's nothing to fear from any sort of anger of Americans against what Brazil did is because
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
They had the support of the Biden administration. The U.S. Embassy didn't do squat when that happened. You remember, I posted every day, day 27, day 28, here is what the U.S. Embassy page, here's their Twitter account. They're posting about, you know, disabled gymnasts in Brazil and, you know, how we need, you know, to support the LGBTQIA2++ rock climbers in Brazil. As X, a major U.S.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
champion, was shut down and as Starlink, a major U.S. military contractor, had its assets seized. And as they began to potentially move into the Chinese Starlink competitor into that, this is the sort of thing we have a State Department to stop from happening. And the State Department was – their silence –
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
combined with the fact that they have formal State Department programs to make this happen, formal USAID programs to make this happen, you have Biden and Lula colluding on it. They wanted that to happen. They were supported for that to happen.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
The SEPS program literally says that the plan is to get foreign countries to implement legal and regulatory measures to go after the social media companies to force accountability on them.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
They're going to aid the former US ambassador in Brazil to leverage his personal connections with Taiwan Semiconductor, And to leverage those connections, I'm sorry, inside of the Texas instruments to distinguish semiconductor needs and give priority. Now, we have a semiconductor shortage here in the U.S. They are diverting semiconductor chips that the U.S.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
I think my opinions on this are not hard to tease out from what I say, but I do feel it is inappropriate for me to... My mission is about speech freedom.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And in the course of that, I talk about all these adjacent things. I talk about the unions and the universities and all these other things because that's important to understand how the apparatus works why they were doing the censorship and the other things related to that operation. But that's for the Brazilian people to decide. And I think what was done to Bolsonaro was a human rights violation.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
It was the sort of thing that we typically put sanctions on foreign countries. for doing in terms of destroying the democratic process. This is what we have democracy promotions programs to stop. When countries arrest their political opponents, when their court systems get corrupt. That's why we have a judicial reform mandate for USAID is when
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
court systems get too corrupt to use the carrots and sticks of our diplomatic sphere to get them to course correct their judiciary. In this case, we literally did it to them. We said, you're not corrupt enough. You need to get more corrupt. But this is a testament to the corruption we had in our own country. under the Biden administration. And in the beginning, this happened under Trump's nose.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
needs and sending them to Brazil, a foreign country, to add voting machines that the democratically elected president of Brazil doesn't want. The U.S. State Department and some senior Brazilian officials also asked Taiwanese authorities to give priority to Brazil's need for semiconductors, which are used in the voting machines. And then if you go to the next slides here. Yeah.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Part of this is because USAID does not have to report to the president when they do these type of operations. Unlike the CIA, they do not need to get a presidential finding for covert action. They can simply earmark the funds for humanitarian relief in Pakistan And then just run it through contractors to do things in Brazil.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
And I think the Trump administration had so much going on with Russiagate and everything else happening at DHS and the border and COVID. And they frankly didn't really know how the anatomy of the beast that they were operating on. This is why I'm so encouraged that USAID was targeted in this way right out the gate.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So that at least you stop the the the bleeding and you go straight to the heart of it, which leads to, you know, all the other malfeasance in the Intel world and its state and and DOD. But, you know, the yes, but but that is for the Brazilian people to decide. But I'm interested, obviously, in the human rights act.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So then I say what's funny is both the 1964 military hunt in Brazil and the 2022 judicial hunt in Brazil received direct help from the CIA to rise to power. And then if you. If you go to the next one, you'll see CIA chief, this is Reuters, told Bolsonaro government not to mess with Brazil election. This is in May 2022. 64 is cool.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Brother Sam.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Yeah. Yeah. But I want to just just kind of close the loop on this, because if you go to the next one, next slide. Yeah. So Bill Burns makes a personal voyage. This is months before the election even happens. We are now force-feeding Brazil electronic voting machines the elected president doesn't even want in the country. And so the State Department is doing that.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Then we send in our covert action boys, the CIA, to say, don't you cast doubt. Look at the language told Brazilian senior officials that President Bolsonaro should stop casting doubt on his country's voting system. It's not even his country's voting system. We sent the semiconductor chips to build that because Brazil didn't want them themselves.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So we're putting the machines in there and then telling them, don't question the results of these machines. So go to the next one. So then this is also some foreign policy. A month after Bill Burns, it was the Pentagon secretary, Lloyd Austin's turn to go down to Brazil and push the chief of the Brazilian armed forces to commit to actually do a pledge. Go to the next slide.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Brazil manifestos seek to rein in Bolsonaro before election. This is before the election in a July conference with regional defense ministers. So we are personally paying as U.S. taxpayers for the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to go down there. We are. suffering under a chip shortage, and we are getting that diverted so that electronic voting machines can go down.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Then we are paying for the flights of the CIA director to go down and warn them not to cast doubt on the machines that they couldn't build without us and that the president didn't want. So this was – and actually, let me show you something else here as well.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
Why do they care? So – My focus on this is on the internet censorship side. I love the people of Brazil. I love Brazilian Zouk dancing. I've always been around Brazilian people. I don't speak Portuguese. But I didn't seek this out. This was something that was an unavoidable, inescapable reality of the US censorship work that I was focused on.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
It was a recurring fact since Trump won the election in 2016, as soon as Bolsonaro started gaining traction in Brazil, that these issues were interlinked, that they wanted to stop Bolsonaro for the same reasons they wanted to stop Donald Trump. I have that much 100%. There are other issues.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
So I have this big unpublished report that I'm just showing you some things from here tonight, but that'll be published sometime in the next several months. There is the open question. So the technical reason they said they did it is because Bolsonaro was a threat to democracy. Who's they? The CIA and Biden? The CIA, Biden, State Department, USAID, the NGO swarm.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
We have this concept called democracy promotion programs.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
which is this idea that if something is categorized as an authoritarian threat or it leads to illiberal democracy without sufficient democratic institutional safeguards, we deputize our democracy promotion programs to basically overturn their governments, to do regime change operations, to institute judicial reforms in the country, to control their prosecutors.
PBD Podcast
USAID Corruption & Brazil's Elections w/ Nikolas Ferreira & Mike Benz | PBD Podcast | Ep. 550
their judges, their universities, their unions, their media ecosystems in order to manage their democracy. And when something gets categorized as a threat to democracy, that's a technical term that unleashes the capabilities of our regime change apparatus. Now, they did that to Trump. They did that to Bolsonaro. There are.
PBD Podcast
Zelenskyy's OMINOUS Putin Threat | PBD Podcast | Ep. 568
So they want to focus on this. It's embarrassing. Yes. We're going to get to the bottom of it. We've have I just talked to Elon on the way here. We've got the best technical minds looking at how this happened. Weird. But I can tell you, I can tell you for 100 percent. I don't know this guy. I know him by his horrible reputation, and he really is the bottom scum of journalists.
PBD Podcast
Zelenskyy's OMINOUS Putin Threat | PBD Podcast | Ep. 568
And I know him in the sense that he hates the president, but I don't text him. He wasn't on my phone, and we're going to figure out how this happened.
PBD Podcast
Zelenskyy's OMINOUS Putin Threat | PBD Podcast | Ep. 568
Well, look, a staffer wasn't responsible. And look, I take full responsibility. I built the I built the group. My job is to make sure everything's coordinated. I mean, I don't mean to be pedantic here, but how did the number have you ever had? Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have and then you have somebody else's number there? Those mistakes. Right?
PBD Podcast
Zelenskyy's OMINOUS Putin Threat | PBD Podcast | Ep. 568
You've got somebody else's number on someone else's contact. So, of course, I didn't see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else. Now, whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is something we're trying to figure out. Hold on.
PBD Podcast
Canada CAVES To Trump Tariff Threats In Trade War | PBD Podcast | Ep. 561
You guys got volume? You know, liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies. Why would you do that? Because you understand, we just talked about Ukraine. You understand you're fueling Vladimir Putin's war machine because they've got to get their gas from him. And he looks at me, stunned, and he said, I didn't do that. And I said, Mr. President, yes, you did.
PBD Podcast
Canada CAVES To Trump Tariff Threats In Trade War | PBD Podcast | Ep. 561
It was an executive order, like, you know, three weeks ago. And he goes, no, I didn't do that. And he's arguing with me. I said, Mr. President... respectfully, could I go out here and ask your secretary to print it out? We'll read it together. You definitely did that. And he goes, oh, you talk about natural gas. Yes, sir. He said, no, no, you misunderstand.
PBD Podcast
Canada CAVES To Trump Tariff Threats In Trade War | PBD Podcast | Ep. 561
He said, what I did is I signed this thing to, we're going to conduct a study on the effects of LNG. I said, no, you're not, sir. You paused it. I know. I have the terminal, the export terminal in my state. I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, national security. It occurred to me, Barry, he was not lying to me.
PBD Podcast
Canada CAVES To Trump Tariff Threats In Trade War | PBD Podcast | Ep. 561
He genuinely did not know what he had signed. And I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, we're in serious trouble. Who is running the country? Like, I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn't know. If it's illegal.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
If it turned out that our own intelligence services were involved in or allowed purposefully the assassination of our own president, that would have, I think, implications diplomatically for U.S. standing abroad. So this is really one of the first litmus tests about how serious the Trump administration is about cleaning up the agencies.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Someone who gets access to high level political figures, cultural figures who can swing hearts and minds, business figures. You know, if I came to you and I said, I'm Mike Benz, I work for the CIA, Tell me all your secrets. You know, you're not going to do that.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
But if you think that I'm, you know, a fun loving guy who's got access to beautiful women and I throw great parties and I can take you and your friends on a great vacation and we've got common business interests and.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
you know i will learn things in the process of those conversations that i can then relay to you know folks in the intelligence world who simply want to know what the next move is of these of these political figures or of these billionaire you know uh billionaire investors or or funders it's also a way to broker deals in a way where you you effectively have a back channel
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Oftentimes these these high level business deals between nation states and also between nation states and corporations need a little bit of massaging from from back channels, from interlocutors, from go betweens who don't formally represent that foreign government or that government like the State Department. Great example. This is Bill Burns, who is the CIA director for Joe Biden.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
for President Biden for all four years. He was picked to be the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, having never worked for the CIA. He had spent 35 years in the State Department. He negotiated the Iran deal for President Obama. And then he went to work at a think tank for seven years. And then he, you know, How does someone like Bill Burns know how all the gadgets work?
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
How does he know how to work the cockpit of the CIA having never worked there? And the answer is because when he worked for the Carnegie Endowment for National Peace, which he was the president of for seven years before he got the CIA job, that's one of those think tanks that's at the center of this back-channel statecraft.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
In fact, his own autobiography is called The Back Channel and basically details the role of his role and the role of his network in being able to massage deals in the background, like the Iran deal. If you're going to line up something like the Iran deal, which was this early 2015 pivotal moment that created this big rift between Israel and NATO, it created this big rift between the
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
the Obama foreign policy world and much of the bipartisan buy-in that existed between the certain factions within the GOP, I think that really cleared the way for Trump. But to line that up, you're going to need all the different stakeholders And sometimes you can't send in a formal U.S. State Department person to do that.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You might want to convey a more heavy-handed message that you don't want to be on the record conveying. But if a back channel conveys it, then you can deny it later. Same thing. So whether that's brokering deals, whether that's setting up informal networks, this is a big part of how Statecraft operates.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
We don't. There could be bombshells, there could be a nothing burger, There could be bombshells that are redacted. I know that the president has come out and said that he's going to try to prevent any redactions from this was when Pam Bondi declared that they were going to come out a while ago.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You have these formal bureaus and these formal divisions and formal W-2 employees at state or CIA. But most of the work happens at the informal layer where someone from state or someone from the intelligence world who is running information
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
who's basically a symphony orchestra conductor of these outside groups that are informal and that can massage it, can get a general sort of set of terms lined up, who can convey sanctions are going to be forthcoming or whatever the message is, and also who can
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
gather intelligence that can be used that you can't necessarily get if you are in the intel world and you don't know who's all going to be there. You can't necessarily tap all their phones or maybe they just bought a burner phone. You need a fly on the wall. You need someone in the room. And I think that is probably the closest to the Epstein story. And I don't know which government It is.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
It could be there's obviously a U.S. government connection in the sense that an American prosecutor was told not to go through with prosecution because he belonged to intelligence. So you obviously have at least the U.S. government involved in that. And again, when you date it back to this whole Iran-Contra network, that was a U.S. government activity.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And this was this whole Adnan Khashoggi network that Wexner and Epstein ran through. They were involved in the illegal arms sales to Iran to evade sanctions by back-channeling the whole thing. And then the guy goes on to negotiate the sale of a CIA proprietary airline. There's obviously U.S. statecraft. There could also be British statecraft involved.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
There could also be Israeli statecraft involved. These things often move together and have for a century. And so I hear a lot about the blackmail story, though, with Epstein, and that's That's where I'd like to see more evidence.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You would think. But there's also, you know, there's weird examples of this happening without blackmail. There was a case in the early 2000s with a private military contractor called DynCorp.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And DynCorp was implicated, and they were actually banned from being able to get government contracts for a certain time after that because they were supplying young girls to these Arab sheikhs and to these sort of paramilitary leaders in Central Asia and Middle East, North Africa. And, you know, this was like human trafficking.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
These are young girls that were basically given, you know, as a way of juicing deals and as a way of, you know, sort of making their clients happy. But that didn't necessarily involve... There wasn't a blackmail situation going on. It was a service provided, basically.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
She said subject to, you know, redactions about national security concerns around the I guess this was around the Epstein disclosures. And that prompted this sort of public backlash. What could undermine U.S. national security about what's in the Epstein documents?
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And so what I... I feel like it's presupposed that it's a blackmail ring. And I would think with the thousands of people that Epstein had as clients or was constantly interfacing with that one person, one person would come out and say, yes, Epstein or an Epstein associate directly tried to blackmail me with, you know, potentially incriminating information. you know, evidence from a video camera.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I mean, someone could... With the thousands of people who were implicated in these Lolita Express, you know, Little St. James Island trips, you would think that one per... Now, you might say, okay, well, no one wants to come forward because they don't want to reveal that they had been blackmailed. But, you know, people can be down on their luck and have little to lose and much to gain.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I mean, frankly, you don't even need to say what was necessarily on it. You can imagine the multimillion-dollar book deal you get by claiming that you are the victim of this extortion. And the fact that not a single person, to my knowledge, has come out and said that is... it doesn't sit well with me that it should just be presupposed in that way.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
If you look at, for example, Epstein's relationship with people like Ehud Barak, who is the former prime minister of Israel, was constantly Jeffrey Epstein's penthouse. Houd Barak was working closely with the West exec, which was the main sort of foreign policy, national security intelligence incubator hub for the Biden White House.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
That was where Jake Sullivan and all of these other national security experts were. And they were consulting with the Houd Barak. And Houd Barak was tightly aligned with them on foreign policy against Trump world things. I suspect that Epstein was sort of synthesizing in the network. Same thing with Reid Hoffman.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I know that there's Elon currently has a feud with Reid Hoffman, who sponsored a number of these anti-Trump, anti-Elon groups. Billionaire, highly influential in Democrat politics. I'm not convinced that Hoffman was being blackmailed by Epstein so much as you're trying to gather intelligence on them.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And the other thing is if somebody in the network squeals to a friend because they're being pressured or extorted, hey, Epstein is trying to blackmail me. Well, that makes Epstein useless because that word gets around there. If I'm being blackmailed, I might tell my mom and dad, I might tell my best friend, they're trying to blackmail me. I don't even need to say what I'm being blackmailed for.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And I think there's a similar perception about the JFK assassination that there are implications for national security and for American standing if it does turn out that there was malfeasance or foreknowledge coming from the national security state. There's a lot of very strange evidence around the role of our own intelligence services in the death of JFK.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
That immediately creates a pressure valve on the person, and that word gets around, and then they say, okay, I don't want to hang around with this guy because there are rumors that he's blackmailing this other person. And then there goes all the access. There goes, you know, your access to Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman and heads of state all over the world. So...
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I think there's layers to it, if that makes sense.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
It's tough. I mean, on the first question about why the U.S. would continue to have dealings with Epstein after the first indictments came down, These networks are always very, very messy.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
When you're talking about this sort of back-channel intelligence work, when you're talking about moving illegal arms or narcotics or working in shady conflict zones and things like this, it tends to attract a cowboy type who is singularly capable of doing things that a more straight-laced person with a clean record can't really pull off. I mean, a great example of this is Hunter Biden.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Hunter Biden has gotten in a lot of trouble throughout his life. You know, he was kicked out of the Navy for cocaine. He I don't know what possessed him to do this particular part, but he was recording on his own laptop him snorting lines of cocaine while, you know, sleeping with Russian prostitutes and, you know, negotiating what girls to bring over and pay for cocaine.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
carrying around unlicensed firearms and the litany of, he didn't pay his taxes for five whole years in a row. And yet he was on the chairman's advisory board of the NDI. The NDI is the National Democratic Institute. It's the DNC branch of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a literal CIA cutout.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Again, it was conceived by the CIA in 1983 because they were sad that they had lost their powers after the church committee hearings in the late 1970s. The founder of the National Endowment for Democracy said it was terrible in the 1960s and 70s when the CIA was seen as subsidizing political dissident groups.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
That's why the endowment was created, so that we could provide the funding and it wouldn't look like the CIA was going to do it. The CIA gets a copy of every grant that the National Endowment for Democracy makes. They have two political branches, the IRI, the International Republican Institute for Republicans, and the NDI, the National Democratic Institute for Democrats.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board after that stuff. And also the NDI was run by Madeleine Albright, who was the secretary of state under Bill Clinton. But Hunter Biden is also being tasked with effectively conducting a form of covert corporate espionage and statecraft while he's at Burisma.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
There's a great book called JFK and the Unspeakable, which documents much of this. You know, the CIA was opening the mail, for example, of Lee Harvey Oswald for months before the assassination, suspecting formally that he was a counter... It was a counterintelligence probe, basically, that he might be working for Russia, and so...
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
They were pitching Burisma to the State Department as being a way to hedge Europe off of Russian gas by building up Ukraine's endogenous gas supply and working directly with the State Department in a number of regions. They petitioned the government of Italy to get them deals. They petitioned the State Department in Foggy Bottom to
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You know, to juice the skids in Ukraine, you had Joe Biden personally go to Ukraine and threaten a billion, you know, withholding a billion dollar USAID loan guarantee to remove the prosecutor who is investigating. But the question is, why would you task Hunter Biden to do that? There's a bunch of Bidens. You had James Biden. You had the nieces, the nephews. Or you could just have a friend.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
But why was it Hunter? And part of this is These personality types, first of all, you're also dealing in a lot of these cases with organized crime networks where crime is not a disqualifier to daily life, especially if you're in a place where you control the prosecutors and you know you're not going to get arrested for various things, whether that's drugs or prostitution or guns or drugs.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
deals that evade sanctions. And so it is dirty work. And so often that requires dirty people to do it. And someone walking in with a totally clean record and no rap sheet is often a stick in the mud or can't speak the lingo or can't hang. And you accrue that over years and they have no, so they have no access. They
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You know, it's just like in the role of organized crime when it comes to the JFK story and with the Epstein story, with the Hunter Biden story, and that... Same thing with Iran-Contra.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Barry Seale was the guy who was the cocaine cowboy who was flying the drugs in and out of Nicaragua when we were using those drugs to convert to cash, to buy the guns, to get around the congressional blockade on using U.S. taxpayer funds to do it. But why did you pick this cocaine cowboy to be the one flying this? Well, because he was an ace pilot. He... Could speak the lingo with the locals.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
He knew the people on the ground. They trusted him. And so he's the way you get access. I mean, you see this story not infrequently in movies. And I think not for the wrong reason.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Well, I think it gets back to the fact that no one could quite make out who he really was. You know, I come back to that quote from like the New Yorker or whatever it was where they said no one can tell if he's a real estate broker, you know, a CIA agent, a concert pianist, you know, or a massage. It's.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
and basically monitoring his communications and mail beforehand, you have a number of other strange circumstances around the events that happened that day. And if it did turn out, for example, that there was a role of our own intelligence services in that assassination, you can imagine the diplomatic backlash that would have for our own State Department.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
you have a guy who's got a very very strange backstory getting into this ridiculous position of power and privilege someone who you know would was only on on wall street for a couple years before he basically inherits this massive portfolio and is able to
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You know, get access to like I come back to the how do you how if I tried to negotiate the sale of a CIA proprietary airline, you know, as a regular civilian would make no sense. How do you even get the access? How would you even get in position to do that? But.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You know, there was a very strange backstory even to that, because you had this, you know, this Iran-Contra situation in the early 80s, and then you had this network in Columbus, Ohio, that was under investigation, and then the main attorney representing that Columbus network, this guy Arthur Shapiro, everyone can look up this mysterious 1985
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
assassination of Arthur Shapiro, which was in the middle of this Iran-Contra scandal. He was the guy who was handling the he represented the law firm that was handling the accounts for this Ohio network. He had not filed taxes for something like seven years. It's another one of these Hunter Biden type situations. So he was under the gun of an IRS investigation.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
He was murdered the day before he was set to testify to the grand jury in the IRS case. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
When we go around and we accuse the FSB or something in Russia or Chinese intelligence services or Iranian intelligence services of malfeasance or human rights violations,
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
If it turned out that our own intelligence services were involved in or allowed purposefully the assassination of our own president, especially one whose name lives on in, you know, the Kennedy family is still a significant part of the Democrat Party. You have Bobby Kennedy, who is the current head of HHS. This is not ancient history. This is a family name that lives on.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
That would have, I think, implications diplomatically for U.S. standing abroad. And I could see there being a knife fight within the national security community about trying to redact the most damning evidence. And so this is really one of the first litmus tests about how serious the Trump administration is about cleaning up the agencies in terms of transparency for past malfeasance.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Where I am on it currently is it does seem like Epstein was an access agent. There's a question of how much smoke do you need to have before you just come out and say, there's a dang fire.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
It's easy to go after things like Crossfire Hurricane or times when Trump himself was personally attacked. But they've been serious about cleaning up the personnel side. They're in the process of firing or offering golden handcuffs to The CIA, they've decimated the staff at USAID. So I think they mean business, but it's a question about whether or not they can get it done.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
It is. In fact, that was actually one of the reasons it was set up in the first place. If you go back and you read the inauguration of organized political warfare by George Kennan, who was the head of policy planning staff for the State Department in the 40s and 50s, he was the guy who would, weeks after he wrote this memo, would actually create this NSC 10-2 plausible deniability thing.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And he wrote this memo a couple weeks before that cloak of plausible deniability was granted to the CIA. And He laid out that we need to do this dirty work of the inauguration of organized political warfare, that we need a formal political warfare capacity that is going to have to work with the criminal underworld. It's going to have to work with all the media outlets.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
It's going to have to work with the unions. It's got to set up all these front entities and it's going to have to create informal channels for all this. And what he says is if we don't do this. then the Bolsheviks will. And so we're going to... And he gives another example where he says the Brits have been doing this for over a century.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
So basically, the Brits or the Bolsheviks are going to dominate the 20th century with their organized political warfare apparatus if the State Department doesn't have this and if we don't create an intelligence capacity to execute that. And so I think that is true. And That's why I think what's happening right now to me is inspiring because it's getting national consciousness to a level that's
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I think, smarter than it was. And sometimes that veers you in stupid directions as you're trying to figure out how it all works. You see one thing and then you fixate on it and you think, okay, everything's this. You see another thing, you go, okay, no, no, actually that was wrong. It's this. You see, okay, it's this.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And then you go out in these directions and you sort of, but over time, it's just a network and it's just how the world works. And That's not to excuse the immorality of organized crime or of intelligence gone wrong. And there is the potential need for that dirty work to be done, if for no other reason than to combat the dirty work being done by other countries. But it can still it can go rogue.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
It can go too wrong, can go unaccounted for for too long. And I think that is where we are. And that is why I think that it is so important that these disclosures come out to the maximum extent possible. And we went through this before and we lived.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
In 1975, during the church committee hearing, when the Democrats held a series of investigations and hearings into the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the IRS, You had a moment where the head of the CIA counterintelligence was holding up a heart attack gun about how we assassinate people with a gun that shoots a dart that makes it look like the person died of a heart attack.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
If we could survive that level of transparency, where we're literally showing our own assassination technique to how to kill someone and get away with it by making it look like they died of a heart attack, I think that... You can do that today.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And frankly, I think the disclosures that came out then is is part of how the CIA survived at a time when it was under huge pressure from Democrats because of their work against the Democrat Party, when it was against the Vietnam War and and it was being that political warfare is being done domestically. So I think this is a healthy process. It's noisy and chaotic.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
and can result in some turbulence. But I think it's part of the cleaning house process. It's gone on too far too long.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I Don't think There's a question of how much smoke do you need to have before you just come out and say there's a dang fire I mean you had The confluence of strange facts on the ground that are indisputable is something you seldom have in a case like this. You have the both of the security cameras malfunctioning with none of the footage, you know, retainable.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You have the pages in the visitor's log ripped out, you know, an unrecoverable from who actually visited the prison. You have both of the security guards falling asleep or walking off the job. You have the head of the Justice Department who's in charge of the FBI. The FBI is the intelligence arm of the Justice Department.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And the person who would be prosecuting whoever killed Epstein if he died by homicide happened to be Bill Barr himself. Bill Barr's father, Donald Barr, was personally the math teacher, was the high school teacher of Jeffrey Epstein. You have the direct family connection between the head of the Justice Department and Epstein. Then you have the fact that Bill Barr started his career in the CIA.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
He told his high school guidance counselor he wanted to be the head of the CIA. He then worked immediately for the CIA for seven years to start his career. He only became disenchanted with the CIA when when the reforms were made in the late 1970s to fire 30 percent of the workforce after the church committee hearings. He went to night law school while he was working for the CIA.
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JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
He then got his first legal job effectively while he was serving as the the CIA's liaison attorney. to the Congressional Committee investigating Iran-Contra. You can read this in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
They described Bill Barr in the early 1980s as the CIA's mop-up man because he was the one who was the blocker and tackler to prevent CIA disclosures about the illegal activities of the Republican Reagan-Bush administration during Iran-Contra. The exact... origin story for how Epstein even came into this world in the first place.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And so the secrets of the Epstein universe, I think, are the secrets of the Bill Barr universe. And the fact that Bill Barr was the head of the Justice Department while all this happened. And it didn't even look like there was an attempt, frankly. I mean, if you go back to those news cycles, oh, the security cameras are gone. Oh, the visitors' logs are gone. Oh, the security guards fell asleep.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And it was almost like jumping on the grenade immediately as it happened. And it's not the first time you have these strange things. I mean, Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, fell off a yacht in 1991. Just just oh, well, I guess that's a suicide, too. And then it comes out later that he was working for Israeli intelligence at the time and potentially British intelligence.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And, you know, it had been known as this publisher. But then in death, we find out that there's this big intelligence network and that happens to be. a close partner of U.S. intelligence on many foreign policy issues.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
So the other thing is when you read CIA assassination guides, as I've done on my own streams, there's so much attention paid to trying to minimize and ensure that there's only a casual investigation afterwards, that you create the appearance of an accident. You know, you can't you can't. To me, I that level of evidence shifts the burden to where I think you need to presume that it is.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
But if there if there is, you know, evidence that absolves the bill bar Justice Department of that, I would be open to it. But I think that the burden has flipped where you need to presume suicide.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I think for the same national security reason that we've been talking about, which is that whether it's US intelligence, British intelligence, Israeli intelligence, whether it's implicating specific things about those networks or about the modalities through which those networks operate.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
So, for example, if those files show that Epstein belonged to intelligence and was reporting directly his conversations about the Iran deal, about his conversations with Ahud Barak, to Bill Burns, I guess that was after it, but to the CIA director or to the Justice Department or to the FBI, you can imagine that straining relations between U.S. and Israel.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
If it comes out that there's a CIA memo that says, you know, we know this about Epstein, he's doing this work for us, but he's also doing this work for the Brits or for the Israelis, you could see a situation where you might have delegations from those governments pushing on the State Department, pushing on the CIA, pushing on FBI,
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
pushing on the Justice Department to not do that because it implicates their own national security. And this gets back to this sort of strange entanglement within the intelligence world where you have these intelligence coalitions. You have them in the five eyes. And so in theory, I mean, you can imagine a situation where, let's just say there's some joint intelligence work we're doing, the U.S.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
is doing with New Zealand. And there's some common network that we're surveying. We have assets on the ground. There are Let's just say we're doing something in like Burma or... Vietnam. Let's just say there's some network. We're trying to pry the Chinese influence off of Vietnam. And you've got these New Zealand contacts, and we're sharing intelligence.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And in these intelligence analyst memos or embassy cables, they talk openly about national secrets shared from the United States to the Five Eyes coalition. And then there's a movement within New Zealand to You know, some political party in New Zealand says the national security state has been oppressing us and we think that they've been, you know, politicized and are impacting domestic politics.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
We want all these files about, you know, their work within these regions to be public. You can imagine a State Department delegation saying you better redact these documents. We told you these secrets and confidence. And so you can imagine diplomatic blowback. You could imagine, you know, threats to the coalition. And so it's that layer of it.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
especially when you look at how deep the relationships go. I mean, almost always US, UK, Israel, and potentially some other partner countries have moved together as a coalition bloc.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I mean, for 80 years now, and it's almost always, even when it's not immediately a joint coalition, there's synchronization that's done to ensure that there's some compromised position that's happening on foreign policy, that's happening on Iran.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Now, some of this fell apart under the Obama administration with the schism that opened up with Obama going through with the Iran deal against the protestations of Israel. and against the protestations of Saudi Arabia, who's another close partner in this. And it's also, I should really add Saudi Arabia to this list because the Khashoggi network was working directly with the Epstein network.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And Saudi Arabia is another one of these Middle Eastern countries who's closely aligned with U.S. foreign policy. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, they really came together
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
after decades of you know of disputes and not you know recognizing each other diplomatically and things because they were both commonly threatened by the obama iran deal trump gets an office and you know eliminates that as his first week and then you know kushner and in the white house end up you know going through the abraham accords and sort of trying to tie them together by economic development but then
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
They ran these operations against Trump, who was, you know, and so you have this almost ancient relationship that only a decade ago start to develop its fissures. And then those fissures have been, you know, widening and narrowing over the past eight years through, you know, the Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump thing.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And I could see there being certain aspects that might be embarrassing that would be allowed because they embarrass one side of that aisle. It is... But I don't know how that how that'll play out because of the the likely perception for the need to maintain the enthusiastic support of allies.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You know, during the Trump administration or whether or not the Trump administration, Trump doesn't, you know, if you're going to throw caution to the wind and say, I don't need to get reelected. We're also reorganizing everything with USAID being reshuffled and, you know, with the. with what we're doing at the NGO layer, maybe it's time to renegotiate all these relationships.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And there's a chance that that could happen with the UK. I know Trump has reiterated, you know, the special relationship, but there's also a lot of conflict over what the Labour Party is doing on human rights grounds with free speech and the tension around Ukraine that is, you know, could potentially lead to a rift there. But
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Whatever happens with the Files, I think, is an interesting litmus test for how those relationships are going to go.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I think the role of unions in organized crime and statecraft, as we were discussing earlier, is something that has to be much more robustly explored. One of the main things that I think is likely to destabilize the U.S. in the next few years, as it was during Trump's first term, were these rent-a-riot pop-up protests that can completely destabilize a country when All the workers are walking out.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Yeah, I mean, there's always an overworld-underworld connection to these things, whether that's in assassinations or whether that's in smuggling narcotics or smuggling goods or arms. This actually gets to the Epstein network as well. I mean, you have these... Jeffrey Epstein was...
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
They're blocking the highways. They're provoking the police. So you're left with either a sort of authoritarian crackdown or, you know, your police precinct burns to the ground, as what happened in Minneapolis. But a lot of this is intermediated by the unions and these groups like AFL-CIO and SEIU and whatnot. And while there's been much attention by Doge on USAID,
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
and on the NGOs, I think there's this very unexplored layer which needs to be renegotiated, which is U.S. financial assistance to unions and worker groups internationally with that money boomeranging back home to spill into paid protests. And so I think that's something that the Justice Department, the Department of Labor, and the State Department need to seriously reevaluate.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I mean, it's sort of it's interesting how these things line up and how they're both coming to a head simultaneously with these attempted disclosures, because, you know, the Kennedy assassination was in 63. The Epstein story really goes back to the 1980s, not too long after after, you know, the the JFK assassination and aftermath. And they both involve this overworld-underworld connection.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You had the Teamsters that were alleged to have had a role in it. You had the fight with the unions. The unions play a really interesting role in statecraft because... They serve as rent-a-riot muscle when we're trying to destabilize a country, when we're doing color revolution work to try to mobilize a wellspring within a country to unseat its government.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
The first thing we do is we go to the trade labor groups, the unions, the workers movements in the country, and then we try to destabilize the industry from within. We cause mass walkouts. We have people, instead of making sure the trains run on time, They're walking out of the hospitals. They're walking out of the, you know, the state run media organizations. They're walking out of daycare.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
They're blocking the highways. And that brings the instruments of a dictator to a halt, as we sort of put it. They can't weaponize their own power arm because there's nobody There's nobody to basically man those stations of power.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And oftentimes, these are rough and tumble types who will take to the streets, especially if they're getting money on the side from a USAID or a National Endowment for Democracy or a State Department. So why we have the National Endowment for Democracy has a specific center called the Solidarity Center, which NED is effectively a CIA front.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
It was conceived in the office of the Central Intelligence Agency director, William Casey, in 1983. It was sort of replacing the old CIA function after the CIA got in trouble in the 1980s. during the church committee hearings. And they have an arm called the Solidarity Center, which goes out around the world and works with the unions. And the unions are very close to the organized crime nexus.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
I mean, this is something that is not just a sort of Hollywood theme or like a Sopranos-style theme where you have, you know, the unions and the mafia, but this goes back
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
a very long time because you have these rough and tumble types who will you know do dirty deeds done dirt cheap they are often at the exact nexus of the logistics chain for intelligence work so for example if we are running arms to rebels in nicaragua in nicaragua as we were doing during the iran contra scandal You're going to need those arms shipped from ports in Miami or Tampa or New Orleans.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You're going to need the dock workers who are on board. The dock workers, the shipping magnets, the whole logistics chain is going to have to run through the people at the docks who are putting the cargo in and who are not looking or not reporting what's inside them. And that's simultaneously an organized crime type activity when you're talking about
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
the sale or movement of narcotics or illegal arms. This is something that Epstein himself was involved with to sort of connect this Epstein-JFK world in the sense that Jeffrey Epstein, his whole network was involved in Iran-Contra in the early 1980s.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
It was Jeffrey Epstein who helped move Southern Air Transport, which was a CIA proprietary airline from Miami to Columbus, Ohio, which is where Les Wexner was. you know, his main backer.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
So he basically had a CIA airline that was implicated in illegal drugs and gun running in the 1980s, moved directly to Columbus, Ohio, exactly where Epstein had bought property and Les Wexner, his principal sponsor, who he had power of attorney over his whole financial empire. You know, that was...
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
To me, you have this, what's most interesting about it is when the organized crime activity is actually sanctioned by the intelligence state. And that's where I think you get into the dirty laundry that the Trump administration is going to have to think long and hard about the degree to which you want to expose. because it's not just us in the U.S. who see these disclosures. It's everybody else.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And then suddenly these things get held up at the United Nations. These things are persuasive to neutrals like in India or a European country who might be caught between worlds like a
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
You can very easily see neutrals being persuaded to think, okay, well, if they were backing the organized crime networks here, and in this case, and we know that there are these unions who are getting these USAID grants or who are meeting with the U.S.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Embassy here, and they're causing us a hard time, it could cause a crackdown on a lot of the soft power influence nodes that we still have in existence today.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Well, no one really knows. It's a black box. There's so many potentials for what it could be.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Yeah, well, you know, he's a guy who was linked at a young age to our own former head of the Justice Department when he, you know, suicided himself, effectively. I mean, I don't know... I don't know how many people to this day believe it was genuinely a suicide. But the fact is, is, you know, he he came up through through. He was the official story is he was working in finance at Bear Stearns.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
He develops a close relationship with Leslie Wexner, who was the head of limited brands, which was the largest retailer in the country in the 1980s. He was given power of attorney over Les Wexner's entire financial empire, was basically given penthouses for a dollar and was completely hooked up to this powerful retail magnet and
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
was involved in bundling money for the Clinton administration during the 1990s. As I mentioned, he was involved in basically personally negotiating the transfer of a CIA proprietary airline directly to his sponsor's home city. That airliner then would carry the goods of limited brands to and from Hong Kong.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And then you had Wexner, I'm sorry, then you had Epstein get in trouble with these companies you know, criminal indictment charges around underage girls in the, you know, in the late 90s.
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
Then you had Alex Acosta, who was the federal prosecutor that was in charge of the Epstein case, being questioned in 2017 about why he didn't, you know, why he gave basically a wrist slap to Epstein after his second indictment then. And he really ignited this in a
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
various charges or try to throw the book at epstein was because he was quote told the back off because epstein belongs to intelligence and that produced you know a huge curiosity because epstein going back decades had been accused variously of working for the cia of working for israeli intelligence of having connections to british intelligence and you know i think there's a great quote that was in i think the new yorker magazine in the mid-1990s
TRIGGERnometry
JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz
And it went something like, no one knows if Jeffrey Epstein is an insurance broker, a concert pianist, a CIA agent, like a retail magnet associate or a Mossad agent. And there is something, John Kiriakou, who's a former CIA agent, I think put it, The most, where I am on it currently is it does seem like Epstein was an access agent. And it's unclear whether... Sorry, can I just stop you there?
The Dan Bongino Show
Trump Shocks The World With Major Announcement (Ep. 2416)
Well, the entire agency exists as a carefully constructed lie. And just like James Clapper and, you know, John Brennan and Leon Panetta, these are these are the holders of the great American lie. you know, closet of skeletons of state secrets. And you don't just hand that over to a random taxi cab driver because 51 percent of the population elected him because he does funny TikTok dances.
The Dan Bongino Show
Trump Shocks The World With Major Announcement (Ep. 2416)
What I think I'm trying to say here is, is if you remember the recalcitrance around sharing, sharing intelligence with President Trump, both in his 2016 presidential run and then again in the lead up to the 2024 election. I think what's happening at USAID is essentially an echo of that, which is that USAID is supposed to be untouchable.
The Dan Bongino Show
Trump Shocks The World With Major Announcement (Ep. 2416)
I mean, virtually, there's no USAID project on God's green earth that is honest.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
Dan, great to talk as always.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
Oh, absolutely. I think what you're getting at is that there is a kind of difficult tango dance about the role of the money that the government takes from U.S. taxpayers to spend on influencing the course of events in foreign countries in order to make pro-U.S. interests promulgate there. And there's different schools of thought in terms of the morality or the efficacy of those efforts. But
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
The absolute drop dead, burn it down and salt the earth around it, you cannot do activity is when that goes back and directly affects U.S. domestic citizens. So the government is basically stealing their money in order to crush them with it. And this is what you saw in every single aspect of what USAID did.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
USAID funded media institutions and then had those media institutions write hit pieces on U.S. citizens. USAID funded social media terms of service pressure groups in order to pressure the tech companies or pressure governments to pass laws on the US tech companies in order to censor the people who paid USAID to do that. USAID funds the unions and those unions turn around and do protest movements
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
and organized violence, effectively, against U.S. citizen elected governments in the form of Trump. Time and time again, USAID is supposed to support energy development projects around the world. They turn around, they fund Burisma, while that's basically the foreign policy pet project of the first family.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
Everywhere you look with what USAID does, they fund the drug networks that then get imported and you end up with Kensington, Philadelphia. They fund the paramilitary groups that end up turning around and having you know, effectively, you know, being at war with our own military.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
I mean, you had a funny situation where a CIA-backed paramilitary in Syria was at war with a Pentagon-funded paramilitary in Syria. And, you know, USAID has this get out of OFAC free card where they can effectively fund terrorists as long as their contractors do it, which is why I always say, when it's too dirty for the CIA, you give it to USAID.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
Plausible deniability. That has been USAID's role from the day it was born. And the fact is, as you look at these grant descriptions, they will be one-line grant descriptions for outlays of $50 million. And there's no way to get beyond that.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
USAID blocks even its Senate Foreign Relations Committee Oversight Committee members, sitting senators, from accessing the grant details and the troves of classified documents that USAID sits on because It is – when I said when it's too dirty for the CIA to give it to USAID, that is not a joke. That's not an understatement. That's not hyperbole.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
USAID can do covert action without requiring the same presidential finding that's required of the CIA. So when the CIA wants to do a dirty deed, a covert action abroad, but they don't think the president will approve, or even worse, it directly targets the president's international allies or even the president himself by proxy –
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
they can simply walk over to USAID and have a USAID network carry out the logistics under the banner of humanitarian aid.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
So if they want to fund ISIS, if a rogue cell at CIA wants to support ISIS groups and the President of the United States wants to eradicate ISIS, then they can have USAID do humanitarian support in the region where they'll pay for the housing, they'll pay for the food, they'll pay for the munitions flows. and then it's not a CI covert action.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
It's just discreet democracy promotion that, oh, just so happens to go wrong being done by USAID. I posted an example of this from the first decade of USAID's existence. This was under sworn testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1972.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
When we were at war in Vietnam and Laos in 1967, the CIA's mercenary army, backed by this commander Vinh Pao, it was USAID who paid Vinh Pao to purchase two CIA aircraft from Air America and Continental Air Services, which are two CIA proprietary airlines. This is all public and declassified aircraft.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
nominally in order to help economic development in the region that the CIA-backed paramilitary effective terrorist group was operating. They knew that that was where drugs were being shipped out of the Golden Triangle. So basically, USAID bought them the airplanes to be able to retail the opium from the Golden Triangle to Vietnam in order to sell them in order to fund their own mercenary army.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
USAID has been doing this since the day it was born.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
I definitely think that's part of it. There is another aspect of it that I think is parallel and on par with how sinister that aspect of it, which is that the cynical exploitation of race, gender, and sexual orientation and religious cleavages within countries in order to selectively rig its internal politics.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
So the fact is, for example, it's not just the Democrats, the Republican wing of USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy also fund, for example, transgender dance festivals and these sort of woke, identitarian events
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
in countries where those demographic groups represent an anti-government force where we're trying to take down that government or represent a pro-democracy force when we are, a pro-government force when we're trying to stabilize that government against insurgents.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
So for example, a lot of these more radical extreme elements that will come from sometimes folks within the country's transgender community or folks within its radical Islamic either extremist or terrorist cleavage or some religious extremists or racial identitarian movements are deliberately paid for, not necessarily out of a sort of woke ideology, but out of the cold, calculating,
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
understanding that when they do the baseline assessment or the strategic assessment for the region, they say, who's against this government and who's for it? And they see, hey, the transgenders don't like the Russian government. That's how USAID ends up sponsoring places like Pussy Riot. And you get Republican support for Pussy Riot.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
They would not want that sort of thing necessarily in their own neighborhood, but it's useful to export and pump up and capacity build abroad.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
Jim's looking at me, Mike. He's talking about the band. In order to destabilize Russia from 2010 to 2012, it was a very high-profile diplomatic incident because they were organizing violent street protests sort of in the name of radical feminism and LGBT causes.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
Look at what just happened here in America, where there was this big Democrat cause for decades about Hispanics and how Hispanics can be sort of localized as anti-Republican, anti-Trump force. And then you see the Cuban population turn out in huge numbers for Trump in 2016, 2020, 2024. What does the Democrat coalition go around doing?
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
They say, well, actually, we shouldn't really include Cubans as part of, you know, they're not useful. That sub-demographic is not useful. So that segmentation strategically is a big part of this.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
Okay, I encourage everyone to go to DuckDuckGo, Google, Bing, whatever. Go to the CIA World Factbook right now. Type in any country in the world, and what you will see is a breakdown exactly like that. Why does the CIA keep such detailed statistics of race, gender, sexual orientation, and racial denomination cleavages in every country on Earth?
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
Because that goes into the baseline assessment or the strategic assessment in terms of what assets to build up in the country or what assets or what chess pieces to take down in the country in order to achieve a particular operational goal.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
And so that sort of religious cleavage point, that's playing out in Ukraine right now, where you have the State Department basically trying to pressure Ukraine and even USAID sponsoring media organizations to pressure the Ukrainian government to box out the Russian Orthodox Church. and various things like that.
The Dan Bongino Show
Sunday Special with Mike Benz, Rep. Andy Harris, Rep. Tim Burchett and Michael Knowles
But this is basically civil war planning that we do in foreign countries, come home to roost in our own.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
Thanks, Dan. Great to talk to you.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
Well, they blurred the eyeballs out. This is actually the – this comes from the source footage. The FBI released –
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
they claim to have about 39 000 video files of the january 6 pipe bomber just in in 2021 they released these in two tranches one in march 2021 another in september 2021 then they did not update the fbi website with pipe bomber information for the rest of the biden presidency so the last thing on the fbi file that's publicly available uh until just this week was
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
september 2021 and they released two separate pieces of camera footage from the dnc site where the pipe bomb was uh planted one of the two pipe bombs now when i was going through this all the different footage and breaking it down in video examination software and trying to get a beat on this right out the gate, it was very evident that this footage had been tampered with.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
It's been published for some time now. The frame rate was reduced. to about 1.2 frames per second, whereas the average 7-Eleven has 30 frames per second. High-end ones have 60 frames per second. It's worth noting that Watergate happened because of a break-in to the DNC headquarters.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
So you would think that the place that was the victim of Watergate would have security cameras that were at least on par with the average 7-Eleven. But what I posted this week
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
is is something that's really bothered me for a long time which is that the in all of the pieces of footage that were released by the fbi where the pipe bomber is in view and you should have a clear view of the pipe bomber's face something very strange happens to the footage which is that a large horizontal blur bar is applied directly over the eyes and glasses area of the pipe bomber which prohibits the ability to zoom in and see the person's eyes
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
And this is particularly troubling because eyeball identification is at the heart of our biometric ID system. So, for example, David Petraeus was doing the counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan. In Iraq, one of the things they did is they had Marines go around and take pictures of everyone's eyeballs.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
That way, if they participated in protest activity or they were seen in meetings from photos, you could quickly ID the person. Every person with a criminal record, every person who's a military serviceman has their IDs in a database. And if you use a clear view or any sort of facial ID recognition system, if you have their eyes, you have their ID. And so.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
What happens to the footage that the FBI released is that this blur bar and you can see this from heat map, just heat distortion maps. You can see this just visually, even when you just zoom in, that the eyes and only the eyes get blurred at the exact frames when you should be able to identify the pipe bomber. So, for example, the one that I released this week and I have another one.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
that I'll be posting this week as well, is there's a camera that's only 20 feet away from the pipe bomber. As he looks back, it makes direct eye contact with that camera. 20 feet away. That is just a three-point shot, which means a simple zoom would be able to go to the person's eyes. That person was wearing transparent glasses.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
and you can see this because just 10 minutes before that in a separate video camera shot you can actually see the person putting on glasses you can even see the glint of the glasses uh off of this off of the street lamp which means and that was at a camera that was 65 feet away so at 20 feet away you should be able to zoom in and see the ice but there are four frames in that shot because the frame rate was so reduced
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
So you are not able to ID them. And they did the same thing on the second DNC shot when the person is walking directly towards the camera. Everything else becomes clear about the person, their clothing, the bag they're wearing, but the eyes get blurred in this hard... extremely visible in your face, blocking out of the eyeballs.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
And again, if this person was a military serviceman or this person had a criminal record, which is either one of those would land any civilian with facial ID, the ability to ID this person. So there's only two real possibilities here. None of them are good for the FBI. One of them is that person was
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
a federal agent or informant or asset directly and they don't want this person id because it would turn the so-called insurrection into a feds erection in one fail swoop remember the the breach of the capitol started at 12 49 p.m on january 6 2017. the pipe bomb was found on at 12 48 p.m just one minute before so it was concurrent the breach the the initial breach of the penn walkway entrance
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
with the actual breach itself. This is why Stephen Sun, the Capitol Police chief who was then fired the next day, said that he believed that the pipe bombs were a deliberate diversion rather than intended to detonate because they decimated the actual Capitol Police presence who were migrating the horses over to the pipe bomb as the breach ensued. The only other option is that this person was a
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
effectively a patsy was not actually a federal informant or agent, but that person was working with federal agents or informants in the sense that they had foreknowledge of it and don't want it ID'd because once you ID the suspect, the criminal process will implicate the network.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
And remember, just three months before January 6th, the FBI did this exact thing with dud pipe bombs in the Whitmer Fednapping affair. They were indicted on possession of weapons of mass destruction.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
That's the technical term for a pipe bomb because the FBI, under Stephen D'Antuono, the exact FBI special agent in charge of the Detroit office who ran that operation was migrated over ahead of January 6th And the FBI had advanced foreknowledge of the pipe bombs and set them up, knew they were taught them how to make dud devices in field training exercises. So it's the exact same players.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
It's the same playbook. And they don't want this person ID'd because it will implicate themselves. And therefore, the entire Fed's erection narrative gets validated in one fell sweep.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
That's exactly right. And then you remember there was this special operation that was launched on January 3rd with Jeffrey Rosen at the AG and Quantico people, and they were all deployed. If you remember that crazy – I think it was Newsweek article about all the secret undercovers that were placed around the Capitol with shoot-to-kill instructions in case something popped off.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
If you remember, that whole operation was launched in secret, wasn't disclosed for months afterwards. because of a suspicion that there may be weapons of mass destruction that were placed around the Capitol. Well, what is the technical term for that in Justice Department parlance? That is a pipe bomb. So it's very – and you had – the whole D.C. Fusion Center had told hospitals in the D.C.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
area just ahead of January 6th that they should, quote, stock up on extra blood supplies because of a potential mass casualty event that happened in tandem with the allegations that – with the January 3rd Jeffrey Rosen operation, with the weapons of mass destruction. It's – the fact is, is the FBI lied publicly. from Jump Street on this whole thing because they needed to.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
They told people when this first happened that they should look at their friends and family and examine their gait. Examine the way they walk. When you're at the water cooler at work, examine if the person walks, your friends and family walk in a way similar to the pipe bomber. Meanwhile, they're blurring out the eyeballs in the footage they released so that you can't even see the person's eyes.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
The whole thing was so sloppy. And the only reason that it has been able to persist is because they have had exclusive dominion over the Justice Department and the FBI. And frankly, I think this needs to go higher than Kash Patel at this point because –
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
The fact is that they will have deleted the evidence, just like all 22 video cameras with Oklahoma City were deleted as soon as Jesse Trenadue filed his lawsuit there, just as the video camera footage for Jeffrey Epstein was deleted and the visitor logs were torn out of the pages so that there could be no evidence of that. The FBI has already nuked the direct evidence on this.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
What's going to be necessary now is for Pam Bondi's Justice Department to get the names of every single FBI agent who was involved in the pipe bomber investigation and put them under deposition, put them under subpoena, put them under penalty of purge. Every person who was involved in the investigation, that way the FBI agents involved in the case
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
can be thrown in jail if they do not cooperate with the discovery of the pipe bomber's identity.
The Dan Bongino Show
Dan Bongino Sunday Special - Jan. 6th pipe bomb scandal
To my recollection, it's four years old.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
should be vanquished entirely it's it's family if that makes sense you know i i was i was thinking about this the other day with we talked about ukraine several times when we've spoken and we've talked about the 2014 maidan toppling of the democratically elected government the
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Coincidentally, the person on the pro-USA side who's leading the charge to fight the White House's reforms is Senator Chris Murphy. Chris Murphy bragged on live national television that the U.S. toppled that government. It was only because of U.S. pressure and U.S. support on the ground for the movements there that toppled that government.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But leaving aside the morality of whether that was the right or wrong thing to do in the name of democracy, when Victoria Nuland made her speech in December 2013, two, three months before that, those protests changed world history.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
She bragged about the $5 billion that USAID and NED and related humanitarian assistance orgs had given to effectively the very same Ukrainian civil society organizations that would lead that charge. And when she did so, she was at a sponsored event by standing in front of signs for ExxonMobil and Chevron. And
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And I've reflected on that picture because it's very easy to look at Victoria Newland as a sort of angel of death figure who knocks on European countries doors and tells them, hey, we're about to topple your democratically elected government. And it's very easy to look at the excesses of of big U.S. corporations. But we do need oil. We do want cheap oil and gas. We do want energy dominance.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And so, you know, at this moment when we're seeing really the first vulnerabilities, certainly in my lifetime, of this blob monstrosity, I feel a strange sort of sympathy for the devil, which is that they've done terrible things and we should not do them again. And they've gone rogue and there's no oversight and horrors beyond your wildest imagination.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
At the same time, these are still parts of the American family. There is some vestige of a function there that I believe our foreign policy planners have to at least know was there and was responsible for much of our prosperity before it's As they try to reconstruct the patient. Does that make sense? Of course it does.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
be able to make it be righteous and virtuous again. But you couldn't do that while it had this halo. And so the halo had to be broken. The mask had to be taken off in order to implement reforms. And there have been... I feel... the global impact of fundamental changes to U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, I'm really glad you asked because that is the exact example I've been using to try to... to try to give a window of entry into this larger sort of point about we need a much larger vision about the role of U.S. foreign policy if we are going to get rid of the shortcuts that USAID provides.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And so, you know, you just mentioned, you know, why would USAID be promoting, you know, trans... Take the example of transgender dance festivals. That's something I've been talking about a lot this week.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
So that is when USAID or USAID's companion star, National Endowment for Democracy or other related NGOs will fund an event in the form of a sort of cultural exchange, and they will bring together people from that country to come to a dance festival that's comprised of transgender individuals and is intended to both
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
foreign policy that are happening now, because, you know, as I've been saying for so long, I mean, there really is a sort of USAID Truman show that much of the world lives in. You know, many people found out for the first time this week that 90 percent of media in Ukraine is funded by USAID. Many people have We're just now finding out the extent of U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Create a sense of unity within the transgender population there and to expose and normalize and curry favor with other parts of the demographics there in order to expand the network node of of U.S. entities who are working with the activists and leaders.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
I wish that was rhetorical. And I do believe in many instances it is ideological excess driven to madness. But give an example from just a few months ago. I believe it was this August this year there was a prime minister in Bangladesh who was basically ousted in a sort of military coup coupled with a color revolution and
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And Grayzone News, Max Blumenthal's outlet, published this report that I've been talking about a lot for the past week because it's just a really, really clean example of all the different facets of the dynamics I'm talking about, which is... Basically, starting in about 2018 through 2020, it appeared that U.S. statecraft was not particularly pleased with U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Sheikh Hasina winning this, you know, the prime minister winning the election and baseline assessments were submitted to the State Department about how to prop up the opposition group, the Bangladesh National Party, the BNP, which was considered more favorable to US interests. The leaked documents don't get too in the nitty gritty about what US national interest has served.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But there were many conflicts between that Bangladeshi prime minister and the U.S. foreign policy establishment. For example, it was revealed in WikiLeaks that Hillary Clinton, while she was secretary of state, threatened to have the IRS do an audit of her son while she lived in the U.S. Basically, there was a conflict around the construction of a U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
military base in the region, which is a very common conflict that we have. Oftentimes, foreign countries don't like having a big, fat U.S. military base installed.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Right. They don't want 500 acres of their land. They don't want to provoke foreign powers. This is what's playing out in Romania with Georgia's queue and the cancellation of the elections.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
media organizations that are funded by USAID. They're finding out the reach of it in everything from the unions to social media censorship to pandemic and gain-of-function research to strange ties even to things like terrorism and the drug trade. And there's that sort of...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, they're building Europe's largest NATO base currently, which faces straight out of the Black Sea at Crimea. But she had been refusing to build a U.S. military base. So let's just... But as I walk through this, let me just make some assumptions and make it a harder issue than, or something a little bit more, I guess, accessible. Let's just say it really is vital to U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
national interests to build that military base in Bangladesh to counter Chinese influence and the Bangladeshi prime minister doesn't want to do it. And so our foreign policy planners decide we need to do regime change. And whether or not you agree, that's a good or an evil thing to do. I'm not even weighing into the morality of it. What if it is the... Declared or discrete policy of the U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
government, the State Department and the White House and the National Security Council all agree this government, we should pursue regime change. All options to destabilize that country in order to weaken the existing government and to build up our network of democratic institutions and activists everywhere.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
in order to either win the next election or in order to do a color revolution style ousting where the prime minister has to flee in a helicopter. And what was done in this case in Bangladesh, and these leaked documents from the gray zone show this in gratuitous detail, is that the National Endowment for Democracy's Republican arm, the International Republican Institute, they have...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
four core force, but two of them are political branches. There's the NDI, the National Democratic Institute for Democrats, and there's the IRI, the International Republican Institute for Republicans. And what the IRI submitted to the State Department in 2019, 2020, after they got walloped trying to back the Bangladeshi National Party in the recent past election,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
was a plan to destabilize Bangladesh politics. That's a direct quote, destabilize Bangladesh politics. By working with, they listed 170 pro-democracy activists, 304 key informants, and then they did a baseline assessment of the different ethnic groups and cultural cleavage points that they could exploit either destabilize the country's politics or prop up the political alternative.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And in the process of doing that, they sought the LGBT population, two Bangladeshi ethnic minority groups, and young students and student groups who had already been protesting earlier that year because of, a local politics issue there. And they noted that rap music was popular and young people were listening to rap music in Bangladesh. So what do they do?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
They turned around and they took US taxpayer funds. They get 100% of the money from the state department and they work closely with USAID. They actually administer USAID programs all over Bangladesh and all over the world. And they funded Bangladeshi rap groups to produce songs and music videos insinuating that people should take to the streets and do street protests.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And, you know, the classic peaceful protest that has the upside of being a riot and protests. uh in you know one of in in iri's baseline assessment submitted to the state department they talked about how one of the songs they paid for uh was was designed to uh to sow resentment uh at the sitting government and uh you know basically undermine people the popularity of the government so you have
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
One sponsored song to get people to take the streets, another sponsored rap song to get people to distrust their government. And then basically the baseline assessment revealed that these groups were the ones who would be receptive Those were the contacts in the region. They do field work when they do these baseline assessments.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
These institutions that everyone thought were private and independent being corrupted by, you know, USAID's 44 billion odd dollar a year budget. And when I think a lot of people... That was a process that I felt was necessary to tell the story of internet censorship. Because for me, my journey of discovery on this was like everybody else.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
What if the baseline assessment, the strategic assessment, happens to reveal that the highest ROI for soft power projection is with very unseemly groups and activities? This is, for example, how we end up funding terrorist groups and paramilitaries. And very extreme, because oftentimes when you have...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
a popular government it's the coalition of the fringes and the extremes and the weirdos and the criminals and the prostitutes this this was in an ned memo in 2009 for cuba where they were uh were the national down for democracy uh you know they have something called the journal of democracy and
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You know, they talked about this exact phenomenon that they might be able to mobilize the Afro-Cuban community to, you know, leveraging racial animus against the, you know, mostly, you know, white Cuban government and, you know, taking note of, you know, proclivities for I think it was prostitution, crime and drugs and how.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
How USAID might be able to swoop in and mobilize these people because a lot of them are really unemployed. And also USAID should fund the rap groups there because these populations all listen to rap, and they did. And this is another great gray zone.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, there's a lot there. USAID gave... Like, am I crazy to ask that? No, not at all. I mean, that is, to me, the final blow. It's bad, and there's the moral question about whether to do this sort of dirty work abroad or... And that comes down to different schools of foreign policy thought and to different views on the relative morality of different ways of attacking the issue of U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
soft power influence abroad. But then there is the. the breaking of the firewall where our foreign policy hounds are never supposed to bite the owner who feeds them. And that is, I mean, that is to me why this is a no brainer, the reforms that are happening.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
I thought internet censorship was a domestic story at first. And so I start following the trail of it. And then I see, oh, that's weird. At this disinformation conference, the next panel is on energy geopolitics. What are they doing together? Huh? That's weird. And then you go over to the energy geopolitics people and you see, okay, well, their fellow panelists are all military contractors. Okay.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
All right. So the military has something to do with social media censorship and the energy pipeline politics and in Ukraine have something to do with it. Okay. That's interesting. And then you keep going down the line and you see, okay, there are these chamber of commerce partners. And then you see, oh, there are these companies.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
suite of humanitarian aid organizations like USAID, NED, the whole suite of NGOs, State Department grantees, National Science Foundation grantees. And you start to see that this is... In order to tell the story, I felt, of internet censorship and what to do to stop it, you had to explain a totally different world than the one people thought that they lived in.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
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The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And for the first several years of this, when I would do my little private briefings and bring my PowerPoints around the country, it was impossible, frankly, to crack through. Even when people saw the receipts on screen, they saw the source documents,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
I think this is why I'm saying I think people are going to want to not necessarily put a new heart in this in this patient when they see how deep it all goes.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Yes. Now, of course, the personnel, you know, 97 percent of USAID employees donate to Democrats. Of course. Right. But but, you know, Liz Cheney started her her career. You know, she is at the at USAID, at the Eurasia portfolio of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Oh, I mean, I literally just quoted you a IRI document implementing USAID programs where they literally wrote to the U.S. State Department that the purpose of this baseline assessment was to gather as many activists and informants and network nodes, quote, to destabilize you know, Bangladeshi politics, but apply that everywhere.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You know, this is, you know, fundamentally what I believe happened during the picture. Do you, do you really want that? Like, isn't that shameful? Of course it's shameful, but, but the, I think people don't fully understand how products arrive on the shelves around them. Um, I was mentioning Milton Friedman's pencil example.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
and and they they just couldn't conceive that the world actually works this way uh that that our country does these things uh and they have a hard time squaring the morality of it with the the operational side if that makes sense like they don't want to believe certain things and so even if it's six inches in front of their face they won't and so but
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, what happens if Malaysia decides to nationalize, you know, to block exports of of gum from the gum trees and the the African miners decide that they are going to go on strike and not allow, you know, not allow, you know, graphite or lead, you know, and No blob, no pencils.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
If you don't have a mechanism to influence that foreign government, to stop the nationalization law, to hit it with carrots and sticks, or if it's a problem within the population, sub-government. This is what happened in the Cold War when the CIA was breaking up union strikes in France and the docks and the longshoremen strikes and the CIA infiltrated the unions and they worked with the
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You know, AFL-CIO slash AFL-CIA. And, you know, they all have union arms. And so you need a method to be able to go into the unions if you want to be able to have pencils. Now, OK, you might say you can live without pencils. But how about no petroleum?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
What if it's something that's, what if these are really critical resources for us to be able to have microchips, for us to be able to have renewable batteries, for us to be able to have, you know, build computers, for us to be able to put gas in our car or heating in our home? There is a potential necessity. And this is why I feel it's so imperative that what's happening right now is happening.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And I'm thrilled that it is, but there's still much more to internalize about this because You're going to need to reconstruct the history of the entire past century as you disentangle this whole thing. If we had not toppled so many foreign governments in service of big oil, would we have had cheap oil? Well, does a president want to... This is where I come back to this Venezuela example.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Trump wants to win. And again, we don't have to call it Venezuela. We can call it random country X. We're going to be hit with a choice as we reduce the USAID function, if we reduce the USAID function. To my knowledge, the staff has been radically cut from 14,000 to something like 290. But my understanding is that most of the grants, you know, it's $44 billion.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
At 14,000 employees, it's about a billion dollars of employee overhead a year. So 43 of the 44 billion presumably are still going to all these Frankensteinian monster projects. But you're going to be hit with that choice of do you want to win this? fighting dirty, or do you want to potentially lose fighting fair? And that's going to play out in every industrial sector, in every region.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that that is something... There's a micro fractal portion of that argument that is going to play out and is going to be a sort of siren song every step of the way at every regional desk at the State Department, at every National Security Council interagency coordination. And there are some lines that I believe we cannot ever cross.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Like, for example, on the social media censorship side. The fact is, is it was according to Biden's foreign policy. Biden declared populism a threat to democracy. His State Department did, his USAID did. And so the best populists were popular online in Europe. So the White House had a whole information integrity working group to have the U.S. funded NGOs lobby populism.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
I guess getting back to this sort of why am I neutral rather than happy right now is because we are conducting open heart surgery on the vital organs of the American empire. And I am pro empire to the extent that it helps the homeland. I don't think we'd have a prosperous homeland without an empire. And the patient needs open heart surgery. It has to be done. I am a hundred percent, uh,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
the European Union effectively and push the different sort of influence and spindle groups comprising the regulatory body around the EU Digital Services Act to add more and more censorship regulations to target their political opponents. And what you're doing is these people could not do that at home because we have a First Amendment, but Europe doesn't have one.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
So if you declare populism to be an attack on democracy, then It's easier to win by advocating censorship. But that, to me, is a violation of fundamental American values. And not just censorship, but putting a lot of people in jail, using violence.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And that's what USAID does. USAID's role with the prosecutors is unbelievable, the depth of that rabbit hole. But if I can just complete this point here, because I want to make sure I'm... There's a lot of nuance to what I'm trying to say here, which is that...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
People need, and especially at the policymaker and White House and House Senate Oversight Committee side, they need to get a sort of topographical map of the scope and spectrum of our dirty deeds done in the name of U.S. aid in order to make a triage assessment of of what kind of things can be dual purpose, because everything USAID is dual purpose. It has to be. Everything has to advance U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
national interests in some respect, whether we're irrigating poppy fields or doing poverty relief programs or public health, something about doing that act has to advance some sort of U.S. national interest. Now, part of the reason it's been so difficult to oversee USAID or get answers from them is because they can't tell you those dual interests honestly in a public forum.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Take this transgender dance festival in Bangladesh thing. Imagine a hearing on USAID and, you know, high-ranking Republican senator holds up, you know, you're funding Bangladesh, you know, you're funding transgender dance festivals and you're spending $2.7 million on this event. What possible U.S. interest does that serve?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Can that USAID administrator on live television say to the world, well, that was a cynical, you know, we determined actually we were running a covert operation to overthrow that country's democratically elected government. And it actually wasn't about that, you know, the that at all. This was just a.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Right. But saying that undermines the efficacy of all other USAID programs. No, I... So it becomes... I get it. Yeah, right. But...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
My concern is there's some things you can't do assassinations, you know, promoting Internet censorship, you know, full on regime change, you know, that mobilizes the ugliest assets in a society like terrorist groups or, you know, you know, extremist groups sort of thing. But there's a lot of squishiness in between that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And I'm not sure that the MAGA foreign policy establishment, being very new, not Marco Rubio, but Marco Rubio is newer to MAGA than the rest of the White House. And he was approved, what, 99 to 0 or something? In the Senate, he was the easiest one to pass. And he's And I think he's done a phenomenal job so far, by the way, if I can say that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But I feel like most of the people who came to the MAGA movement came to that for nationalistic reasons and don't... understand the interplay between the national and the global. And as they are finding that out, they are seeing how horrible the deeds are done of the global. And there is going to be this impulse to...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
destroy this thing completely destroy this thing and by the way i don't that's not even my principal fear because i i actually think that you know the other part of this is that i could very easily seeing see most of these grants being preserved simply through the trench state department yeah right simply through the state department i mean this is what happened with brexit everyone celebrate everyone who is pro-brexit celebrated brexit the day it happened that to me is like the closure of the usa building but the fact is is they effectively stopped brexit yeah
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
agree with the decisions that have been made on policy so far on this. But I want to make sure, and I feel a great sense of duty and obligation to try as best I can to help identify the organ you're operating on, because in the zeal to carry out radical reforms, you can If you don't... Take out the wrong organs.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
because there's so many layers of resistance and implementation. And we're going to run into that here, which is why I'm using this time to be able to talk with you today on something that is... on this, which is that you're going to need to understand...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
The purpose for these things and the scope of it and be able to look at just how bad it is with clear eyes and not necessarily, I mean, have your rage boiling your anger moment. And when that clears, a fundamental... The reorganization of the way we carry out soft power is going to have to replace what we used to do if we don't do these dirty deeds anymore.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Right. The only problem with that is... Trump represented something very different than that vision that was expressed by the Bush-Biden blob uniparty that had been there. And in countries that are not stable, elections completely change everything. When
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And this maybe gets to whether or not, you know, the problem is not necessarily just the institutions, but rather the the sort of legacy of momentum of all these previous political forces, because you could see a situation where then, OK, every time a MAGA type. Populist candidate wins an election.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
All of our foreign policy institutions switch radically in one direction, calling that American interests. And then a sort of internationalist blob, a globalist person wins an election. Then all the institutions switch all that. And so, you know, you can't you can't even build permanent structures in foreign countries or permanent networks because everything's so schizophrenic.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Right. Politics stops at the war's edge, right? That's exactly right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, there's a distinction I think that's useful to draw here between public agencies paying for premium services of U.S. news websites that are foreign-facing. So, for example, the State Department pays for premium subscriptions to various news sites in order to be able to have access to all of the...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
New York Times or Politico, you know, to be able to get behind the paywall for their employees so that while they're doing their job of soft powerfulness abroad, they have the maximum amount of knowledge at their fingertips. It's the same thing with... But that's all fake.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, that's right. But there's two forms of that. And I'm just also trying to educate people as they... go through this discovery process about the extent of it, because you're going to see it's everyone. But there are two forms of it. One is
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
one is you know a hundred percent it's pernicious uh the other one has there's smoke but there's not necessarily fire and so when i say this the smoke not that obviously creates an incentive to um please your the people giving you these government procurements for example if the this is this is what i published for example about reuters you know the biden administration
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Yeah, or if you don't even know how the atriums, how the organ works, it's directionally correct to do the open heart surgery, but the patient can die on the table if you do it wrong. And... All of that has to be... This is just the beginning of the fight to reform this, in my view. But we are now in the arena, and a blow has been struck. This is, in my view, this week is really the first time...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
you know, government agencies, you know, tally something like $300 million to, to various Reuters sort of sister, sister company groups between their, between their news agency, between their, their Westlaw arm in between their, you know, sort of like forensic and like accounting services. But, you know, you, you see these big, like $60 million worth of grants from the justice department.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And, you know, Now, the Justice Department's paying for Westlaw, you know, which is a Thomson Reuters thing. It still makes Reuters richer. But Reuters is writing hit pieces on the very people that the Justice Department is going after. And so it's softening up, you know, the enemies.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And in fact, you know, Reuters won a Pulitzer Prize for its hit piece for its investigative series on malfeasance by Elon Musk and all of his portfolio companies, Tesla, X. Neuralink, SpaceX. And meanwhile, the Biden administration had 11 different regulatory agencies going after all of those.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And so the media getting paid by the government was providing the ammunition for prosecutions and regulatory and disciplinary actions against the very stated targets of the government. And so you don't have a you don't have a stated agreement in that case, you have a very, very perverse incentive.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But there are places where you have, where it's even worse because there's, again, there's sort of two forms that can take in the form of, you know, paying for services, but then also there's the affirmative sponsoring of media. So, you know, for example, And I believe it's the State Department, maybe USA, does pay like the Reuters News Agency for work abroad.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But it's a lot less than the premium services. But more – like here's a really clean example that gets to the heart, I think, of what you're talking about with this domestic and how this all ties together. The world's largest consortium of investigative journalists is a group called the OCCRP. And you just think of it, the Corruption Reporting Project.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
They have, since the very beginning, been, they were initially, I believe, fully funded by the US government or they were the anchor fund. And now I believe half of their funds come from a combination of USAID and the State Department. And these are supposed to be independent journalists and they're investigative hit piece writers covering the topic of corruption.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
If there's something that's published on OCCRP's website or through their media network, it's never about the sky was blue today and someone saved a cat from a tree. No, it's all investigative hit piece work exposing some aspect of corruption in a country. And this was something that the US began funding
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Really, I mean, this type of work over a decade ago and really around this before OCCRP, around the time of Yugoslavia and whatnot, because we wanted to create a predicate to arrest the political enemies of the State Department in the region by cooking up corruption scandals that prosecutors can then use to arrest them on the basis of corruption.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And so the problem is prosecutors don't know what to look for. And also, it's not necessarily politically feasible to prosecute somebody who's got a halo on them. So the halo has to be broken by hit piece news articles, by investigative journalists who often get proprietary access, for example –
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You know, the OCCRP, this corruption reporting project, has gotten very strange special access to hacked documents while they're being funded by, you know, what many believe to be a CIA front group, you know, in the form of USAID. You know, when they get special access to documents hacked from a computer and use that as the basis for the Panama Papers, well, you know, they're reporters.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You can't ask them their source, but...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
the interests align these are the targets of of the u.s state department who happens to be funding them they are mercenary media for the state now what now i'm going to i want to mention two aspects of this scandal because it's this plays out everywhere but this one it's just it it's it's simultaneously clean and dirty enough that i feel like it's just an anecdote everyone should remember forever one directly on u.s politics and targeting trump as you mentioned
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
OCCRP got their Eurasia, covers like seven or eight countries that they're supposed to dig up dirt of corrupt politicians and corrupt oligarchs in those territories. And they're Eastern Europe, $20 million for their Eastern European operation. And so that covers Ukraine. And so what did they do in 2019? They dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And then that dirt ended up being used as part of the impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019. So this is the State Department funding mercenary media to then dig up dirt on high-profile U.S. citizens who, metastasizing into that very evidence being entered into the congressional record to successfully impeach the president of the United States.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
maybe in American history with few exceptions, maybe in the 60s and 70s, that the blob, the foreign policy establishment that impacts so much of domestic affairs and sometimes controls it, has had to answer to the people that fund it. This is a shot across the bow.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
So in that case, if there was no, you know, if there was no State Department USAID funding to OCCRP, they wouldn't have presumably had the capital to go out and dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani. And then Americans wouldn't have been hearing, you know, that... These and they also, you know, wrote hit pieces on Paul Manafort and in his I believe his relations with Julian Assange.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But basically, you had this foreign policy blob apparatus who hated Trump and wanted to take him out. And just like state and USAID were paying OCCRP to dig up dirt on foreign oligarchs and foreign presidents. The net result, and we don't know if there was any sort of, and I'm not saying that there wasn't necessarily a direct agreement to do that. I'm not privy to that. But the fact is, is.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
That is in effect what happened. The faction of the foreign policy establishment that most detested Trump and wanted him out, he was being impeached because of his foreign policy around Russia and Ukraine. And so USAID spending to journalists in Ukraine comes back to be used to impeach Trump.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, we're in a sort of. You can you can see I can you can feel the. The passion around this this week and people sensing how much of their world has been usurped without their consent by these institutions. But just to complete this on the corruption reporting project that gets half of its funding from the State Department, USAID and the U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
government has the formal yes, you know, yes, yay, yes, no about who they can bring on as staff. And they have to, you know, submit basically, you know, what they're going to do, you know, the year ahead. But on USAID.gov, the USAID website, before it went down this weekend, but I have all the receipts and I have all the PDFs on my social media feed.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
They have a whole document on this corruption reporting project and how amazing it has been for USAID's anti-corruption humanitarian work. And it shows the entry, it says $20 million, and here are the seven or eight countries they operate in. The next page has something which is just absolutely devastating to the concept of the firewall between our humanitarian aid organization and prosecutors.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
It's called, it's the accomplishment section. And there are four bullet points in this accomplishment section. Again, this is on USAID.gov publicly boasting about
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
hit pieces for hire mercenary media to call people corrupt call citizens call so the first line item is over a billion dollars worth of assets seized so they're basically saying hey great return on investment we spent 20 million dollars we were able to seize a billion dollars but you did that by paying journalists to dig up dirt on people what if the journalists got it wrong
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
We'll get to that, actually. That's bullet point four. But bullet point two was it was something like somewhere between 100 and 300 policy changes in different government and civil society institutions in these countries. So this USAID saying us paying for political black ops hit pieces generated hundreds of policy changes at the government level and, and at the institutional level there. Well,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
There have been so many tactics that they've been able to deploy to shift the course of domestic politics in order to ensure that their global vision stays the course. And there's been a blitzkrieg. I don't think they saw this coming.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
We're presupposing all those are good. I mean, they wouldn't be calling them an accomplishment unless the USA thought they were good. So they have a catalyzing change they want to do to the policies of foreign countries. And they think the way to do that is to pay mercenary media outlets to dig up dirt on people. and then use that as the predicate to force through policy changes.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Then they have a section on all the different government officials that they got that were forced to resign because of their state's, USAID state-sponsored media. And I think the list was like six or seven, but they said, including a president and a prime minister. So they are bragging effectively in this document that, hey, what a bang for the buck.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
For $20 million, we were able to topple two governments. And then the fourth bullet point is the one that winds through this whole USA prosecutor story. It says 456 arrests and indictments generated on the basis of OCCRP's reporting.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
So this is the State Department bragging about the incredible volume of human beings whose lives and liberties have been taken from them because of sponsored hit pieces by the U.S. government. We don't know how many of those people were innocent. We don't know, you know, what even they were charged for. When you read that USAID.gov document on OCCRP, it doesn't even list their crimes.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
We just know it's a good thing that 456 people got arrested because we paid for.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Right. And prosecutors then use that as the basis for a criminal indictment.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, how many foreign leaders have you seen, other than maybe one I can think of, but how many foreign leaders have you seen who have been making impassioned floor speeches this week about the tens of thousands of people who are going to die if USAID leaves?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
I'm wondering where all the leaders of African countries have been this week or or, you know, low income Central Asian or Western Hemisphere countries are. Why do why are they all either silent or like in the case of El Salvador, relieved that this is happening? None of them are getting the money. In fact, many times USAID is forced on them as a condition.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Yeah. Right. Oftentimes, USAID institutions are forced into their country or forced into different regions in their country as as part of a compliance measure that the State Department is imposing. You know, you need to have a certain level of human rights, you know, you know, monitoring or, you know, you're.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
your water levels have to have this, you know, certain percent purity or you need to be able to maintain, you know, this, you know, your energy development has to be this consistent with climate change or else, you know, we're going to, you know,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
destroy you in the in the you know with the with our trade relations or we're going to put sanctions on you unless you put our humanitarian aid organs in there and so boom just like that under the banner of aid we're in control of your energy infrastructure we're in control of your river systems yeah so you know i i think the reason that the only people that we really see who are
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Who are defending USAID right now are people here in the United States or in NATO that are directly or indirectly on the take or their or their donors or constituents are.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, that's why I said donors and constituents. Right. Because those are like think about the congressman in those representing those districts. And, you know, you see that. That's exactly right. It's our own, you know, it's our own economies.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And then, you know, the point I was making earlier is that, you know, you are going to have this sort of follow-on, trickle-down economic impact if many of our multinational corporations who form the bedrock of our, you know, stock exchanges and corporations Chamber of Commerce, if the dirty deeds that USAID does are cut out, are they still going to have as – will that impact their profitability?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And so that's why I want to spend the time in the beginning just talking about that tension because – In the oil and gas case, like Trump has a plan around that drill baby drill, right? Like, you know, we might not need to fund transgender dance festivals in order to, you know, like you go to the CIA world book, you know, everyone go on CIA.gov and just look at every country.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And the CIA has a world book of all of the strategic resources in every country. And so, you know, Burma is top strategic resource petroleum. OK, let's just. We don't need to necessarily have the sticky issue about whether or not we need to extract those foreign resources from Burma if the sitting government there doesn't, if we are drill baby drilling at home. Right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
There's creative offsets that can be done to replace dirty tricks. You know, for example... Like, you know, with ISIS and the dynamics in Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan, if there are ways to reconceptualize the way we do trade in the region or do creative, you know, joint partnerships or try to make inroads into other, you know, parts of the population that were not tested as robustly. Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But you're going to need to think a lot more creatively about that when you don't have access to the dirty deeds done dirt cheap. And so that's just I feel like that. I just want to impress that point because I think a lot of MAGA Republicans are going to think that it's. it's easier than it is to reorganize that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And there's just a lot of surgery that needs to be done if you're going to cut that function out, which I totally support doing in nine out of 10 cases. But there's a...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
There's going to be a remnant and we need a doctrine that's cohesive and sellable to the American people because the problem was is we'd built such an elaborate labyrinth of lies that you couldn't even honestly talk about it with people. This is the whole oversight thing that I mentioned. This happened with the Zunzaneo scandal with USAID from 2009 to 2014-ish. There was...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You know, USAID and NED were at the forefront of the Arab Spring and toppling democratically elected governments in Tunisia and Egypt and all over, you know, in these street color revolutions that were powered by digital diplomacy. You know, we've discussed this before, you know, where USAID was funding people, you know, to do youth engagement for how to use Facebook hashtags. Right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And, you know, and how to mobilize street protests so that everyone knows where to go and what kind of, you know, slogans and slang to use. And so, you know, they wanted to... Kind of like the George Floyd protests. Yeah, kind of like the George Floyd protests.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
My understanding is a lot of it has to do with the natural resources and the sort of Middle East, North Africa. I mean, the fact is Egypt is sort of the lip of Europe that way. But I think there's probably Middle Eastern politics that play into it as well. And it's a complicated picture. Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Milton Friedman gives this example about the pencil. Have you ever seen this video? No. He talks about it in the context of libertarian economic theory. He says, look at this pencil. And he holds up a pencil, and it's got a lead tip and graphite and gum. And he goes, no, no single person in the world can make this pencil. The gum comes from trees in Malaysia.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. At every level, at every year in the budget, there's going to be this fight.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And the lead comes from some mine in Africa and the graphite comes from graphite miners in South America. And it's the magic of the market that all makes it possible. Everyone doing it for their own self-interest economic gain, but it creates this magical web of cooperation where everyone profits and that's how we get cheap pencils in the US. And
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
I think what we're about to walk in on is the flip side of that, which is that... People have been lied to in this country where they've thought that they've been sold that this was humanitarian aid and co-signed it. And let me come back to this point about the pencil because maybe that'll just appear a little bit later in the story. And I'll just sort of hint at it now.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
I mean, now, and here's the question, how much more does the State Department get in the budget? You know, since, you know, I had like a $35 billion budget, now it's getting USAID's $44 billion. But what fraction of that is Trump going to... I've been saying here for a long time, because everyone talks about how USAID is funneling things to left-wing causes, right? And very easy to see that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But right now, the people who are trying to defend USAID are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They want to defend it on humanitarian grounds, and then they get totally deluged with all the ways that it has gone wrong and all the horrible things that's funding. So then they then turn to layer two.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And we talked about the 97 percent of employees at USAID who donate to Democrats. But to me, the main issue here is the remnant of internationalist Republicans in Congress who can form a critical majority block with in the House or in the Senate in order to. get their way on this issue.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You could see a situation where their own vested interests, their own constituents are so dependent on either USAID's funding or the results of USAID operations that they will side with the Democrats in order to inflict damage on the Trump White House budget vision. And so that's going to be a constant fight. And my
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
What I'm hoping evolves over the next weeks and months is a moral north star for America first nationalist or populist or MAGA or centrist or simply reasonable liberal or center left folks where you have the current level of American prosperity. You remove that evil in the labyrinth of lies and Something needs to fill that gap.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You know, like we talked about in the oil and gas spaces, drill, baby, drill for oil. Okay, but now do that for semiconductors. And now do that for every critical mineral. And...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Maybe the answer is, I mean, what I've been trying to sell is that if you're going to do the dirty deeds and you do believe they're necessary for statecraft, then there has to at least be an obligation to be honest about them.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You know, like I thought it was very honest, you know, when Lindsey Graham finally came out and said the strategic vision of the United States is the, you know, the $14 trillion worth of natural resources. Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Relying on the humanitarian predicate for it allows voters to be deceived and for them to then turn around and feel totally hoodwinked when they find out that, hey, why are you paying for the unions, the media companies, the things that are acting here on the homeland? We have this tumor that we're removing from the body of the American project.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But there was blood flowing into that and it's connected to all these arteries. The thing that I want to make sure happened that is midwifed appropriately is what are you changing about our foreign policy structure so that when you remove the tumor, the blood still flows in the way that you want it to. You're not ripping the heart out with open heart surgery.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, look at the benefits to the stock price for Chevron and Exxon when the war broke out and the U.S. State Department strong-armed every country in Europe to divest from Russian gas, and they all were forced to buy expensive –
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
uh north american lng uh their their stock prices went to the moon they they've had something like you know triple the you know the profits or something for for a certain period of months uh you know following that and reap these windfall benefits um and you know the the this is we're sort of confronting the ghost of ronald reagan here because you know the the the
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
The reason you do that for statecraft purposes is trickle-down economics. What's good for ExxonMobil is good for the American citizens. And so if so, a dirty deed done to advance, you know... Big oil, big ag, big tech, whatever it is, anything that's good for them is good for us. And so anything that the U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
This is sort of like Lindsey Graham defending our operations in Ukraine when it was, you know, we need to do this for democracy, democracy. And then we say, okay, well, you canceled elections. You know, you're... you know, there are all these non-democratic things that are happening.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
government can do in the form of overt or covert diplomacy or covert influence in the region that tips the scales in favor of those – U.S. corporate interests or U.S. multinational interests will ultimately trickle down to the people itself. I mean, that's the logic. I understand.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Take the Pepsi coup in 1973. We overthrew the government of Chile. We toppled the Allende government. And 30 years later, 35 years later, files were declassified that showed that the chairman of the Pepsi-Cola company had lobbied the Secretary of State that U.S. national interests in the form of Pepsi-Cola bottling operations were going to be devastated if INDA was allowed one bottle
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
It was allowed to remain in power. And I forget if he was nationalizing some element. Yeah. But basically, you know, Pepsi had these bottling operations there. It was going to massively, you know, tank their capacity to produce the cans for Pepsi bottles. And so. a meeting was organized between, uh, it was like, it was, it was the, it was the CIA director at the time.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And, and the chairman of Pepsi Cola, everyone can look up the guardian article on this. Just type in Pepsi, Ku, Chile. And, uh, So the chairman of Pepsi and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency have a planning meeting about the best way to overthrow a government in order to preserve Pepsi's profits.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And he goes, okay, okay, layer two of my defense is there's $14 trillion worth of natural resources under the soil there. So, you know, having it be a U.S. vassal state is advantage to us because then we can exploit those $14 trillion worth of resources. I mean, that's what's implied there, right? Why would Americans benefit from Ukrainians exploiting that $14 trillion?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And they even bring in to the meeting, the meeting minutes show, they bring in basically the State Department's media guy for the region who ran a web of print media and radio stations. so that the media guy could be brought into the propaganda that was being co-generated effectively by the CIA and Pepsi. Well, I mean, this plays out everywhere as multinational corporations Can benefit from U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
government pressure on foreign companies applied to that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
long-term strength you know selling all your industries to china at 40 cents on a dollar you know clearly makes a small number of people rich but it's like it's not a long-term plan for prosperity actually well you know there's not good at this in a way it's a miracle that this is happening because it's forcing us to confront all the related issues as we put together a more cohesive vision for u.s soft power which is that that reaganite style trickle-down economics 1980s thing is
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
may have made sense when those corporations were American corporations with American manufacturing facilities employing American labor. But now these are nominally, you know, American companies, but there's no trickle down because it's not like that's substantially increasing American jobs when they're going overseas to East Asia. They don't provide American jobs in the first place.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Right, or it's not, you know, providing, you know,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
enhancing the security of our supply chains because it's you know it's giving more more for our factories because we don't have the factories anymore and so trump is doing all this in tandem you know he's trying to onshore things he's trying to bring back domestic manufacturing and some of that may be how we approach statecraft which is that you know the kinds of entities that we consider to be u.s national interest are the ones that you know have a certain amount of american investment
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You can't be a sort of American in name only and have so much of your workforce in China or have so much of your operations. I mean, there may be a sort of – we need to sort of have a cohesive vision of what –
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Now, by the way, that's not a knock on Ukraine, but you simply saw that shift happen When, you know, as it got harder and harder to defend it on the basis of democracy promotion, the mask had to slip in order to defend it at the deeper level. To let people in, okay, here's why we're really doing it. And every USAID program operates that way. It is...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
So am I being crazy? Oh, not at all. I mean, there's a million direct examples of this. There's something that you've brought up several times so far around Black Lives Matter.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Right. No. And there's a few pieces to that. So first, Black Lives Matter is, you know, one of the main NGOs that serves as the Black Lives Matter clearinghouse is the Tide Center and the Tides Foundation. And USAID gave the Tide Center a $27 million grant. Wow.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Yeah. And now nominally that grant is for the Tide Center institutions to solicit secure concrete investments from foreign countries on issues related to U.S. national interest. So basically the USAID has deputized this, you know, group that's... you know, in the center of the nest around Black Lives Matter to secure commitments from foreign governments from a formal U.S. government agency.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
They're deputized to act as a sort of long arm of the State Department and they're getting $27 million for it. And by the way, when they get Actually, before I go deeper on the Black Lives Matter stuff, because there's a lot there. I've been calling this the Smithmont problem for USAID.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
We had a Smithmont Act from 1948 until 2013 with the modernization under Obama that effectively got rid of it that prohibited foreign propaganda or fake news stories intended for foreign audiences from being circulated here at home. They got rid of that. With USAID, it's even worse because as bad as it is for propaganda, USAID has the Smithmont problem for financing and operations.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
USAID can provide money to international institutions or to NGOs for their work abroad, but then they turn around and now they have all this money. And they now are wealthy and powerful and deeply ingrained, highly pedigreed institutions because of all their money from state and aid and and Ned. But there's nothing blocking them from also operating on U.S. soil.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
So, you know, give an example of like.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
there's a you know this this for-profit private sector censorship mercenary firm called news guard and got a 750 000 pentagon contract to uh you know help the pentagon trace the information for fingerprints of russian mis and disinformation okay maybe there's a strategic interest in the pentagon uh mapping out pro-russia narratives uh in in regions around the world But NewsGuard targets U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
citizens. NewsGuard has, you know, the former head of NATO on its board.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Yes, yeah, of course. But they, whether or not the grant is, Is for like they don't have there's a lot of domestic censorship grants that the Biden administration gave to pump these things up domestically, like the National Science Foundation does a lot. But in this case, it's what you're doing is you're making the institution more powerful. You're buffering its revenues.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You're padding its profit margins. So it's now more powerful to be able to take you on, even if the grant isn't for that money. And so it bleeds into it. And this happens with every institution USAID works for. And when you, again, coming back to the fact that USAID is at the heart, you know, USAID is the swing player between the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
It's a sort of somber moment, actually, more than anything. And I found myself very reflective this week and hit by the weight of history of it, if that makes sense. And there's a lot to this. I mean, a lot of people have said, aren't you so happy? You've been fighting for this so long and now it's happening. And so they're expecting cartwheels and spiking footballs.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And it works with all three of those. And, you know, you never know when you see a USAID program, which of those three ops is being run. But you know for certain it's one of those three. You don't know if it's to advance, you know, a stated State Department diplomacy priority in the region. You don't know if it's being used in order to advance a U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
getting back to this rock in the hard place analogy is that they want to say it's humanitarian aid, but it's clearly done so much harm in so many places. It's doing such terrible things, funding the Wuhan lab, you know, not to mention, you know, the whole rest of the USA Truman show, but then they go, okay, okay, well, it's US soft power. It advances US strategic interests.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
national security interest in the region, or you don't know if it's being used to advance an unstated State Department foreign policy goal being pursued by the CIA and it's functioning as an intelligence. And I'll give you some examples of this. In 2021, I've talked about this a few times, but
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Under Mark Milley and President Joe Biden, the first special forces vision statement prospectus, pages 16, 17, everyone can look this up. It's a public document, government document you can find online. And it presents a way to synchronize the psychological operations and civil military affairs work that the special forces does
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
with the different foreign policy agencies who can play supporting roles. So they give an example of, they're trying to block the Chinese from buying a port in China and the African, I'm sorry. In Africa. In Africa. The African government doesn't want to go through with it. I'll just try to make this as simple as possible.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Basically what ends up happening is the State Department can't get the African government to cooperate. and agree to cancel this port construction. And so they need to buy time before the port is completed for the State Department to have more carrots and sticks, more leverage to be able to force the African government to relent and cancel it.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
That is, they need either more appropriations and allocations to be able to bribe them with, or they need more... Sticks to be able to punish them with, you know, leverage from from from something harm that's being done that they can offer to make the pain stop.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And so so this is what the special forces document envisions envisions, which is that the role of the special forces in that in that scenario in the name of great power competition and special forces role in countering, you know, peer competitor from from China.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And they also argue there's a national security basis because this would give China – it was a West African hypothetical country, so it would give China access to the Atlantic. But what they did in this scenario, and they war-gamed this all out, is how they would effectively induce race riots to get the African workers out.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
to all go on strike and boycott and take to the streets and protest against the Chinese business interests. This would also devastate the country economically. It would effectively bring the, you know, it would also humiliate the Chinese business interests in the area. And so it would create this international scandal.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
It would scandalize the pork construction and the destabilized economic state would allow the U.S. ambassador to walk back in and say, hey, you know, you know, all this pain can stop, just cancel the poor construction type thing. But what's really interesting is in the special forces perspectives. Can you imagine writing that? Like let's, let's incite race riots.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And they, well, they, their quote was inflame racial tensions or inflame tensions. Can you imagine? And so what they did is, I think it was inflame tensions, but they explicitly say, you know, it's Africans versus the Chinese there. And, and what they did is the, the, the role of USAID in this special operations scenario,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
literally printed, you know, by the U S government was that USAID would, would swoop into the scene and provide job fairs. U S taxpayers would, they do job fairs in the exact region where the, you know, rioters and protesters were striking in order because they wouldn't, the, the special forces concern was that the people they needed in the streets in this, you know, uh, protest, uh,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
To destabilize the country would not want to would not were too poor to leave their jobs. They would not want to go on strike in these Chinese owned factories and businesses. So they needed a replacement source of income. And that was where USAID came into the operation. USAID would do job fairs. And so the African.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
protesters would be subsidized to do that protest street protest destabilization activity and don't need to worry about whether or not you know it's going to cost them their jobs because they're now on the payroll of USAID and but that was a special forces operation and And you see this with everything USAID does.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And so you say, oh, okay, so it's not aid? And then it becomes very schizophrenic to defend this thing because it's a labyrinth of lies. USAID's access and its reputation completely depends on its perception as being a kind of quasi-charity, even though, you know, charity is nowhere to be found. It's a U.S., foreign policy instrument. Aid isn't even in the name.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But, you know, to come back to this, you know, thing on, you know, we were talking about, I guess, BLM and some of this domestic, you know, foreign thing is, sorry, if you want to drill down on that and ask me a question. But what I'm saying is USAID plays this military role as well with support assistance programs.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, because once that when they defined populism as a threat to democracy because it undermines public faith and confidence in democratic institutions, they were able to effectively categorize the sitting president of the United States as an attack on democracy. And
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Good thing we're democracy promotion programs because we are the white blood cells of the immune system to stop the virus of threats to democracy.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Of course, but they say we need... Democrat institutions to provide the bumper cars to stop demagoguery.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, she winds up at the Center for Information Resilience, which is a London-based, basically a British statecraft organ. She had to file a FAR registration. She became a registered agent of the United Kingdom for, you know, for her work.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Yes, yes, they were, yes, recipients of USAID money. Although I believe she, I think she wrote that she left there several months ago sometime in 2024. But the fact is, is it's Still that same network.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Well, I actually think there's there's there's layers of sophistication to to Nina. And oh, is that true? Yeah, I do. I do think so. And I don't have any personal extra. I mean, she's written a lot of. not flattering things about me. And I've pointed out what I consider to be massive conflicts of interest when the entire field of professional internet censorship, that is, you get paid
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
you pay your mortgage with paychecks that come from your job censoring the internet. I mean, I fundamentally do not believe that Nina's field, that this disinformation of censoring citizens in our own country And leave aside, you know, the sort of, you know, maybe more nuanced issue about whether there's a role of countering foreign propaganda and how robust that is.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
The fact is, is, you know, what was done here was just straight up saying that domestic misinformation is a threat to democracy. And so the U.S. government should be, you know, should play the task of censoring its own people through this whole society network. But. You have I mean, there's so fundamentally, I don't believe that that job should exist.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And it is part of what I consider to be my my purpose in life to try to bring freedom to the Internet. And to the extent that that that field exists as a profession, you know, that is those those two things are in conflict. And then, you know, the other part of it is the conflict of interest. Right. When when.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
you can see how these very censorship institutions that are being funded by USAID, and so many of them are, it's unbelievable. I mean, USAID has a formal censorship program. I believe we've even talked about it before, but now I think people are starting to appreciate the significance of it.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And in fact, its website just went down a few days ago, and it's under, I believe, an extraordinary amount of scandal, which is that these organizations USAID takes taxpayer money and creates lobbyists for more USAID because all the people who... It creates a conflict of interest between their own personal piggy banks and what the actual national interest of the country is.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
I've said this many times, but it's the Agency for International Development. And when you see aid, it's your mind playing tricks on you.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
If your whole field is getting funding in significant part from USAID, well, then if you want to really make it in this world, you have a... moral hazard, a perverse incentive to become a tiny little lobbyist to explain why it is that censoring the internet is essential to U.S. national interest and to sell a whole
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
ideology and a whole completely different vision of what our country even is and what we're even fighting for. Because the more that our public grants and contracts, the more that our procurements, the more that the USAID piggy bank funds that, the bigger the pie of that field gets.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And so, and so you, but you see this in everything that USAID touches, you know, from the, from the media to the social media, to the universities, to the, to the unions, to the anti-corruption, you know, prosecutor work to the humanitarian work around, uh, you know, in, in drug zones and, and in, in, in paramilitary zones.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And, and so it's, it's, you know, I think it's what Elon would call a self-licking ice cream cone. And, uh, You know, the ice cream's gone bad, but with the BLM thing, it gets very strange because USAID is a professional rent-a-riot organizer. I mean, leave aside the countless documented cases of USAID rent-a-riots from...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You know, as we mentioned, the Arab Spring, which we, you know, we went over the rent to riots there. USA pumped $1.2 billion into the region, you know, during that period. We have literal USA documents explicitly doing operational planning to create smart mobs and people to take to the streets and riots. You know, you see in Georgia, you saw it in Belarus in 2020.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
It's anytime there are... What about Minneapolis? Well... This is where it gets interesting in the role of these foreign policy institutions and their domestic, you know, things. So there's one other. So I want to mention one quick adjacency before we go into that, which is around USAID funding to the to the Tide Center, which I mentioned, you know, has this Black Lives Matter adjacency. But.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
The Tide Center is also the fiscal sponsor of a group called Fair and Just Prosecutions, which is the central group that manages, at least according to reports from, I believe, Daily Wire and write-ups in the, I think it was Federalist and such, but I believe it was a Daily Wire investigation, oh, based on Media Research Center report, that Fair and Just Prosecutions is a, you know, bill themselves as sort of left-wing progressive criminal justice advocacy group.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Right. Well, I mean, you know, I mean, I'm sure in the Ronald Reagan building, you know, but how it's colloquially known, I mean, and how it's described to the voters, it's described as humanitarian assistance. And you go, okay, well, you know, and we can get into the depth of the scandals, but...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And they are media research center published a long report, you know, essentially saying that they were the managing control group of Soros prosecutors, because what they do is all these source. Now, they don't fund the Soros. They don't fund the election campaigns of the at least to my knowledge of the Soros prosecutors like the Open Society Foundation does. But what they what they do is they.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
They fund, they manage, you know, they get the prosecutors, the source prosecutors to sign pledges about what they're going to, you know, what they're not going to, you know, to not enforce certain laws that are on the books in the region. You know, they pressure them to prosecute certain political targets. They give them social media hashtags and talking points.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
They help write their press releases. They meet with them every, you know, every week. And, you know, they, they're, it's, you know, prosecutors are, You know, at least according to this reporting, which has some pretty damning, you know, inside documents to, you know, to to make this case.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But you basically have prosecutors being managed by this shady NGO who is effectively, you know, puppeteering these. who are dependent on continued funding for their election campaigns and continued election funding for their future careers. You know, what's, you know, AG, Attorney General, you know, the joke is, you know, it's short for aspiring governor because, you know, so it's a path.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You want to cultivate these donor networks forever. But the Tithe Center, which gets $27 million from USAID just on basically, you know, two grants alone,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
That's what needs to happen. For example, you can't share the same corporate entity. You shouldn't be able to, you know, if you're, I mean, imagine if Raytheon, who is paid by the U.S. military to drop deadly, lethal, you know, munitions clusters on foreign countries and your professional job is killing people. And they were getting billions of dollars from the U.S. Pentagon.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And they opened up a, you know, a Raytheon, you know, and Raytheon started creating a new line of business for domestic countering misinformation projects where they monitor the Internet for COVID skepticism or, you know, climate change, you know, denial. Right. You would look at that and you would say Raytheon is getting paid by the military to kill people overseas.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And I know their grants, you know, their contracts with the Pentagon are not for that work. But they have more muscle and money to play with. They're being pumped up by steroids administered overseas. Exactly. I mean, you saw that with the Bangladesh case, too, by the way.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
I guess the fundamental feeling that I have right now is this is going to get a lot worse as people go through this self-discovery process of what's happening. We were talking a little bit earlier where I mentioned eight years ago when I was writing my little book,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
You know, the when the person who is now the minister of foreign affairs in Bangladesh after the coup, by the way, the the new the new head of state, there is a Clinton Global Initiative fellow. But the the the foreign minister was brought in by USAID for for formal training on countering misinformation. And, you know, who who led that?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
It was a another, you know, State Department USAID contractor, a group called PolitiFact. It was the executive director of PolitiFact who does – who writes hit pieces on you and me that were conspiracy theorists for talking about January 6th.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And they are acting as an instrument of statecraft to get money from our paychecks to do international work to train foreign journalists and foreign ministers – how to censor or stop the spread of information the State Department doesn't like. But now their margins are padded by that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Right. Well, I'll tell you what we did in the financing space. And I remember being a corporate lawyer and watching that evolve and play out. Yeah. We had things like, you know, these anti, we had anti terrorist financing, you know, OFAC style laws that prevented laundering, you know, uh, and, uh,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Even if you could technically do it, you didn't want to risk it because there were criminal penalties for doing it and there were financial penalties. And so in something like this, imagine if the grantees had to pay treble damages in the amount of their grant if they tripped one of those foreign domestic firewalls.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
If their grant was for $30 million and they have to pay – they're liable for up to $90 million, if a U.S. court finds that they violated the USAID Smith-Munt Act – I mean, this is something that Congress could put –
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
in you know put in today i mean you could you could add criminal penalties but you need right now there's no penalty whatsoever the only penalty is that it is that people might find out and it might cause a political scandal and it might make the usa grant coordinator um less likely to give you the next grant in the future where's the clawback where's the where's the the restitution damages uh
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
People shouldn't maybe even be able to sue the U.S. government body administering the grant for for failing to do oversight of the NGO receiving that money. You might create a cause, a private cause of action against the State Department or whatever new form USAID costs that can be done legislatively in the message that I mean, first of all, that would that would go.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
A huge distance to being able to deal with this problem because you're going to have this problem, whether USAID exists as an outside as an independent agency or whether the State Department just inherits a USAID herpes infection and just lives with it inside the agency.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
book attempt to try to explain everything that was happening in internet censorship and I felt like I had to explain all these other tectonic plates of American society and global affairs just to understand who and what and why they're censoring the internet.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Thank you for saying that. And it wouldn't have been possible without you as well. I do just want to clarify. I don't believe that I have mixed feelings. I 100% endorse directionally and technically everything that I've seen so far. But I appreciate the weight of the moment and that you are dealing with something much more delicate than simply, you know.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Thank you.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
But, you know, I would spend my whole day in USAspending.gov, you know, to the exclusion of everything else, friends, family, a social life, and just going through that, this can't be true. This can't be true. Oh, my God, it is. Oh, my God, it is.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And there's a sort of five stages of depression that plays out as you discover it yourself going into these grant databases and seeing the receipts with your eyes like that. Because that's what I've seen on my newsfeed this week. It's been just hundreds of people, all with huge megaphones who are just... Spending their day hearing about, oh, wow, there's all this corruption at USAID.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
Let me plug it into the search database. Let me fish around a little bit. Oh, here's what I found. And now everyone's contributing to this common knowledge, which is really amazing. But I still feel already faith has been shaken. But there are layers to this that I think are going to truly shock everyone.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
people when they begin to try to put their their minds around it and i i believe fundamentally in u.s soft power i believe in soft power projection i believe there is a role for projects in foreign countries that have a dual function of helping the people there and helping secure import-export markets for us, helping secure natural resources, helping secure U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And that's not how I feel really at all because... The task here was to break the halo of this angel that turned into an angel of death. I don't think we've had the success of the 20th century without having a soft power influence arm. I think this is how we add cheap gas and affordable homes and middle-class prosperity and export markets for our manufactured goods here. The task is to...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
national security goals in the region. There is a role for that. And I just... I feel that many came into this movement around MAGA and nationalism because they cared about their schools and the woke agenda in their schools. They cared about their streets and their neighborhoods and whether they were safe. And they cared about corruption from the U.S. president or their local representatives.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
They never had to think about Pakistan, Bangladesh, Estonia, Tanzania. They never had to think about how you make a pencil and how the goods and services that they were... give them the advantage life that we have in the United States versus other countries depends on the battering ram of this blob apparatus.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
And so as they learn more and more, the depths of depravity of the blob, I am, I myself am in a hard sort of between a rock and a hard place where more than anyone, maybe in, in,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think)
that i know uh have been have been spearheading and trying to lead the charge to to break the blob's halo um now i'm i'm in a sort of curious position where i feel i'd be remiss if i didn't spend this time at least fleshing out that i i don't believe that it should be